How can legal firms attain growth through peer referrals and reviews?
Sep 14, 2021
10 min read
Law firms should not neglect the importance of online reviews. These reviews or feedback can encourage or discourage a prospect from doing business with you. According to the survey conducted by Statista in 2020, in the USA, 17% of the respondents said that they use an online search engine to find an attorney. Hence, online reviews of legal firms can allow users to choose which firms they can work with.
As per the Google Consumer Surveys, 27.6% of the respondents read Google reviews of legal firms before approaching them. 18.4% of the respondents said they would consider reviews of a law firm available anywhere on the internet apart from Google. Therefore online reviews have become an extremely crucial factor in determining the success of a legal firm. Other review platforms like Yelp, Yahoo, etc., are also important. Hence, if a law firm ranks higher on search engine page results, it must ensure excellent ratings or reviews.
Why are online reviews crucial for your legal business?
1. Reviews bring credibility to your firm
Regardless of how your law firm generates clients or new cases, your brand credibility and authority remain among the most crucial factors that help you develop long-term benefits. Therefore, you need to establish a polished online reputation for your legal firm. Before analyzing your final work, potential clients check your online reputation.
You can alter the first impression they make of your firm by establishing an excellent online reputation. You can maximize the potential of these impressions by maintaining online reviews. As an attorney, you have to appear innovative, robust, and reputed. Online reviews can help you achieve so.
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2. Confirms your legal expertise
The legal business is a competitive space. Hence, it can be highly complicated for a new law firm to attract high-value audiences. Today, several legal firms invest in various advertising techniques to build their reputation, spread word of mouth, and gain more business. However, in the internet era, there are affordable ways to showcase your legal expertise.
If a legal firm implements a sophisticated online reputation strategy, it can showcase its unique expertise to targeted audiences. Boosting online reviews can be a robust way of building your brand name in the market. An excellent online reputation can act as a powerful tool for an online legal firm to speak out its success stories.
If you have an online business, there are huge chances that your clients are already posting their experiences. It can be on different social media websites or search engines like Google. With a forward-thinking approach, your firm can encourage client conversions over the internet through online reviews. Your previous clients can narrate the positive experiences when they hired you for a particular legal niche. All this will allow new prospects to know more about you; hence, it will help you showcase your legal expertise.
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3. It gives you an advantage over your competitors
If your law firm can develop a professional way of encouraging clients to upload their positive reviews, you can beat your competitors. Showing off successful cases can prove an effective way of establishing your superiority over your competitors. You can develop email marketing tactics, social media message campaigns, personalized emails, etc., to encourage previous clients to drop their reviews. You have to request them, don't make them feel pressured!
Remember: asking for a review should not sound like a marketing plan! To make the process seamless, you can create a separate webpage for reviews or ask them to write a review on search engines directly. Just provide them the link and guide them on how they can drop feedback. You can also explore other avenues like Facebook reviews, LinkedIn reviews, etc. However, you must encourage online reviews on Google because Google reviews have the most significant influence on new clients.
How can your firm get more reviews?
Why are Referrals crucial for your law firm?
Quickly build relationships with other clients.
We would suggest that you should identify your top five referral sources. Once you have done that, you can schedule regular meetups with them. You can introduce sessions or free consultation where you can have a conversion with your potential clients. If you can highlight the benefits they can get from your services, you can tap into new business opportunities.
Apart from educating them about specific services, you can also educate them about the target market or different practice areas. However, you should never forget that developing referrals is a two-way relationship. You should contact your prospects regularly, learn more bout your target clients, and focus on business development goals.
Promote your victories.
To drive excellent referrals, you need to establish your brand credibility and online reputation. To achieve a premium online reputation, you can use different legal marketing techniques to promote your thought leadership. One of the best ways to establish your expertise is by promoting your success stories or your client's success stories. You can also make use of high-quality case studies to advertise your client victories.
You can approach some prominent publications or websites to publish your blogs or articles to highlight your achievements. Ensure to select publications that are popular among legal clients because that will help you drive maximum returns. You must actively participate in community organizations, talks, seminars, etc., where you can network with potential clients. These tactics can help you generate business or referrals.
Credibility authority
We highlighted the importance of networking in the previous section; however, networking is way more than giving out business cards. Before attending a seminar, talk, or networking event, make sure you have defined goals. To establish your credibility and authority effectively in a networking event, you must determine what you want to accomplish.
You must have three straight answers for these questions - What is your professional background? What unique does your legal firm do? How can clients reach out to you? You need to answer these questions. It will help you to establish your legal firm's authority. If you have made new connections, make sure to drop a formal email to them. It is essential to contact your prospects once they get out of that networking zone. Emails are effective in creating a long-term relationship with new prospects.
How Do Law Firms generate client referrals?
Prioritize Key Referral Sources
Prioritizing the best referral sources is a critical element of business development. You need to focus on attorneys who are bringing high-value clients to your law firm. You need not focus on attorneys with the most cases; you should concentrate on lawyers bringing the best cases. Once you start recognizing these critical aspects, you can analyze the funnels. You must evaluate funnels that help you to capture leads. If you can realize these referrals, you can spend time and resources on them. You might end up getting better results than before.
Schedule Meetups Efficiently
As discussed in the previous sections, conferences and meetups are great to establish brand authority and credibility. However, such networking events are great for building referrals. You can make the most out of these events by getting aware of your target clients or peers. The value you get from these events depends upon you. Once you are aware of your target peers attending the event, you can gain valuable returns.
Take Up Pro Bono Cases
Pro Bono cases are where the lawyer provides their services to a person without expecting any return from them. Pro Bono cases are often seen as community work where lawyers tend to help others. However, offering Pro Bono services can help a law firm drive more contacts, leads, or recognition.
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Start Automating Your Newsletters
Once you start automating your newsletters, you will be able to keep in touch with your clients, business partners, and attorneys. It's a great way to help your business scale further. You can send a newsletter via email, or you can send it in a physical form.
- Benefits to Email Newsletters - Email newsletters are very budget-friendly; they are highly scalable too. Once you develop a template for your email campaign, you can smoothly pitch in your law firm's blogs, case studies, submission forms, etc.
- Benefits to Physical Newsletters - Many people observe the numerous advantages of email newsletters. However, there are some significant advantages of using physical newsletters. Many email newsletters go unnoticed, in the bin, or end up cluttering themselves among hundreds of other emails. The best part about using a physical newsletter is that it allows you to stand apart from the crowd.
Conclusion
The legal industry is highly competitive; therefore, you need strategic ways to gain new clients. You need a robust client acquisition strategy through which you can keep your business alive. If you are a legal firm, you might be aware of the exponential rise in searches for online legal-related queries for attorneys. If you want to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy for your law firm, contact us today!
Why Your Dental Practice Needs More Shareable Content
For as long as we can remember, businesses have relied on advertisement medium to capture their majority audience. But much like dinosaurs and cavemen, the traditional TV and media advertisements have become a thing of the past. Today, where in a world of 7.7 billion people, almost half of the population uses internet to look for businesses and everyday things, it has become extremely important for businesses small and big alike to have and maintain an online presence. For potential customers, one of the most important aspects of learning about business has shifted from traditional advertising and consultation. Businesses now rely on content marketing to engage their audience in the digital sphere. Adopting a carefully crafted content marketing strategy can result in greater audience engagement and leads for any business imaginable. What Is Content Marketing? To better understand why content marketing has become a go-to strategy for marketing professionals, it is important to learn what content marketing is. Content marketing a carefully planned marketing approach that focuses on the creation and distribution of content that is relevant, unique and valuable to attract, engage and retain targeted audience with the aim of generating and converting potential profitable leads. Simply put, content marketing is any type of content, whether blogs, videos, infographics or visual content created and shared with the goal of attracting, engaging and retaining audience. Content Marketing For Dentists Everybody knows that they should be visiting a dentist regularly in order to maintain oral hygiene and a healthy smile, but what dentists don’t know is that 51% of their potential patients use internet search engines to look for a dentist. Just acknowledging the above fact is sufficient enough to realize how important it has become for dentists to ensure they are among the top results of search engines. Now that you have fully absorbed just how much important it is for your dental practice to have an online presence, it’s time to look at how you can make sure to appear in the results when a potential patient is looking for a dentist. Most people, when looking at content marketing focus on placing and using keywords throughout their websites. However, this is not a strategy that can yield long term effects for your dental practice. The simplest way to understand how a reader or searcher can become a potential customer is to realize that the people searching for dentists online are human. Only providing human connection and building a relationship with your reader is the way to build trust and ensure they choose you. If you have a dental practice business or are a dentist, and are still not convinced on why you should be looking at content marketing to bring in more business, here are a few reasons why content marketing can do wonders for you. Why You Should Consider Content Marketing For Your Dental Practice? 1. Improved Visibility Unique and engaging content can provide you a better opportunity to optimize it in a way that will boost visibility. If you focus on creating content pieces that are informative and valuable, you will show up in search engine search results for when people are looking for similar topics you have covered. Once hooked, readers do not refrain from sharing the content. Valuable content creation does not limit your visibility to search engines, in fact if you post unique, engaging and informative content on your social media, people might share it with their friends and family bringing more and more visitors to your website, and we all know what more visitors can mean for your business. 2.Reach Target Audience One of the perks of using digital media for marketing your dental practice is that you can create specifically targeted content that can hit home run. Traditional ways of advertising have become tiresome, expensive and ineffective. With content marketing, you can target people looking for a dentist with effective content marketing strategy to attract your target audience, hence, filtering out people who actually are interested in your services so you can convert and retain them as your patients. 3.Build Trust Choosing a good dentist is not less than choosing a life partner. It can have a huge impact on the quality of your life. Which is why, you need to let your audience know that you are trustworthy and knowledgeable, and that they can trust you to take care of their smiles. When you create and post content that is informative, it shows the people searching for a dentist that you are not only experienced but you believe in sharing information for the greater wellbeing. Investing in good content can help your potential clients build trust in your knowledge and to show how passionate you are about your profession. 4.Build Reputation Nobody wants to go to a dentist that doesn’t have good reviews. Everyone including you and me look for referrals when it comes to choosing a dentist or any health practitioner for that matter, which is why you should be working on building a positive reputation among your patients. Using content that talks about authentic information and facts, gives out tips and tricks, and other essential information can help your dental practice build its reputation online. Once your audience identifies you as a reputed business, they won’t be hesitant in coming to you for their oral hygiene or recommending you to friends and families. 5.Stand Out From The Crowd Accepting the fact that almost half of the world’s population is online, it is assumable that there must be several other dentists with online presence, looking for potential patients. Now, if everyone is already online and out there, how do you make sure you attract your fair share of the audience. Here comes quality content. Investing in quality content will help you get noticed by your potential patients. Content that provides value instantly becomes a valuable asset that you are willing to share with your target audience and if you are willing to share the knowledge without any interest or gain, automatically sets you apart from the rest. Your audience soon recognizes you as a valuable connection to their dental health practices. 6.Provide Value Using digital media doesn’t mean that you have to attract and retain only new clients or patients, but it can also help you keep your existing patients well informed and interested. Creating and sharing valuable content provides value for your existing patients which ensures that they will keep choosing you for your services because of the value you provide to your existing patients. It’s a win-win for all. 7.Boost Growth/Increase Number Of Patients Effective content marketing strategy can help your dental practice attract and increase followers that may in turn convert into profitable clients. Creating shareable content gives you an edge over your competition because the more times your content is shared, the more audience it reaches creating a follow back link to your website. 8.Brand Awareness Among all of the digital media marketing aspects, investing in good content marketing strategy is crucial as it creates a platform for your target audience to build an association with your brand name. If you create content that has valuable information and sticks with your audience, they’ll automatically associate the piece of information with your brand name. This effect creates a beneficial word-of-mouth marketing platform that you won’t even have to work on forever. Now that we are convinced on the wonders content marketing can bring to your dental practice, let’s take a look at how you can actually approach content marketing in real life. How To Approach Content Marketing For Dentists With everything in life, strong planning and execution are the keys to having desired outcome. And content marketing isn’t any different. For this blog, let’s learn from the pros. The experts at CoSchedule have broken down the content marketing process into four big buckets. Planning Publishing Promotion Measurement Let’s look at all of these buckets one by one. Planning We can’t stress enough on the importance of planning in the whole process of content marketing. Smart planning is the key and will definitely save you a lot of mistakes and hurdles later on. Identify Your Audience One of the first steps in planning a content marketing strategy should be identifying your target audience. To help you figure this part out, just answer the four questions below: What problem does your product solve? Who is your current audience? Who is your competition? How are you different from your competitors? Once you’ve successfully answered these four questions, congratulations, you are now on your way to understanding: What content you need to create? Who are you creating the content for? What content are your competitors creating? How can you set your content apart from your competitors? The answers to these questions will help you create your content core. The mixture of the content regarding what you do, and what your audience cares about. This will become your content core for all of the upcoming content pieces that you will create for your company’s content marketing strategy. Establish SMART Goals We won’t go into much details about SMART goals, instead we’ll just move on to the importance of establishing goals that specifically state: What you’re going to achieve? When you’ll achieve it? Develop Your Content Strategy It’s time to finally get on to developing your content strategy. To simplify, here are the questions that will help you create your content marketing strategy for your dental practice. What content will you create? Why will you create the content? How will your success be measured? Create A Content Evaluation Strategy Once you have a content marketing strategy in place, you also need to figure out how you’re going to evaluate and decide what is working and what is not? To help you perform regular content audits, Pam Neely has shared a comprehensive guide which doubles as a content audit template. Generate Ideas For Content The final step in your extensive smart planning phase is to generate a list of possible content ideas to help you create content that becomes an instant hit among your readers. Content Publishing Phase Getting your content planning done means you get to move on to the next step that is executing the plan that you’ve just made. Let’s see how your content planning will come to life. 1. Understanding Keywords And Keywords Research One of the most important aspects of creating content is to understand how keywords and keywords research work. Keywords help you understand what your audience wants and how you should focus your content on keywords to reach maximum number of audience. But if you have not done keywords research before, don’t fret, because here are a few tools that can be of extreme help to research keywords you can rank on based on difficulty and competition. Google Keyword Planner Moz’s Keyword Explorer Ahrefs Keywords Explorer Keyword Studio Serpstat 2. Creating A Workflow To make sure your content marketing strategy is executed flawlessly, it is recommended that you create a content calendar to plan out your dental content pieces in advance. Next, create a workflow so you and everyone on your content marketing team knows what to do and when. A simple workflow can be crucial in accomplishing success in your content marketing strategy. Content Promotion Phase Now once you have planned and successfully executed good content marketing strategy, next comes the step to promote it so it is shared now and again resulting in growing audience and potential leads. Let’s take a look at how you can promote your dental practice content pieces. 1. Identify Social Media Platforms One of the major platforms to use to share your content created for your dental practice are social media platforms. Use your social media accounts to create a following and then to share the content and bring back traffic to your website. Prioritize social media platforms on their purposes to better engage your audience with relevant type of content. Use the following infographic to help you understand the importance of social media platforms depending on their purpose. 2. Email Marketing And Search Engine Optimization As stated by Campaign Monitor, Email marketing is 40% more effective for acquiring customers than social media, and it shouldn’t be hard to accept because it delivers 4,000% ROI. Search Engine Optimization is nothing short in yielding lasting benefits after your social media and email marketing course has been run. It is so effective that a well-crafted SEO content strategy can boost up your traffic by up to 500%. 3. Outreach Last but not the least, use a traditional PR / Outreach technique to promote your content to the audience directly that might be interested in your content. The key to not sound hard core sales personnel, try this guide to PR by Neil Patel. With your quest to outreaching to your audience directly, focus on building contacts and relationship rather than your customers, because according to Heather Anne Ritchie-Carson, cofounder of <Onboardly, it’s time to put back the human in PR relationships. 4. Measurement To guarantee that any strategy is working, evaluation is important. To gauge how effective your dental content marketing strategy has worked, measurement through analytics tools. Using some of the most common analytics tools is the easiest way to measure the growth of your dental practice. Here are a few common ones to get you started: Google Analytics Piwik Heap Kissmetrics 5. Reporting Schedule Evaluating your content marketing strategy regularly is the only way to learn about its effectiveness. Therefore, setting up a reporting schedule is important. But if you are even slightly like us (forgetful, shh), you can even set up automatic measurement schedule with this guide from Google. Content Marketing Strategies For Dentists Now that we have created a fair understanding of content marketing and its important and the process, let’s dive into some of the most commonly used content marketing strategies that have proven effective for a lot of dentists and other medical professionals along with hundreds of other businesses. 1. Blog Posts Creating a great blog post is the first step in your content marketing strategy, but wouldn’t it be sad if only a fewer people were reading the awesome blog post that you wrote? Having a proven blog posting strategy like the one here can ensure your efforts and valuable knowledge is reaping benefits for both you and your readers. 2. EBooks, White Papers and Case Studies Creating and publishing in-depth researches are a great way to show your readers that you are passionate about ongoing learning in your profession. This helps the reader that has crossed the initial engagement period with your blog and is looking for more information to build their trust in your services. Sharing case studies prove that you are open to learning from your mistakes as a dentist and believe in growing forward with sharing transparent information that the reader can ponder upon. 3. Videos Remember when we talked about building relationships with your customers and providing value? Using videos are a great way to do just that. Creating an informative video or a learning guide can, not only give your existing patients a gentle reminder of things they should remember minus the embarrassment of asking again, but it is also a lucrative way to attract more new patients. 4. Infographics Much like videos, visual content gets maximum share due to their readability and the ability to pack complete information in a short space. Infographics are easily becoming a go-to content marketing strategy because of their potential to become share worthy. They only key to producing a shareable infographic is to keep it simple, readable, reliable with references and focusing on visual content. One of our favorite tips to creating an effective infographic is the one by Neil. 5. Podcasts Another great type of content to give a little oomph to your content marketing strategy for your dental practice is to invest in creating podcasts. These little podcast episodes can become the bridge between your potential patients and you. It is a great way to connect with your audience and share valuable content. 6. Guest Blogging Guest Blogging is a proven tactic to build credibility for yourself as a professional while getting a follow link to your website to increase traffic. A lot of websites and blogs are almost always ready to accept in-depth, well researched articles by guest authors because as stated by Social Marketing Writing, “62.96% of peopleperceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible.” While planning out content marketing strategy for your dental practice, including to acquire guest blogging opportunities should be a must. 7. Media Publications Everyone knows that being featured in a media publication is kinda a big deal for any business because it means popularity and exposure. As much as this sounds like a dream, Jayson DeMers, founder of AudienceBloom has given some fool proof tips to help you plan on getting your dental practice featured in media publications. Mistakes To Avoid While Content Marketing For Dentists Creating and sharing content to market your dental practice in the hopes of attracting and acquiring new patients can become overwhelming. And with possibilities of reaching your content marketing goals come a fair share of mistakes you’ll make learning on this journey. But you don’t have to make all of the mistakes yourself, which is why we are listing down a few common content marketing mistakes as stated by Jeff Bullas that dentists can avoid in their content marketing strategies to grow their online presence and business. 1. Failure To Plan This is a no-brainer as we all know that if we fail to plan, we are planning for failure. This is the most costly mistake you can make in your content marketing strategy. It is crucial to plan clearly as to what the business aims to achieve through content marketing and exactly how it has to be executed to avoid maximum chances of failure. Our only tip is to spend sufficient time in planning to avoid failing. 2. Unclear Purpose Many a times, businesses can fall trap in figuring out their true purpose when considering content marketing. It is important that you remember the reason why you’re creating the content and only focus on providing value to the reader and build relationships, the rest will follow. 3. Unprofessionalism Understanding the need of content tone and style for your business is utmost important. If you create content that works for a specific industry, one cannot trust it to work for your industry as well. You need to remain professional while writing or creating content in language that is correct, clear and concise. The best thing is to keep your audience in mind, the people who you want to read your content. 4. Lacking The Social Signals The importance of using social media to share your content cannot be neglected. However, maintaining a balanced usage is critical. Some businesses lack the use of social media for their content marketing which means they miss out on a huge chunk of prospective audience. But, at the same time, over using social media can move you away from your content marketing results. Do not rely heavily on social media platforms to market and promote your content rather create engaging, and valuable content that is share worthy. 5. Avoiding The Organic Search Factors One of the major reasons to use content marketing for your dental practice is to enhance your search engine rankings to improve online visibility. However, if the latest SEO techniques are not incorporated within the content defeats the entire purpose of content marketing for dentists and all other professions. If you do not feel confident in your skills to optimize your content with SEO techniques, it is always better to engage a professional to help your maximize growth through content marketing and SEO. Conclusion Content marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness and grow your online presence in the age where if you’re not online, you’re losing business. Dentists and other medical practitioners have come to realize just how important it is to invest in content marketing for their dental practices. Thus making sure they know content marketing benefits, processes and strategies can boost their online traffic and conversion rates by ten folds. ...
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SMX East 2018: Here’s What You Need To Know
Even if you have a fleeting interest in SEO, you’d already know what ‘Search Marketing Expo (SMX)’ is. If you live under a rock and don’t exactly know what it is, don’t worry we’ll give you a brief before diving deep into what this special event had in store. So, what exactly is ‘SMX’? SMX is the brainchild of the most authoritative and respected voices in the SEO & SEM industry - Search Engine LandMarketing Land (which is just Search Engine Land themselves but focusing entirely on SEM). We all know how dynamic the SEO industry is and how confusing it can be for marketers to figure out, with little to no direction from Google, the exact strategies that will land them on the top of search engine results. ‘The SMX Conference’ was created to change all that in 2007. It is an year-long series of events held at different venues with an aim to bring the best of the best in SEO & SEM together and share their views about the future of this dynamic industry with deep insights you’ll not be able to see or hear anywhere else. It is undoubtedly the best place to go for some fresh search engine marketing wisdom to tackle the search engine challenges you face every day in your business life. We just loved it! And we dig SMX! Our co-founder and Business Head, Gaurav Sabharwal, recently went to attend the ‘SMX East’ event in Manhattan, New York at ‘Jacob K. Javits Convention Center’ (23rd October to 25th October) and came back a lot wiser when it comes to understanding the latest in SEO & SEM and the whole marketing industry in general. Here’s what he had to say about it - ‘“It was my 2nd time going to an SMX event and it just gets better with each passing year! The industry insights I got to hear, the expos I attended, the industry leaders I personally met and the overall networking experience there doesn’t even come close to other SEO events and conferences and every bit of information I soaked in at the SMX East will definitely help us serve our clients a lot better in the time to come” Top Highlights Out of a bunch of industry leading keynotes, here are a few top highlights of the event that you should definitely have a look at as they will greatly help you plan your SEO strategy for 2019 - Bing is going to be more important than ever for SEO Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, had organized two opening keynotes on 24th October about their future plans for SEO (featuring Christi Olson & Frederic Dubut) SEM (featuring David Pann, general manager of global search business at Microsoft). Source: Search Engine Land Talking about the SEO-related keynote first, the search experience Bing is striving to provide us is intelligent, personalized, pervasive, predictive and conversational. And the primary interface they are focusing on is voice. With the help of their digital assistant Cortana, they plan on increasing their search engine capabilities marginally and help searchers in new ways that no one has ever tried before, not even Google. You can read more about this keynote here. Source: Search Engine Land On the other hand, the SEM related keynote which was presented by David Pann was huge. With Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Linkedin, they are trying to make use of the massive social professional networking platform by letting marketers target three attributes from Linkedin in their Bing search Ad campaigns. The three attributes being company, job function & industry. Considering the fact that the user base of Linkedin in 550+ million strong, this new roll-out will put the 26.2 billion acquisition to good use and give a lot of advertising and targeting advantage to bing marketers. Also, Bing is actively working on an AI-driven solution called Bing Advisor designed specifically to give valuable insights to marketers that would help them greatly in planning their marketing campaigns. You can read more about this keynote here. Source: Search Engine Land The opening keynote on 25th October was of the other search engine - Google, presented by Jon Diorio, group product manager for Google Ads. In the keynote, Jon Diorio talked about a lot of upcoming updates that would make advertising via Google Ads a lot easier but impactful for advertisers. The updates are as follows - Click-to-message Ads updates Texts that users send from click-to-message ads can now be delivered directly to advertisers via email. This would kill the need for advertisers to provide their phone number in order to use message extensions. Advertisers can now set up automatic replies to respond to users immediately with preset messages. Store Visits in Google Analytics out of beta To enable marketers to track the offline impact of their marketing efforts on other digital channels beyond Google Ads, Store Visits data will be rolling out in Google Analytics in a coming few weeks to all eligible advertisers. Along with that, Google is also releasing a few store visits tools with the help of Data-driven attribution and Smart Bidding that would help them greatly in determining what is bringing them the most foot traffic. For more information, you can read the keynote here. Source: Search Engine Land No SEO event is complete without talking about probably the most important ranking factor for Google - Backlinks. The next highlight is all about that and a lot more. In a keynote presented by a panel of experts including Ali Brenner (Senior SEO Manager, Sapient Razorfish), Lisa Baron (CMO, Overit) and Paddy Morgan (Co-founder, Aira), they talked about writing the type of content that attracts links and each one of them had their own 2 cents to share. Here are the types of content that people love to link to, according to Ali and Lisa - Evergreen Content Content with exclusive data Content with engaging videos, images or comparison Content that has a story behind it Content with actionable insights Content with simple words & catchy structure with hooks To know more about what they had to say about link-building, you can read the story here. For Gaurav, ‘SMX East’ was truly a remarkable and refreshing experience and we would suggest you to go attend it once if you are dead serious about learning something meaningful in the SEO & SEM industry, you’ll get to know stuff that actually works and not just noise! If you can not make such type of commitment, we would suggest you follow their Youtube channel because there’s a lot that is yet to come. Interested to know more about what happened at the ‘SMX East’ event? You can have a look at their agenda to know exactly what happened when and who made it happen. ...
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Why Writing Compelling Email Subject Lines Still Matter
It’s been more than 40 years since emails saw the light of day being used as a proper marketing channel. Still, it has managed to stay at the top of all other marketing channels for a long, long time when it comes to driving the most engagement and conversions. Though social media may have the spotlight right now when it comes to engaging your audience and building connections, email has always been the king of the game called marketing and is still very popular amongst professionals for retaining and interacting with consumers, 80% of them agree. Unlike popular belief, email is still very much alive. According to a Radicati report, nearly half of the world’s population will be using emails by 2020. The report also suggested that people will spend close to 250 billion emails every day in 2019 for carrying out both business and personal communications. That’s a LOT of emails sent in a day! Standing out from the crowd is something email open rates thrive on and writing compelling subject lines that get clicked as crazy will always be at the heart of it. Most people quickly scan the subject lines in their inboxes before deciding which messages are worth their time and attention. So, with so much pressure on the subject line to entice the potential reader, it makes sense to put your best foot forward and leave an impact on your subscriber list by writing compelling subject lines that urge them to click through. If you haven’t been able to make your CTR tick when it comes to deploying emails that convert, here are some tips that might help you do so - 1. Be as direct as you can Source: Sumo Offering a discount? Have something special to offer? Have an important announcement to make? Be upfront and clear about it. Don’t think you’ll trigger spam filters just because you have the word ‘discount’ or ‘off’ in your email subject line. In fact, people love discounts, and having the word ‘discount’ in your email subject line is proven to improve your click rates drastically. 2. Personalization rocks Source: GetVero Personalization adds a special touch to your emails and portrays to the receiver that the email is written specifically for them. Add a first name, last name, full name or email ID in your email subject lines to add that personal touch. This would require you to choose an email marketing client that provides the functionality of putting dynamic content in them or you can take help from an experienced email marketing agency, like us, that can easily do this for you. 3. Don’t get too creative Source: Sumo It’s easy for subject lines to lose their meaning and context in the pursuit of making it more creative and ‘catchy’. Studies suggest that getting overly creative with your email subject lines, pop-ups and opt-in forms can have more of a negative effect on your users than a positive one. Emphasizing on the first tip, just keep your email subject lines simple and focus on highlighting the exact value it provides. 4. End it with a question mark? Source: Sumo Ending your email subject lines with a question mark tends to increase its click rates by 23%. Question marks add the element of curiosity which urges the reader to click, pair it with a relevant topic that your audience might be interested in and your CTR will go through the roof! 5. A/B test No email marketing campaign is complete without A/B testing. For email marketers, A/B testing has always been an essential component in figuring out what works and what doesn’t. With the help of a little A/B testing, you can easily focus on what’s working for your target audience and quickly scrap what’s not. This not only leads to cost reduction, but you’ll also save yourself a lot of time that would have had spent on figuring out why your email marketing campaigns aren’t delivering like you expected them to be. In my opinion, email is still king when it comes to having personal interactions and building meaningful relationships with your users and it’s not going anywhere soon. Do you indulge in sending emails to interact with your audience? How do you make them click? Share your unique subject line writing ideas and tips in the comments. ...
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