Start off your week strong with our curated list of tips and inspiration around every aspect of the digital marketing world. This is the Mad Fish Catch of the Week.
SEO
Building an SEO strategy requires you thinking about all aspects of your website, content, and on and off-site SEO. While it may feel overwhelming, breaking down the tasks that need to happen and finding the support system you need to manage these factors is imperative to your businesses success. Understanding how to optimize your on-site content, your blog, your technical SEO and more can help you make a difference in your business. For a cheat sheet on what to be looking at, check out this article. It’s a primer that will help you get started and know what to look for in your prospective digital agency.
PPC
How can you improve conversion rates with the same ads, landing page, and bidding strategy? This piece discusses using increased frequency to manufacture brand affinity to optimize and see rates soar by up to 300%. While it may seem like serving ads more frequently is an auto-win, it’s also very possible that you will be tuned out by your audience or be seen as spam and actually impact your customer’s opinion of you in an adverse manner.
This is where putting the right content in the right places comes in. If someone sees an ad for a product that feels natural and specific, as in, they understand the purpose and how it’s going to help them individually, you are likely to be able to work on nurturing them by showing them similar content over time. Learn more about the testing process here.
Design
If you’re a digital calendar person like me, you’re constantly looking for an app that combines usability with slick features and beautiful design. The new iteration of Google calendar is helping us achieve all our plans with their new update that puts function first with the discovery tasks like an event and reminder summary which lets you know what’s needed for each event without going to a separate page. Plus, they don’t overburden you with features and have improved the way the color contrast and typographic hierarchy works so your interface is a lot easier to understand. Walk through the entire change with this article.
Social Media
Anyone managing social media, whether it’s for multiple accounts for different clients or companies, or just trying to juggle different platforms, finding the best tools to make things as efficient as possible is essential. Buffer has made a huge difference for our team, but this blog regarding an additional 11 tools that can help you get social under control can help you expand your social media presence and information without making things more time-consuming. Bookmark it here.
Content Marketing
We talk a lot about usability and UX in the context of design, but understanding the way that written content plays into ease of use and conversion is essential. We love this piece on the different things you should be looking for to bring out your inner UX writer as well as the pyramid of explaining a product: how it works (interaction design), how it looks (visual design), and what it says (content design). Test content like you do design, allow time for revision, and use real content in prototypes.
It’s always a good reminder to remember that you need to think like a human to write like one. Often, we suggest speaking copy (especially for short-form content) so that you can be sure that what you’re saying is succinct and makes sense. It also allows you to experiment with word choice and inject humor in a natural manner. Learn more about writing UX content here.
Culture
Wondering what’s important in work culture? Ditch the ping pong table and improve your support for working parents, helping improve flexibility for working from home, and enhancing team members experience by making them feel valued. The overall takeaway was that it’s less about putting money forward, but are about internal policies that improve overall value. Read more of the reasoning behind these employee’s experiences and preferences in this piece.
Productivity
Motivating yourself to form helpful habits can be difficult. Whether it’s exercising daily, putting away your phone, or reading daily we all have things that we’d like to add to our routines. While we’ve all read about perfecting a morning routine, who has done it? We’re loving these five essential things to do in the morning. Becoming alert, taking care of your emotional state, intellectual growth, health, and working on long-term goals are mentioned.
This list of 23 simple things that can help you perfect this routine is a great jumping off point. Personally, I’ve been working on writing before I get onto social media and making time to walk my dog while listening to a podcast in the morning so I get some space to digest what’s happening in the world and in my neighborhood. Read more tips from the blog here, and let us know what you’ve been doing in the morning to improve your health.