Digital Marketing Tips for Artisan Coffee Shops

Artisan coffee is a growth industry. Millions of people are rediscovering their love of freshly ground coffee and on every street in every town, there is at least one artisan coffee shop staffed by cool hipsters. With growth in this niche phenomenal, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd, so a great marketing plan is essential. You can’t afford to sit back and wait for customers to find you and learn to love your dark roast espresso or super smooth flat white. Sure, organic traffic will come, but it’s better to kick-start the process with a smart digital marketing campaign.

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Build a Website

No matter how amazing your coffee shop is, you need a website. Customers tend to look for a website when they learn about your brand. They want to find out more about you. Coffee junkies are interested in different beans, roasts, and anything coffee related, so it’s essential that you have a fully functioning website open for business at the same time as you open your coffee shop doors.

Use your website as a content marketing hub. Tell your customers more about the types of beans you use and where they originate. Offer hints and tips about the perfect blend and post videos of your finest coffee moments. Little details like this that will help you attract and retain loyal customers.

It’s easy to create a website. Content management systems like WordPress offer a simple drag and drop interface anyone can use. However, you should start with a good hosting package so page loading speeds are not compromised, as this will affect your business. You can sign up for Blue Host with coupons to save money, which is perfect for a startup with very little money left in the budget.

Social Media

A strong social media presence is critical. People love to share content online with their friends and family. Create a Facebook page and encourage customers to join you online. It’s also worth creating a strong presence on visual social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. Show off your latte art skills and post videos about how to make the perfect cappuccino.

Forum Posting

Many coffee enthusiasts love to chat about coffee online, so join a few coffee forums and become a trusted source of advice. You can share your coffee stories and promote your coffee shop at the same time. It’s also a good place to source new coffee beans and equipment for your coffee shop, as many people in the trade will frequent popular forums.

PPC Advertising

In the early days, PPC advertising is a good way to build up a clientele. Social media PPC advertising is cheap and effective, as it directly targets your ideal customers. Use social media PPC to spread the word and drive footfall to your website and coffee shop.

You don’t need a big budget to market a coffee shop. Once you have customers through the door, your amazing coffee should be more than enough to keep them coming back.

How can your Restaurant use Digital Signage to Attract More Customers?

The food industry is one of the biggest users of digital signage LCD and LED displays, mainly because of the nature of the business where, over and above marketing, digital signs are also used for menus, recipes, list of ingredients, and other information that is very useful to the customer. As early as 2011, a survey conducted on 200 industry leaders showed that 21% planned to roll out digital ordering kiosks and menus. So, how can your business use digital signs to attract and retain customers?

  • Digital Menu Boards
Here a digital media board is being used at a restaurant.

Here a digital media board is being used at a restaurant.

Place digital menu boards (DMBs) above the cashier or any other strategic place that can be viewed by all. Studies have shown that this boosts overall sales by between 3% and 5%, and even higher on the specific items promoted. DMBs help drive foot traffic and you should, therefore, use them in places like airports and malls where you are competing with other restaurants and you need to catch the eye of passers-by. Studies show that purchasing decisions of 30% of customer surveyed are influenced by what is on DMBs and 15% of restaurants report increased customer numbers after installing DMBs.

  • Display of useful information

Display of information such as calories and ingredients will help you stay on the good side of the law. Recent U.S. laws require that restaurants that have over 20 outlets display calorie info alongside each item. Displaying ingredients used could help you attract customers. You can also list potential allergens like nuts and gluten, and whether the items displayed are vegetarian and/or vegan friendly.

  • Ordering Kiosks

You could use your digital signs as ordering kiosks. These take the form of digital menus or tablets brought to the table. Ordering kiosks are intuitive touch-screen signs that allow customers to place orders, even without talking to the waiter. Some restaurant owners fear that this might give an impersonal and cold experience, but they actually lead to a more personalized experience.

According to a 2010 survey, customers preferred QSR offering self-service. “Chef Crafted Sandwitches” in 200 McDonald’s stores is a good example of how ordering kiosks can boost your restaurant business’s sales.

  • Games and entertainment

Other than digital signage content giving information, you can also use digital signs for interactive games and other forms of entertainment. This will come in handy since customers will not get bored (which usually leads to them leaving) as they wait for a table.

  • Social networking

If you have a social media channel, you could integrate it with digital signage to allow people to leave reviews and comments. You could ask them to give feedback for a chance of getting money-off coupons or free burgers. You can display social media feeds and encourage sharing, which increases the chances of your content going viral.

  • Add recipes

Adding a recipe is a good way of attracting and retaining customers. Recipes make a good back screen when there’s nothing else being displayed.

Your competitors are most likely using digital signage and you should not be left behind since this catching up might be difficult. You should let a pro handle digital signage since this will allow you to concentrate on your core business and it will bring professionalism.

Author Bio: Bill Williams will help you attract customers to your restaurant through digital signage. He offers digital signage and other business promotion services like SMM and PPC. Visit this website for more details https://www.dopublicity.com/

Ways to Use Press Releases for SEO Purposes!

seoWhen a company has some news that it wants to share with the media, it uses a press release. For decades, this method of disseminating company news has been utilized successfully. Thanks to the Internet, press releases can be conducted on a digital platform and contribute positively to the SEO effort for a website.

How can press releases be valuable to you from an SEO perspective?

A press release is indirectly and directly valuable to your website. It can add value to your website directly when Internet users click on the press release link in the search engine results and arrive at your business website. In this way, your website gains an increased number of visitors. The press release helps your brand value to increase by creating some buzz and awareness for your business.
Indirectly, your press release can give you benefit by being quoted or presented in another website or blog. If it is posted in an influential website, the readers will go through it and head on to your website. If they find that it is unique, eloquent and beneficial, then they will recommend it to other websites and your business brand value increases exponentially. As a result, your business becomes more well known on the Internet and everywhere else. As such, it is clear that press releases normally give you some SEO benefits. They include:

  • Real and natural backlinks from other websites or blogs
  • Increase visibility and readership for your website
  • A stronger brand
  • Increased number of traffic to your website

Strategic targeting when you write press releases

Your press release should be written for online readers. You should ensure that your PR firm in San Francisco firm does not write it for search engines. Some PR companies write releases int his way by stuffing too many keywords in the content. When they do this, the overall product does not effectively communicate the company message. As such, you should use keywords carefully. Here is how to do it.

Strategic keyword placement

First of all, ensure that you pick out the most ideal keywords and keyphrases for your press release. These should be words and phrases that clearly describe your business, your product or your service. After you identify these keywords and phrases, you should use them sparingly in your press release. If you put too many of them, then it will be flagged by the Googlebots and your website can be demoted in the ranks. As such, it is important to place keywords sparingly in the press release for maximum impact.

Conclusion

It is very possible to use press releases for SEO purposes. If handled properly, these releases can inform Internet users about your business. Simply follow the above tips and tricks while using the press releases for this purpose and this will help you to achieve SEO for your website.

Bio

Fetty Schuman is an SEO expert. She works with one of the top PR firm in San Francisco firms and delivers exceptional work for her clients. She is considered an authority on how to utilize press releases on the Internet for SEO purposes. Her opinion is presented in magazines, websites and blogs.

Considerations when reviewing Analytics Data

analytics (1)Questions to Ask of Analytics Data
Do you know how to succeed in business using SEO? One must have a fair idea about how search engines operate. Using the data reporting and analysis efficiently and responding to it is of utter importance. With a proper response to the analytics report, you can build a strategy which suits your business. This article delves into the questions you can ask of your SEO data.

Brief Intro about SEO
Search engines go through websites in detail. They use an algorithm to deliver the most relevant and helpful search result for the users. The rank of a site on SERP is based on a number of factors like title, link, and more. The higher the rank of your website or web page, more are the chances of search engine users visiting them. This helps in the marketing and growth of your business. This is the reason why there is so much buzz about SEO in the online marketing segment.

It’s All About Data
SEO is all about getting your data right and work on it instantaneously. Data reporting and analysis should be the major building block of your SEO strategy. They help you by providing information to monitor the performance of various fields of your business, as well as bring out meaningful insights that can be used to understand and optimize your business. You should respond to these data in order to improve the performance of the business.

Working Out the Strategy
Your SEO strategy is the prime factor behind successful online Internet marketing. You must obtain enough information and devote enough time for constructing your strategy. A variety of factors and stuff are needed to be looked into, analyzed and implemented.
What you want is important information to determine the strategy. Your goals, the type of traffic you are aiming to get, etc. are essential data.
Understand the Targets: You must be clear about the target. You should clearly define the targeted audience in your strategy. For example, a flower business would clearly be meant for the local residing people.

Questions to Ask
How far have you succeeded in attaining your goals?
You must take a look at the organic traffic you have gained in a month’s time. If you had hoped for a certain amount of traffic in a year, the SEO expert will keep an eye on the analytics
.
How much have things improved?
In this phase, the SEO expert looks at other aspects of analytics. You can observe the changes that you had not expected. The bounce rate on your site may have increased instead of decreasing. Or, a page on the site may have gained popularity. This type of information can tell you how a recent change you made has affected the behavior of your audience.

How are things different from what you had hoped?
Knowing the difference between the results you had expected to receive and the results you have actually received are important to determine strategies. This may prove that your assumptions had been wrong and you may have to adhere to more useful techniques.

What are the notable features in the change?
Getting detailed information about the changes is also a significant factor in determining further strategies. In the event that you notice a rise in traffic, you should try to identify the demography of the increase in traffic.

With the right question, you can understand where you have gone wrong and what improvements you have made. The question can assist you to determine the measures you can take to design better strategies and improve your traffic count. So, prepare the right questions and get improved results.

Discover Just How Many Roles Public Relations Serve in a Business

Conducting a market research is one of the most important things that you can do for your brand. In order for it to grow, you will need to advertise it and in order to advertise you will need to know the characteristics of the people you are advertising to. There is no way you are going to use social media marketing to capture an audience that is barely on social media. It will not make sense just the same way you are not going to use newspapers to advertise to teenagers who do not read newspapers nowadays. This is why it is very important to carry out the market research and it will help you greatly in your public relations activities.

PR for business growth

Public relations activities range from promotional to maintenance tasks. In the case of a startup business, most of their PR is going to revolve around promoting the company. People have to know about the existence of the company and this means advertising has to be done. There are different avenues available to get a brand to its audience’s attention. With digital marketing, there is so much available to help a brand grow in leaps and bounds currently.

The most crucial thing in PR for business growth is to understand your audience. What are their characteristics? What is it that they like? What do they not like? This is where the market research comes in to help out.

For instance, you will discover from your market research of the American market that the Hispanic community makes up the largest percentage of minority groups in the country. You will also discover that they have a purchasing power of something north of $1 trillion. It therefore makes sense to tailor corporate communications to suit this community. There are PR companies that deal primarily with Hispanic public relations and thus they can make your promotional work so much easier.

PR for maintenance purposes

The purposes of advertising are always to make people aware of a brand and to remind them that the brand exists. Do you think that a brand like Pepsi still needs to be advertised? It is a world renowned brand but then people tend to forget about things pretty fast. This is why they have expensive ad campaigns all the time. This is PR for the aim of maintaining the performance of the brand in the markets.

PR for disaster management

Corporate scandals occur all the time. You here of a company that had to recall half of their products due to this or the other reason all the time. There are other brands that are accused of discrimination of people for whatever criteria. Such scandals can destroy the company quite effortlessly. This is why it is important to have a good PR team working with you. When such occurrences come up, then you are able to sort the out with immediate effect and control the amount of damage that might possibly result from the scandal.

About the author

Mosaico is a renowned Hispanic public relations company with years of experience in corporate communications. When it comes to reaching out to the Hispanic community, they are the best in America.

How to Build a Peer Network to Increase Your Social Reach

If you are looking for the maximum leads and heavy inflow of traffic, you have to make sure that the content that you share must have the maximum reach. Are you keen on exploring the way to increase the traffic of your content? Well, this is possible with the help of peer network that helps in increasing your social reach. Basically the group of social advocates in peer networking can enhance the reach of the contents that you share. This article will help you to understand what peer network is and thereby render growth to your business.

What do you want to share and with whom?share

The very first thing that should be taken into consideration is the content that you want your network to share. You might have a few goals in your mind. For instance, you might promote and advertise your brand so that your business is at the top of every potential customer’s mind. Focus on the original contents that you are developing and identify how your customers respond to it. So, it is considered best if there is a blend of original and third party contents in your write-ups.

Easy sharing of contents by the social advocates

  • There are two methods of sharing contents:The first one requires you to post the content on your business’s pathways and thereby email the post links to the network of the social advocates. Mention in the email to the social advocates to share the contents by personalizing them in order to entice the audience. Sample social posts and tweets can be attached and the best part is that this method is free and simple. Though it is time consuming, but it has the advantage of enhancing the engagement for your main business channels over the course of time
  • Automating service, like the ‘Circulate.it’ is the second method. All that you need to do is load the post links into the service that will automatically send emails to your network of the social advocates on the specific date and time that you pre-select. This is a more organized and less time consuming method.
    Expand your team

Once your internal team of members is acquainted with the entire process, you can ask for experts to join your team and taking up larger roles. You can allocate them with the work to exploring links to the third party contents exactly like the ones where you are sharing now. You have to be clear with your work expectations from your new team members. Ensure that each of the team members are delivering a certain minimum number of links every day so that there is no obstacle with the growth of your business.

Choose your network of advocates carefully

Once you experience success from the contributions of your network of the social advocates, it is imperative that you can further expand your team. But make sure you are cautious enough. Ask the following questions in your mind before you expand your team strength.

  • Do you have loyal followers who can share your contents even without being demanded?
  • Do you want to include industry influencers in your network?

Invite only those people who can prove to be advantageous for your business by sharing your content and reaching the maximum targets which shall help you to satisfy your goals.

Author bio: Neha Mishra works with digital marketing team of Organizein.com. She does take care of writing part of her team and has written articles on Social Media, SEO, Web Design and many more. She has provided social media services in Los Angeles to lots of clients looking to boost their business

Learning ES6 (FINALLY)

Some amazingly great changes are in ES6, but I wanted to start out simple by highlighting a very useful syntax introduction: the let command.

In a nutshell, let introduces block-level scoping to variables.

What does that mean? I’ll show you:

<script>

var x = 10;

if(x) {
    var x = 92;
}

console.log(x);

</script>

What will happen when you run this snippet? The console will display something similar (literally) to “92”

> 92

Now, if you run this snippet using let like so:

<script>

var x = 10;

if(x) {
    let x = 92;
}

console.log(x);

</script>

console.log will display “10”.

> 10

So, block-level scoping means we can isolate scope within control structure blocks in the same way as we can control scope within functions!

(also, if you haven’t opened up your devtools, now is a good time to do so. then you can copy/paste the code between the <script> tags to run it)

I love this feature. I’m super late to the ES6 party, but better late then never!

How to Build a Powerful and Effective Email Marketing Strategy

How to Build a Powerful and Effective Email Marketing Strategy

Even though it has been around for quite some time now and many other channels of communication have emerged enabling businesses to communicate with their customers and stakeholders, email remains a firm favorite of businesses, large and small. In fact, due to its familiarity, universality, and flexibility, email is actually thriving even with the new generation of mobile device users who are using it to communicate 24×7. However, unless businesses have an effective email marketing strategy in place, it is quite likely that the time, money, and effort in sending off the emails will be wasted to a great extent. Some tips on getting it right:

Get Together an Acquisition Strategy

If the growth in numbers of your audience is your priority, as it will invariably be, you need to begin by thinking about all the places and occasions where the audience is already engaging in some way with your company or brands. Now you need to find out how you can enhance that experience and drive better and more interactive engagement. This can be as simple as optimizing the opt-in form for mobile devices.

mobile friendlyMake Your Communication Mobile-Friendly

With more and more customers accessing their emails over mobile devices, you are bound to lose out badly if your email communication is not optimized for these devices. A survey reveals that 63% of American customers immediately delete the emails that they cannot read with ease on mobile devices.

Getting Recipient Permission

It is extremely important that you, as a sender of marketing emails, get the permission of the recipients so that they feel that they have consciously chosen to engage with you and not been randomly selected to be spammed. The process of opting-in automatically refines your database so that only those who are genuinely interested in your company and products are present in the database, avoiding the usual label of being marked as spam.

Use Relevant and Targeted Data

Whenever you need to send out communication using bulk email marketing services in Mumbai, you need to make sure that you are only addressing the relevant audience and not using a shotgun approach by sending to your entire database. If your communication is filtered so as to be location or gender-specific then you are likely to get superior results due to enhanced customer relevance and experience. If you are active on social media, do not use the same contents in your email as consumers are constantly looking for different information on these channels.

Personalized Email Communication

Customers who have opted-in to receive email communication from you will appreciate the communication, even more, when they are addressed by name, and the contents reflect that the recommendations have been made as per the recipients’ preferences and past purchase behavior. According to experts the addition of personalized recommendation can increase click-through by 25-35% and conversion by as much as 15-25%.

Drive Deals With Email Marketing

According to studies,those who prefer to receive information about deals over email as compared to any other channel, including social media, such as Facebook comprise the largest segment. The behavior is explained by the simple fact that the deals stay in the inbox and can be read at leisure, unlike the flurry of posts in social media that can leave you scrambling, and possibly missing out something that might have been really interesting. The best thing to do is to publicize your deals on social media and encourage customers to sign-up for your emails.

Conclusion

Along with a strong website and social media presence, you can use email marketing to engage with the customers in a way that is meaningful to them. You need to customize your email marketing efforts to cover a large assortment of devices that range from conventional desktop computers to the latest in mobile phones and tabs. Encouraging opt-ins from customers will refine your database and you will be able to deliver exclusive, customized and targeted communication through a focused email marketing exercise.

Author bio: Jonathan Caser is a senior customer consultant working with GingerDomain.com, a leading digital marketing services provider.

Mobile SEO: Mobile Search Results Ranking Factors now revealed

Many webmasters and business owners already know that it’s important to have a mobile-optimized website, but few are truly conversant with the differences in ranking factors for mobile search and desktop search. Such people adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to SEO, applying the same techniques for mobile search optimization as they do for their desktop sites, and they often neglect their mobile ranking metrics during performance analysis.

In a world that is growing increasingly mobile, this is a very dangerous strategy, and one that prevents many businesses from realizing their full online marketing potential. Google revealed in May 2015 that in ten countries, including the USA and Japan, the number of Google search queries on mobile exceeded the desktop search queries, and many countries continue to follow the trend. In fact, overall analysis reveals that mobile searches are more than desktop searches globally.

Any astute marketer/business manager would see the importance of having a separate strategy to track mobile search ranking performance. This is especially true because Google does not use the same ranking algorithm to provide mobile search results as it does for desktop. There have been numerous reports in the last few months revealing various factors that influence mobile search ranking, particularly after Google released their ‘Mobilegeddon’ update to making mobile friendliness a key ranking factor for mobile search results last April.

This article reveals the most important element search marketers should be following during mobile search optimization, revealing inherent differences between mobile and desktop search optimization strategy. Read on to find out more.


Highest ranking domains must also be mobile friendly

magnetAccording to research done by Searchmetrics, the Google mobile-friendliness update resulted in a higher fraction of mobile-optimized domains within the first ten pages of search results. Before the update, approximately 80% of the top 100 websites ranked were mobile-optimized, a number that increased to above 90% in the months following the update’s release.
These are just statistics, which, while helpful, do little to practically arm marketers looking to improve their mobile search performance going forward. This post breaks the findings from Searchmetrics’ report.

 

Technical elements

The report shows that technical components significantly contribute to mobilerankings, probably owing to the smaller screen size and limited bandwidth available for mobile devices. Technically speaking, these are the most important ranking elements:

 

 

  • Site speed – you can use the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google to gauge your site’s loading speed. On average, page one ranking sites have an average loading speed of 1.10 seconds.
  • Flash elements– use of flash elements has been on the general decline, even before the Mobilegeddon update was released. Instead, HTML5 is recommended to enable proper content display on both desktop and mobile.
  • Keywords within domain – use of keywords in domains’ significance has fallen in the last three years since Google instituted the Exact Match Domain Update. The report reveals that significance of keywords within domains is even less for mobile search result placement than desktop. Therefore, choose your domain name according to your branding strategy, and forget the keywords.

 

User experience

Mobile devices have limited screen sizes, and so optimizing fonts, images and other elements for proper rendering is important for creating positive user-site interactions. The following are the most important factors considered under user experience:

  • Unordered lists – high-performing mobile sites utilize more unordered lists compared with their desktop counterparts. However, the lists are shorter for the formers than the latter. Use of bullet points improves content scan-ability, but keep the lists short and sweet.
  • Internal linking – mobile content has fewer internal links compared with desktop content, even though this number has increased significantly in the last year since the update. Ensure that your internal links are meaningfully used and placed in such a way that mobile users can click on them accurately.
  • Images – top-performing mobile search results have fewer than four images per page on average, unlike desktop sites which have at least nine. Mobile content should include sparing use of images, and the images should be optimized to ensure fast loading.

 

Content

Content remains significant as a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile search. These are the most important factors to consider when building mobile-optimum content:

  • Body keyword use – keyword use within the body of content increased from 2.7 to 5.48 between 2014 and 2014. It is notably lower than desktop averages which are around 10.22 within the same timeframe.
  • Word count– desktop results have an average word count of 1285 compared with mobile’s 868. Understandably so, mobile content should be shorter to avoid tiring out readers, but long enough to provide adequate information on the subject.
  • Proof terms – high-performing mobile sites utilize more proof terms – words related to a page’s main/target keywords. These are easy to include naturally if your content adequately covers the subject in discussion.

 

Conclusion

These are the most important mobile ranking factors. However, things like social signals and inbound links still play some role in mobile ranking, although their part is not immediately clear. However, if you begin with these as you draw up your mobile SEO strategy, you are likely to see great improvement in the coming months.

 

Bio:

Michael Bentos is a highly experienced online marketer currently working with the team at ParadoxSEO.com, an SEO company with a powerful platform that aims to simplify SEO. He provides internet marketing and SEO service to businesses worldwide. Connect with him via LinkedIn.