Digital Insights

The answer to the question 'do I need a blog for my business?' is, surely, yes. A blog allows you to attract new customers, inform clients about new products in your business and establish a platform to communicate to your target audience. If you don't have a blog, you should contemplate setting one up, as your competitors could soon start to run away with your market; a recent study by Hubspot suggested that companies who blog receive 97% more links to their site than those that don't, enabling them to appear higher in the search engine rankings and, therefore, attract more traffic.

Constant email marketing, sms marketing, sales calls and now even social media has become a spammers paradise and we all hate spam! No one wants to be ‘that friend’ who constantly posts on social media and you definitely don’t want to be the business that does it either! So the question is… how often should I post on social media? This question is posed by individuals from a personal as well as a business standing, pretty frequently.

We recently ran a piece on the most relevant social networks for your business in 2016. Now that you have a handle on what social media platforms you need to be on, you should start to understand social media best practices and articulate areas that may be hindering you social media strategy. You may have invested a sizeable amount of time and money into your social media roll-out but you are not seeing much of a ROI. Read on as we shed light on the reasons why social media isn't working for your business.

Social media done the right way is going to strengthen your business' online presence, increase brand advocacy, improve your search ranking and connect you to your customers on a personal level. Too many brands waste valuable time and money by communicating on platforms that are not relevant in the South African market when social media has so many great opportunities. With half the year gone, let’s look at the most relevant social networks for your business in 2016.

There is no doubt that email is still a very effective method of communicating with your audience - especially if it is used in the correct way. However, you can only really tap into the power of email marketing when you have a large captive audience. Here are 5 tips to growing your email database.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been a buzz phrase for many years already. There’s even an entire industry that focuses just on SEO. Depending on your goal and ambitions, SEO can quickly absorb massive amounts of your marketing budget. This makes a lot of marketing managers and business owners wonder if SEO is a waste of money or not? Let me try answer that for you with a quick “why”, “what” and “how”.

Previously, a sizeable portion of marketing revolved around putting out tradition advertising. However, in recent years, the advertising game has transitioned into a much more sophisticated machine and with good reason – consumers are wanting to become knowledgeable about things they pay for and are looking for brands that they can trust. This is why you should be educating your buyers with content and building trust with them.

This is certainly a wonderful time for advertising, considering how technology has evolved. The introduction of various tools that assesses big data and give real-time analytics enables marketers to make more informed decisions.  Sophisticated marketing tools and processes may prompt you to ask, “Is bulk email dead?”

There seems to be some grey area on whether or not social media affects your search ranking. You may argue that page ranking does not consider keywords on social posts but that is inaccurate. Google and Bing looks at various data from social sites in order to articulate how high or low to rank a website.

Johannesburg is widely regarded as the business hub of South Africa. A competitive market demands that businesses always bring their A-game. Johannesburg businesses need to be on point with their marketing efforts and that includes their search engine optimisation (SEO) execution. In this piece we will look at some effective tips to boost SEO for Johannesburg based businesses.

There is a growing trend (over a number of years already) on health, fitness and well-being. This is the perfect time to be running a fitness facility. However, it is important to note that even if you have a fantastic fitness facility that includes the most knowledgeable trainers and sophisticated equipment, you still need an edge over your competition. Here are three useful tips on how to attract organic leads for your fitness facility.

It may be an obvious statement but the first step to more customers is more leads. Generally, this means using different marketing tactics to attract people to your website, to call you, send an email or send an SMS - there are many ways. However, in an economy that is struggling to grow, businesses are having to reduce costs and run as lean as possible. One great way to reduce the time spent on chasing leads (a big waste of time and cost if they're poor leads) is to qualify them.

There is a growing trend in the website design industry to have all of a business's content on one page - the industry commonly calls it a “One-Pager”. The question is, does it really generate more leads for your business?

You’ve just started your business and one of your strategies is to get customers from a website. Alternatively, you’ve got an established business and it’s about time that you you redesign your website to make it more effective. Either way, you need a website that attracts visitors, generates leads and allows you to close your customers.

When it comes to launching a new website there are few things that you should remember and prepare for to make your new website launch successful.

The SEO game is in constant transition as it is often undergoing various changes to improve the relevancy of search results. This has been happening to a point that even devout SEO specialists have a hard time keeping up to date with all the changes. However, despite the constant changes, one can’t dispute the fact that making use of long-tail keywords will attract quality leads.

Search engines such as Google are continually improving the way they create their search results. They’re increasingly making sure that the results they show their users are relevant and in context to what they’re looking for. One of these improvements is local search.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a powerful way to attract people to your website and in-turn generate leads and customers. Over the years the SEO landscape has changed considerably and as it has changed businesses have had to change their SEO strategies to make sure they stay relevant and on top of those search rankings.

The internet has become a global market and consumers have become more conditioned and opened to doing business online. Moving your business online brings about a host of advantages. The internet can work wonders for every aspect of your business profile. It is time to embrace the age of digital, move your business online and reap the rewards – here are a few tips that explain how.

One of the first steps to getting more customers is to start generating more leads. There are many ways that companies generate these leads including more traditional methods like TV / radio adverts, mass mailing and cold calling. Whilst these methods still have their place we would like to share a 5 simple methods that have worked for us.

The advent of the digital age is here to stay because of the immense effect and influence it has on consumers. A price-tag cannot be attached to the importance of your business being discovered online – digital paints a fuller picture easier.

WordPress can lay claim to powering more than 24% of the web. It can be best described as an online, open source website creation tool, written in PHP. It is widely revered for being one of the easiest and most powerful blogging and content management system (or CMS) on the market. It is open source – this means that the source code of the software enables the user to study, modify and experiment with it at leisure.

On that note, here are a few South African websites that have been built by this popular web creation tool.

Your website is your business' most critical marketing asset. But here's the problem... it's leaking traffic, leads and revenue right now.

So how do you stop your website from losing valuable opportunities and turn it into a revenue generating marketing tool?

There's some basic rules to making sure that your website is working for you and that it's getting the results that you expect. This is why we've created a FREE guide for the 25 must-have for every website to generate traffic, leads and sales.  

What does the guide give you access to?

• Essential SEO advice to increase traffic

• Important design tips to reduce bounce rates 

• Content creation ideas for engaging visitors

• Best practices for converting traffic into leads