Archives for November 2019

Creating and maintaining a positive reputation for your business is a vital and important aspect in creating a loyal customer base while building your brand.

No major successful or popular brand started out and became successful with a negative reputation. In fact, the reputation of a business has been proven to have a significant influence on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and trust.

Customer retention is something that the majority of big and successful companies thrive on. Customers that are happy are more likely to be return customers who spend more money, and in turn, tell their friends and family about their experience.

Having a reputation marketing strategy in place should be the first thing your company focuses on when building your reputation.

More and more businesses are encouraging their customers to go online and post reviews about their experiences. There are many big review sites out there and the data you get from them can be invaluable to your reputation marketing campaign.

Managing these review sites builds trust and authority for your brand and shows your transparency and accountability. Getting feedback about your business and your brand provides you with valuable insights on where your business is falling short, and how you can improve. Even good feedback can be improved on.

Believe it or not, there are many companies that have failed due to having a bad reputation, and either not knowing, or not doing anything about it until it was too late.

On the other hand, it’s worth mentioning that companies with a good reputation financially outperformed companies with bad reputations in every way.

With a good reputation marketing strategy in hand, your business will benefit from higher brand equity, exponential growth, and a flood of loyal customers with increased customer lifetime value worth 10 times as much as their first purchase.

Don’t wait. Take control of your reputation marketing strategy today, and get started building your businesses trust, brand, and reputation today.

Send me an email johnny@johnnymurray.com now to get started.
Johnny Murray

Your website is your online shop window. It is the first impression you are giving to your new visitor regarding the credibility of your business. If a customer cannot navigate your website to find what they are looking for, they will have no faith in buying from you. You should want it to provide a good experience for your customers. Does it function correctly? Is anything broken? Have you checked lately?

1. What is your site speed? How long does it take for your website to load? If it takes too long, you may have just lost multiple visitors. If it’s not as quick as your competitors, you have just made a bad first impression.

2. Does the content on your site accurately describe what you are selling? This is not only important for your site visitors; even before anyone else sees it, Google has to value your website to ‘rank’ your business site in the search results.

3. Does your site work properly on mobile devices? Have you checked? If not, you are losing a lot of potential customers interested in your services.

4. Are parts of your site broken? Obsolete? What effect are these broken bits having on the overall performance of your site?

Want to find out what else may be improved? Hit me up at johnny@johnnymurray.com.

It might surprise you to know that a lot of business owners don’t optimize their websites.

And when we talk about optimization, we are not just talking about the speed of your website, although that is a big factor when it comes to the impatience of today’s web surfer.

In fact, everything on websites and landing pages can be optimized and refined so that they will increase conversions.

Speed should be the first thing that you look at, although it is probably the easiest thing to fix if there is a problem. You’ve got 3-6 seconds before a user will think there is something wrong with the page, or maybe that the page is down. You probably understand this if you are looking for something and have landed on a slow loading page before.

The next thing to take into consideration with speed is the headline or the first thing that a visitor sees when they hit the website or landing page. Another 0-8 seconds and if you don’t have the right headline, that potential customer is gone and searching somewhere else. Split testing headlines should be on top of your list.

You should always be testing, and if you find a winner, you don’t stop there. Website owners that get twice the sales are always optimizing headlines and copy.

Other things that you can do is take a look at your copy or your sales pitch. Customizing your sales pitch can increase conversions because it gives your visitor a more personalized experience. Make sure you are offering unique value to that potential customer. Offer something of value right up front, don’t waste the visitors time. Time is valuable and many people have a shortage of time and don’t want to waste time looking for what they need.

Offering something for free is another way to optimize for conversions, especially if you are getting their email in the process. There is almost no better way to get someone interested in what they are looking for than to offer them part of the solution for free, and then ask them what email you can send their free information to. Make that offer limited so they realize it’s not going to be around forever.

Optimization could also include features such as live chat. Live chat is great because if a customer doesn’t see something, and they see a chat box, they are more likely to try and ask about what they are looking for using a chat feature.

Exit overlays should be your last ditch effort to get the customers attention. Again, by telling a potential customer something like ‘Wait, don’t leave empty-handed, let us give you ‘insert product name’ for free just for visiting. You would be surprised how many conversions this will likely bring you.

This is just a small sample of some of the things you can do to optimize your website and landing pages for increased conversions.

If you would like to learn how to increase conversions for your website or landing pages, contact me at
johnny@johnnymurray.com

There has been a lot of testing and research done over the past couple of years, and it’s no surprise that more people are using mobile devices to find products or services. The one thing that may or may not come as a surprise is that many businesses haven’t adapted to these changes, or even tested their website. Prioritizing user experience should be the first thing you or your website designer should do.

Any website needs to have design elements that make the website easily seen, and also make it easy to navigate should be on the top of this list. Many websites are starting to get rid of images because they take too long for mobile devices to load, if too many are used. However, if you do use images, they should be scaled down, and the images should use text, such as a card menu seen on Microsoft homepage. This one easy design element shows people what they are looking for quickly, and describes it easily.

And if you’re doing to use video or animation, then fast-loading cinemagraphs are the way to go for mobile devices. These small half-photo, half-animated clips, are quite popular, and load quickly. Make sure that your copy is relevant to the visitor quickly depending on their query, and what got them to your website in the first place. Give a quick big picture of what your site is all about, and what you offer the minute the customer gets there. Realize they may be on a mobile device, and test it, or have your website designer continually test and improve the experience.

Make your site easy to navigate, create different designs for the different sections, but use a consistent theme. Use eye-catching transitions from section to section to keep the user interested. And make sure the font for your copy can be easily seen. Visitors still do the quick scan, so if they quickly scan, make sure you grab their attention quickly. Use custom visual and iconography, or images and symbols, that tells your brand story and shows some personality of who and what your business is about.

All of these design trends are based on statistics. And with the statistics comes the realization that effective website design that makes life easier for users when they visit your site, should be the main goal of you and your website designer. Your competitors are optimizing their websites, if you don’t optimize your site, then you will be left behind.

If you would like to learn more about optimizing and using the latest design trends to improve customer experience, then email us today at johnny@johnnymurray.com, and we will be happy to help you deliver a great user experience.

Johnny Murray

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet marketing advertising model where businesses or individuals who want pay a certain amount of money every time your ad is clicked.

This is a way of buying extra targeted visits for your website. The sponsored ads that typically appear on the top list of the results from a Google search are what we call AdWords PPC.

PPC is highly cost-effective. You only per for the clicks. Your ads that don’t get clicked, get exposure!

Will PPC increase traffic to my website?
Yes. PPC has proven to increase visitors to websites by 300%.

Will it increase the sales I make when potential customers visit my website?
Yes. PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something compared to those customers who stumble upon your website.

What about my brand?
Search ads can increase brand awareness by 80%. That’s Huge!

PPC results are phenomenal. Contact us for more information.

Here at ICU Marketing Associates, we want to make sure your business looks irresistible online. Our experts have compiled a list of 4 warning signs that your website might need a total redesign.

1. Your site takes more than 3 seconds to load

If your site takes longer than two seconds to load, you can not expect people to sit around and wait for the content to show up. According to a survey from Akamai, 49-percent of consumers expect a site to load in two seconds or less. Testing the speed of your website is easy. Open your website on multiple devices such as phones, tablets, and desktop computers to check the speed.

2. Some of the features or content do not display properly

Check your website regularly to make sure logos, photos, and outside links are working properly.

3. Your site is difficult to view and navigate on mobile

Check to make sure your website is usable on a wide range of mobile devices. The last thing you want is to lose a potential customer because your website is not responsive.

4. You’re Not Seeing Any Business Results.

Is your website bringing in leads and sales? If not, then it is definitely time to consider a redesign.

If one or more of these 4 warning signs apply to your website, give us a call today and let our experts help you create the best version of your website.

908-375-3030
johnny@johnnymurray.com

SEO is the process of improving the visibility (ranking) of a website on Google using Google-friendly elements and techniques.

Consider these facts:

1. Ninety-nine percent of customers looking for your services never scroll past the first page of search results. That means your business goal should be to appear on page one of the search results. That’s the aim of SEO.

2. Click-throughs to your business following natural searches (SEO) have a 14.6% buy rate vs. direct mail or print advertising which have a 1.7% close rate. You may wish to consider switching your spending!

3. Ninety-one percent of internet users who are looking for services to buy use natural search results. SEO!

4. Seventy-two percent of customers who did a local search for a business visited a store within 5 miles of their home. Do local customers see your business when they are looking for your service?

5. By the way… Google accounts for over 76% of all worldwide searches. So you have to be seen on Google!

Here’s more:

6. 58% of customers search for local businesses every day.

7. 89% search for local business at least once a week or more. Is your business address appearing in front of your local customers?

8. 86% of local customers look up a local business on Google maps. Are you listed there?

9. 76% of local searches result in a phone call.

10. A massive 72% of customers who did a local search for a business visited a store within 5 miles of their home.

If you are not using SEO and would like to learn more… feel free to contact us: johnny@johnnymurray.com.

Did you know you can extend your marketing messages beyond your existing followers and connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels through boosted and sponsored updates?

We recommend performing a test either on Facebook or LinkedIn.

The first step is to get a Facebook Business Page or a LinkedIn Company Page created for you, compose and publish a post, then ‘boost’ that post.

We advise that the post be linked to a landing page on your website where they can sign up for more information so you can capture their email addresses.

For Facebook, we can select your boosted post audience to target by country, age, gender, and interests. For LinkedIn, we can choose the characteristics of your audience you want to target by country and title or job function.

With a test budget of $200, you can reach at least 30 to 50 thousand people seeing your message and brand (impressions) on Facebook, while on LinkedIn, you can reach approximately 7 to 9 thousand decision makers.

Now that’s powerful!

Imagine reaching out to a huge number of people who might be interested in your products or services with specific demographics without having to know who they are, their email addresses, and phone numbers!

Johnny Murray
johnny@johnnymurray.com