Digital marketing is imperative for businesses today. Read on for critical advice.
Getting your domain name right
If you are to establish a presence online, you are going to need to choose a domain name. This is a pivotal part of building your online identity, as it has a massive impact on your visibility and your overall brand.
When building your website and looking at what is the best website builder, try to find one where you can buy a domain too.
Read on to discover some of the common mistakes business owners make when buying domains so that you can avoid making them.
Making it difficult to spell
If you can, you should avoid any words that are difficult to spell. This includes words that have different spellings for different cultures, as well as homonyms, i.e. 'peace' and 'piece.'
Incorporating characters other than letters
When it comes to communicating a website URL that contains dashes and/or numbers, there can be a lot of confusion. You are going to spend a considerable amount of time continually explaining that the numbers are either typed out as a number or spelled as a word, or indicating what sort of special characters go where.
Selecting a domain name that is too similar to another website
You need to come up with a site URL that is unique to your website, reflecting your brand image and what your website is all about. If you simply copy another website, you won't have a strong brand recall and recognition.
Making it too long
You also need to make sure that your domain name is not too lengthy. After all, the whole aim is to get people to visit your website with ease. A lengthy domain name can work against this, especially when it comes to people that are trying to get into your website from a small touchscreen device, like a smartphone. People may also struggle to remember your URL if it is long, reducing the chances of them visiting your site again in the future.
Using HubSpot to generate contacts
For those who are unaware, HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform which helps businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert leads, and close customers. However, for this to be the case, you need to know how to use HubSpot effectively. One key area that this software assists with is lead generation.
Manual input
There is only one place to begin, and this is with manual input. When you log into HubSpot, you will see that there is an ‘add contact’ button. This enables you to manually fill in all of the fields for a contact. This is great for the likes of walk-ins and telephone enquiries. Whenever a customer gets in touch, a member of your team can take their details and input them manually into the software with ease.
Integration
Another option is integration. This involves importing contacts from a pre-existing database. All you need to do is export your records from your current system, and you can then import them into HubSpot with a few clicks.
Prospects tool
One of the most useful features of HubSpot is the Prospects tool. This tracks companies that have visited your website through their IP address. To view these details, you will need to add the HubSpot tracking code to your site. All you need to do is head to Reports, then Analytics Tools and click on Prospects. After this, click Actions, and select View Tracking Code. Once you have done this, the Prospects tool will start populating all site visits.
Offline resources
You can also add contacts to HubSpot from an offline source. There are many different ways a contact may be added from an offline source. This includes the following:
- Contacts created via the conversations tool
- Contacts created via the documents tool
- Contacts created via HubSpot Sales
- Contacts imported into HubSpot
- Contacts created via third-party software
- Contacts created by using the events tool
- Contacts created by manually adding them
- Contacts imported via Salesforce
- Contacts created via forms submitted from a filtered IP address
- Contacts created directly using Contacts API
Live chat
You can also capture contact information when you are using the live chat feature. There are tools that can do this automatically such as Zapier.
Bot
Finally, a contact may be created when using the bots tool. This can also be an offline source.
Marketing automation
Marketing is a massive undertaking for most businesses today. Marketing automation enables businesses to run this side of their operation more efficiently. It means that you can implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press ‘send’ on every post you create, message you write or email you generate.
The benefits of marketing automation for sales
There are lots of effective automation tools out there that help you with identifying your audience, as well as designing the right content and automatically triggering actions based on customer behaviour and schedules.
Improve time management and enhance organization
One of the exceptional things about marketing automation is that it frees up your time, meaning your team can focus on the core elements of your business, those tasks that have an impact on your bottom line. Marketing automation is great in terms of organization and simplifying staff expenses.
Increase ROI in the long term
You can enhance your customer lifetime value by automating the likes of customer follow-ups, up-sells, and cross-sells. You will see your sales activity result in a better ROI when this is combined with improved lead management and prioritization.
Greater accountability
Marketing automation also tends to track team member performance. This will enable you to highlight areas for improvement and bottlenecks with ease. It will also encourage your team members to work harder because they know that their performance is being tracked.
Leading scoring benefits
Finally, other benefits associated with market automation include the fact that it takes the guesswork out of lead scoring. Through improving lead scoring, your team will find it easy to prioritize the right leads, those of high value. They will also know when the right time is to follow up with people, whether via telephone or email, to maximize conversions.