Today, every online business strives to achieve leads. They use various advanced marketing tools and techniques to stay ahead of their competition, but they don’t know how to break the ice. When it comes to lead generation, content marketing is still unexplored. Interesting, innovative and easy to understand content can easily capture the interest of users. In a nutshell, better use of content marketing can generate more leads. Quick facts:

• The biggest challenge for B2B marketers is “generating high-quality leads (61%)”.
• The three most common lead generation strategies are: email marketing (78%), event marketing (73%) and content marketing (67%).
• 83% of B2B marketers use content marketing for lead generation.

Here are a few ways to generate leads by using content marketing:

• Newsletters – A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication that is used for capturing the interest of people. In fact, it is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to grow your email list. Newsletters not only helpful in updating customers, but also improve their knowledge and understanding about a specific topic.
• Blog Posts – World class business owners have recognised the potential of regular blogging. Blogging not only establishes a better connection with customers, but also helps businesses to make their customers loyal. Businesses spread their messages, industry or product information in an interactive way through blog posts. No doubt, blogging can easily improve brand image and visibility of a website as well.
• Quiz - Offering a quiz to your visitors is the best and the most creative way to learn more about them, engage them, spark interest in them and obtain their information. It is also a great way to connect with your audiences and learn about their preferences.
• Videos – In order to generate leads, it is important to create helpful, interactive, and useful videos that can solve the problems of your users. You must create "how to" videos or "video tutorials" to help your users. Through videos you can easily educate them in a friendly manner.
• Webinars – This is the best and the most effective way to share your presentation, discussion, demonstration, or instructions with your audiences. Most business owners use webinars to spread their messages and presentations to public.

You can combine all these dynamic content marketing tactics to redesign your marketing plans. However, well-crafted content is the key. So, it’s important to create valuable content for your users so that it can play a sheet anchor role for your business.

Inbound marketing is a method of creating quality content that attracts people towards a brand. By creating and distributing the content, a website automatically attracts inbound traffic and improves its overall conversion rate. Unfortunately, most business owners often fail to distinguish the basic difference between outbound marketing and inbound marketing and suffer a lot as a result. Here are a few basic elements that need to be understood by business owners:

1. Content Creation and Distribution – This is a lifeline of inbound marketing. Both content creation and distribution for the targeted customers are equally important. This educates as well as informs customers.
2. Personalised content – Audiences like personalised content that solves their problem and provides them with possible solutions. Therefore, tailor your content according to your audiences’ needs.
3. Multi-channel approach - Inbound marketing includes multi-channel approach to spread the content to the maximum number of customers.
4. Integration – Content creation, distribution and its evaluation work together to improve the overall marketing efforts.
5. Timing – Timing is everything, especially when it comes to inbound marketing. You must provide the right content at the right time to your audiences to build trust.
6. Blogging – Blogging is one of the best ways to educate your customers. However, you must create educational and informative content ("content is king") that can answer your customers’ queries.
7. SEO - You need to make your website user as well as search engine friendly. For that, you need to pick appropriate keywords, write good and useful content, optimise your website and build links.
8. Sharing – You need to create high quality articles, press releases, case studies, whitepapers, videos, presentations, and infographics and share them on social media platforms for optimum exposure.
9. Calls-to-Action – CTAs are buttons or links that encourage visitors to take action. You must use them across your website for better conversions.
10. Social Monitoring – Monitor social conversations, customer feedbacks and respond to them professionally.

So, adopt inbound marketing to expand your customer base. Meticulous and focused inbound marketing efforts will make your brand much more powerful and visible. Are you ready to push the envelope? Quick facts:

• Inbound marketing includes content marketing, email marketing, SEO, social media marketing and blogging.
• 41% of marketers have improved inbound ROI for their company.
• 66% of consumers have made online purchase as a result of a marketing email.
• The top 5 results get 75% of the clicks.

Online businesses create and distribute social media content for brand building as well as improving their ROI. They create the most valuable content to educate their audiences; however, they often struggle to:

• generate huge traffic to their websites
• choose the most effective content distribution strategy
• establish their brand image
• generate the expected leads

The reason could be anything, from wrong identification of target audiences to miscalculated content distribution techniques. Content distribution is the key to any marketing strategy. Let’s discover some of the most effective social media content distribution techniques that can make your content viral:

• Use custom GIFs – GIFs are one of the most impressive ways to tell a story. Use a relevant GIF according to your content and industry needs. (Tip – You can use GIFMaker.me to create animated gifs, slideshows and video animations with music.)
• Use Snapchat – Use Snapchat to raise your own community and share your content (you can share drawings, emojis, and captions). This is the most underutilised platform to date. (Statistics - According to research firm, only 40% of B2C businesses have accounts, compared to 93% for Instagram. Even fewer B2B companies are on Snapchat.)
• Rely on user generated content - UGC has incredible benefits, you can easily optimise and publish your UGC. (Research shows people trust user generated content more than other media.)
• Run contests – This is one of the most engaging techniques to grab the attention of your viewers on social media. You can instantly involve a huge number of your fans and followers.
• Use infographics - To remain unique, competitive and advanced, businesses need to include infographics in their strategies. (Statistics - Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.) (Tip – Use Piktochart or Canva to make the most beautiful infographics.)

Quick tips:

1. If you display UGC on your product page, it will influence your buyers’ behaviour and increase your website’s conversion rate.
2. Always use URL shorteners for links.
3. Always identify your loyal followers.
4. Use podcasts to build a stronger relationship with audiences and capture the market.
5. GIFs educate your followers.
6. Create infographics to display numerical data.
7. You can also use Gifographics to engage more customers and to promote social sharing.
8. Images and videos are hidden keys to social media success.
9. Stay up-to-date on the latest social media marketing best practices.

These are the most powerful social media content distribution techniques, which need to be incorporated in your marketing strategies. Quick facts:

1. 60% of marketers predict that the use of infographics will increase in 2016 compared to 2015.
2. 57% of marketers think that e-books are effective marketing tactics.
3. Infographic usage grew from 9% to 52% in 2015.
4. 65% of people classify themselves as “Visual learners”.
5. Social media is the most common content marketing delivery mechanism, used by 87% of marketers.

Worldwide business owners create extraordinary content for their audiences; however, they fail to distribute it which results in their failure to reach their audiences. There are certain effective tools for content distribution, which can help them to reach targeted audiences. Business owners must use these powerful tools to promote their content and improve their ROI. Quick facts:

• Users send 204 million email messages in a minute, making it the most popular way to share content.
• Content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing; however, it generates roughly three times more leads.
• On average, content marketers are dividing their content into three areas: (61%) created, (27%) curated and (12%) syndicated.
• 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content everyday.
• 91% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.

Here are a few well known content distribution tools that need to be utilised:

• SimpleReach – This is a renowned platform that helps publishers and business owners to smartly distribute, retarget and measure their content across the most efficient channels. This content distribution tool has amazing features such as analytics tool, real-time dashboard, historical reports, audience targeting and more.
• Outbrain – This content marketing platform offers a pay-per-click model of content distribution to publishers. Businesses also use this platform to promote their press content.
• Taboola – This is the most effective content discovery platform, which helps contentmarketers to drive more traffic to their site, blog or video and improve their leads by getting their content recommended.
• Xink – This is a well known cloud-based email signature management software that helps content marketers to take advantage of their email signatures in order to improve the visibility of their content. This tool is an ideal one if you want to drive quality traffic to your website.
• Inbound.org - Inbound.org is a feed where you can read about a particular subject as well as express your ideas and participate in a discussion. In addition, you can get answers to your questions from domain experts.

Quick tips:

• Rely on Guest blogging.
• Leverage social search optimisation.
• Strategically distribute your content to other sites.
• Test every content distribution platform you use.
• Analyse historical data to identify which content is driving more conversions.

Content distribution is much more important than content creation. So, use these tools systematically to display your marketing achievements and make your content more viral.

Backlinks are the most important part of a website. Backlinks speak volumes about your site’s authority and prominence. However, online businesses often fail to attract backlinks for their websites. Therefore, it is important to understand how search engine evaluate links. Learn how to achieve quality backlinks:

1. 1.      Write press releases - This is one of the best mediums to achieve backlinks for both small and medium size business owners.
2. 2.      Offer “embed codes" – Offer "embed codes" so that users can copy and embed your rich-media content. This will help you to build good links for your website.
3. 3.      Write case studies - This is one of the best methods to engage customers and lower your website’s bounce rate.
4. Use social media - Share your content on the top social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)This will give your content more exposure as well as backlinks. (Search engines consider quantity/quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google +1s, etc.)
5. 5.      Create a Wikipedia page – This is one of the best ways to establish authority and trustworthiness of your website. Search engines give prominence to Wikipedia.
6. 6.      Never ignore the power of Guest blogging –In order to achieve high quality links, you need to write quality and authoritative content and submit it to relevant blogs.
7. 7.      Optimise web pages – Optimise your web pages properly to achieve good visibility and traffic from the web.
8. 8.      Use calls-to-action on every page – People often ignore this; however, call-to-action  are one of the best ways to make a link worthy and actionable.
9. Use Stumbleupon - StumbleUpon is an effective platform to organise your favourite bookmarks. You can attract more traffic to your website by using StumbleUpon advertising.
10. 10.   Request links from .edu sites – Write high quality resources (articles or tutorials) for the educational purpose in order to get a valuable link.
11. 11.  Build links through community discussions – Join industry relevant communities to discuss on a specific subject. This is a great way to obtain a backlink.

All these strategies are helpful in obtaining backlinks for your website. This will also strengthen your site’s authority in its niche. Quick and easy Link Building tips:

• Discover your competitors' backlinks.
• Audit your website to remove dead pages and broken links.
• Convert your content into videos, presentations and infographics.
• Write quality research papers, case studies, manuals, guides and reviews and submit them to the top resources.
• Use powerful tools to analyse your link profile.
• Join industry specific forums, blogs or social groups.
• Publish a newsletter to increase your traffic and the amount of backlinks.

Quick facts:

• Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites.
• Search engines use links to determine how well a page should rank in their results.

Your well designed website is unable to attract the kind of traffic you expected, have you ever wondered why? The reason might be your website’s design not being SEO friendly. If you use SEO wisely, you can easily improve your search engine rankings as well as drive more traffic to your website. Here are a few elements that need to be considered to make a website design SEO friendly:

• Proper structure – Your website should have a proper structure and a well defined navigation path.
• Responsiveness – Your website should have a responsive design so that it can be easily accessed by desktop as well as mobile.
• Integrate Social Media – Integrate social media (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Facebook icons) into your website’s design to attract search engines as well as audiences.
• Use SEO for Images – Image optimisation is the most overlooked part, so optimise your images.

• Avoid using javascript redirects - Avoid using javascript redirects and remove them if they are there. This will help search engines to easily read and rank your website.

• Make user Friendly URLs - User friendly URLs help search engine robots to identify your page and its offerings. (Prefer "hyphens" to separate words to “underscores" in your URLs)
• Make sure your web design is accessible - If your website is not completely accessible, it will definitely affect your rankings as well as conversion rates.  So, make sure it is accessible on all browsers.
• Reduce Flash elements – Too much use of flash elements on a website can affect its performance. Search engines also ignore them, so avoid it.

  Quick tips:

1. Never ignore Google Webmaster Guidelines.
2. Optimise images.
3. Always update the sitemap of your website.
4. Ensure mobile compatibility.
5. Ease the navigation and eliminate the clutter.
6. Explain images and videos.
7. Make sure every page of your website is accessible.
8. Use categories and subcategories for products.
9. Always create simple text links in the "footer section" of your website.
10. Include text on every page of your website rather than images only.
11. Use the most effective content management system for your website.

Conclusion Simple changes can make your website competitive, SEO friendly and visible on the web. However, you also need to understand the behaviour of search engines and the way they read your website (check cache). This will help you to make your website strong and search engine friendly.

A run-of-the-mill digital marketing tool will take you nowhere. In today’s market, business owners need to use the most effective and advanced tools to help their cause. In other words, thinking out-of-the-box is the order of the day. Hence, you have to keep on exploring new tools so that you can beat your competitors. Here are a few advanced tools that can help businesses to acquire new customers as well as accelerate their business:

• Buzzsumo - BuzzSumo is the best tool to check the sharing statistics of a particular search term. This insightful tool also helps you to find the most prominent authors in your particular niche. In addition, it has many special features that can add value to your content, which can increase conversions.
• Content Marketer – If you want to increase traffic to your blog, you can use the Content Marketer tool. It helps you to be more efficient and effective in your content promotion.
• MailLift – It is a handwritten letter service that is specially built for sales and marketing purposes. This is the best way to thank your customers and encourage referrals as well.
• MailChimp – Is an online email marketing solution that helps in managing subscribers, send emails, and track results. Its robust marketing automation ensures that your emails get to the right people at the right time.
• Piktochart – It is the best infographic design application that helps to create beautiful, high quality infographics. You can make product or industry related infographics to improve the overall understanding for your users.
• Prefinery – It is a viral customer acquisition platform for product launch and closed beta programs. It is also helpful in sending automated and personalised emails.
• Qualaroo – It gives marketers a comprehensive solution for collecting and acting on visitor‘s insights to improve website’s performance. It helps you to understand your customers and target your visitors more specifically.
• Optimizely – It is the best tool to measure the performance of a particular web page. On the basis of the outcome you can improve the appearance of your web page and make it more productive.
• PowToon - PowToon helps to make interesting videos and presentations that can transform any business. You can use it to explain special features of products or services and help your customers in an interactive manner.

These advanced tools are essential to improve online marketing efforts and gain organic search visibility. All these tools are highly effective, revolutionary and can help you to enhance your customer base and improve your brand image. No doubt, these tools can easily steer your ship towards success...

Google analytics is the best analytical and statistical tool. It helps businesses to analyse their websites’ performance. It presents factual data so that business owners can make smart decisions. If used systematically, it can improve business opportunities as well as minimise risk. However, most businesses are yet to explore its real potential. Businesses should use this incredible powerful tool to:

• have business insights
• analyse traffic sources
• study consumer’s behaviour
• monitor and identify issues
• research qualitative aspect,
• identify risk and opportunity factors
• track referral traffic
• stay ahead.

Google Analytics can make any website efficient and effective Google Analytics is easy to install (through a tracking code) and manage (through its properties). Businesses owners not only gain actionable insights, but can also set up goals to measure the success of their online marketing efforts. Here are a few aspects that need to be understood:

• Goal Setting – This is the best way to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. You can analyse the conversion path of your customers with the help of goal setting. In addition, you can set many goals for your website according to your business objectives.
• View data - Google Analytics allows you to read and analyse statistical data. You can learn about your website’s traffic and view audience’s report. You can monitor sessions, users, and page views, bounce rate, content, speed, landing pages, and even compare them.
• View acquisition – This is helpful to understand traffic channels as well as specific sources that are driving traffic to your website. You can learn about traffic coming from social networks, etc. If you want, you can connect Google Analytics to Google Webmaster Tools to learn more about search traffic to improve your knowledge and adjust your strategies.
• Behavioural statistics – If you want to keep a track of the top performing pages of your website, you must use "Behaviour report". You will also learn about the website’s speed through this section.
• Conversions – If you have set a goal, you can understand how many conversions have been received. You can rework on your strategies and set more goals for your website on the basis of your findings.
• Event Tracking – This is the best way to learn user’s behaviour when they visit your website. Just by adding a code on a specific tab, image, banner ad, button or text link, you can track and analyse events. (Events are user interactions with your website’s content) (Anatomy of Events- Category, Action, Label (optional, but recommended) and Value).

  Quick tips:

1. Track audience’s locations.
2. Always examine visitor’s activities.
3. Analyse keyword performances.
4. View unique visitors and their total number of pageviews.
5. Check your backlinks via referrals.
6. Understand the important concept of Goal Conversions.
7. Find and remove irrelevant backlinks linking to your website.
8. Perform multiple tests on your content for better traffic.
9. Analyse your high and low quality pages through "landing pages".
10. Manually search the source code to ensure the presence of tracking ID.
11. Export the report in pdf or excel format for further data analysis and evaluation.

Conclusion This shows that Google Analytics gives you the true picture of your website, like actual speed, traffic sources, and overall customers’ behavioural trends, etc.

Social media is the most powerful platform for business owners. It is a major driving force behind business decisions and operations. Social media platforms make you identify emerging market trends and new growth opportunities as well as improve customer service. Therefore, businesses must hire an experienced social media specialist to outperform their competitors. However, hiring a social media specialist is the most daunting task; businesses must choose the one who can handle everything meticulously. He or she should understand the technical aspects of different social mediums. Here are a few qualities that a social media specialist should possess:

• Multidisciplinary - Social media is multidisciplinary; therefore, a social media specialist should understand different social media networks and plan accordingly.
• Audience Oriented – Audience oriented social media campaigns are the need of the hour. So, a social media specialist should be capable of solving clients’ problems.
• Communication Skills - A social media specialist can’t do without good communication skills and an in-depth knowledge of the industry. This will enable them to handle all the disciplines professionally.
• Creative – Your social media specialist should be innovative, creative and open minded. He/she should know how to create buzz, should understand the process of content writing as well as distribution.
• Proactive – Your specialist should be proactive and intelligent. He/she should be able to handle audiences and engage new prospects on different social media platforms.
• Experience - A good specialist can handle all the technicalities of social sites. Experienced specialists can easily develop their strategies according to the social sites for the maximum possible reach.  
• Analytical mind – An expert should have the ability to analyse reports. He/she should be able to evaluate and measure the performance of social media posts against business goals.

Besides that, organisational skills, an acute sense of time management, patience, and sense of responsibility are the key factors when it comes to handling social media. So, hire a suitable candidate to improve your social presence. Quick tips:

• Always create meaningful content and a strong brand personality on social sites.
• Identify relevant hashtags and industry influencers.

Quick facts:

• 91% of retail brands use 2 or more social media channels.
• Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp handle 60 billion messages a day.
• Pinterest has 100 million monthly active users to date.
• Instagram has 300 million active users.
• Facebook has 1.71 billion monthly active users.
• YouTube has 1 Billion active users each month.

In today’s challenging digital world, online businesses that understand the importance of top rankings and know how to achieve it have a competitive edge. However, what about the rest? Most online business owners struggle to achieve top rankings. Here are a few ways to achieve good rankings:

1. Remove too many outbound links – Use a few relevant outbound links because they pass link juice to other websites which is not a good SEO practice.
2. Image optimisation – You should optimise images by using "Alt text" (alternative text).
3. Improve page load speed – Increase the speed of your site to serve your users efficiently. (Tip - Try to minimise HTTP requests).
4. Improve your website’s usability – Improve the usability of your site by acquiring good backlinks, getting rid of duplicate content, providing an easy navigation structure and eliminating doorway pages. (Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing).
5. Use multimedia – Use images, presentations, infographics, videos and audios to enrich your users’ experience. This will decrease the overall bounce rate.
6. Fix broken links – Broken links can damage your website’s usability. So, fix them immediately before they deter the search engines. (Tip – Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Google Webmaster Tool or W3C Link Checker to check your website’s broken links).
7. Improve readability – If you want to make your content readable, you should use bullets and small paragraphs and easy to understand language. (Tip – Use Readability-Score.com to check your content’s readability).
8. Include a "contact us" page - Including a "Contact Us" page sends a signal of authenticity. You should display your complete contact details so that your customers can contact you without any problem.
9. Use social media – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media sites should be used with the utmost care as they can influence your SEO rankings.

However, your priority should always be to improve the overall understanding and experience of your users. Quick and easy Tips –

• Use graphs and infographics to display critical information.
• Use clear and catchy headlines.
• Create original, valuable and actionable content.
• Use social proof (customer testimonials or case studies) to improve your website’s credibility.
• Use the Google Webmaster Tool to check your site’s health.

  Quick facts:

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• There are 2.3 billion active social media users.
• More than 90% of visitors who read your headlines also read your CTA Copy.
• Social sharing influences purchasing behaviour.
• 86% of female shoppers say they trust product recommendations from real people.
• 61% of CMOs say search engines are an effective marketing channel.