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Author: Jacqueline Elder
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Why does my small business need a website?
Here are 8 reasons why your small business and brand need a website:
1. Google needs to know you exist!
If Google knows who you are, then everyone will be able to know who you are! In a world that is condensed onto our digital devices, your consumers are quick to ask a search engine “find a (enter product or service) near me…” and if you are not on Google, you don’t pop up on their radar. Even if you do not host a digital shop online, you should have your business name, products/services offered, contact information, and physical location (if applicable) published online for potential consumers to find! A one-page website is a minimum for any small business or brand!
2. You need to build credibility…
Ever searched for a business online and couldn’t find anything about them? Did you think that was a little… SUS.? Not having a website is a big red flag for consumers and will lead to a downturn in sale conversions and a lack of trust for your brand.
3. Your competition is already doing it.
Your competitors are online and taking your potential consumers! Without an online presence, you cannot build your brand credibility, loyalty, or community, which means you can’t compete or sustain new conversions!
4. Take your store everywhere!
Sure, you may have a physical storefront, but why would you limit yourself to such a small group of customers?! Building a website allows you to create a network of consumers, suppliers, and investors that you normally would not be able to reach.
5. It’s YOUR name on the website!
Sure, you could put your products or services on other platforms, but who is really making the money then? After all of the fees, your net profits are desolated! Why not own your site and keep the money that is rightfully yours. Another plus is it’s your name in the URL. There is no “yourname.theotherbussinessgettingfreeadversting.com“
6. Free advertising!
Speaking of free advertising, that’s what your site is! If you build your website correctly (or better yet, we do it right for you!) you will show up in search engine results! Showing up is just more advertising for you!
7. It shows customers why you’re the right fit for them!
Blogs, “about us” pages and values can all be published on your website. These little things can make a huge difference when a potential consumer is trying to decide between your brand and competitors.
8. It shows customers what great products you sell!
How can a potential customer know what you’re selling if you don’t show them?! Sure they could walk into your store or see your product on a friend, but allowing your consumers a place to scroll through your offerings in one place they can access anywhere will lead to more conversions and greater brand recognition!
Bottom line…
You’re missing out! Having your own website allows you to present your best self, stay relevant, be credible, and reach a whole new audience of potential consumers!
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Do I Need More Than A Facebook Business Page?
Your Small Business Has a Facebook Business Page, but No Website?
Not having a website is a common blunder that will leave money on the table! Your small business needs a website no matter if you have other social media accounts… Read here about why your small business needs a website. Continue with this post to see why a Facebook Business Page is simply not enough!
Facebook Controls Your Story… and your money!
Facebook is an ever-evolving system of corporate and social engineers trying to take home bigger paychecks! Oftentimes, it’s you and your small business that is flipping the bill!
Some argue that Facebook and Instagram (Meta) are “pay-to-play” systems where small businesses only gain traction after they have paid for ads. While this is a bit of a myth since organic growth is possible (though grossly slow), Meta is only growing and implementing new updates that could start to become premium add-ons!
Why invest in Facebook when you should be investing in your own business and brand! That’s why investing in your website is more important than ever! Being in control of your content, optimizing your search engine results, and knowing that every penny spent on your website and website advertising directly benefits you is a major plus!
Speaking of Facebook… Guess Who Else is Already There?
Your competition! And unlike your website, there is no way to cut the competition off and redirect your potential consumers to your brand. By using social media as your only source of marketing, you are falling through the cracks. This will cause your brand to have to fight with bigger businesses for the same space. These distractions can cause you to lose out on potential customers, investors, and vendors! With a custom built website, you can tailor the content and products to fit your unique brand. Current and past customers have a place to return to, over and over, building your community on your terms!
Start Building Your Community! You’re More than a Facebook Business Page!
As mentioned, you may have a community following you on Facebook, Instagram, or other social media platforms; However, the pages are still saturated with other brands and businesses’ content. This could pull your consumers away! By having your very own website, you can engage your community without distractions.
A Facebook Business Page is not enough! -
Social Media Strategy: Sharing Our Small Business Growth Hack!
A social media strategy is important to your overall growth plan! Here are 5 key takeaways from our strategy and proof in the numbers!
Our Social Media Strategy has led to an
over 15000% growth on Instagram Reach!1. Set Your Social Media Strategy Goals!
We love a good SMART goal for our social media strategy! Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals are a great way to give yourself goals with a purpose. Once you’ve laid out your goals, you can write down steps to accomplish the goal(s)! Taking baby steps is sometimes the best thing you can do, but being able to watch how those steps affect measurable factors lets your stay flexible and pivot to the best action plan!
2. Plan, plan, plan!
Speaking of planning, if you go into anything unprepared, you’re going to put a lot of energy into a lot of nothing! Creating content can be a chore, and a lot of small businesses don’t feel like they have the time or energy to put into it! When they do think of their social media content, it’s a last-minute, rushed task that makes the audience feel like they aren’t worth your efforts… We at Forward Digital Marketing sit down once a month to write out a very overarching plan to guide us. This plan is not rigid, but it gives us a base to build off of!
3. … But don’t over plan!
The reason we don’t give ourselves a hard and fast plan is because trends change fast on social media! In our monthly plan, we create a set amount of evergreen content and then leave room for trends that pop up throughout the month! Another great tip for your small business is to set “fallback” content days! Don’t know what to post on a Thursday? Have an already set theme for that day that you can quickly grab or make content for without feeling like you are starting from scratch.
For example, we at Forward Digital Marketing have Wednesday scribbled down as “Trend Alert Wednesday!” When we do not have any content plans for that day, we can quickly default to doing a trend breakdown. This saves us a few minutes and helps keep us sane during a busy week of content making!
4. Check Your Insights!
Once we’ve posted anything, we check out insights! Now, we do this for a living so how often we check is going to be greater than how often you need to check! When posting content, you should always look back at the insights 24 hours and 7 days later. This will give you a better understanding of what your audience likes and does not like. If you keep posting things that are getting low engagement, your audience is going to zone you out.
If you watch your insights and see that carousel posts are more successful with your following, then in your plan you should add more posts like that! Keeping an eye on the analytics is going to give you valuable, measurable feedback! This helps you reach your SMART goals set at the beginning of the process.
Organic growth is growth that has NO MONEY put into advertising! 5. Remember, It’s the Internet.
One of the biggest takeaways with social media is that it is the internet… the internet can be a wild place full of unique personalities, robots, and ever-changing algorithms. What works one month, may not work as well the next! It can be an overwhelming place of confusion, but as long as you are putting in the time to plan and watch your insights, you’ll be more prepared to face whatever is changing! Another way to stay on top of all of the news is to follow trusted industry experts!
Most of us are on social media personally, so why not add a few educational and helpful small business tools to your feed! Forward Digital Marketing is one to follow! We work hard to research the changes, the growing pains, the successes, and the trends so you don’t have to! We take one more thing off of your to-do list. Still, feeling overwhelmed by the idea of building and posting content monthly, weekly, or daily?! Hire us as your social media management team! We build your monthly posting schedule based on your insights and audience. You give us a few photos and we do the rest! It’s just one more way Forward Digital Marketing can serve you!
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Weekly Canva Design Challenge 06.17.2022: Watch Our Designers get Creative!
Weekly our graphic designers get to flex their creative muscles with the Weekly Canva Design Challenge! This fun community challenge sets a weekly theme that artists, designers, and regular people around the world get to create a graphic inspired by! This week’s design theme is travel! Here is what our team has come up with!
To vote for your favorite, head over to Instagram to vote for your favorite design! Share the design to your story to get your friends on your side! 😉
Canva Design One!
Something romantic in traveling is the art collected along the way! Canva Design Two!
Traveling is a goal that keeps on giving! What do our designers win? Right now, just bragging rights… But you should leave comments with some ideas for future competitions! 😏
Honorable Mention: The Big Boss Had Some Fun Too!
Who do you think takes bragging rights away this round?! Follow for weekly design challenges! Hire us for your own website and social media designs!
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Discover if Your Website Bounce Rate is Good, Great!
Driving traffic to your website is a worthwhile cause! But what happens once they get to your site? Do they stick around or bounce right back off, driving your bounce rate up?
The bounce rate is the percentage of single, individual visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Your site’s bounce rate is an important insight that gives you a look into how engaging your site content is.
Having a bad bounce rate could indicate there are issues within your website! It could also mean that your content is just not any good. Let’s work through the good, the great, and the could be better bounce rates and learn how to improve yours!
Bounce Rate is Defined as “the percentage of individual visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.” This is different from an exit rate, in which the user only leaves the page, not the site. What’s a Good Bounce Rate?
A good bounce rate is based on your website’s needs, so giving an exact number is not so easy. A bounce rate between 56% to 70% is on the high end, but not the end of the world! If your website is built to drive traffic to other sites, this rate might be right where you need to be!
A bounce rate between 25%-30% is unusually good… but it can happen! Don’t be spoiled by these numbers, because they are not easily maintained. Anything under 40%, that’s not caused by a broken Google Analytics install, is something to be very proud of! This is proof that your website is professionally built, well engaging, and meeting the needs of its users.
Where the majority of good website bounce rates will fall is in the 35%-55% range. Once it starts to creep up towards the 60% range, it’s time to take a look at individual pages’ bounce rates and see what is causing the rate to spike.
How Can I Fix My Website’s High, Climbing Bounce Rates?
So you’re bounce rates still aren’t where you’d like them to be… Here are some things that could be affecting your bounce rate negatively:
- – Your Page Speed is LOW!
- – Annoying, Badly Designed Pop-ups
- – Website is not User Friendly
- – Page, Meta Titles Are Not Optimized
- – Page is Blank, Loading Error
- – Content Lacks Quality…
- – Pages Aren’t Mobile-Friendly– Unnecessary Plugins
- – Google Analytics is not Set-up Correctly
Slow Loading Pages:
The most common contributor to slow loading pages are unoptimized images. If you upload a large photo to your website, just to scale it down, you could be taking up valuable bandwidth space that is slowing down your site!
Poor Design:
When someone enters your site, are they automatically bombarded with large pop-ups, chatbots, or screens held hostage until the user has given you something? Do six invisible videos automatically start playing with sound? Do page buttons only work when you click the text just the right way or does the text wrap in weird ways under images, making it impossible to figure out what you’re trying to tell the audience?! Though all of this may seem extreme and never done on purpose, it could be what is driving your visitors away!
Not Mobile Friendly:
Does your website do all sorts of back flips when a user views it with their mobile phone or tablet? The number one factor is that your website is not mobile responsive! Mobile responsive website automatically correct proportions to fit the screen it is viewed on. Rather than designing layouts that can be “scaled-down,” website designers have to think about each element individually!
Will the text still show up and be legible? How can a user navigate to different pages? Does the mobile site have the same content as the other devices? All of this goes into creating a fully user-friendly mobile site… and which is so important when over 57% of all site visits are now through mobile devices!
Bounce Rate and SEO
Using correct keywords draws in the correct user! If a user is looking for rubber duckies and finds your site, which is selling pineapples, they won’t stick around very long! Maybe your page keyword is “yellow” and when that user is looking up “yellow rubber duckies,” your site pops up! It’s great that your website is found, but it is found by the wrong consumer… by doing the research and optimizing your website pages to the max, you attract individuals who are actually looking for sites like yours! This means they won’t bounce as fast because they are genuinely interested in the products, services, or information you offer.
Bottom Line: Define Your Bounce Rate Goals and Dig In!
The bounce rate is an important analytic to keep your eye on. It may not look like ours, your neighbors, or [insert large corporation here], but that’s because the goal of each website may be different! Be sure to set realistic goals and watch your data to figure out what works and what is driving your audience away. It might be as simple as fixing your keywords, or it could be as complicated as rebuilding poorly performing pages!
Don’t know how to check your bounce rate? Click here so that we can help you set up your Google Analytics! After set up, you’ll be able to monitor bounce rate and way more! Already have Google Analytics set up, but don’t know where the breakdown is? Let’s run a website audit to get you the information you need to optimize!
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Free Canva Templates to Save Your Small Business Time!
Canva is a great resource for small businesses to create visually appealing graphics, and though it is an easy and user-friendly system, it can be very time-consuming and take a ton of creativity to come up with unique visuals. We’ve created some free Canva templates for your brand to use!
All templates below are free to use and completely customizable with a free Canva account. Share with others if you enjoy these free templates☺
To use free templates, follow link below template of your choice. Then choose to “use this template” and a copy will be made for you to edit freely!
Golden Sage Eucalyptus! Free Canva Template from FDM
Sage and gold are not only trending but super fresh for any brand! Check out how one of our brands used this exact template for their very own content! Video at the bottom of the page.
Get the graphics free to customize for your brand here! The original template size is 1080×1350.
Starry Good Vibes! Free Canva Template from FDM
Sometimes, a filler post with a great message is all you need! Download this template and exchange the colors for your brand’s to spread the good vibes.
Get the graphics free to customize for your brand here! The original template size is 1080×1350.
Overexposed Outdoor Photographs! Free Canva Template from FDM
Any outdoor enthusiasts would love to use these eye-catching graphics! Are you selling hiking gear? Are you a nature photographer? No matter how you use it, you can fully edit the graphic to display your brand’s vision!
Get the graphics free to customize for your brand here! The original template size is 1080×1350.
Want more Free Canva Graphics? Be sure to follow the blog and follow us on social media to get all of the updated templates! Need a custom template built for your brand? Click here!
Check out how @ajacqofall (A Jacq of All Trades) used our Golden Sage Eucalyptus for her brand on the mobile Canva App!
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Weekly Canva Design Challenge 06.01.2022: Watch Our Designers get Creative!
Weekly our graphic designers get to flex their creative muscles with the Weekly Canva Design Challenge! This fun community challenge sets a weekly theme that artists, designers, and regular people around the world get to create a graphic inspired by! This week’s design theme is pineapple! Here is what our team has come up with!
To vote for your favorite, head over to Instagram to vote for your favorite design! Share the design to your story to get your friends on your side! 😉
What do our designers win? Right now, just bragging rights… But you should leave comments with some ideas for future competitions! 😏
Design One!
Design Two!
Who do you think takes bragging rights away this round?! Follow for weekly design challenges! Hire us for your own website and social media designs!
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Amazing Graphic Design Trends! We Are Obsessed With These 2022 Vibes!
Um, Obsessed Might be an Understatement!
What social media and graphic design trends are taking over 2022?
Vintage-Futurism
Vintage frames meet wild colors! Add in some pin-up gals kissing an astronaut and you’re looking at a trendy design!
Retro
Think the 60s-70s, muted jewel tones, game inspired fonts, and groovy stickers. This trend is up 62%!
Bright Colored Letters
This goes into the next point, but we cannot say this enough: COLOR!
Color Overload
I mean, keep it coming until you just can’t anymore! Color overload is trending up 50% in the last year!
Anti-Design
Anti-design is very asymmetric! It has a lot of movement in the graphics and fonts… it is also the highest moving trend, blasting up 325%!
Y2K
We love this trend! Those late 90s and early 2000s vibes are everything right now!
Risograph
What is a risograph? Think photocopier printer but with a stencil! It has a really cool texture that is absolutely HOT 🔥 right now!
Moving Fonts
Fonts with movement not only grabs the eye immediately, but adds a ton of visual interest to your content, that keeps on giving!
Forward Digital Marketing Helping YOUR BRAND Find It’s Look 👀
Start with a Brand Kit designed by our in house professionals! The brand-kit is build custom for your brand and gives you a play book to create seamless content across all of your media and digital marketing. Have a team who works on different pieces of marketing? Send them your brand-kit so that everyone is on the same page! Fonts, colors, graphics, etc. are all defined for your brand.
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Public Service Announcement: Your Facebook Contest is Illegal!
Yep, that is right! Your Facebook contest is probably illegal… or at least breaking Meta standards and it can get you into a lot of trouble! We understand! Your friend of a friend started a new business and did a giveaway contest that got them found by a of of people! When you see that they are succeeding, you assumed you could just do it too! WRONG.
Meta Has Standards That Small Businesses Tend to Ignore
Don’t be that business…
Small business do not have a lawyer on staff like large corporations, so often “legal” matters are not on the radar. That does not mean you are exempt! As a small or medium business owner you have even more to lose. You do not take home a six-figure paychecks. Often, you do not even see that yearly vacation! Running a small business is not for the faint of heart! That is why you have to check and recheck the standards to keep your business on the right tracks.
Can I Run A Social Media Contest?
Yes! Just Do it Right!
Running a giveaway or contest is a fantastic way to build followers and engagement for your brand. The excitement that consumers feel when they win is something is hard to match, and it is be a great way for your brand to stand out and be found! When you run a contest or giveaway, there are some techniques that make it even more successful.
Why Should I Run A Social Media Contest?
#1: Growth!
When you run a social media giveaway you are allowed to ask potential consumers to like or follow your brand. This obviously means that you are growing your network of individuals that can see your future content.
Example of Giveaway Post #2: Build Your Brand
Please the algorithm to be able to please your following! When your consumers like, share, and comment on your content, the algorithm learns to put your posts in front of people. When you run a giveaway with clear instructions to like and comment on the post, you are inviting consumers to engage with the algorithm so that they see your content in the future! Another great way to build your community is to work with other brands. Collaborate with other content creators to reach each other’s audience.
Example of working with other accounts for giveaways or follows #3 Increase Your Email List
Email marketing is still king! Marketing campaigns in consumers inbox is the number one marketing technique that provides long-term success. So why not use your contest as a way to build email data? Adding the option to opt-in to your email list is a fantastic way to ensure that you can connect with your audience in the future, without stressing about algorithm changes.
#4 Jumpstart Engagement
Remember that the contest buzz will die; However that does not mean that your brand buzz has to die with it! Any giveaway will generate engagement with your audience, but it is important to keep that interest up after the prize has been handed out. Remember, Forward Digital Marketing would love to help you keep your content fresh… *hint hint* We can analyze your website and social media accounts for you to build a targeted contest for long term success!
How Do I Run A Social Media Contest?
Set Your Goals
If you do not plan, you will not win! At the end of the day, you need to define S.M.A.R.T goals to be able to measure the success of your giveaway. Define what you will accomplish with the contest. Are you looking for more followers? Do you want to convert more sales? Whatever your goal is, make sure it is something that you can go back to at the end and compare data. Remember, you can get creative with what you are collecting from your consumers. It does not always have to be likes or comments, but always remember that you are within the community guidelines.
Determine the Type of Contest
After you’ve set your goals, you can figure out which contest type will fit your brand best!
Want more followers? Then your contest can be based off of simply following your page or profile. Be sure that the person or account is still following you when you announce the prize winner! Often times we see people follow and then unfollow, tricking you into thinking they are eligible.
If you are looking to generate more leads, you can ask participants to enter their email to enter to contest. These can be collected through a landing page or a separate Facebook tab for your contest.
Another unique way to build participation is by running a “photo-competition!” To enter this type of contest, participants tag your brand in their own post. This method works on many different levels, but it can be hard to execute if your brand does not have an established reputation.
Set Your Prizes
Budget, budget, budget. You need to ask yourself (or your marketing department) how much are you willing to spend or giveaway? How often are you wanting to run these giveaways? Also, is there an advertising budget for your giveaway?
Learn Your Audience
To be even more successful, you should target your contest towards a specific audience. This will help that advertising budget stretch farther. It will also help ensure that your audience is genuine and will engage in the future, giveaway or no giveaway.
Knowing your audience also means you will know where to put your contest (and learn the rules that goes along with that platform.) It also means that you are being careful to not ostracize your current followers for potential entrants.
Run A/B Testing
Before you go to far, run an A/B test. An A/B test is when you create content that is exactly the same, except for one difference. Maybe you test which product your audience would prefer to receive. Or maybe you test which platform your contest would be most well received on. No matter what, do not rush into posting a contest because you are eager to reap the benefits. If you do not put in the time to pre-plan, your giveaway or contest will not reach its full potential!
Understand the RULES!!! (each site is different)
Yes, there are rules… and you need to figure them out!
Facebook’s Guidelines are often ignored… Don’t get shadow-banned (or actually banned) for not following the Facebook Contest rules! Facebook
You can check out the full list of guidelines here, but it is so important to remember that you need to define what the contest or promotion is, clearly. Also let your audience know that Facebook is in no way affiliated with or a sponsor of your contest.
Most importantly, you also cannot use friend connections to increase the reach of your contest on Facebook. This means you cannot have people share the post for more entries, or even tag their friends in a post as a form of entry.
Instagram
Instagram is now owned by the same business as Facebook, Meta. This makes the rules pretty similar, however it never states that you cannot use tags of other users in the comments, like Facebook discourages. Instagram does say that you cannot ask a user to tag themselves or their friends in a photo that does not show them or apply to them. Like Facebook, the contest owner must state that Instagram is not affiliated or a sponsor of the contest.
Twitter
Twitter’s biggest concern is the creation of fake accounts… so their guidelines ensure that users running a contest or promotion discourage entrants from creating multiple accounts and tweeting the exact same thing repeatedly.
Run the Contest
Now is the easy part! Make your contest announcement, run some ads and boost the post to increase reach, cross-post on other platforms and through your email campaigns, and watch it take off!
Analyze the Results
Once the contest deadline has come and passed, you’ve announced your winner, and shipped off your prizes, now is the time to look at the new collected data. How well did your contest do? Have you achieved the SMART goal you set at the beginning of all of this?
Running contests should be about improving engagement, reach, followers, and potential customers! But do not let the fire burn out. Now that you have all of these improved metrics, it is time to get serious about building great content that will keep your audience engaged and producing conversions.
I Need Forward Digital Marketing’s Help To Run A Contest!
We understand the ins and outs of social marketing, and we are data nerds! Who could be a better partner in running a successful contest? As Forward Digital Marketing, we can run social media audits before and after the contest to see just how well it did on your chosen platforms! We can crunch the numbers and measure your SMART goals for you, giving you the opportunity to focus on your growing business.
Running a contest to increase product sales? Let us help you build a beautiful e-commerce or Shopify website!
Whatever your business and goals, Forward Digital Marketing is here to help you!
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