As a former vice president of business development and a current founder of a digital marketing agency, I have been on both sides of the coin when it comes to marketing.

I spent thousands of dollars on marketing and wondered if it was put to proper use.

Initially, I became curious about the subject of digital marketing web design and SEO, so I studied it, put it to practice, and never looked back. Over the years, I have sought to answer the concerns of business owners as they spend money on online digital marketing.

SEO techniques vary depending on what your website offers, and for a competitive sector like eCommerce it’s essential to get it right. Here’s an in-depth guide for getting your website visible on Google.

These are the questions you will find answers for in this post:

Question – 1: What you think will impact the most on SEO, post COVID-19 crisis?

Question – 2: What trends have you observed in the digital marketing landscape recently during COVID-19?

Question – 3: How businesses should make themselves ready for digital marketing in the future?

Going by PathInteractive’s study which is done using Sistrix’s U.S Visibility Index, several brands stated that they have seen a remarkable rise in organic traffic starting from 20% to a huge 300%

Email marketing is one of the strongest and most efficient ways to reach your customers.

In the era of digital revolution “Marketing” is most essential part of the business revenue generation. If you are offering top class services or product and potential buyers are looking for the same how will you connect with them? How will a buyer know about your services? No doubt you could be the best service providers, but how people know? Why should buyers come to you?

The answer is “Digital Marketing”. Every 2nd person carries a smartphone, laptop or desktop. You just need to catch them with the resources they have. For every secondary requirements people surf Internet. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

Do you know the most effective marketing channels require least efforts?

Digital Marketing includes various paid and free marketing. We will discuss both to choose the best option according to the nature of your business.

1. Social media marketing: Most of the businesses are moving towards social media to enhance their visibility globally. Social media is most trending marketing technique to get higher revenue. Reading or writing social media reviews and comments will influence the shopping behavior of 67% of consumers. The average internet user spends nearly two hours browsing social media networks daily. That is the right platform to target your customers.

Please refer the image below showing the number of social media users globally:

The top social media sites where businesses are trying to engage their customers.

2. Influencer marketing: Influencer campaigns have proven effective for over 80% of marketers who have tried them according to the eMarketer data. Marketers receive an average of $6.85 in earned media value for every $1 spent on influencer marketing according to the AdWeek data.

3. Web trafficking: Web traffic as the name suggest, we analyze visitor activity on our site by using various Web trafficking tools like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster. These traffic analysis tools help us to check the number of visitors on our site, how much time they are spending on which page. Which page needs to get improved and much more.

Top web analytics tools of 2016 according to the research:

Google Analytics

Bitly

Piwik

Open Web Analytics (OWA)

Clicky

4. Email marketing: 61% of marketers increasing their investment. No doubt email marketing is most promising approach to get more business because it helps you building better relationship with your customers. It takes less efforts and it is most effective according to the research. It gives you better ROI only when it created properly. I have already explained you email marketing in detail in my previous posts. Most popular tools for email marketing is MailChimp and Mailerlite according to me.

I explained why usually email campaigns don't work for various organizations, in my previous post.

Here I will explain to you how to create a perfect email marketing campaign that actually works.

Have you ever wonder “Who is getting your email, and why?” If the answer is NO, then it’s the right time to work on your email strategies. Start with determining who your audience is!

For example, You have a list of 100,000 email ids in your database. You have to identify the potential audience to improve your open rate. If your major target audience is in the USA, then you have to create a mail which is mobile friendly, concise and up to the point.

As per the research, Tuesday to Thursday is the best days to send business emails. 11 am – 1 pm or 5 pm – 6 pm is the most optimal time when people go through their inbox. Now you understood why the audience and the time is important.

Today I received an email, which was extremely amazing. And, that’s how it comes to my mind that I should share my learning with you. After reading it, you will have a great take away with you. It will help you planning the perfect email marketing campaign.

A lot of business do email campaigns just for the sake of awareness. Is it worth doing email campaigns? Is it delivering the purpose of the campaign? Here are some facts you should consider:

“70% of the mails goes to the SPAM category. Why? Because those mailing lists are purchased by a 3rd party. They may not be the right audience for your business.”

“Email is traditional approach. But it’s not, email marketing is still an effective and efficient tool, if its optimized for the buyer’s persona.”

“According to the Direct Marketing Association, 76% of marketers say they use email more than they did three years ago.” 

Have you ever thought why your email campaigns don't give you the expected ROI? Well, here I am sure you will get the answer to all your questions.

Do you know how Smarketing works for a business? If not, then you are losing a huge market share. Smarketing can actually help your business generate 20% more annual business revenue. You must be wondering what it means? So, here we go! 

                                    Sales + Marketing = Smarketing

Smarketing is the process of balancing the Sales and Marketing team together by aligning the common goals of the business. In most organizations sales and marketing teams are isolated, but that’s the pain point. These teams are collectively called revenue generating teams; they should be aware of their mutual benefits of working together. Great collaboration between these teams can generate more business.

So, how can the marketing team and sales team work together to be one team, known as Smarketing. It’s a critical factor for the success of inbound processes. Smarketing plays an important role in the process of closing the deal by converting prospects into customers. In this process the marketing team provides qualified leads to the sales team. It helps save the time to decide which could be the potential customer.

What are the best practices to maximize the business revenue?

There have to be common organizational goals for both the teams.

Sales and marketing should get compensated on the basis of service level agreements (SLA) and shared sales quotas.

Sales and marketing teams contradict each other most of the time, but in reality, they are the two halves of the same circle. The visibility of the goals should be higher.

Communication is the most important factor in business. Inter-team communication can help sales and marketing teams to measure the performance of the sales qualified leads (SQL) and marketing qualified leads (MQL).

Don’t forget about your personas. A clear understanding of audience personas generates high quality leads.

There has to be a bottom up approach where sales team can share the sales goals of marketing. After that, marketing team can create the goals accordingly to deliver a sales quota.

HubSpot Inbound Marketing certification is really important for a marketing professional, it helps you showcase your inbound marketing skills. It takes a lot of reading and time to consume important stuff from the class videos. But, Here I am going to share some quick tips which will help you passing the exam in just one go. 

Appear for Inbound certification trice a month. It takes 48 hours to retake the exam.

Just attempt the exam directly on: https://academy.hubspot.com/certification

Understand the questions asked and the pattern of those questions. Most of the time questions are repetitive. Once you give the exam you will watch the class videos and note the important pointers which will help you in the exam.

Download the transcripts of each and every lecture and read it carefully. Most of the answers you will get in the lectures transcripts only. Make notes from the transcripts of the videos.

Here you go! Try again for the exam and you will clear it, I am sure.

What type of questions you should prepare for?

Most of the time the questions are situation based. You should read the answers and pick the most suited option. You will get very closely related options. To pick the right one, just try elimination methods.

For example: You've joined a startup company. Before building out your content strategy, you'll need to develop your company's primary buyer persona. What's the appropriate order for developing the buyer persona for your startup?

A)  Research, identify trends, and create persona stories

B)  Create persona story, test and optimize, and make assumptions

C)  Make assumptions, identify trends, and ask company employees for input

D)  A buyer persona shouldn’t be developed at this time

Now, when you will read the guide and watch the course videos, you will see that no assumptions should be made while developing the buyer persona. Based on that you can eliminate the option 2nd, 3rd and 4th. That's how it works! you can make these kind of pointers to remember.

The videos are full of knowledge and explanations. It will be a great learning for a marketer, whose implementing the strategies for their organization. These are the same problems we face on the daily basis which is asked in the questionnaire.

You should try these approaches and I am sure you will definitely get certified in one go. You can connect with me to get to know more about inbound marketing or follow me on Twitter. Hope it will help you creaking the exam.