• Your website next to its most important competitors (one of the most typical setups)
• Multiple URLs tracked, all from the same website
• Variations of a single website or subdomains targeting different locations

and more.

With AWR, you can track up to 50 websites or URLs per project, and measure their performance side by side, through one of the dedicated SEO reports:

• My Sites [new] – compare ranking performance of all webpages, for one keyword at a time
• Comparison Websites – compare the websites’ positions in SERP across the entire keyword list or by keyword group
• Visibility Websites – compare visibility and other aggregated SERP performance metrics for tracked websites
• Visibility SERP Features – compare how tracked websites perform in terms of SERP features.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the My Sites report, that brings together metrics from four different arenas to broaden your website performance monitoring and analysis.

Here’s what you’ll find inside.

Keyword performance

First off, the essential metrics for comparing your websites’ ranking performance for the targeted keyword: Position, Page and Best Position.

SERP Features tracking

Add up the SERP Features ranking column to see who from your tracked websites is listed as special features in the selected SERP.

Top Keywords

Correlate with each website’s top performing keyword and get a better understanding of their potential in SERPs.

Website prominence in SERP

And gain context for your analysis, by including the websites’ global SERP performance for the keyword set that you are tracking: the number of keywords for which websites are ranking and estimated organic visits driven from these keywords.

Give it a try!

Once you give the My Sites report a go, please let me know how it works for you. Would love to hear your feedback on this.

To explore this report with your own ranking data, be sure to log into your AWR account or start a free 30 days AWR trial, if you’re new to AWR.

This is the core value of Lifull Co., Japan’s largest real estate database. With tens of millions of users each month, the portal is strongly focused on high volume, quality and ease of housing and property searching.

Shin Okubo works with the SEO Strategy Division, mentoring a team of 20+ specialists.

We have been evaluating Advanced Web Ranking for some time, and started using the platform in 2019. Implementing Market Share was a key decision factor Our business values this figure, and the ability to show it in dashboards is very good for us.

Shin Okubo, SEO Strategy Division Lifull Co.

Currently, the team at Lifull works with multiple AWR accounts, monitoring location based ranking positions on a daily basis. The keywords are segmented in more than 100 groups, and performance is compared against 5 top competitors.

The Challenge

Running an SEO competitor analysis with AWR was already possible for static competitor sets, with the help of two visibility metrics: Click Share and Estimated Visits. When combined, these metrics provide an estimation of the traffic share driven by keywords ranking in Top 20.

Yet, getting a clear image is a bit more tricky when operating in a highly competitive industry, where the digital search landscape is so dynamic. There was still a question that Shin and the team could not resolve directly with AWR for their analysis:

How much are the Estimated Visits representing from the max possible traffic value?

During the discussions with Shin, we understood that finding the answer was very time consuming for the team. They had to export top sites and visibility data from AWR after every ranking update, and further run formulas in Excel in order to understand the competitor distribution and compute the actual share on the search market.

The Solution

With this pain point in mind, we thought of a way to automate the process, and came up with a new Visibility report in AWR:

Market Share looks at the Estimated visits that a domain or a URL gets from organic search, and it computes the percentage that it represents from the max possible value. In doing so, it takes into account all competitors from the SERPs, not just those which are actively monitored in the AWR project settings.

Once the implementation process was completed, we tested the new metric and competitor discovery algo together with Shin, and here’s what we found:

New competitors across the global keyword set

Shin and the team were tracking 5 competitor domains, all based in Japan. With the new development, we found a new competitor that was gaining a market share wider than two of those already monitored. In addition, this competitor’s market share trend showed a constant growth during the last month’s updates.

The team decided to add the new competitor to the AWR project in order to keep a closer eye on it in the future, find their best performing landing pages and further analyze the SERPs for it’s top keywords.

If you’re new to AWR, sign up for a free 30 day trial to check out the visibility reports live, with your own ranking data.

New and emerging competitors had a different distribution at keyword group level

Following the analysis on the competitor landscape across the entire set of keywords, we thought we should check what happens for specific keyword segments.

For this purpose, we looked at the 190 groups defined by Shin and made a selection for analysis by two criteria:

Performance

Here, we looked at search discoverability, so we selected the keyword groups that had the highest visibility percent, largest number of top 10 positions and largest number of impressions according to Google Search Console.

Then we looked at the incoming traffic, and selected the groups that had the largest number of clicks and highest CTR.

Search Intent

For this analysis, we looked at the keyword semantics and made the split by informational and commercial intent.

We ended up with a selection of 7 groups that we showed Shin during one of the discussions. The analysis that we presented included two types of data:

Aggregated

We showed the market share split on each group of interest, for both the existing and the new competitors discovered. On each group, the market share distribution was different among the known competitors. In addition, we pointed out two more competitor domains that were holding an important part of the total estimated traffic for those terms.

Granular

For each competitor, we could point directly to the exact landing pages that drove the highest market share, and to the specific keywords that helped them gain that share.

Some final thoughts

Based on the insights gained from the Market share analysis by keyword group, Shin and the team were able not just to measure the performance and find new competitors, but also to identify specific keywords that they could further target on the SEO flow.

What about you? It’d be interesting to learn how you discover new competitors and run comparative analyses!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

This is especially true for SEO agencies. Starting out and landing a few early clients is (relatively) easy. The SEO market is immense and there are countless resources like this blog to help you out.

But growing from a small team to a seven-figure business requires a whole new set of skills. You need to create processes, build lead-gen systems, and grow your project management chops. As you land bigger and bigger accounts, you’ll have to develop systemic plans to scale your operations.

In this article, I’ll share some of my favorite tips for building a scalable SEO agency.

Build a Scalable Lead Generation System

One of the biggest barriers to growing an SEO agency (or any agency for that matter) is a scalable lead generation system. If your sales team doesn’t have a steady flow of leads to work with, scaling is always going to be a challenge.

Unfortunately, as this HubSpot report shows, most agencies depend on highly unscalable lead sources, such as referrals.

Although referrals, conference appearances, and cold outreach can be effective (usually in that order), they’re not always scalable. You can’t reasonably rely on them to land you new leads, at least not in the long-run.

The solution to this problem is two-fold:

• Adopt more scalable lead-gen tactics such as inbound marketing
• Systemize non-scalable tactics (such as outreach or referrals)

Usually, you’ll want to adopt both these approaches. That is, build an inbound lead-gen system that captures leads passively. Combine that with an aggressive outbound approach to sustain non-scalable tactics.

I’ll share a few tips to do this below.

1. Offer free audits to capture leads

Last month, we ran a small survey of agency websites to evaluate the way they sell their services. To our surprise, we found that an exceptionally large number of SEO agencies offered free consultations or audits:

The process is simple enough: agencies offer SEO audits on their websites. Prospective clients enter their key information and get a free audit report.

With reasonably targeted traffic and well-optimized CTAs, you can capture leads in a scalable, predictable fashion.

One reason why this tactic works is the relative ease of creating SEO audit reports. An experienced agency can put together a report in under an hour, sometimes even less. For clients, this serves as a proof of work while also giving you crucial lead information.

If you’re going to adopt this approach, keep two things in mind:

• Your lead quality will be poor; be prepared to create a qualification process to scrub irrelevant leads.
• You’ll mostly capture leads from smaller businesses. If you want to chase larger accounts, this might not be the best solution.

While this tactic doesn’t work for everyone, it can be effective for an agency struggling to capture leads on an ongoing basis.

2. Systemize your referrals

Marketers consistently rank referrals as their top source of quality B2B leads.

It’s easy to see why: a recommendation from a friend is more persuasive than a testimonial from a stranger.

Although referrals aren’t as scalable as an inbound campaign, you can develop systems to get them in a predictable fashion.

Here’s how:

Start by identifying your happiest clients. These are clients who love your agency enough to recommend it to others.

Use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to find these clients. At the end of every project, send all your clients a simple NPS survey. Ask them how they would rate your service and the rationale for their score.

Look for clients who score your service as a 9 or 10. These are your ‘promoters’ and are most likely to recommend your agency.

Once you’ve identified these clients, send them an automated email to ask for referrals. Since they’ve already shown a willingness to recommend your services, they’ll likely be happy to oblige.

A more targeted approach is to evaluate mutual connections between you and your ‘promoters’ on LinkedIn. If there are any mutual connections that you would like to have as clients, ask these promoters for an introduction.

Another tactic is to use incentivized referrals. Let your clients know that you’ll give them a reward for any new leads or introductions they can give you. As Phillip Reinhardt of PBJ Marketing says, “Economics 101: incentives matter. Spread the word to anyone and everyone you know any and every time of day.”

3. Scale your lead sourcing

Lead sourcing is the process of collecting lead data without the opt-in process that usually accompanies lead generation.

For example, if a lead lands on your website as part of a marketing campaign and fills out a form to download an eBook, it would be lead generation.

However, if you use a lead intelligence tool to gather insight about your site’s visitors, it would be lead sourcing.

Lead sourcing is an underrated tactic for getting new leads into your sales pipeline. When paired with a targeted outreach campaign, it can bring in a steady supply of clients.

Here are a few ways to scale your lead sourcing campaigns:

Use website visitor tracking

Every month, hundreds of people visit your website. Google Analytics can tell you how they interacted with your content, but it can’t tell you whether these visitors were associated with actual businesses.

B2B website visitor tracking tools fill the gap. These tools tie your traffic to specific businesses, effectively “de-anonymizing” your visitors.

Once you know which businesses visited your website and what pages they looked at, you can reach out to them with a cold email. Since they’ve already spent time on your site, they’ve shown at least some interest in your services.

Use lead intelligence tools

Lead intelligence tools can be broadly divided into four categories.

The first, and perhaps most advanced type, are data repositories such as LeadFuze and Datanyze. These tools will help you create lists based on specific keywords, industries, or even people.

These tools are cheap and easy to use but can suffer from outdated data.

An alternative is to use ‘technographic’ tools such as BuiltWith. These tools tell you what technologies a website is using. If you’re targeting clients that use a specific tech stack, this can be a compelling source of leads.

The third option is to use automated email finder tools such as Voila Norbert or Anymail Finder. If you have an existing collection of names and websites (such as from LinkedIn or Crunchbase), you can use these tools to find their email addresses.

Once you have a set of leads, you can start an automated outreach campaign to push them further down your pipeline and turn them into clients.

The next step in scaling is building a system to serve your clients. Without a standardized service model, you’ll struggle to go beyond a certain size. I’ll show you how to build this system below.

Build a Scalable Service Model

The agency business resists scaling. Unlike a manufacturer or a software developer, you can’t just install additional capacity to serve new customers. The key resource you depend on – people – is subjective. If you hire 10x more designers, you won’t always get 10x more designs.

The solution to this problem is to build systems and develop processes. The more standardized your service model, the easier it will be to scale. If a new client comes in, your people should know exactly what they have to do.

I’ll share a few tips to build a standardized, scalable service model below.

1. Understand the Maturity of Your Existing Systems

Either by luck or by design, some parts of your agency will be more scalable and mature than others. Maybe you already have a powerful lead-gen system. Or maybe your project management methodologies are already standardized.

Your goal should be to:

• Assess the maturity of each process in your organization
• Bring immature process to parity with more mature ones

Most agency processes can be broken down as follows:

Market focus: Your market focus defines who you sell your services to. A mature market focus would be “ideal customer” driven, i.e. you have a target client that you pursue exclusively. An immature market process would be reactive, i.e. you sell to whoever lands into your pipeline.

Project management: This defines how you manage your projects. If you use ad-hoc solutions, non-standard methodologies, unspecialized tools and personnel, your project management processes would be ‘immature’. However, if you use standardized tools and methodologies (such as Agile or Critical Path Method), your PM processes would be ‘mature’.

Client acquisition: Your client acquisition processes define how you acquire new clients. If you have a scalable system to capture, qualify, nurture, and close leads, your processes would be ‘mature’.

Agency services: These processes define how you serve your clients and deliver solutions. If you’re creating new solutions from scratch for every client, you’d categorize these processes as ‘immature’. However, if your solutions are standardized and repeatable across clients, you can classify them as ‘mature’.

The more your agency leans towards the ‘mature’ side for every process, the easier it will be to scale the business.

2. Map Workflows for Every Client-type

Most agencies can divide their client base into different “types”. You might have a “small local business” client-type, an “early SaaS” client-type, and so on.

The service model for each of these clients would be different. A local business would need citation-building services, while an early SaaS business would need guest posts.

To standardize your service, start by charting the workflow for each client. Map every touch point, interaction, and service from the moment the lead becomes a client to project close. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Onboarding
• Project documents, including project plan, communication plan, charter, etc.
• Key communication emails
• Website auditing process
• Service process

Look to your existing and past clients to figure out these workflows. Get as granular as necessary. Don’t just map the process you used to create the project plan or communication plan; map the emails, messages, and tactics you used internally/externally in the creation process.

A broad, zoomed-out workflow might look like this:

As you drill into each process, you can standardize its workflow further.

You’ll find that some processes are shared across all clients, some shared across specific client-types, and some completely unique for a single client. If you can standardize the shared processes, you’ll find it much easier to serve clients at scale.

3. Automate and Templatize

In the agency business, you trade time for money. The more time you waste creating SEO reports and writing emails from scratch, the less you’ll have for chasing leads and serving clients.

To scale your business, you need to:

• Templatize any document you create more than once
• Automate document delivery, notifications, and reminders

Think of all the documents you create in the course of serving a client. Ask yourself: can I turn this into a template? Can I automate its delivery?

For example, as par the onboarding process, you might send clients a series of emails informing them about your service and asking them for key account information. You can scale this process by:

• Creating templates for every email
• Scheduling their delivery
• Creating reminder emails in case of non-receipt of key account information

The more documents you can templatize, the less time you’ll have to waste in creating things from scratch.

Similarly, use automation to remind clients, writers, designers, etc. of upcoming deadlines. If possible, create if-then rules for reminders (“If deadline exceeded by > 5 days, remind via Skype message”).

Automate any routine tasks such as reporting as well. Use tools like AWR to make the reporting process faster. Use this guide if you need help creating a project status report.

Over to You

Scaling an SEO agency – or any business for that matter – is never easy. You have to capture leads on a scalable basis and serve them effectively. The complexities of SEO and the subjective nature of agency work make the scaling process even harder.

Use this guide as a starting point in your scaling efforts. Build a scalable lead-gen system, then standardized processes to serve clients at scale.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Nowadays, getting your brand to sell just isn’t enough. Businesses don’t sell products anymore – they’re replaced by user experiences, and customers judge you not on how good your product (or service) is, but on how well you deliver the whole package.

Satisfying customers in every stage of the customer lifecycle is now the key to inspiring customer loyalty.

And with 77% of consumers who prefer receiving emails than other forms of digital marketing, email is still one of the most effective ways of growing a business. For your business to be able to deliver a seamless experience, knowing the five stages of the customer life cycle can help you level up your marketing campaigns and allow you to send the right content to customers at the right time.

For example, an email with a discount code for a new gadget may convince someone who’s already interested in buying the gadget to purchase from you. But it won’t have the same effect to someone who’s not even thinking of buying the gadget in the first place. These customers are in different stages of the lifecycle, and you need to send customized messages to get each in the next stage and ultimately make that purchase.

Knowing what stage your customers are in prevents recipients from clicking that ‘Mark as Spam’ button, which is an email marketer’s worst nightmare. Here’s a look at email examples you could send for each stage of the customer lifecycle:

Stage 1: Awareness

Awareness is the first stage in the customer lifecycle. In this stage, potential customers are just starting to recognize a problem they’re having, and it’s your job to reach them out and further educate them on how they can solve their problem. Email marketing is one of the best ways to do this.

In the awareness stage, you don’t want to sell your product right away, just like you wouldn’t ask someone you just met to buy your products without making sure he really needs it. Focus on giving value by educating your potential customers and setting them up for the next stage of the cycle.

In the example below, Strava, a social network for athletes, highlights the importance of having a community to bond with during workouts. They made readers aware of companionship, a vital ingredient that’s missing in their journey to a healthy lifestyle.

Other email ideas during the Awareness Stage:

• How-to articles – to provide solutions and establish your authority in a topic
• Links to related content – to further educate potential customers in their problem

Stage 2: Consideration

Once your potential customers become aware of the specific problem they’re having, they’ll move on to the consideration stage. In this stage, they’re focused on looking for solutions and comparing them side-by-side to see which one is the best for them.

Remember: you’re selling an experience, not a product, so sending an email that outlines why your brand is better than the competition is a huge plus.

Trouva, an online marketplace that specializes in unique finds from independent boutiques all over UK, goes the extra mile in their consideration-stage email and even outlines a map of boutiques that people can use to get to their favorite boutiques.

Other ideas for the Consideration Stage:

• Reviews and testimonials from existing customers
• Free webinars to teach users how your product works

Stage 3: Decision

This is where your potential customers have sifted through her options, almost ready to make that decision. They just need a little push to tip them in the right direction – like sending them an email notification for your limited free shipping for Father’s Day. That’s what shaving equipment retailer Harry’s did in one of its email campaigns to make it easier for guys to click on that checkout button.

Other ideas for the Decision Stage:

• Premium trial invitation – some users are skeptical, and the key to winning them over is letting them have a “free taste” of what you can offer for a limited time.
• Offer money-back guarantee on online orders

Stage 4: Retention

In this stage of customer lifecycle, the emails you send focus less on selling something and more on nurturing the relationship that you’ve already established with your customer. Emails sent in this stage tend to be more casual and written on a personal perspective, like what Frank Chimero did to promote his online pop-up shop AOK.

Other ideas for the Retention Stage:

• Holiday cards with exclusive promo codes
• Collect feedback on your service through surveys

Stage 5: Loyalty/Advocacy

Having regular customers is great, but having loyal customers – those who are so passionate about your brand that they become unofficial brand ambassadors – that’s even more awesome. Using marketing automation to promote causes that you support is an effective way of improving brand loyalty and turning your repeat customers into brand ambassadors.

Frank Body, an Australian-based skincare company known for its signature body coffee scrub, used a simple email to encourage their customers to advocate the fight against breast cancer – and promote the brand at the same time.

Other ideas for the Loyalty/Advocacy Stage:

• A special member discount as reward to brand loyalty
• Personal messages from VIPs in the company (e.g., thank-you letters from the CEO)

Conclusion

To make email marketing bring high ROI to your business, you need to keep your bases covered and customize emails based on where your customers are in the customer lifecycle. Every business will have different recipes for success, but mixing the right amounts of creativity and powerful marketing automation can ensure satisfaction both for you and your customers.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

A website with quality content, steady traffic, and consistent monthly revenue – sounds too good to be true? Well it doesn’t have to be – there are plenty of high-quality sites for sale on the web.

Whether you are looking for tech websites, eCommerce businesses, affiliate sites, or lifestyle blogs – there is the perfect niche site out there waiting for you.

Read these tips to help you with your next site purchase – make sure you get the best possible deal.

Start With Website Brokers & Platforms

Start by exploring the big brokers and platforms out there: you will find thousands of ads and listings to choose from. You may get lucky and just stumble upon the perfect opportunity.

Some of these sites charge fees, others are free online communities:

• Flippa — use the advanced search to help you filter this big database
• Empire Flippers — specializing in selling established websites
• Exchange — specializing in ecommerce stores with a huge database
• FE International — established website brokers
• Ebay — yes, they also list websites for sale!

Top tip: Use email alerts, spreadsheets, and IFTT to help you shortlist and keep track of ongoing conversations with sellers.

Social Media & Outreach Methods

Some people prefer to sell directly – they will advertise their site sale on social media, instead of listing it on marketplaces. Keep an eye for out anyone selling by following relevant keywords, and engage sellers in conversation if anything promising crops up.

Be proactive about your search and use your outreach skills to your advantage. Put out requests to buy on social media, and seek out relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups. It’s worth posting on relevant forums and blogs to let people know you’re looking for sites to buy.

You should outreach directly to any specific sites you’ve got your eye on. Email the site owner with a concise email – show that you’re a genuine buyer with serious intentions.

Auditing a Potential Purchase

You should never buy a site without doing due diligence checks first.

When analyzing a site before purchase, focus on core metrics. Get hard figures on traffic and revenue before you proceed any further.

Here are some things to look out for:

• Is the traffic organic or paid? Be careful with heavily subsidized paid traffic, or organic traffic that’s faked (look for traffic from similar sources, or traffic that doesn’t convert).
• Fully audit the backlink profile to spot any worrying links or future risks to the business.
• Validate the revenue source(s) and look at revenue channels from the last 12 months. Is there a good spread of income? What’s the overall revenue trend like? Can you spot potential for growth, or has the site plateaued?

Fully investigate anything that’s worrying you, and don’t rush into anything if you’re feeling unsure.

Content Auditing

Audit the site’s content to spot future revenue opportunities.

All content should have a clear theme and the site should cover the niche thoroughly. Niche sites need to be thoroughly researched in order to be credible – you are speaking to die-hard fans and aficionados, as well as hobbyists and newbies.

Content formats to look out for:

• Resources and guides that go into detail on niche terms and LSI keywords
• Interview videos with niche experts and influencers
• In-depth reviews with videos & ratings
• Interactive quizzes & calculators
• Downloadable magazines & guides
• Image galleries
• Niche roundups
• Tool & software reviews
• Listicle posts
• Seasonal content
• Contributed articles

If the current site-owners haven’t gone all-in with their content, this may be the perfect opportunity for you to up the site’s value, and flip it a few months down the line. Content upgrades are a great way to increase traffic, revenue, and overall site value.

Niche Research

How do you know if a niche is going to bottom out soon?

Consider these things carefully:

• Gimmicks – has this site got staying power? Can you ride the wave long enough to get what you want out of the deal?
• Low margins – can they be increased? Can you play the volume game?
• Marketplace – do people actually care about the site? Are there influencers and content producers you can collaborate with?
• Saturation – is everyone else doing the same thing right now?
• Competition – who do you have to defeat in the SERPs? Who else has their eye on this niche?
• Testing things out – can you try before you buy? How much are others making on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis off similar sites?

Some entrepreneurs swear by formulas and calculations when evaluating a niche, but you also need to consider your interest levels and internal resources. There is nothing worse than working on something that holds 0% interest for you, even if it’s profitable.

Approach the niche community

Search for information and support out there – there is loads of it online! You can learn a lot from others who have already done it, like Spencer Haws at Niche Pursuits – it’s worth following relevant blogs and social profiles to see what others have been up to recently.

Transactional Integrity

When buying a website, make sure that the transaction and transfer of assets are properly managed.

You need to ensure that your seller is the genuine article, so always request proof of ID and address details. Your best bet is to use a service like Escrow.com to ensure your funds stay secure. When it comes to security, the seller should be just as concerned as you – watch out for anyone looking to ‘cut corners’.

Dealing with a multi-currency transaction or conversion rates? Take care that you’re not missing out on money due to timing or mismanagement – speak to some financial experts first.

An agreement in writing (a contract) is a good idea, as it allows all parties to define their role in the partnership and asset transfer. If you are considering a transitional ownership period, a legally-binding contract is a must-have.

Secondary Assets

A website doesn’t function in a vacuum: buying an online business might mean purchasing a ton of other assets like social media profiles (often included in the website price, but not always), licenses, supplier relationships, unpublished content/editorial planning, freelancer relationships etc.

Be very clear on what you are, and are not, purchasing. You need to ensure that you are taking on a viable business model where you can generate profit immediately. You need all the pieces of the puzzle to make that happen.

Selling A Website

If you want to get into buying and selling websites, you have to get good at spotting commercial opportunities, and maximizing them.

Sell a site on at its peak, and you may be in for a healthy lump sum. Buy up lots of sites and upgrade their content in one go, and you might be able to make a tidy profit.

Tips for site sellers? It’s important that you price your sites competitively, and that you approach the sale in the right way. Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and cut out any personal waffle in listings: keep things data-driven and actionable. You have to really sell the site and the niche to people, so include as much positive information as you can.

Sign up for a few different sales platforms, and do some of your own marketing too. Try bidding for relevant search terms, and putting out ads on forums.

Conclusions

Buying a niche site is a great way to expedite your online income goals for the year, but don’t get suckered into buying an expensive site that’s not going to ultimately make you much money. It’s a good idea to start small: buy a few small niche sites, improve them, flip them, and work your way up to bigger purchases.

At the top end, people spend millions on websites: it’s big business. But these days, anyone can start buying and selling niche websites thanks to a relatively open marketplace.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The digital craze that has been taking over the world has had a tremendous impact on everyday communication. Online office space has limited personal interaction and disabled us to dig deeper into our client’s character, to gauge their mood and the value they bring to collaboration.

Despite the ever-increasing lack of face-to-face communication, we still have to find a way to recognize the type of the client we are working with as it will help us deliver positive results and create a long-lasting relationship with our clients.

Everybody who is a part of the world of marketing knows that good client communication is a prerequisite for marketing success. They are also aware that there are numerous types of clients they have to handle on a daily basis and turn them into loyal followers.

The team that changes their approach to meet customers’ needs regardless of how high their expectations are is the team that gets good customer service results.

From the ones who think they know everything to the ones who think they can micro-manage everything, there are clients of all shapes and sizes you have to deal with if you want to be awarded for your marketing efforts.

Here are the most common types of customers you can meet when running your marketing campaigns.

The know-it-all client

Even if you and your team have extensive knowledge, remarkable experience, and fantastic skills to make the most of your marketing campaign, there are always clients who for some reason, think they are knowledgeable enough to handle it themselves. Whether or not they’re familiar with the subject matter, they will insist on giving you suggestions and advice.

This type of client may be the most difficult of them all as he not only distracts your attention and prevents you from focusing on the real work, but also presents the ideas that don’t seem to work and are therefore meaningless.

As much as this type of collaboration may seem frustrating, don’t step out of the game, accept the challenge and show your customer that you truly care about his opinion and attitude.

Although this type of clients can be pretty argumentative, try not to get into conflicts with them and direct your energy into winning their trust. Once you achieve that, you will be able to manage communication seamlessly and be rewarded in no time.

The ideal client

As unbelievable as it may seem, there are clients who appreciate your efforts every step of the way and where client collaboration is a delightful experience.

This ideal customer is like a Holy Grail – difficult to find and almost impossible to reach. Ideal customers will immediately give you full support, encourage you to make the right moves and will not question your competence to successfully complete your job.

They don’t mind investing more money into the project if they know it will yield better results. They are excellent communicators and will be all ears when there are some new inspiring ideas and thoughts you would like to share with them.

When working with this type of a client, you need to be aware of the tremendous value they bring to your business, nurture your relationship with them by giving them special offers and other perks and concentrate on turning them into long-term collaborators.

The big saver

This type of a client has the tendency to criticize your work but not because he really thinks that you haven’t shown your maximum potential, but because they want to undermine your confidence and make you eventually lower the price.

While the big saver will not pick on small details and will not complain about everything on the way, but they will subtly abuse people to get what they want.

When trying to tackle this type of client, it’s important that you try to hit the right balance. You need to show them that you respect their requests, appreciate their precision and assertiveness and make necessary changes if they don’t heavily disagree with the project.

However, if you recognize that they are being manipulative and cheap, you need to state that you do not accept such a behavior.

A new client

Once you’ve attracted a new customer, you need to do everything in your power to keep them and turn them into a loyal customer. A new customer is still not quite familiar with the services you are offering and is probably just learning the ropes of digital marketing.

To make them want to become a part of your customer base, you need to be there for them in case some issues arise or if there are questions they needs answers to. You don’t want to keep them waiting and leave them in the dark about the outcome of your marketing efforts.

You need to guide them and show them how processes work and what important steps you need to take to reach a positive outcome.

Allocate some time for your customers, make sure they get the necessary information and that they are equipped with the right knowledge that will help them understand your processes perfectly.

You can do this during the on-boarding process or by having an online customer service available in real time.

A micro manager

The micro manager is probably the most demanding and the most difficult client to work with. Needless to say, nobody likes being constantly under the watchful eye of their clients.

This kind of behavior is intrusive, annoying and detrimental to your creative process. The micro manager is the kind of client who wants to micro-manage every single detail and keep ultimate control of the project by constantly asking questions and offering suggestions.

This can have an adverse impact on your team’s productivity, jeopardize the entire project and even lead to a project failure.

The most efficient way to handle this type of clients is to communicate, communicate and over-communicate. Offer them insights into every stage of your campaign structure and be there to reassure them that everything is going according to the plan.

While working with clients who are control freaks may be exhausting and overly irritating, you need to calm yourself and do your best to leverage the communication between two of you.

The under-value client

Whether it’s because they haven’t done any research about your business or because that is simply in their nature, under-value clients tend to underestimate your skills and undervalue most of your efforts.

They think that most tasks don’t require much time and other resources and usually ask questions like: It couldn’t be that hard, could it? Do you think you could finish it in an hour or two?

In such a scenario, you need to show self-confidence, keep your head up high and demand respect from your clients. Before diving deeper into your project, you need to explain how the process works, outlining the time and other resources necessary for the successful completion of every project phase.

Bullet-proof yourself from unreasonable expectations, show your client that you stand your ground firmly and that you have faith not only in the project you’re working on, but also your future collaboration.

The indecisive client

These are the clients who find it difficult to make up their mind whether a small thing or a big issue is in question. Also, they tend to give short answers like “maybe” and “I don’t know” or change their mind at the last moment.

There are hundreds of questions swarming in their head and they are struggling to find the right solution and answers to the questions that bother them.

In order to help them make the right decision, you need to be able to educate them on why your service is the best and guide them through the processes. Once they have made up their mind, support their decisions a few more times, tell them they are in the right hands and make them trust your instinct.

Due to the heavy workload and multiple project and deadlines you and your team need to juggle on daily basis, it’s sometimes challenging and even impossible to complete all your processes within a specific budget and timeline.

This can give you a hard time, especially if you’re working with clients who want their projects to be done fast. They want you to exceed their expectations, deliver outstanding results and be efficient at the same time.

Working with such clients can be an overwhelming experience, as it puts you under a lot of pressure and sometimes causes burnout. Don’t shy away from setting clear boundaries. Be realistic about your abilities and the time you need to successfully complete the project.

Overall, no matter how high your client’s expectations are, it’s of key importance to promote a culture of open and transparent communication.

This is the only way to build trust and healthy relationships with your clients – which you will undoubtedly benefit from on your future endeavors.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

But what if instead of targeting celebrities with a huge social following, you work with hundreds or thousands of micro-influencers to get even better results?

In general, micro-influencers are bloggers or social media users with 100,000 followers or fewer. And here are a few stats that illustrate why brands really need them:

•  71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference.
• Only 14% of people can recall the last time they saw an ad and identify the offer it was promoting.
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 33% trust ads.

Think of it this way – Say you run an eCommerce business that sells tennis equipment. Even if you managed to get Serena Williams or Rafael Nadal to endorse your product (good luck with that), most people would take it with a grain of salt. If instead you find a few hundred regular tennis fanatics to mention your brand on social media, their friends and followers will listen.

I know what you’re thinking: A few hundred micro-influencers? It will take ages to reach out to all of them.

And you’re absolutely right, unless you take advantage of marketing automation.

How to automate your micro-influencer marketing campaign

Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can put some (or most) of your micro-influencer marketing campaign on autopilot. But before you start using them, you need to answer 3 questions:

1. What do you want to achieve with influencer marketing?
2. Where does your target audience hang out?
3. What kind of influencers will they listen to?

What do you want to achieve with influencer marketing?

If you want your micro-influencer marketing strategy to succeed, your goals need to be more specific than just improving your bottom line.

Social media influencers can help drive all sorts of goals that ultimately improve your brand reach and grow your business, such as:

• Build brand awareness
• Drive sales
• Generate new leads
• Grow your social following
• Get reviews
• Increase site traffic
• Encourage in-store visits
• And more.

Which marketing goals you choose will determine what kind of content your micro-influencers will share. This influencer marketer post is a good example of encouraging in-store visits:

Where does your target audience hang out?

Next you’ll need to figure out which social platforms are most relevant to your target audience. Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are all popular platforms to find micro-influencers, but where is your target audience actually listening?

If you already have buyer personas as part of your marketing strategy, you can refer back to them to figure this out. Compare your buyer personas to the demographic data of different social media sites, such as gender, age, location, income, education, etc.

Which platforms best represent your target audience?

You can also refer to your current social media marketing efforts to get an idea. On which platform do you get the most followers and engagement already?

Once you know which platforms you want to market to, you can start finding influencers.

What kind of influencers will they listen to?

The last step before you start automating is finding your perfect influencer. You already know what platform they should be on, but what other characteristics should they have?

Consider:

• Male, female, or either?
• How many followers?
• What skills and interests should they have that relate to your product?

Those are the minimum questions you should answer before searching for micro-influencers. Some search tools allow you to get even more nuanced, with filters based on age, location and other factors. But we’ll discuss that below.

Tools for Micro-Influencer Marketing Automation

Now you know what you hope to achieve with micro-influencer marketing, and have a good idea of what kind of influencers can help you do it. Next comes the processes you can automate:

• Finding influencers: Instead of scouring social media to find your perfect influencers one by one, use an online tool or searchable database to do it for you.
• Creating content: You could create content yourself or hire influencer marketing experts to do it for you. Better yet, use an influencer marketing platform that prompts your influencers to create content for you.
• Compensation: Use an influencer marketing tool to set your campaign budget and automate payments to your influencers.
• Measurement: Automatically track your influencers’ posts to get insights about engagement whenever you need.

You can automate some or all of these processes depending on which tools or services you use. In the rest of the post, we’ll discuss 3 types of tools that help:

• Influencer discovery and outreach tools.
• Influencer marketplaces to find, contact, and work with influencers on different social media sites.
• All-in-one tools to automate every stage of your influencer marketing campaign.

Influencer Discovery and Outreach

Klear

Klear is an influencer search engine with 500 million profiles spanning 60,000 categories. You can use it to search for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and blogging influencers specializing in all sorts of niches.

Klear gives you an in-depth look at each influencer’s social presence, including their engagement:

You can easily catalogue and contact influencers right on the platform.

NeoReach

NeoReach is a self-service influencer marketing platform. It indexes the social web into a searchable database of social media and blogging influencers. The platform also helps you manage outreach, and track the results of your campaigns.

Huge brands have used NeoReach to find influencers to help promote their products, like Walmart and their Gold Disk Giveaway:

HYPR

HYPR calls itself the world’s largest influencer marketplace, and with more than 10 million influencers listed, it just might be. It helps you find influencers based on their audience demographics, like age, location and interests.

Traackr

Traackr is an influencer relationship management platform. With it, you can upload your database of existing influencers and use their information to expand your network and find others.

Traackr can also help you impress your potential influencers by making it easy to monitor influencer activity and discover the right time to connect and start building a relationship.

Traackr also helps you manage your engagement with influencers and measure the results of your efforts for brand reach and other factors.

Revfluence

Revfluence is a sophisticated database of over 500,000 influencers that uses machine learning to help you find the right people to help with your marketing campaign.

You can browse influencers by industry, location, audience demographics and lots of other factors, or just use a keyword search. Instead of sending out hundreds of cold emails, Revfluence makes it easy to contact influencers with a single click.

The platform also helps keep track of sales, site traffic, follower attribution, and other key performance indicators you can use to measure ROI.

Influencer Marketplaces

Shoutcart

Shoutcart is an influencer marketing tool for Instagram and Twitter. All you have to do is browse their database of influencers and select ones that work best with your niche. You can browse by category, number of followers, price, and other factors, or use the search feature:

Then you upload an image or video to the site for these influencers to share. Select what time you’d like your influencers to share, pay for the order, and you’re done! Your influencer will share the post with their audience.

Tribegroup

Tribegroup works a bit differently than Shoutcart – you don’t provide the content for influencers to share, they create it for you.

First, you upload a brief of your product to the platform, then select influencers from Tribegroup’s extensive database.

These selected influencers can then create a unique post about the product and submit it to you for approval. If you like it, they’ll share it and you’ll pay them.

The real benefit of this platform is that the content influencers share is more genuine. They add their own touch to the post instead of blindly sharing whatever brands throw their way.

Famebit

Famebit is another popular platform where you can find micro-influencers for YouTube and Instagram. If you’re looking to market on YouTube, Famebit connects you with creative people who will make unique videos about your product and share them on their profiles.

This YouTube video for Office Depot is an example of the platform’s work:

Like Tribegroup, you submit a brief about your product for content creators to work with. They’ll then submit content proposals to you that you can reject or approve. Once approved, they create the content and share it with their social followers.

All-in-One Tools

IZEA

IZEA is an all-in-one influencer marketing tool that can help you with many different areas of the process. If you have the budget to completely automate your micro-influencer marketing strategy, then you can hire their in-house team to create content, find influencers, optimize your campaign, and more.

If you’re on a budget, you can opt for their self-service content amplification tool. It’s also automation-friendly because you can add links to your content or your entire RSS feed to the system to create new influencer marketing opportunities every time you publish new content.

Then you just pick your influencers, set your budget, and let the program run itself.

Linqia

Linqia is another great tool for micro-influencer automation. It uses a combination of artificial intelligence and audience targeting to find the best influencers for you. It also offers goal-based pricing that automatically adjusts how much you spend based on what goals you want to achieve (Reach, engagement, traffic, etc.).

They also have a team of experts on hand who can optimize your campaigns for you, and make sure your brand is appears consistently across social media.

Wrapping Up

Now you know quite a few different tools that can help you automate your micro-influencer marketing strategy. Let’s quickly recap which platforms can help you with your various automation needs:

You can automate as little or as much of your micro-influencer marketing campaign as you want, based on your budget and time investment needs. All these tools are at your fingertips to make it happen.

Influencer marketing is a nascent space in digital marketing. New tools are released all the time, while the others are constantly improving and expanding their features. As time goes on, there will definitely be new ways to save time and optimize your strategy using automation.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

When it comes to UX and CRO, this can be particularly challenging even for the most experienced marketers and specialists.

The reason is simple, there’s too much to cover. So let’s build a simple checklist to make sure that your funnel is optimized from top to bottom.

First Things First – Filling the Top of the Funnel

The top of the funnel is where most of us marketers like to hang out. Understandably so. Generating traffic and leads seems a lot sexier than optimizing the appearance of your credit card collection form.

Make no mistake, ensuring your credit card form is slick and minimalistic can have a serious impact on conversions. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.

But for now, let’s dive in and see how to optimize just the tippy-top.

▢ Perform serious keyword research

It’s safe to say that keyword research is pretty low on the average marketer’s “favorite things to do at work” list.

It’s a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Worse yet, it can often leave you feeling hopeless and defeated.

But it’s a necessary evil, and one that can truly work wonders for your traffic generation when done correctly.

Start by considering your searcher’s intent. When someone realizes they have a problem that your business solves, what will they type into Google? If you need some inspiration, AnswerThePublic is a great tool that will show you the most common related queries typed into the search engines.

After getting some ideas, plug those queries into your keyword explorer of choice (Moz, Ahrefs and SEMrush are all good solutions) and look for opportunities with relatively low competition and decent search volume.

Don’t forget, a keyword with a monthly volume of 200 can occasionally be more valuable than a keyword with over 1000 searches in a month. Many factors are at play here, and I’d recommend taking a look at this guide.

▢ Build a content strategy

If you want to build targeted and valuable traffic, you’re going to need to spend some time thinking about creating top of funnel content.

Now, many marketers openly admit that they don’t have a well thought-out content strategy. In fact, a recent study found only 44% believe that their content marketing goals are clearly stated!

This is understandable given the time required to build a complete strategy. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll be competitive without documenting your own strategy.

Having a documented strategy is crucial to traffic generation success. Without it, you may be creating content left and right, but you’ll have no idea which channels or types of content actually drive the most engagement.

Document the direction your content marketing will take in the coming quarters. Do this thing before you start creating and promoting the content itself. For a complete understanding of the process, here’s a beginner’s guide.

This rather simple step will work wonders to keep company stakeholders happy and allow you to take care of the next checklist item as well.

▢ Close the loop on content ROI

So let’s say you’ve documented your content strategy and spent some time analyzing the competitive landscape. You know what keywords you want to go after and are reasonably confident you can get into the top 3 and start earning those leads.

Before you start publishing and promoting all of that awesome content you’ve got in the bullpen, make sure that you’ve got a measurement plan in place.

Do you have a solid understanding of how you’re going to monitor the ROI of your content marketing in the months to come? Are you aware of the pitfalls that many marketers face when they overvalue certain metrics and ignore others?

It’s important to note that there are many different types of content. Video, infographics, social shares, blog posts… the list goes on and on. Similarly, there are a huge number of channels through which these various content types can be promoted.

When you dive into the analytics a few weeks down the road, keep your eyes peeled for what channels and what types of content generate the most engaged and valuable leads.

Having this process dialed in will set you up to double-down on the most effective methods you identify.

Monkey in the Middle – Nurturing the Lead

Now we’re ready for things to get interesting! You’ve got a steady stream of new website visitors, but what are you going to do to keep their attention?

One recent study found that on average, consumers are exposed to hundreds of ads every day. What’s more, the New York Times reported that the average person can experience up to 5,000 ad impressions in a single day.

With such an overwhelming number of brands getting in front of consumers every day, it’s increasingly difficult to make a lasting impression.

So. How will you ensure that your brand…

• Stands out?
• Gets a repeat visit?
• Earns the opportunity to convert a lead into a sale?

Here are a few of the most high-impact ways to start jacking up your conversion rate.

▢ Leverage a sense of urgency

It’s an age-old sales trick, but one that’s cliched for a reason: it works.

Creating and leveraging a sense of urgency can work wonders for helping that on-the-fence lead.

You can create advertisements that mention a limited inventory of a particular item. You can also offer special discounts to followers of your social media feeds, your advertisement that mentions limited inventory of a particular item. The sky’s the limit.

SaaS companies can take advantage of this tactic as well, though many still haven’t caught on. It can be a bit harder to accomplish, but don’t be deterred. They can make quite the difference when done correctly!

Some other ideas are

• Limited-time bundles
• Mystery deals
• Express shipping
• BOGO

All of these tactics, when combined with a time factor, are guaranteed to help those leads that may be on the fence about making a purchase.

▢ Encourage trust

For many consumers, trust is the deciding factor.

Will you make good on your promises to them? Are they getting a good deal? Is it safe to do business with you?

These questions are all bouncing around in a prospect’s head when they’re in the middle of your sales funnel. It’s therefore both obvious and critical that you encourage (and deserve) their trust.

This can be accomplished in any number of ways. I’d recommend dabbling with all of them to find out which have the biggest impact on your leads.

• Showcase testimonials
• Quote 3rd party reviews
• Display reputable badges of businesses that have featured you in stories
• Comparison charts between your business and your competitors’
• Offering a guarantee of some kind

Like I mentioned above, experiment with these and let the data do the talking!

▢ Stay in front of your leads

As we saw earlier, consumers are inundated with brand mentions on a daily basis. So it stands to reason that you’ll want to work extra hard to stay in front of leads (hopefully without being a nuisance).

If they’ve given you permission to email them, be sure that you have some automated email drips set up to provide them with additional context about your service. You can also use these emails to take advantage of the “leveraging urgency” methods above.

There are so many different methods to remarket that it’s worthy of linking to an entire guide on the subject. Kissmetrics does a great job comparing and contrasting the various approaches you can take with remarketing.

Display ads have notoriously low CTR, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value. Especially when used for retargeting, they can have quite an impact. Check out this example from Heineken.

Since many platforms bill these as PPC and clicks are few and far between, it’s an easily affordable way to pop up and remind your prospects about your brand.

Bottom of the 9th – Closing the Sale

We’re nearly at the finish line!

You’ve got a solid understanding of how to earn more targeted traffic to fill the top of your funnel.

You also know how to leverage some amazing tools and some pretty cool psychology to get your prospect ready to buy.

Now let’s cover a few items that will help ensure you don’t lose them before the deal is sealed.

▢ Create content to address lingering questions

You might say “but this is what my sales team is for”. Or assume your FAQ will have it all covered.

Trust me. Not everyone is willing to read a FAQ or comb through your extensive Support documentation. Digestible and scannable content can make a big difference.

You can get a bit more creative with this content since keyword optimization shouldn’t be much of a concern. At this point you already have the prospect’s attention.

I’d also advise taking a look at the final stages of your competitors’ funnels. What kind of materials are they equipping leads with and how are they proving their worth?

Feel free to take inspiration and engage in a little “one-upmanship”. Do they claim to increase sales by 20%? Find a case study from one of your own customers where you were able to increase their sales by 25%.

These little details can help nudge a customer from a rival to your own solution.

▢ Minimize the steps necessary to convert

I’m still amazed by some of the clumsy and ineffective credit card forms I see across the web. Especially when it’s so well-documented that humongous gains can be had by optimizing these simple forms.

Check out this one case study where UXdesign.cc walks us through the process of their credit card collection form overhaul. You can see the form getting simpler and more effective as they go through the process. Very helpful!

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

In a recent study by Cisco, it was estimated that global internet traffic from videos will constitute 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.

With the widespread adoption of high-speed internet (and in recent years, mobile internet), people can finally fulfill their desire for vibrant, stimulating visual content whenever and wherever they are.

When you consider that 6 out of 10 people prefer online video streaming to live TV and that 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s clear that YouTube is the perfect platform for brands to communicate with their audiences.

As with all types of content marketing, one of the biggest challenges in producing videos is selecting topics that people are genuinely interested in. It can take hours or even days to create a high quality video. But if the topic isn’t something that people care about, don’t expect to get any views.

Instead of using the “post and pray” approach to video production, it’s far more effective to research what kinds of things people are actually looking for, and then seek to fulfill their demands.

You can accomplish this by using a selection of YouTube keyword research tactics. For maximum engagement, it’s crucial to find keywords that people are searching for on YouTube, but also on Google.

YouTube Autocomplete Options

The best place to start performing keyword research is within YouTube itself.

When you type in search terms related to your niche, you’ll receive a selection of suggested results. This feature was designed to help users find content which relates to their interests, but it can also be leveraged by marketers as a keyword research device.

For further options, enter your keyword followed by each letter of the alphabet and see what kinds of results show up. At this stage, you may wish to start recording your findings on a spreadsheet.

Because you can’t receive extended data (such as search volume) about the keywords, it’s not wise to make your decisions solely based on YouTube’s autocomplete options. However, you can get some great insights before moving onto other tools.

Competitor Research

In order to determine what types of videos are ranking well in your niche, check out your competitors.

With the free Chrome tool, Tags for YouTube, you can easily analyze the titles and meta tags used by your competitors. You can learn more about these keywords once you enter them into some of the other tools shown below.

AdWords Keyword Planner

YouTube’s own keyword research tool became obsolete in 2014. The company recommends moving over to AdWords for keyword research – so this is the next place you should visit.

Although you have to sign up to AdWords in order to do keyword research, it’s free and takes very little time. You can click here to get started.

In the “ads formats and sizes” tab, make sure that “video” is the only format checked. Next, run the keywords you found on YouTube through this tool and see what kind of results you get.

Adwords Keyword Planner is extremely helpful because it displays the search volume for specific keywords. Obviously you’ll want to utilize the keywords that are receiving the most searches.

You can also input the URL of other high ranking videos into Keyword Planner and see what keywords come up. These results will give you excellent insights into how to rank well for your niche.

For more unconventional and smart ways to use the AdWords Keyword Planner, check out this post from Dan Shure.

Keyword Tool Dominator

If you’re just starting out with YouTube videos, Keyword Tool Dominator is a great resource. It allows you to input 3 seed keywords per day for free, generate a list of relevant keywords and download the ones that are most useful as a .CSV file.

For unlimited daily searches and to view keywords in order of search volume, you can subscribe to the YouTube edition of Keyword Tool Dominator for a one-time fee of $39.99 USD.

There are more comprehensive (and expensive) keyword research tools available, but if you’re a beginner – this is an excellent starting place.

Google Trends

Google Trends has long been one of the most popular research tools for marketers. Fortunately, this tool allows you to look at search queries which specifically pertain to YouTube.

Select this option under the “Web Search” tab, enter your keyword and voila! You’ll receive some excellent insights into the rising or falling popularity of your search term.

When analyzing related queries, ensure you don’t blindly use keywords that have no relevance to your niche. For instance, when looking for queries relevant to SEO, it’s important to note that Korean performing artist, Seo In Guk, has absolutely nothing to do with search engine optimization.

If you have a brick and mortar store or your content pertains to a specific country, Google Trends allows you to generate results by location. Simply click the “Worldwide” tab and scroll down until you find your desired country.

If you’re marketing to more economically developed countries or just to English-speaking countries, it’s useful to play around with this feature and also check out the “Interest by Region” tab. It’s important that your keywords are applicable to your target demographic and not people from nations who aren’t interested in buying from you.

Conversely, you may discover entirely untapped markets that you wouldn’t have expected to have an interest in your products and services. This is why Google Trends is such a powerful research tool.

Keyword Keg

Keyword Keg is one of the most comprehensive research tools on the internet. It allows you to filter your data by YouTube searches.

In order to get highly specific results, you can also filter by language and by country.

With this tool, you can learn about each keyword’s search volume, keyword power, world value and world cost per click. The only downside to this tool is that if you want to see all the data pertaining to each seed keyword, you have to pay.

Depending on how much information you want access to, you’ll pay anywhere from $8 to $24 USD per month in order to use the Keyword Keg service. Fortunately, there is a 30 day money back guarantee, so if you sign up and don’t consider it to be a worthy investment, you can cancel your membership with no loss.

If you’re serious about generating engagement for your YouTube videos, I believe you’ll find Keyword Keg to be a worthy investment.

Keyword Tool

If YouTube plays a significant role in your company’s marketing strategy (i.e. the people who watch your videos are consistently converting into paying customers), consider subscribing to Keyword Tool.

Of the tool’s many data insights, the ability to filter using buyer intent is particularly useful. With this functionality, you can hone in on keywords that lead to conversions instead of just views.

Depending on what functionalities you require, you’ll pay anywhere from $48 to $88 USD per month for a subscription to this service.

With the free version of the tool, you’ll receive a huge list of results per search (pulled from YouTube Autocomplete and Google). However, in order to know how valuable each keyword will be for your campaign, you’ll have to subscribe to one of the paid packages.

All pricing packages allow you to export your data to a .CSV file. If you want to view keyword search volumes and find out the AdWords competition or CPC for your keywords, you’ll need to go with the Pro Plus package at $88 USD per month.

You’ll definitely receive excellent keyword insights with this tool, but if your budget is low or you’re just getting started with YouTube, it’s better to start with cheaper or free tools.

YTCockpit

If YouTube is your only or most dominant channel for bringing leads to your website, consider using YTCockpit.

Unlike other software packages which can be used for a variety of SEO applications, YTCockpit is completely focused on YouTube. Because the tool is so specifically targeted, its functionalities are unrivaled for video marketers.

YTCockpit will deliver keyword ideas based on data from YouTube Autocomplete, Google AdWords and Google Suggest. However, you’ll also receive intel about the likes, subscribers, video lengths and video qualities pertaining to your search results.

This tool is excellent for performing competitor analysis and you can also see the traffic trends for each keyword.

Depending on the package you want, prices range between $19 to $99 USD per month (you will receive a discount if paying for a year in advance).

Summary

If you’re just getting started with YouTube and want to perform basic keyword research, I would explore free options such as YouTube Autocomplete, Google Trends and AdWords Keyword Planner.

If you’re already up and running and want to maximize the impact of your video marketing campaign, I would suggest looking into more premium tools, such as Keyword Tool and YTCockpit.

Whichever path you choose, know that when you consistently integrate researched keywords in your YouTube uploads – you’re already ahead of the majority of publishers who are using the haphazard “post and pray” approach to YouTube video optimization.

Can you think of any other methods for performing YouTube keyword research? Please let me know in the comments below.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Traditionally, that meant lots of cold calling. But the advent of technology is making the ever-dialing sales person more and more obsolete.

Chatbot technology is emerging as the next big thing that will revolutionize the sales force. Between ease of use, unrivaled support, and on-demand access, the bots make for some stiff competition.

Let’s take a closer look at how chatbots are changing the way businesses attract new customers.

Simplifying the User Experience

Endearing customers to your product partially revolves around removing barriers to entry. Simply put, people are likely to take the path of least resistance.

Chatbots offer easy access to both information about, and the ability to purchase products and services. Here’s an example for clarity.

Two people are talking about their new favorite makeup over Facebook messenger. One friend recommends your brand to the other, and she’s interested.

With a chatbot, that person can message your bot, get information, and order the makeup – all without leaving the Facebook Messenger app.

What you’ve done is skip the entire sales funnel. Consumers can jump from awareness to action with only a few messages to your chatbot.

Unrivaled Product Support

Social media changed the face of customer support forever. Companies embraced Twitter with open arms and started building online relationships with their consumers.

Chatbots are the natural extension of these connections. While social media support gives customers an on-demand pipeline to customer service, bots take it a step further.

AI is advanced enough that chatbot services largely mimic human interaction. At 10 pm your customer service reps are home for the night, but a chatbot isn’t.

And even if your chatbot can’t answer a customer inquiry, it can provide a human rep with valuable insight into the problem.

Chatbots can send data back to your customer support team, reducing the amount of time it takes to solve problems.

Less time spent gathering basic consumer information means more money saved.

On-Page Chatbots

While many chatbots live in messaging applications, some businesses implement bots into their landing pages.

Chatbots that live on websites function similarly to their messaging-based counterparts. However, the on-page bot offers a unique take on customer acquisition.

Instead of drawing people in with content or offers, landing page chatbots look to offer convenience and direct sales.

Customers visiting your website can gather product information and make purchases within seconds of your page loading.

This is especially important, as 55 percent of people spend 15 seconds or less on your website.

Offering engaging, informative product information through your chatbot will keep people on your landing page longer. Quick and easy landing pages will only increase your conversion rates.

Implementing Your Own Chatbot

All the knowledge in the world is useless without implementation. Let’s explore how your business can start capitalizing chatbots.

Creating your own chatbot means mimicking companies who’ve created a successful bot. Kayak’s chatbot is an excellent example for attracting customers through a simplified user experience.

The bot lives in Facebook messenger and provides users with a “travel agent.” Users can ask questions ranging from “where should I go on vacation for under $1000” to “I need a hotel in Atlanta.”

Kayak’s bot will answer any question with a travel recommendation and links to book hotels, flights, etc. Customers move from the acquisition to decision phase of the sales funnel in just sentences.

Consider building your own Facebook messenger bot that fits with your business voice and tone. Messenger comes integrated into Facebook, allowing you to drive potential customers from your Facebook page to your chatbot.

Customer support chatbots are better suited to living on-page. It’s usually easiest to choose an outside solution to help implement these bots on your website.

Though just like with Facebook Messenger bots, these on-page customer support bots need to fit your company’s voice and tone. Make sure your on-page bot sticks with your brand image.

Chatbots allow you to engage customers with your brand through ease of use, unrivaled support, and on-demand access to information.

Creating an easy path down the sales funnel ensures that implementing a chatbot will only improve your customer acquisition process.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.