Whether you’re running ads, sending email newsletters, growing your social media, or climbing the SEO ladder, all roads eventually lead to one place: your website. Here’s why exceptional web design isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity.

First Impressions Matter—A Lot

Users form an opinion about your website in just 0.05 seconds. That tiny sliver of time is enough for them to decide if they’ll stay, engage, or bounce. Clean, professional, and engaging design not only keeps visitors around but also builds trust. Poor web design, on the other hand, can make even the most legitimate business look unprofessional or outdated.

Your website is your 24/7 salesperson—it needs to look and feel the part.

Web Design as the Core of Your Digital Ecosystem

Think of your website as the central hub of your entire digital strategy:

• SEO brings users to your site through search engines.

• Paid advertising (Google Ads, social ads) directs traffic to landing pages or product offers.

• Email marketing drives subscribers to blog posts, products, or event registrations.

• Social media campaigns create buzz and push followers to engage deeper via your website.

• Content marketing lives primarily on your site—blog posts, case studies, service pages, and more.

If your web design is clunky, slow, or hard to navigate, all those strategies underperform. A great website makes everything else work better.

Key Elements of Effective Web Design

A well-designed website should do more than look good—it should convert. Here are some key elements that separate good web design from great:

1. Responsive & Mobile-First Design

Over 60% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Your website needs to look and work flawlessly across screens of all sizes. Mobile-friendly design isn’t optional—it’s critical for both user experience and SEO rankings.

2. Clear Navigation

Users need to find what they’re looking for in just a few clicks. A clean, intuitive structure helps guide visitors through your site, increases time on page, and boosts engagement.

3. Speed & Performance

A slow website frustrates users and tanks your SEO. Speed optimization—from image compression to smart hosting—is essential for retention and ranking.

4. Conversion-Driven Layout

Your site should naturally guide users toward key actions—contacting you, booking a service, or making a purchase. Strong CTAs (calls-to-action), strategically placed, can make all the difference.

5. Consistent Branding

Your visuals, tone, and messaging should reflect your brand at every touchpoint. Web design is your opportunity to make your brand identity shine through—through color, typography, imagery, and voice.

The Role of Web Design in Your Marketing Funnel

Your marketing funnel—awareness, consideration, conversion—relies on your website at every stage.

• Attract new users with search-optimized content and landing pages.

• Engage them with valuable info, testimonials, and design that communicates trust.

• Convert them with smart layouts, easy navigation, and optimized contact forms or checkout flows.

When your web design supports the funnel, you turn casual visitors into loyal customers.

Web Design + SEO: The Dream Team

Google pays attention to how people interact with your website. High bounce rates, poor mobile experience, and slow load times can all hurt your rankings. On the flip side, strong web design increases engagement and dwell time, which sends positive signals to search engines.

Also, design supports technical SEO—site architecture, internal linking, and schema markup all benefit from well-thought-out layouts and structure.

Web Design as a Long-Term Investment

A great website doesn’t just help you today—it sets you up for future growth. As your business scales, your website should evolve with it. That means designing with flexibility and future-proofing in mind.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we don’t just build beautiful websites—we design strategic digital hubs that grow with your brand, convert your visitors, and amplify every marketing dollar you spend.

Final Thoughts

In a digital-first world, your website isn’t just a part of your business—it is your business. Whether you’re building your first site or looking to upgrade, investing in high-quality web design is one of the smartest moves you can make.

Let your website be more than a placeholder. Make it a powerful, central engine for all your marketing efforts.

Ready to build something amazing? Contact Blue Shift Web Services and let’s create a website that works as hard as you do.

The post Why Web Design Is the Central Hub of Your Online Presence appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

1. Start Early with Teaser Campaigns

Black Friday has evolved beyond just one day—it’s now a shopping season. Many consumers begin researching deals and making shopping lists well in advance. To stay top of mind, start building anticipation early through teaser campaigns.

Email marketing is a highly effective way to tease your upcoming Black Friday deals. Use engaging, visually appealing emails that give hints about exclusive offers, limited-time discounts, or secret promotions. These teaser campaigns help create a sense of urgency, making customers eager to check back for more details.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we specialize in email marketing. We can help you design and schedule email campaigns that are personalized and delivered at the optimal time to maximize engagement with your audience.

2. Offer Exclusive Black Friday Deals

To make your Black Friday promotions stand out, focus on creating exclusive deals. Offering limited-time bundles, special editions, or early access sales can make your customers feel like they’re getting something unique. These deals don’t just appeal to bargain hunters—they also create a sense of exclusivity that can help build loyalty.

In addition to general promotions, think about rewarding returning customers with personalized discounts or early access to sales. This can be a great way to show appreciation to your loyal customer base and increase repeat purchases during the holiday season.

If you need help crafting personalized offers or structuring exclusive deals, Blue Shift Web Services can assist with marketing strategy consultation to ensure your Black Friday offers hit the mark.

3. Leverage Social Media Marketing

Social media is a key tool in your Black Friday marketing strategy. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter allow you to reach a wide audience while building excitement for your promotions. By creating engaging content such as countdown posts, sneak peeks of deals, or interactive polls, you can generate buzz and anticipation among your followers.

Running social media contests or giveaways leading up to Black Friday is another great way to boost engagement. Encourage your audience to share your posts, tag friends, or participate in fun challenges for a chance to win exclusive discounts or products. This not only drives engagement but also expands your reach through word-of-mouth.

If managing social media seems overwhelming, Blue Shift Web Services offers social media management services to help you create, schedule, and optimize your posts for maximum visibility and engagement.

4. Optimize Your Website for Black Friday Traffic

Your website is at the core of your Black Friday sales strategy, so ensuring it’s fully optimized is essential. With the high influx of traffic on Black Friday, a slow or unresponsive website can lead to lost sales. Make sure your website is fast, mobile-responsive, and easy to navigate so that customers can easily find and purchase what they’re looking for.

Focus on optimizing your product pages with high-quality images, clear descriptions, and strong calls-to-action. Also, consider adding features like live chat to assist customers with any questions or concerns in real-time, helping to close sales.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we provide web development and optimization services to ensure your website is fully equipped to handle Black Friday traffic and maximize conversions. From page load times to mobile responsiveness, we can help you fine-tune every detail.

5. Utilize Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a powerful tool for getting your Black Friday deals in front of the right audience. Platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads allow you to target specific demographics and behaviors, making it easier to reach potential customers who are likely to convert.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we offer paid advertising management to help you craft targeted campaigns that drive traffic and increase sales. We’ll work with you to create ad strategies that meet your specific business goals while maximizing your return on investment.

6. Craft a Post-Black Friday Strategy

Black Friday isn’t just about making sales on a single day—it’s about building long-term relationships with customers. Once Black Friday has passed, continue the momentum by engaging customers through follow-up emails. Send thank-you notes for their purchases, offer additional discounts on future orders, or suggest complementary products they might like.

Follow-up campaigns can also include feedback surveys to gather insights on what worked well and where you can improve for future promotions. This not only shows customers you value their input but also provides you with valuable data for your next marketing push.

Blue Shift Web Services can help you set up automated email follow-up campaigns that keep customers engaged long after Black Friday. Whether it’s a simple thank-you message or a more targeted product recommendation, we’ll ensure your follow-ups are timely and relevant.

7. Analyze Your Black Friday Performance

Once Black Friday is over, it’s important to review the performance of your marketing efforts. Analyzing key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and ad performance will help you understand what worked and what didn’t. Use this data to refine your strategies for future sales events.

Understanding customer behavior, what products performed best, and how effective your marketing channels were will give you insights to better plan for future campaigns.

At Blue Shift Web Services, we help you dive into the numbers and make sense of your marketing performance. We can help you set up tracking tools and provide detailed reports, so you can make informed decisions moving forward.

Conclusion

Black Friday is a prime opportunity to boost your sales and expand your customer base. With the right marketing strategies—starting early, creating exclusive offers, leveraging social media, optimizing your website, utilizing paid ads, focusing on post-sale engagement, and analyzing results—you can make the most of this critical shopping event.

Need help implementing these strategies? Blue Shift Web Services is here to support you with a range of services, including email marketing, social media management, web development, paid advertising, and SEO. Let’s work together to make this Black Friday your most successful one yet.

The post Black Friday Marketing Strategies for Success appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Get Online with a Website

The first thing you should have is a website. Your website will enable you to be found on Google search, if you do it correctly. A website consists of one or more pages with information about your site, and possibly a shop for them to make purchases. When making your website, it’s important for you to indicate what the next step is for your potential client. For example, if they need to call you to start the process of getting your product/service, then you need to use that as your “Call to Action”. These are buttons scattered around your site to enable users to figure out what to do next.

Have a Strategy

When it comes to taking your business online, it’s important to understand that “consistency is key” in every aspect. If you’re working on a social media following, you’ll need to post consistently. That’s to say that you need to post at the same time on a regular time interval. If you post on every other Tuesday at noon, you need to keep that up. You can always increase your frequency, but you can never decrease it. Having a strategy helps you to keep this schedule.

Hire it Out

Hire out if you need to. If you know that you’re unable to take on the task of getting and keeping your business online, there are plenty of digital marketers and virtual assistants that can help with the various tasks involved with digital business. A digital marketer (or digital agency) can help you with strategy, implementation, and management of your website, SEO, social media, and more. A full-service digital marketing agency can help with a wide spectrum of services from graphic design, to marketing, and more. Using a digital marketing agency can ensure that your marketing strategy is done right, with minimal effort on your part.

The benefits to hiring a full-service digital marketing agency is that you can trust that your message and branding is consistent across all platforms. This is important because you want to be recognizable and limit any confusion.

Content + Construction

Your content is very important across all of your marketing materials. Your website and online presence is no different. You want to make sure that your providing the information that people are looking for:

• Contact Information
• Who You Are
• What You Do/Sell
• What Problem You Solve
• Why You’re Different
• How it Works

When building the home page of your website, I generally suggest that your home page be “snippets” of your other pages. This means that your home page will feature a pargraph or so of information that can be expanded upon on the other pages. Usually this will be a bit about your company, a bit about your services/products, a blog/portfolio section and then contact information.

If you’re looking to get started, we have a variety of digital marketing services that we provide and can make a custom digital marketing strategy for your business based on your goals and audience. Click here to get started.

The post How to Take Your Brick and Mortar Business Online appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Blogging for SEO 

There are some important factors that should be taken into consideration while writing a blog for search engine optimization. You’ll need to make sure that you’re focusing on one keyword or key phrase. This is going to be the topic of the blog post, for example this blog’s key phrase is “Marketing on a Budget”. You’ll want to use this keyword as much as naturally possible. When writing a blog post it should be no less than 500 words, however the more the better. Creating graphics and using images throughout your blog is a great way to encourage your readers to share your post on social media platforms. You should strive to place an image every 150 words or so. Make sure to add proper “alt” tags describing your images. Another thing you can do when writing is to link back to other pages or posts on your site. For example, at the end of a blog post you can recommend a blog post with a similar topic that you’ve posted previously. 

After you’ve written your blog post and published it on your site, you’ll want to share it to EVERY social media channel you can. You can create custom graphics for each platform, or use a generic square layout for all of them. 

Some great places to share in addition to your pages are inside Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, and Google My Business. Search for relevant industry groups and networking groups, and join them. Make sure to read the rules before sharing your posts, as some groups consider it as self promotion.

Make sure to post consistently. If you post every week, make sure to do it on the same day. For us, our typical posting days are Tuesday or Friday. You can determine the best day to post by checking your analytics.

Social Media for Marketing on a Budget

We have talked before about having a social media profile on all of the major platforms, regardless of if you’re using them. However, when money is tight and you’re marketing on a budget, social media can become a great way to getting yourself out there as long as you remain consistent. 

Images and videos are the way to go when it comes to social media. Most industries will benefit from using Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. We go in depth in “Social Media for Business”.

Be sure to register for our email list in order to stay up to date with the latest tips in marketing! If you’re looking for an SEO professional or a full-service digital marketer, we’re here to help. 

The post Marketing on a Budget appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

Web Design Essentials Checklist

• Focus on User Experience
• Let A Pro Handle It
• Content is Key
• Call to Actions
• When and When NOT to Summarize
• Social Proof
• Navigation
• Pages
• Points of Contact

Focus on User Experience 

Design for your audience not yourself. A common theme is to design the website to how you like it, even if you’re not your target audience. For example, I enjoy dark colors and cursive fonts, however I know that the most common profile of my audience wouldn’t like that. Similarly, if you’re designing a site for a dog walking company and you actually like cats more you still know to put dogs on the site. If the visitors like your site, they’ll stay longer and maybe even buy your product or services.

Let a Pro Handle It

In the world of web design, it may be tempting to use the “DIY site builders” to cut some corners when making your foothold online. However, this is usually only good temporarily and should be phased out as soon as possible. The reason for this is that the SEO standards are not taken into account within a site builder. You making the font super large (like 72px) in the text editor to make it look like a heading, doesn’t do so in the backend which is what robots and crawlers (like the ones Google use to index your site on their search engine) use to know what the page is about. Professionals will be able to guide your website to look desirable, be search engine and mobile friendly, and serve as a solid foundation in your marketing strategy.

Content is Key

We’ve preached this time and time again, but content is everything when it comes to online presence. Each and every page should be given the care and attention of a newborn baby. These words and images will be the first introduction for many potential clients. Keywords

Calls-To-Actions

Call to action buttons tell the user what the next step is. This is important whether you’re wanting the customer to buy a product on the site, schedule a meeting, or simply call the store. The buttons need to be eye-catching, have enticing language, and lead the customer to the next step in the process. 

When and When NOT to Summarize

On the home page you should summarize what is vital to the company: services, about section, products, contact information. On other pages, you should not summarize. The minimum amount of words for a given page is 500. For product descriptions, you should shoot for 350-400 words.  

Social Proof 

Testimonials, Reviews, Images of customers, events and the like are incredible ways to utilize social proof to build brand trust.

Navigation

Navigation should be very intuitive for the user. Being able to easily find what they’re looking for is a major bonus for your business and increases the likelihood of a conversion.

Pages

For search engines, the more pages the better. This can usually be achieved through a blog, landing pages, and products. A typical website usually has around 5-7 pages: Home, About, Contact, Blog, Shop, Services, and Portfolio. Of course, these can expand as needed to include anything from FAQs,  to individual pages for each service, to extra pages to expand on information mentioned throughout the site.

Multiple points of contact:

This includes phone, email, and address typically. However, having chat boxes and chat bots are new rising way to allow clients to get in touch with you. You may have noticed on our site that we have a chat box where you can chat live with us anytime. It’s linked to an app on our phones so that we get notified like a text message. This allows us to bring another level of availability to our clients.

Hopefully this simple list can help you really take charge with your website. If you need a professional, we are a Melbourne, Florida web design company servicing nationwide!

The post Web Design Essentials All Business Owners Should Know appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

As we’ve been preaching all year, visual content is going to continue to dominate marketing. Images and Videos get more interactions than text posts on every platform. Two other trends that are dominating the upcoming year are customer experience and personalization. To take advantage of these trends, continue reading below!

Visual Content

As I said above, images and videos get a much higher interaction rate than text posts. To put a number to that: Posts with images produce 180% more engagement. Some other fun facts about visual content:

• People are 85% more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.
• Using colored visuals can increase a person’s desire to read content by 80%.
• 93% of all communication is visual.
• Our brain processes visuals way faster than text. To be exact, 60,000 times faster.

Customer Experience

As business owners, I know we all strive to give every customer the optimal amount of care and consideration. Consumers have increasing power levels when it comes to online presence, their reviews can make or break a company. Some ways to harness this amazing opportunity would be to encourage positive reviews from customers that have had a great time with the company, or to encourage reviews in exchange for discounts or reward points or the like.

From a business stand point, consider ensuring the purchasing process that your customer goes through is convenient, friendly, easy, and efficient. Try personalizing your emails (Mailchimp has a nifty “personalize field” tool to help you do just that!). Other things we’ve touched on in the past are ensuring you have a mobile friendly website, a strong brand image, a well designed website and marketing tools, and ensuring your tech is all up to date.

To expand on personalization, 80% of consumers said they’d prefer to do business with a company that has a personalized experience.

Other customer based things you’ll want to focus on is retaining loyal customers that advocate for your brand. Studies show that it costs nearly FIVE times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an old one. Providing recurring services such as maintenance and retainer packages are just a couple of ways to keep your customers coming back for more.

Email lists are a great way to inform returning customers of deals, items, and specials! Try getting your customers to sign up for email list in exchange for discounts, birthday gifts, or another freebie.

Reviews are a great way for your customers to advocate that your business is the best.

Position Zero and Featured Snippets

SEO is such an important part of marketing these days, and 2020 will be no different. However, there were amazing new upgrades to search engines this past year. Google introduced snippets at the top of the search results that shows a relevant portion of a page that answers the question that was searched. This has been dubbed “Position Zero” by marketers. This coveted postion is usually the only information a searcher will see. 60% of results on Google now feature position zero snippets.

Getting this highly sought after position though is harder than getting position one, as the SEO techniques are different. You’ll want to focus on answering questions completely and thoroughly while being as concise as possible. This means you should be focusing on quality content this year more than ever.

So with these new 2020 marketing trends, are you ready to start your marketing campaign in 2020? Check out our previous post with a marketing checklist or reach out to us for more help! Like, comment, and share this post!

The post Marketing Trends 2020 – What You Need To Know appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

1. Buy A Domain
2. Logo
3. Website
4. Audience Profile
5. Marketing Strategy
6. Content Creation
7. Tracking Efforts

Buy A Domain

A domain is the address that a client would type in to find your business’ website and more information about you.

Your domain should be connected to the actual name of your business, as in your domain should say your company name. We suggest using Google Domains in order to purchase your domain. This way as you navigate which hosting platform works best for you, you don’t need to pay 12 dollars each time you move.
Buying a domain early on in your business will help you with SEO (search engine optimization) in the long run. Currently, domain age is a determining factor in where you rank in search results!

Logo

You should get a logo, it’s very important to visually recognizing your business. It should be used across ALL promotional materials, both digital and physical.

Website

Websites are the central hubs of online presence. Every avenue of marketing should circle back to your website. You need to pay for hosting for your website. Think of your domain as the address to your store, and the hosting as the building at the address.

• • We have a whole dedicated post to what you need on your website.

Social Media

Almost everyone uses some form of social media. Whether it’s to learn, work, network, or connect with loved ones, they are online. You can use these platforms in order to get your product, services, solutions, and the like in front of potential customers.

• Reserve your desired username on ALL platforms. Even if you’re not planning on using them. The main six platforms are:
  • • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • YouTube
    • Twitter
    • LinkedIn
• Make sure the profiles are all filled out and are linking back to your website.
• Make sure that they are all using your logo.

Audience Profile

Finding your audience profile is important so that you have an idea of how to format your marketing strategy in order for it to be effective.

Find your audience profile by answering these questions:

1. 1. What problem does your service/product solve?
   2. Who has that problem?
   3. Where are they? (Physically and Digitally)
      • This will determine where you put your marketing efforts.
   4. How do I talk to them? (Professionally, Casually)
      • This will determine the language used throughout your marketing efforts.

Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy is loosely defined as all avenues of promoting your business.There are several different marketing strategies: content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, and offline marketing to name a few.

While determining your marketing strategy, you’ll use your audience profile to determine which avenue will be the best to put your effort into.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most widely used strategies, as it can be used on any platform. It’s a long term strategy focused on providing quality, valuable content instead of selling.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to target potential (and existing!) clients that are already interested in your business’s products or services. For this, you should gather emails from your website through a subscription box or from customers when they purchase.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is probably the most well-known digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re doing paid advertising or just simply posting on your social media accounts, it’s social media marketing. When done correctly, this is a powerful strategy that can really make you money.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is one of the most profitable options, if done correctly. SEM includes both paid advertising on search engines and organic results (search engine optimization). We have dedicated blog posts about these as well!

Pay Per Click

Pay per click is another well known digital marketing strategy. This is the most important to get right, as you don’t want to be wasting money on campaigns. To learn more about Google Ads and making it profitable click here!

Content Creation

This is probably the most time consuming part of a marketing strategy. All of your research on keyword and topics, as well as actual copy and graphic creation are part of this step.  You should determine how often you want to post and the type of content you want to post (video, image, text). Want to learn more about content creation?

Tracking Efforts

When it comes to tracking the effects of your marketing strategy, it’s important to know what and where to track it. By default, you should see an increase in overall website visitors of course. An increase in sales is also likely.

Some more nuanced things you should be tracking include:

• Keywords
  • keeping track of what keywords have the best conversion rate,
  • keeping track of what people are searching to find you,
  • optimizing regularly to ensure poor words are removed and replaced with better words.
• Engagement
  • Engagements are the most important metric to check, most people forget about these as they are most focused on vanity metrics. While it’s important to put effort into vanity metrics like followers and page likes, engagements are used in social media algorithms in order to show posts in home feeds. Facebook in particular puts a large emphasis on posts with high numbers of interactions.

You can use analytics software to track these metrics. For websites, Google Analytics will be the best tool. You should pay attention Insights, Demographics, and User Behavior. As for social media, each platform has their own analytics built in for you to track your metrics on their platform.

We will be posting a more in depth post about tracking marketing strategies in the future so be sure to subscribe!

Optimizing Strategy

Optimizing your strategy is the final step in your online presence. You’ll continuously optimize as you gather more data about your customers and visitors by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

So there you go, a step by step guide on getting online. Stay up to date with our latest tips and tricks by subscribing to our weekly newsletter!

The post Get Your Business Seen: Online Presence Guide appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.

There are several questions you need to ask yourself before you start on a Holiday Marketing Campaign.

1. Who is your target audience?
   • Yes, yes, we’ve all heard this before. Whether you refer to it as “Client Profile”, “Customer Profile”, or “Audience Demographics”, it really means the same thing. Do you know who you are selling to? You’ll want to nail this down before moving on in your marketing campaign.
2. What problem does your product/service solve?
   • This should be easy, why should they buy from you this season?
3. Where is my target audience?
   • A well rounded marketing campaign is important, but you don’t want to put effort into where people aren’t going to be buying.

So now, we’ll cover our different methods for marketing before and during the holiday rush.

Holiday Marketing Campaign Checklist

• Social Media Campaign
• Pay Per Click Campaign
• Email Campaign
• Content Marketing Campaign
• Website and SEO Campaign

Social Media

Social media is an amazing tool for your marketing campaign year round, but maybe even more so during the holidays. This is where you’ll showcase majority of your products, testimonials, and the like. Consider posting more frequently during the holiday season, and really theme your posts to the season as well.

Some ideas for your social media campaign for holiday marketing are:

• Posting gift ideas
• Sharing favorite traditions
• Sharing testimonials/reviews
• Giveaways

Some other tips include:

• Put emphasis on graphics (these garner more interactions that plain text)
• Remember hashtags!
• Schedule your posts in advance.

Pay Per Click Advertising

If you’re looking to target people more directly, consider Pay Per Click Advertising for your Holiday Marketing campaign. You can make a highly targeted ad appear in front of your consumer and (if done right) get a sale from it. There are several options here:

• Google Ads
• Bing Advertising
• Etsy
• Amazon
• Social Media like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

If done with a strategy in mind, PPC ads is a great way to get new business during the holidays. It’s best to start these campaigns a couple of months in advance in order to fine tune things such as keywords and ad copy (the words). During the season, it’s important to mention holiday sales and categories like gift cards, gifts for her, gifts for them, gifts for him, etc.  Now it is important to note that “boosting” posts on social media is different than pay per click ads. While each has their own benefits, pay per click may be more profitable in terms of conversions. I’d only boost posts like giveaways and special deals. We recently wrote a post you might be interested in: Google Ads & How To Make Them Profitable

Email Marketing

Email marketing is great, if you’ve already built a list. (And it is never too late to start!) If you have already gathered followers, consider sending email blasts that are geared to holidays. Big companies like All Recipes and Betty Crocker send out emails about recipes to use at holiday get togethers. This a great way to put your deals in front of people who already want it. Some great tips for email marketing:

• Have a pretty template
  • When using a company like MailChimp you can design gorgeous emails that include images, structure, and more. Be sure to utilize these to increase conversions from your email marketing list.
• Link to your site
  • Link to blog posts, products, and more in your email to promote traffic to your site
• Personalize it.
  • Use the functions to personalize the emails. This will often include things like “Hello [subscriber]” which would display: “Hello Emily” in my email, or “Hello Ryder” in Ryder’s. This of course depends on the name entered when registering.

Content Marketing + SEO

Content Marketing is powerful, it’s the juice that gives your search engine ranking a boost. Blogging, web copy, product descriptions, gallery descriptions, and the like are all ways to use content for your holiday marketing. The most common is to produce quality blog posts consistently and with intention (check out our content creation post here). You’ll find doing keyword research is a wonderful way to blog with intention. To do this, you can simply google your industry and “holiday” and scroll to the very bottom of the search results. You’ll see “Related Searches” at the bottom with variations of most popular search terms. You can use these to target your blog post to those searches. There’s a more advanced tool called Google’s Keyword Planner where you can track traffic and search popularity for keywords and compare them. There are some major points to keep in mind when doing content marketing:

• Use keywords in the following places:
  • Title
  • Meta Description
  • Headings (You’ll see that I used “Holiday Marketing” in one of my headings, and in my title).
  • Image alt tags
• Use images (strive for one image every 150 or so words)
• Consistency is key; if you blog once a week, keep it at least once a week on the same day of the week.

SEO is search engine optimization and there is so much you can do to boost your rankings in search engines. We have some dedicated posts for you to read:

• Evergreen SEO 
• SEO: A Guide

Website

There are many things you can do on your website to market for the holiday rush. Making sure your website is built properly, functioning correctly, and is visually appealing is very important. Other things like using banners that mention the holidays, creating a specific category of products for the season on your e-commerce site (Amazon does “Cyber Monday Deals” for example), and blogging are all wonderful ways to get your website ready. There are other items as well such as making sure your site is secure (it has that lock in the address bar). This is definitely important if you take payments on your website. You’ll also want to make sure you don’t have any broken links on your site. Broken links are links to pages that don’t exist. They can be caused by typos in the link address or because a page was renamed. It’s important to check for your most important pages to be working.

So there’s your key to making your holiday marketing campaign shine this holiday season. Like what you read? Be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more tips and tricks. Don’t forget to like and follow us on our social media!

The post Holiday Marketing: Is Your Online Presence Ready for the Holiday Rush? appeared first on Blue Shift Web Services Blog.