Planning for Peaks: How Can Technology Play a Vital Role?
Retail is always one step ahead and that doesn’t just the physical stores – planning for peaks is at the front of every online retailer’s mind too. Whether that’s strengthening your ad strategies, preparing for product launches or being smart about inventory.
It all comes down to staying productive and preparing for the upcoming busy season. Tech plays a vital role in this, ensuring you can offer the best service for customers – from their first website visit, right down to last mile delivery.
In stores this is obviously key but online it is so much more competitive. The competition online starts with exposure to your business and making sure you are the first they have seen! It is important to make sure you are seen before the rest of your competitiors and expanding your online exposure as much as possible. With shoppers becoming less brand loyal online and opting for retailers that can offer the smoothest service and best delivery options, it’s more important than ever to plan out and anticipate customer journey from the very beginning and getting your products out there.
The beauty of being online is that there are many ways you can market and advertise your product to your audience. Things like Google Ads, Social Media campaigns and Guest posts can all help to gain the all important exposure before the crowds, or clicks rush in.
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Amazon Prime Day
Amazon Prime Day is taking place as we speak, so although you might be prepared in terms of the stock, if you’re a seller in this space, there are still a few marketing tactics you can use to boost sales.
One of the best ways to encourage purchases is to educate your customers and provide tips around shopping for the two-day extravaganza. Many customers are not aware that they can create personalised deal updates on Amazon – they simply go onto the Prime Day 2022 page and create deal updates for the items they want to follow on there.
On top of summer, sales are bound to be better when this annual event rolls around at the same time for sellers. One of the most common complaints from stockists is having to manually look through full lists of orders to determine what’s on back order and what stock availability looks like. Having somewhere to digitally store this information and create a centralised list can really help with prioritising inventory levels. Here’s where tech, once again, can literally save the day!
Christmas in July!
One of the scary thoughts of peak season for many online retailers is the reminder that Christmas prep needs to start as early as July in order to keep up with an influx of sales. This is almost always a less daunting thought when there is a streamlined fulfilment process in place.
Many retailers opt for an Order Management System , allowing for the continuous tracking and active monitoring of purchases and inventory levels. This ensures the fulfilment process runs smoothly and in turn, so does the customer journey. Not only does this allow you to process orders faster during the busiest periods, but it also removes the risk of the sometimes costly human admin errors that can come naturally when there’s high demand.
Opening up conversations around Christmas can also be helpful, especially if you have larger recurring customers and contracts. Discussing the peak season allows you to plot and plan, formulating your distribution strategy ahead of schedule.
This, along with having the right tech in place for when one of the busiest periods of the year hits, allows you to streamline orders and reduce errors. Most importantly, tech enables you to maximise the opportunity that surrounds this peak period, so you don’t end up with dead stock or the inability to fulfil orders.
Summer sales strategy
Summer is in full swing, and things are already hotting up for many online retailers. Consider packaging up products with summer in mind when thinking about your strategy plan. Certain products such as sunglasses, fans and sportswear, naturally seem more appealing in the hotter months. Put these particular items at the front and centre of your marketing efforts and across your website. It can help to list items under certain themes such as summer, much like Amazon does when it comes to peak periods.
Thinking about your customer journey is also key throughout the summer months. Shopping experiences should be hassle-free and so should getting in touch with retailers. Research suggests that 40% of survey respondents said that they are happy to be contacted by chatbots when seeking help online. Deploying a chatbot strategy could be key to maximising your time when it comes to responding to common questions, where customers are also looking for efficiency so they can enjoy the great outdoors!
Following this, it’s the picking, packing and shipping processes involved in summer fulfilment that should be handled with care. Technologies available such as order management software, ensures users are alerted in real-time when a new order comes in and, information will automatically be sent to warehouse operatives – allowing them to pick and pack the order as quickly and as accurately as possible.
Black Friday
Black Friday, also known as Cyber Week, is one of the most anticipated sales periods for online retailers. Having your ecommerce store set up for an influx of sales this November should be a top priority that you’re already starting to think about.
One of the things that is helpful to do early on, is getting as many customer reviews and testimonials on site by the time this busy period rolls around. Purchase decisions are often made by reading through other user experiences. Customers have lots of sites to choose from when it comes to Black Friday sales and this is a great way to educate them and support them with purchase decisions.
Another top tip is to always have a range of payment methods available on site, so that you can reach a wider range of people when it comes to potential sales. You should also have strong delivery options and an easy returns policy, so that customers can purchase with ease.
Implementing a multi-courier strategy, rather than working with a sole courier will allow eCommerce businesses to offer more flexibility and options. Using more than one dedicated courier will also help to keep costs down.
If you opt to implement an order management system with pre-built courier integrations, then working with multiple couriers won’t even add to your admin burden. These pre-built integrations seamlessly connect with all the data within your platform, allowing it to automatically select the best courier for the job, based on rules you define (delivery date, product value, delivery location etc.)
Post-Covid service levels in peak seasons
Covid-19 had big impacts on order management, fulfilment and delivery processes across the world but now customers are no longer accepting Covid-19 as an excuse for late delivery. Poor customer service and a general lack of efficiency in the order process are not so widely tolerated. Post-Covid-19, shoppers are now spending less online but demanding better service when they do. According to a new study, two-thirds said they had noticed an increase in customer service problems at point of purchase and/or delivery since the pandemic began.
Peak sale periods are a real test on how effective a retailer’s order management and warehouse management systems are in meeting the high demands of customers. This is something that is crucial for retailers to get right, with 63% of customers stating poor delivery would stop them returning to a company.
Implementing technology such as a consolidated order management system can help retailers handle an increase in order demand, whether that’s supporting warehouse employees, or customer service teams during seasonal peaks. A sound order management system provides real-time data and displays achievable KPI’s, therefore reducing any errors and miscommunication in times where demand is high and retailers have to act quickly.
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Would you like to write the most engaging and gripping content? As the internet grows, it seems so does the amount of competition. We are all looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the internet and grab the attention of our desired audience. Although it is not the easiest task to achieve great, quality content, it will be the best way to grab the right attention! With the growth of the internet and accessible online sources, this can be used to our advantage and help find ways to use and implement features into own our content. Quality is not about how many posts are shared, but the characteristics and style of your content.
In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, content remains king, but how we approach content creation and distribution continues to change. One of the most effective strategies for brands today is combining the power of guest posting services with content diversification. This approach not only helps in building authority but also ensures your brand message reaches a wider audience across different content formats.
Guest Posting: A Proven Strategy for Authority and Reach
Guest posting is one of the most reliable methods for building authority in your niche and increasing organic traffic. When you publish high-quality content on established websites, you gain exposure to an audience already interested in your topic. Moreover, this kind of collaboration leads to valuable backlinks, enhancing your website's domain authority and improving its ranking in search engines like Google.
Platforms like AI Guest Posts offer a streamlined way to find opportunities for guest blogging on relevant, high-authority sites. Leveraging such services helps save time and ensures that your guest posts are placed on websites that align well with your target audience and industry.
For an impactful guest posting campaign, it's important to go beyond traditional blogs and text-based content. This is where content diversification comes into play.
Content Diversification: Why It’s Essential for Guest Posting Success
In 2024, audiences expect more than just well-written articles. Content diversification means offering information in a variety of formats—such as infographics, videos, podcasts, interactive quizzes, and more. By diversifying your content, you engage a broader audience and cater to different preferences, which ultimately helps boost the effectiveness of your guest posting services.
1. Reaching a Wider Audience
Different people prefer different types of content. While some prefer reading long-form blog posts, others are more inclined to watch a quick video or listen to a podcast during their commute. By diversifying your guest post contributions beyond articles—such as embedding explainer videos or podcast snippets—you attract a more varied audience.
For instance, visual content such as infographics is highly shareable and can make complex information more digestible. Sites like Canva provide tools to create eye-catching infographics that can be embedded within guest posts, adding more value for readers.
2. Improving Engagement and SEO Performance
Diversified content tends to perform better in terms of SEO. Google favours websites that offer a rich variety of content types, indicating an effort to provide a holistic and engaging user experience. Including videos and audio clips in your guest posts can help you rank for video searches, drive more engagement, and reduce bounce rates. Studies show that pages with videos tend to have a higher average time-on-page, signalling quality to search engines.
3. Enhancing Social Shares
Diversified guest posts are also more likely to be shared on social media. Visual content and short video clips are inherently more shareable than long text articles. To encourage social media distribution, it's wise to include interactive elements like quizzes or short polls that encourage readers to share their results. Tools like BuzzSumo can help identify the types of content that perform well on social platforms, informing your diversification strategy.
How to Diversify Your Guest Posts Effectively
If you want your guest posting strategy to succeed in 2024, it's crucial to take an integrated approach. Here are some tips to get started:
1. Incorporate Multimedia Elements
When submitting guest posts, consider including a mix of multimedia elements. Whether it’s a quick infographic or an embedded video, these elements can help make your post stand out. A simple guide to creating these visuals is available on Visme, which offers resources for designing professional-quality graphics without advanced skills.
2. Offer Podcast Collaborations
Instead of only contributing written content, offer to collaborate on a podcast episode for the host website. Platforms like Anchor make it easy to create and share podcasts. Podcasting helps you reach audiences that prefer listening over reading, and it adds a personal touch to your brand voice.
3. Tailor Content for Different Audiences
Adapt your content for the website where you are guest posting. For example, if you’re targeting a site with a younger audience, consider a TikTok-style video or a visually rich infographic. Conversely, for a professional B2B audience, you may want to include detailed graphs and statistical analysis, which you can create using tools like Datawrapper.
4. Why Choose AI Guest Posts for Your Guest Blogging Needs?
As digital marketers, time is always of the essence, and finding the right websites for guest posting can be challenging. AI Guest Posts offers a solution by connecting you with high-authority platforms that align with your brand. They help you navigate the guest posting process, ensuring that your content—whether it's a blog post, infographic, or video—lands in front of the right audience.
By collaborating with a reliable guest posting service, you get access to quality backlinks that boost your SEO and bring more organic traffic to your website. Diversifying your content while guest posting helps you gain more engagement, improve your SEO metrics, and enhance your brand’s overall authority.
Conclusion: Embrace Guest Posting and Diversify Your Content
The combination of guest posting and content diversification is a powerful way to grow your online presence in 2024. Guest posts help establish your authority, while diverse content formats ensure that your brand appeals to a broader audience. Platforms like AI Guest Posts make it easy to find the right guest blogging opportunities, allowing you to focus on what really matters—creating high-quality, diverse content that resonates with your audience.
Whether you're looking to improve your search engine rankings, gain exposure, or reach new audiences, integrating content diversification with guest posting services is the key to standing out in the competitive digital landscape of 2024.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often viewed as a complex and ever-changing field, but its core principles remain constant. If you're looking to increase your website's visibility, generate traffic, and climb the search engine ranks, understanding the foundational elements of SEO is critical. This article will unlock the secrets of SEO, covering essential topics like link building, content marketing, and optimising for search engine rankings.
1. The Foundation of SEO: Why It Matters
At its core, SEO is about making your website more visible to search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. The higher your site ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs), the more likely users are to visit your site. Why does this matter? Studies show that over 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results, making it crucial to rank as high as possible.
2. The Power of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a central part of any successful SEO strategy. Search engines prioritise websites that regularly publish high-quality, relevant content. This not only helps with ranking but also establishes your brand as an authority in your industry.
Focus on High-Quality Content: Google’s algorithms reward websites that produce in-depth, well-researched content. Blogs, case studies, infographics, and videos that provide real value to your audience are more likely to rank well.
Consistency is Key: Regularly updating your website with fresh content signals to search engines that your site is active and valuable.
Use Targeted Keywords: When creating content, make sure to incorporate keywords that your audience is searching for. Tools like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner can help identify relevant keywords with high search volume.
3. Link Building: The Backbone of SEO
Link building is one of the most important ranking factors for search engines. It involves getting other reputable websites to link back to your content, signaling to search engines that your site is authoritative and trustworthy.
Earn Quality Backlinks: Focus on earning backlinks from credible, high-authority sites within your industry. Guest posting on blogs, securing mentions in industry publications, and creating shareable resources are great ways to attract backlinks.
Avoid Low-Quality Links: Links from spammy or irrelevant sites can harm your rankings. Always aim for quality over quantity when building links.
Internal Linking: Don’t overlook the power of internal links. By linking to other relevant pages on your website, you improve your site’s structure, making it easier for both users and search engines to navigate.
4. On-Page SEO: Optimising Each Page
On-page SEO involves optimising individual pages on your site to help search engines understand and rank your content.
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Your title tag is one of the first things search engines and users see. Make sure your primary keyword is included. Meta descriptions, while not a direct ranking factor, improve click-through rates when they are engaging and relevant.
Headers (H1, H2, H3): Break your content into readable sections using headers, which help both users and search engines digest the material.
Image Optimisation: Use descriptive alt text for images and compress them to ensure your page loads quickly, another critical ranking factor.
5. Technical SEO: Enhancing Site Performance
Beyond content and links, technical SEO is crucial for ensuring your site is easy to crawl, secure, and optimised for all devices.
Mobile Optimisation: As more users search on mobile devices, Google now considers mobile-friendliness a key ranking factor. Use responsive design to ensure your site looks great and functions well on mobile.
Site Speed: Slow-loading sites frustrate users and are penalised by search engines. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help you improve load times.
Crawlability and Indexing: Make sure your site is easy for search engines to crawl and index. Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console, and fix any errors that may block search engines from accessing your content.
6. Search Engine Ranks: Climbing the SERPs
The ultimate goal of SEO is to rise to the top of search engine ranks. But getting there takes time, effort, and the right strategy.
Track Your Progress: Use tools like Google Analytics, Moz, or Ahrefs to monitor your search rankings and track organic traffic over time. This will help you identify what’s working and what needs improvement.
Competitor Analysis: Regularly check in on your competitors to see how they’re performing in search results. Understanding their strategies can reveal opportunities for your own SEO improvement.
Continuous Optimisation: SEO isn’t a one-time task—it requires regular adjustments. Keep up with the latest trends and algorithm updates to ensure your site remains optimised for long-term success.
7. The Future of SEO
SEO is always evolving, and staying ahead of the curve is crucial for maintaining your search rankings. With the rise of artificial intelligence, voice search, and new ranking factors like Core Web Vitals, it’s more important than ever to stay informed about SEO developments. Focus on user experience, creating valuable content, and building authoritative links to future-proof your SEO strategy.
Conclusion
SEO doesn’t have to be a mystery. By focusing on key areas like content marketing, link building, and technical SEO, you can unlock the secrets to improving your search engine rankings. SEO is a long-term investment, but with a clear strategy and consistent effort, you’ll start seeing the rewards in higher rankings, increased traffic, and greater visibility for your brand.
Master the essentials of SEO today and watch your website soar to new heights!
Google is known for its constant algorithm updates, with the goal of improving the quality of search results and enhancing the user experience. In 2024, several significant updates have rolled out, impacting how websites are ranked and how marketers approach their SEO strategies. Below, we explore the key changes and what they mean for businesses and digital marketers.
1. Focus on Helpful Content: The "Helpful Content" Update
One of Google's core focuses this year has been on promoting "helpful content". The Helpful Content Update prioritises pages that provide real value to users over those stuffed with keywords or created solely for ranking purposes. Google’s AI now does a better job of determining the true intent behind content, rewarding pages that genuinely address user needs.
How to Adapt:
Audience-Centric Content: Ensure your content addresses user queries comprehensively and prioritises providing answers or solutions rather than just boosting rankings.
Remove Fluff: Thin, repetitive, or overly-optimised content can hurt your rankings. Focus on improving the depth and originality of your articles.
User Satisfaction Signals: Pay attention to user engagement metrics, such as time on page and bounce rate, as these can indicate how "helpful" users find your content.
2. Enhanced E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
Google has added an extra "E" to E-A-T, now called "E-E-A-T"—"Experience." This addition means Google now considers whether content creators have first-hand experience on the topics they discuss. This change is particularly impactful in areas like health, finance, and other “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) niches.
How to Adapt:
Author Expertise: Ensure content is created or reviewed by individuals with direct experience or expertise in the field.
Author Bios and Credibility: Include detailed author bios, qualifications, and links to credible sources that verify the author's expertise.
First-Hand Accounts: Incorporate personal experiences, case studies, and testimonials into your content to demonstrate true experience.
3. Page Experience Update: Mobile-First and Core Web Vitals
Google continues to push the importance of user experience with updates to its Page Experience metrics, especially emphasising mobile usability and Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals include metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), all of which measure the quality of a user’s interaction with your website.
How to Adapt:
Speed Optimisation: Optimise your website's loading speed, with particular focus on mobile devices.
Stability and Responsiveness: Minimise layout shifts that might frustrate users, and ensure that interactive elements are highly responsive.
Mobile-Friendly Design: Test your website across various devices and screen sizes to ensure a seamless mobile experience.
4. AI and Conversational Search: Integration of Generative AI Results
Google has rolled out more integrations of generative AI and conversational search features into their search engine results. Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) aims to provide more interactive, AI-driven results that summarise complex queries in a conversational way. This impacts the traditional search result layout and the visibility of featured snippets.
How to Adapt:
Structured Data Usage: Ensure your website uses structured data to help Google understand your content better and make it more likely to be included in AI-generated responses.
Conversational Content: Incorporate a natural, conversational tone into your content, anticipating longer, more complex queries that users might ask AI.
Focus on Rich Answers: Create content that answers questions in a concise, authoritative manner to increase chances of being included in AI summaries or rich answers.
5. Spam and Link Quality Updates
Recent updates have also focused on cracking down on spammy practices and low-quality link building. Google's SpamBrain AI is better at detecting manipulative link schemes and penalising websites involved in unnatural link practices. It’s clear that Google’s push for higher quality extends to off-page SEO as well.
How to Adapt:
High-Quality Backlinks: Focus on acquiring backlinks from reputable, relevant sources rather than quantity. Check out Ahrefs’ Guide to Quality Backlinks for strategies.
Disavow Low-Quality Links: Regularly audit your backlink profile and disavow any links from spammy or irrelevant sites using the Google Disavow Tool.
Avoid Link Manipulation: Avoid engaging in link exchanges, PBNs, or other tactics that could be flagged as manipulative.
Conclusion: Staying Ahead of Google Updates
Google’s recent updates underscore its commitment to improving user experience, content quality, and combatting spam. SEO professionals and content creators must adapt by prioritising helpful, experience-driven content, optimising user experience metrics, and focusing on high-quality, ethical link-building practices.
Staying informed about these changes and continuously refining your SEO strategy are key to maintaining strong visibility in search results. Remember, Google's updates are ultimately aimed at rewarding websites that provide real value to users—so focus on creating the best possible experience for your audience, and you'll stay on the right side of these changes.
