Our Top Blogs of 2019 & The Top Take Aways
Headless Commerce, Product Photography, and Law Firm Marketing
This year we worked hard to cover the topics that matter most to you. From eCommerce tips to social media optimization, to SEO, we covered a range of topics to help you grow your business. To finish out the year, we wanted to share our top ten blog topics
1. Three Huge Statistics About eCommerce Product Photography & What To Do About Them
We published this late last year and it continued to gain traffic throughout 2019, and with it’s usefulness we wanted to reshare these interesting stats.
The stats are as follows: 75% of Online Shoppers Rely on Product Photos When Deciding on a Potential Purchase, 22% of Returns Occur Because the Product Looks Different in Person, and Good Visual Content is 40% More Likely to Get Shared on Your Social Accounts.
This means, professional photos truly make a big difference and can be a valuable way to build your business. Here’s a few of the reasons why professional product photography makes the difference:
- Professionals use better lighting
- Professionals have the right equipment
- Professionals make sure the photos are consistent and clean
- Professionals are savvy and efficient editors
- Professionals capture multiple views
- Professionals shoot in high-resolutions
- Professionals can accommodate design requests
Get the full scoop here.
2. Do People Really Use Social Sharing Buttons?
The popularity of social media is growing every year, and social sharing is also growing, but in a different way. The earlier versions of sharing buttons caused distrust, as highlighted in the blog: “Early on, social sharing buttons were unpredictable; you might click the ‘Tweet This’ button, only to see that an automatically-generated Tweet with strange-looking HTML markup or cut off text was blasted out to all your followers.”
Sharing is growing as it’s becoming more predictable and sophisticated. Platforms like Medium that allows users to highlight text before tweeting it are growing in popularity, especially since it allows it to be more easily shared.
In 2019 we started seeing social sharing in a new light, through Instagram stories post sharing onto stories, and Facebook stories. We’re excited to see how this continues to play out in 2020 and will keep watching how this grows.
Read more here!
3. 8 Best Practices for Using Video on The Web
Video is continually growing in popularity, especially with long-form videos popping up on Facebook and Instagram. We wrote this blog to include some best practices to consider if you’re looking to take the dive into trying out video on the web.
A few of the main considerations: don’t overdo it, provide a pop-up option, use an optimal format, be mindful of file size, consider external hosting, don’t have automatically playing audio, include text along with the video, and include closed captions.
In summary, we’d say, try out videos, but make sure they’re optional - give people other ways to consume the same content and make sure they’re easy to consume on any format.
Read all the details on the full blog.
4. 8 Ways to Prepare Your eCommerce Store for Summer Slowdown
Every year, there tends to be a slowdown in the summer months - people are not shopping for a holiday, there’s a lot of summer vacations going on, kids are out of school - resulting in a 30% slow down during the summer.
With that in mind, we recommended eight different ways to optimize your eCommerce store to help build business, as well as use the slowdown to prepare for the busier seasons.
1. Offer multiple payment options
2. Turn on abandoned cart emails
3. Add a store locator
4. Update product photos
5. Allow customer product reviews
6. Offer live chat to answer questions
7. Write a blog!
8. Conduct an SEO Audit
Rather than scrambling in Q3 and Q4, we recommend using a summer slowdown (or any slowdown) to take time to prepare and optimize your site.
Learn more here.
5. Why You Should Begin Your Online Marketing Strategy with Personas
In this blog we cover the importance of doing market research to profile your target customers. We shared the stat that 71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas. We covered a few different aspects to cover, including the personas background, demographics, goals, and purchasing habits. We recommend creating 3-5 personas, depending on your market and business structure. When you're able to consider objectively what your target persona is looking for, it can guide your content, design, and calls to action, giving you confidence in your choices.
Read the full list explanation here.
6. Why SEO Is An Unquestionable Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy
In this blog we shared one of our favorite metaphors sharing the importance of SEO with your website:
“The best way I’ve ever heard someone explain SEO is like this - your website is a house you’re selling. It’s beautiful - a craftsman style home with a newly renovated kitchen, beautiful yard, with four bedrooms and two and a half baths. You’ve been trying to sell the house and obviously it’s got some selling points built in, but you’re just not getting through to the right buyer - they’re looking for a smaller ranch style. That’s where a realtor steps in - they guide prospective buyers to your home based off of their specific needs - those looking for 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths, exactly like you’re offering!
In your website’s case - strong SEO serves as that helpful realtor. It guides people to find you based on what their specific needs are. Maybe your buyer is looking for a brewery near Pike Place market. A site with strong SEO that matches this search content will grab the hand of the searcher and show them something like Old Stove Brewing Company because it fits the requirements of being a brewery near Pike Place. When someone’s searching for a home, they often have pretty specific needs - similar to when someone is searching for your business. So rather than just putting your home out there and maybe having lots of people see it, you should use SEO/hire a realtor to get the right people to look at your home.”
Read more on the subject here.
7. 14 Tips to Create a Landing Page that Converts
With Pay-Per-Click ads growing in popularity, landing pages are also growing in popularity as a place to send those ads. But with most relatively new forms of marketing, best practices aren’t always obvious, especially when there isn’t a ton of data to back up these claims. Lucky for you, as a web agency we have the knowledge of web design best practices, combined with experience helping our clients and can share our tips for creating a landing page that converts.
- Make your content relevant
- Segment your audience
- Keep content to a minimum
- Reiterate Calls to Action
- Experiment with A/B testing
- Add testimonials
- Keep SEO in mind
- Conduct quality analysis testing
- Keep branding consistent
- Make sure it’s mobile optimized
- Include contact info
- Optimize your forms
- Keep it simple
- Have a game plan
Check out the full list on the blog.
8. 3 Marketing Pain Points for Law Firms and How to Fix Them
Midsize law firms offer a sweet spot that many clients desire - you have the staff and resources to work on larger cases, while also having a small enough team to have close contact with your clients. That being said, there’s also pain points that come with the size, so we identified the three we see most often and offered solutions.
Problem: Credibility.
Solution: Build credibility through networking, LinkedIn, and a solid web presence. Attending legal events, as well as having a modern website can build your credibility to a new and growing audience that looks to the web for credibility.
Problem: Seasonality
Solution: SEO tactics to build out ongoing marketing and bring in a steady stream of cases. Conducting something like an SEO audit can optimize your site one time, as well as provide keywords for you to use in further content and blogging.
Problem: Lack of Resources
Solution: Make your resources work for you. Rather than try a little bit of a lot of different types of marketing, channel your energy into the best performing marketing area.
Read the blog here.
9. 10 Tips for Restaurant and Food Marketing
We love food and restaurant marketing. It’s aesthetically pleasing, you can get creative with the brand, and there’s a lot of opportunities to do some fun marketing. In this blog we shared 10 ideas and tips for restaurant and food marketers.
- Make sure hours, location, and your menu are online
- Use your delivery service to market yourself with t shirts, car wraps, and packaging.
- Get on social media!
- Use your reviews to market yourself
- Take. Good. Photos.
- Host events
- Use eCommerce if you ship
- Make sure your site is mobile friendly!
- Try a delivery service
- Collect emails (to remarket to) using a raffle
Check out some examples and the full explanation here.
10. What You Should Do If Your eCommerce Store is Still on Magento 1
We wrote this blog in June offering some help and urgency for users still on Magento v 1. With the news that official support for the Magento 1.x versions will stop after 2020, over 55,000 eCommerce stores will have to figure out a game plan.
Magento 2 is addressing many of the issues faced in Magento 1, including:
- Support of Css3, HTML5, and MySQL
- Mobile friendly
- Simplifies checkout from six stages to two
- Supports the latest PHP versions
- Better non-technical UX interface
We urged users to take into account a few important considerations, including the fact that you’ll have to redevelop your site, there’s a new cost for hosting, design changes are required, and third party extensions aren’t guaranteed to work.
With that in mind, we also recommend using this as an opportunity to take a step back, assess your needs, and see what your options are moving forward with all different types of eCommerce platforms. Do you need unlimited product attributes? Then avoid Shopify and check out BigCommerce or Magento. Need something quick, easy and templated to throw a website together? Check out Shopify! Thinking about Headless or a powerful SaaS platform? Then do your research on BigCommerce and their growing capabilities.
Learn more about the switch here.
And that’s a wrap! 2019 was a year full of a lot of new and exciting things in the world of web, eCommerce, development, and digital marketing. At efelle, our team was also thankful to grow our team and build out our service offerings to our clients.
If you have any questions about any of the topics covered here, please feel free to reach out to our team - we’d be happy to help!