Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Best SEO Tools to Boost Your Business

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

We all are aware that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of any business’s digital marketing strategy. It involves optimizing your website and its content to rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords and phrases. You can drive more traffic to your website, increase brand awareness and generate more leads for your business. 

But, SEO can be a complex and time-consuming process, especially if you’re doing it manually. However, there are plenty of SEO tools available that can help streamline the process and make it more smooth and efficient. 

Let us guide you through some tools that will make SEO easier for you and help you generate leads through digital marketing. 

Learn about the best SEO tools that will help you boost your business

Best SEO Tools to Help You Generate Leads for Your Business 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers a wide range of features to help you improve your website’s ranking. It has a powerful backlink analysis tool that allows you to see who is linking to your website, what anchor text they’re using, and the quality of those links. It also provides keyword research tools, site auditing features, and competitor analysis tools. With Ahrefs, you can track your search engine rankings and monitor your website’s health to ensure it’s performing at its best.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another popular SEO tool that offers a wide range of features to help you improve your website’s ranking. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, site auditing, and more. One of the unique features of SEMrush is its ability to track your website’s position in local search results, which is especially useful for businesses that serve a specific geographic region.

Moz

Moz is a well-known SEO tool that offers a range of features to help you improve your website’s ranking. It provides a site auditing tool that can identify technical issues on your website that may be impacting your search engine ranking. It also offers a keyword research tool, competitor analysis tools, and a link-building tool that can help you earn high-quality backlinks to your website.

Learn about the best SEO tools that will help you boost your business

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides valuable insights into your website’s performance. It can help you track the number of visitors to your website, where they’re coming from, and how they’re interacting with your website. This data can help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your website for better performance. For example, if you notice that a high percentage of your visitors are leaving your website after visiting only one page, you may need to improve your website’s user experience to encourage visitors to stay longer.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another free tool from Google that provides insights into your website’s performance. It can help you identify technical issues on your website, such as broken links or crawl errors, that may be impacting your search engine ranking. It also provides information on your website’s search engine visibility, including the keywords and phrases that are driving traffic to your website.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that can help you optimize your website’s content for search engines. It provides a range of features, including a content analysis tool that can help you ensure your content is optimized for your target keywords. It also provides a meta tag generator that can help you create optimized title tags and meta descriptions for your website’s pages.

Learn about the best SEO tools that will help you boost your business

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a website crawling tool that can help you identify technical issues on your website that may be impacting your search engine ranking. It can crawl your entire website and identify issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags. It also provides data on your website’s structure, including its URL structure and internal linking.

SERPWatcher

SERPWatcher is a keyword-tracking tool that can help you track your website’s search engine ranking for specific keywords and phrases. 

SEO tools reduce your efforts to individually do your keyword research and data analysis. They help you plan and improvise your strategies to grow your business. They give you timely reports on the performance of your website that help you analyse your work progress.

We at Windchimes Communications, promise services par excellence. We are a digital experiential agency committed to keeping you updated with the latest trends in digital trends. We believe in finding a simpler way of doing things. 

Television Commercials or Ads on YouTube-What do you choose?

Tuesday, August 4th, 2015

Are brands relying more on YouTube for their advertisements than stereotyped television commercials for their branding?

clip_image002[6]When was the last time you watched a television commercial without cursing the show you are watching for making you go through it? Cannot recall? We guessed so. Now, let’s take YouTube. For short videos on YouTube, it is easier to anticipate when exactly an ad is getting over and whether or not it would pop up again. Things like this influence people’s choice of the platform they want to watch your ads at. The platform of broadcasting your video advertisements is important, but a perfect combination of timing and content is the key here.

Sometimes, the ads are better watched on YouTube first when multiple viewers have already watched it, liked it and shared it. You may even watch an advertisement intentionally, thinking it’s an interesting short video. Deepika Padukone’s Mother’s Day special video for Tanishq was a hit on YouTube before it was telecasted on television. Alia-Siddharth’s Coke advertisement gained enough loyal viewers through YouTube before the ad hit the television.

Can you recall Google’s ‘Help your mother get online’ advertisement that got viral on social media? Given that people have mastered in skipping channels to avoid the television commercials, sharing and circulation of advertisements across social media platforms by them is a revolution in itself.

Blog Image (in the content) (1)It all comes down to the timing and content of the advertisements. Once you have uploaded your advertisement on YouTube, you can sit back and relax to see it getting circulated. It’s all about building a beautiful and strong story, and giving people sufficient time, not too much, not too less, to watch and appreciate it. When you force your advertisements on the viewers, you force them to repel it. Online shopping websites, which bank a lot on social media, are also focusing on online ads. The ad titled as ‘The Visit’, by Myntra gained more than 2 Lakh hits within 10 days.

The media industry is now shifting from the television commercials to online advertisements. The platform is interactive and viewers can have fun with various ad formats. It also gives them the liberty to share their thoughts about the videos. The cost is also quite less as compared to television commercials, as Google Adwords relies on Pay Per Click and Pay per View themes. Technology is taking over the traditional media and hence, video ads have an average click-through rate (CTR) of 1.84%, the highest click-through rate of all digital ad formats.

The ‘Skip Ad’ option could be a minor hiccup in this, but the overall demand for online video is too high, and it has increased the number of video advertisements that are being uploaded on YouTube.

Who’s Your Next Best Hire?

Monday, February 9th, 2015

image Life is about changes, challenges and victories. To sum it up it’s a roller-coaster ride with ups & downs each day. We all have infinite potential within ourselves. All we lack is the ability to tap that reservoir of opportunities that exist within our life. Hence, here we have a beautiful piece of article written by our HR, Vasudha Misra Agnihotri.

Let’s see what she has to share!

 

As most people say, Motherhood is a challenging and enriching experience and so rightly it happened with me.

Each day starts off with a new adventure and ends with new experience. A lot of new moms often end up giving up their career because they often find it difficult to balance out their home and work life.

It’s time that we break the myth that only a dedicated mother can be the best mother. Today lakhs of young mothers are driving the change by starting their career in social and digital media agencies.

Our lives are constantly revolving around social media platforms so be it 12 years or 70 years, we see each one of us plugged on to our smartphones either chatting or visiting profiles of our long lost friends.

Such interesting and vibrant is this field with budding talents and creativity. So where’s the space for new moms? Well, the new mom is the new set of target employee that brings a new flavor to this field.

The pros of working with a social/digital media agency like Windchimes Communications is that it gives you flexibility and opportunity to work things around as per your schedule and availability and that’s one of the reason why it is becoming a popular career choice amongst the new mothers.

The competency and strength that a new mom will bring on board is her ability to multi-task, adaptability, ready to re-learn and handle difficult pressures and deadlines. Don’t we think it’s the perfect combination of ‘chai with bun maska’ to have on-board & handle the bunch of new talent?

She has seen it all and they are ready to take it all!! The new talent is full of energy and she knows how to channel their energy. While she will have her own set of challenges but she is now bestowed with best of energies & power to tackle any and every obstacle that comes her way.

In my opinion, the best target hire for mid to senior level hiring should be a new mom who is willing & seeking for that growth and wants to bring the change – not only for herself but for the organization she would be a part of!

For more details follow – www.windchimes.co.in to check how they nurture their best talent.

The Myths and Realities of Experiential Marketing

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014

Blog ImageThere’s no escaping it. ‘Experiential marketing’ has lately emerged as one of the new buzzwords in business, but one needs to analyze how it can be used for their brands? Seeing the brands and the rise of experiential marketing, it is very important for brands nowadays to cut through the noise when consumers are being bombarded with messages and information through a multitude of media channels. With that in mind, one has to ensure and start thinking about how they can get people to experience and talk about their offerings. One has to offer experiences that lead them to communicate; share and advocate your brand to others, who in turn can get interested in your brand.

The consumers of today are more inquisitive and interested. They know what’s happening around them. Experiential marketing by brands, here, can play a great role in engaging with the consumers. Hence, it is growing at a great pace and its significance & benefits are not unknown. While in the process to bring brands to life through experiential marketing, brand managers need to be clear about a few myths enveloping this communication channel!

Here are a few ‘Myths’ which in the process of moving ahead we tend to overlook:

Myth: Experiential is just an event

Experiential is all about creating brand experiences that are not only positive, but are based on high-quality marketing techniques, consumer behaviour and analysis. Though live events get people talking, it is more than just an event. It is more about the specific market that one is targeting. Hence, the essence of experiential is based on the experience that brands create for their specific target audience.

Myth: It’s expensive

Experiential marketing increases overall brand awareness and purchases. And a lot of people think that for an experiential marketing to be effective, it has to be costly. But, this is not the case as one needs to look at the return on investment to know its complete value. One needs to check out:

Increase in the overall sales
Number of attendees of the event or experience
Level of engagement achieved with the target market
Number of clicks and likes achieved. Basically, the overall digital traffic
Coverage of the event or experience (online, offline, TV and print)

Myth: It is only one channel of communication

Experiential marketing is all about creating a bond between the user and the brand by getting them engrossed in a fun & memorable experience. But the communication should not just be this, brand managers and experiential marketers need to come up with new ways to communicate with the consumers. Brands thus, need to create a two-way dialog with consumers to help them feel heard and authenticated. There should be enough flexibility added to your experiential events by combining it with digital, PR and other communication platforms.

Myth: It’s a trend

No, not at all! Experiential marketing is m\not a trend. One cannot avoid the way social media has evolved and how consumers have evolved with it too. Also, nowadays how consumers share their experiences across social networks cannot be ignored. Hence, brands have taken a step to capitalize on this by making experiential marketing an essential part of their brand strategy & mix. In the end, it completely depends on the brand and what message it wants to give out and how!

Myth: They say, anyone can be an experiential marketer

This is not the case because experiential efforts can fail badly if not set in motion with proper planning and at the right time. As known, there are various channels of communication that are used to communicate to consumers, so deciding on which channels to be used very much depends on the industry it is being used for and the target audience. Planning this properly comes from the one who is an expert in the use of experiential marketing. So, anyone can be an experiential marketer is a myth!

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141113013258-11474854-top-5-experiential-myths-bustedimage

Finally, when you design an experiential marketing program for your consumers, make sure it is well integrated with other communication channels, encourages and enhances consumer engagement. Ensure realistic parameters are set that protect brand’s identity across and take care to keep in mind the myths attached with experiential marketing for complete success and long term benefits. Lastly, don’t forget to ‘Have Fun’! Do share your thought with us in the comments below.

Supercharge Your Brands With Videos

Friday, October 17th, 2014

imageWe have landed into the generation where everything is transforming into digital; even the experiences! And in this experiential era, videos can do miracles for your inbound marketing. Videos, particularly YouTube provides referral traffic in terms of user engagement, retention and referrals. Videos can be tremendously beneficial for your inbound marketing attempts. In this time of digitalization and experiences, videos certainly dominate the marketing strategies. What you need to know are the steps towards charging all your marketing efforts with videos and connect with your consumers by appealing to their interests.

Videos nowadays are the most powerful tools for any brand. They are, sort of considered to bring along superpowers. Well, let’s check out why so!

There are millions of users who watch online videos everyday. According to a study, image

  • – 45% of internet users view atleast one online video a month
  • – 90% of online shoppers state that videos on a retailer’s website influence better and quick purchasing decisions
  • – 75% of executives view work related videos atleast once a week
  • – 59% of senior executives prefer to watch a video than read text
  • – Integrating a video in an e-mail can increase the click through rates as well

Now, the question is what makes the videos so powerful? What are the three most important traits of videos?

Well, Videos are said to improve:

  • imageVisitor experience – an average user will prefer to spend more time on a web page with a video compared to the one without it
  • Brand perception – Through body language, expressions, eye contact, voice, tone and appearance more information can be expressed through a video
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  • Search Engine Optimization – Videos are more likely to receive an organic first page ranking than normal text pages

The next question is; how popular are videos?

YouTube, the most popular video sharing and viewing platform reaches more people than the regular television networks. Every minute, millions of videos are uploaded.

With million videos being uploaded everyday, Instagram is next. The engagement level of Instagram videos is also on the rise and surprisingly, it is more viewed than Instagram photos.

Vine is next in the queue with millions of videos being uploaded everyday. Also, it is estimated that every second atleast five Vine videos are tweeted by people.

It is believed that by the year 2017, two-thirds of the World’s mobile data traffic will be video.

Now, you must be wondering how to take that first step towards creating video. Here you go:image

Firstly, define your audience & goal, which means define your message and the target audience it should reach

  • Repurpose a previously successful topic and explain it in a completely new way
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  • Brand your video with your logo and branding
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  • Keep it short; keep it simple & sweet, because most users click away from a video in the first few seconds, if the video is not engaging. Therefore, the optimal length for a video is considered to be 60-90 seconds
  •  
  • Content is key because any video which is just about flash and no message or substance is of no use
  •  
  • Title tips, there has to be something written that makes people watch the videos. proper keywords need to be integrated in the video title to optimize it for search engines.
  •  
  • Optimize your video for search engines. The video has to be uploaded to right platforms, with right keywords and URLs.
  •  
  • Go beyond YouTube. Yes, there’s more to explore, such as Instagram, Facebook, website, blog etc.

Encourage sharing and including an html embed code as embedded video views will be added to your ‘views’ tally on YouTube which is an important metric in Google’s search algorithm.
 Source: www.bixamedia.com

So, are you set to integrate videos to your marketing strategy? if yes, then do ensure you make it brief, branded, relevant, targeted and also pay attention on carefully curate the meta data. What are your thoughts on the importance of videos? Do share your thoughts in the comments below.

Mobile Marketing: The Next Big Thing to Capitalize On!

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014

imageAs the days are passing by, more and more innovations are happening. And these innovations bring along, an array of opportunities for all the mediums that brands can integrate into their marketing strategy. Among these, one of the most evolving mediums now is ‘Mobile’. Most of you would agree on this as Mobile advertising now, is not only considered as the second screen by most brand evangelists, but is also being looked upon for capitalization.

As mentioned earlier, mobile is one of the fastest growing platforms for commerce and keeps the consumers informed at all times, even when they are on the go. It helps consumers to stay in touch with brands and businesses, informed about purchases and also the deals and offers at that time.

Today, everybody has a mobile device, be it a smartphone or a tablet. And undoubtedly the number of mobile device owners is growing year by year making the brand managers, advertisers and marketers re-think their marketing strategy and see how they can capitalize on this.

Having a mobile enabled and ready site really helps in terms of portability and reach. Hence, marketers should capitalize on these changes in the technology and craft their strategies in a more effective way. Mobile Marketing is here to stay and all set to reach its target audience in the most engaging ways.

imageWell, its about time too. Considering the way digital innovations are happening, mobile marketing is soon to catch the pace and will not only be a competitive advantage for brands, but a survival strategy too. What do you think?

Talking about survival, one has to keep in mind the essentials of creativity in mobile marketing. Creativity is indeed the soul of any type of marketing or advertising as it makes a difference to brands in a lot of ways.

Well, creativity is not the only thing required for fitting everything into a mobile screen. The challenge lies in conveying your brand message in a way that only a mobile phone can, leading to an interactive experience and consumer engagement.

Build a responsive site and benefit from a fully reactive website design. With a responsive site one will not have to create two separate sites. Also, the design adjusts itself to the screen various sizes according to the devices. There is no need to re-direct links to let the mobile users view the correct version of the website. Most importantly, the SEO rankings shoot up

Bill Rogers, Ekton CEO, on these innovations happening said at Internet World, this is “the future of web design.”

One should ensure the images should resize automatically else it can ruin the mobile experience for users. Also there should be n compromise in the quality of images used. Websites, campaigns, e-mails etc. shared by brand should be made mobile friendly.

image

Using Geo-location and Targeting can be really helpful in delivering a great service. Doing this can help the brands to prompt the closest location of a store etc. to the user. Latest offers, discount coupons and information about deals sent on a mobile device can lead the consumer towards the brand too.

Another method is to use the phone’s information to personalize the complete experience. But this may seem a little tricky due to privacy issues. However, by using the web cookies you can tailor your site or mobile app to be responsive to what customers are searching for.

Check out this image that clearly displays the effectiveness of mobile marketing based on a few important statistical studies:

image
Source: mobile-marketing-blog.net

The transitions happening in the strategizing by brands are immense. With mobile technology on the rise, disconnect between the brands and consumers is unlikely. Brand managers are gearing up to mobile and bridging the gap between strategy and implementation. Though mobile marketing is comparatively a very new medium, brands that can crack it, stand to gain. Have you ever imagined the profit a brand can gain on reaching out to the target audience through a mobile that he/she carries along all times of the day? One cannot just ignore the real-time connect, context-based advertising and interactions that can be generated from mobile marketing. Do share your thoughts in the comments below!

Branding & Marketing: The Online-Offline Blend!

Tuesday, August 5th, 2014

Blog ImageIn this constantly changing world of marketing, advertising and branding, a very simple Google search has the potential to reveal all trends that the industry can experience in times ahead. Few trends are already in the process of shaping up the route of marketing & branding and few are emerging gradually. The first quarter of this year has already witnessed few of the major developments in the social and digital landscape; one of these innovations being; the fusion of online and offline techniques. The time is here when businesses are striving to create an integrated marketing strategy because of the rising association between the corporeal and virtual worlds.

Digital Marketing is the leading edge, and everybody knows that. Therefore, with digital marketing or simply calling online marketing, it has become very easy for brands, brand managers and marketers to connect with their target audiences.

Now the question is, do you think this is just enough? The answer is, ‘No’!bi

Simply because, by just having an online marketing campaign does not mean one can leave offline marketing aside. What one should not do is, having two stand-alone marketing strategies and actually work towards having both the offline and online strategies work in synchronization.

Moving on, this type of marketing blend requires more than just integrating the marketing techniques. It requires integrating the mindsets of the marketers as this online and offline fusion is just like the two sides of the same coin. Consumers and audiences today are already living in this reality.

just think about it, how we print our movie tickets after booking it online, we research things online and pick it up from the related store, we buy something in the store and get information about it online. Still, marketers are not able to make out much on how and when to integrate both the channels.

If you are still wondering on how to begin with bringing your online and offline strategies together, below are a few things you can start with:

– Using Social Media platforms to spread the word about some brand event offline

– Adding a QR Code to a direct mail will lead to users visiting your website, subscribe to your other channels and interact with your brand on social media channels

– Encouraging offline decisions with SEO can provide valuable information about the target audience. Once the keywords that customers are using are understood, what inspires them to buy the product or brand can be defined and further, offline & online strategies can be planned around that

Integrating Offline and Online Marketing into your branding strategies can very much empower your Business. Let us see how:

imageHaving a great user base on social media channels and a considerable amount of traffic is not enough nowadays. As it has now become important to personalize the social media output unique to the brand. This not only helps in distinguishing the brand in the industry but in also evolving as a thought leader. Therefore, it becomes essential to select social media mediums that offer the best access to the target market, while also inculcating the character emotion into the content as a way of engaging an audience in conversation.

Keeping the brand’s identity alive across all channels is very important. The brand thought needs to be carried across business. So, while integrating the online and offline, one must ensure spreading the brand awareness. One must ensure that a fluid and cohesive brand is established across all outbound materials and publications. A cohesive approach needs to be adopted while marketing any venture.

Marketers and brand managers this year have seen, implemented and come to a conclusion that one of the best ways to market a brand is through an interactive campaign; a campaign that engages consumers through both corporeal and virtual marketing. While technology, social media platforms and mobile media might be used for organizing and facilitating an innovative idea or event, it will also need people to interact with it physically.

Online strategies like: Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Mobile Advertising and Social Media Marketing and Offline strategies like: Corporate Gifts and Promotional Products, Mainstream Media, Business Cards followed by Networking with members of the community are few such techniques to start with and help your brand excel with this fusion!

As they say, with great popularity come great challenges, how do you plan to fuse your next marketing strategies between the offline and online so that the consumer experience is not only good, but an extremely relevant one? How do you think one can leverage their knowledge about each prospect on one channel to turn them into a better customer on the other? Finally, how do you think it can be measured, analyzed and improved? Do share your thoughts with us!