August 9, 2023 by Peter Brittain in Digital Marketing

As with many aspects of the internet and all it involves, web design is a professional skill and an industry constantly evolving. As new technologies become available regarding how internet users access and consume content online and as the visual elements of websites advance, what looked to be a state-of-the-art website a mere 6 months ago, may already begin to look aged.

You can still find websites where the copyright symbol has a year from the noughties next to it, or if you search on the site ‘Wayback Machine’, you will see websites that are the equivalent of recently discovered artifacts and antiques and appear as though they belong in a museum, rather than online.

This all points to the fact that web design never stands still and that every year there are new concepts, web design developments, and technologies that need to be used to create a modern website. You will find many of these new web design techniques trending, whereby more web designers include them in the new websites they are creating and for 2023, here are seven of those current web design trends.

Inclusive Websites

Everywhere you look these days, you will find that inclusivity is becoming an increasingly common term used within multiple industries, and rightly so. Read More

Email Marketing

10 Effective Strategies To Guarantee The Success Of Your Email Marketing

May 3, 2023 by Peter Brittain in Email Marketing

Within digital marketing, some techniques and strategies come and go, often cast aside due to updates Google makes to its algorithm. One such tactic was article marketing, which utilised sites like Ezine Articles. Despite many excellent articles being published, Google decided that links from those articles should effectively be ignored.

However, many digital marketing strategies have been successful for years, and if you ask digital marketing experts, most will tell you they will continue to be so. Some examples include great web design, SEO, content marketing, and the one we are focusing on here: email marketing.

We are not exaggerating when we say businesses worth tens of millions of dollars have been built almost solely as a result of email marketing. One of the appeals of email marketing is that it is something anyone can do in the sense that everyone is capable of writing and sending an email.

However, not everyone knows how to write and send an email that can market a product or service, build trust with subscribers, and ensure that their subscriber list looks forward to the next email.

Further, many business owners do not know how to create an effective email marketing campaign that can guarantee results. Read More

Web Design

Web Design Strategies For Better Website Conversions

April 15, 2023 by Peter Brittain in Web Design

One of the enormous benefits of excellent web design is that it can achieve many things for the business that owns the website being created. What it can achieve will largely depend on the business’s goals and ambitions, which in turn dictates the remit it will have given to its web designers.

However, in most cases, when a business website is being designed, it should at least help to take visitors to the website closer to becoming customers of that business. How subtle or strongly the website does this will depend on the business type and how the business owners want their customers to follow their sales funnel.

That means that the overriding objective of the website’s design can range from turning a visitor into a prospect or lead by encouraging a call to the business or entering an email address in an opt-in form to them selecting a product, taking out their credit card, and making a purchase while they are on the website.

There can be other calls to action on a website; however, regardless of what they are, each is a conversion. In other words, the website has converted the person who landed on the website from a visitor to a paying customer or a least a prospect who has shown that they have an interest in the products and services that the business may offer. Read More

Marketing For Lawyers

How To Run Google Ads For Your Family Law Practice Without Spending A Fortune

April 5, 2023 by Peter Brittain in Marketing For Lawyers

One of the quickest ways you can drive traffic to your family lawyer’s website is with paid advertising, and the most popular of those is Google Ads. Google Ads has been providing businesses with a quick and straightforward way to promote themselves on Google’s search engine and other partner websites for years, and you may recall it being called Google AdWords in the past.

Despite it being a relatively simple process to set up ads, many business owners pass it to a local digital marketing agency to get their ads created and then manage them so that the ads are continuously optimised for the best results possible. Unfortunately, even though there are such agencies to do the work, some businesses remain reluctant to try Google Ads.

For some, their hesitance is not related to setting up ads but their fears about how much running Google Ads will cost them. This is understandable given that paid advertising in all its forms can be costly, and whilst most will generate a handsome return on that investment, there are no guarantees of success.

Daily Budget Limit

Google Ads is the ideal solution for those with a limited budget, whether it is a genuine lack of funds or simply that you do not want to commit too much to an ad campaign until it has been proven to work. Read More

Marketing For Bridal Retailers

How To Ensure Your Bridal Business’s Branding Stands Out Against Your Competition

March 5, 2023 by Peter Brittain in Marketing For Bridal Retailers

In most places, the level of commercial competition within the bridal retail market is considerable. Given that the bridal market in Australia is estimated to be worth upwards of 350 million Australian dollars annually, it is understandable why so many bridal businesses want a share of that considerable financial pie.

To do so, each bridal business must market and promote itself effectively; there is no shortage of ways to do that. However, underpinning any digital marketing campaign, there must be a solid foundation: the company’s branding. Without clear and effective branding, a business has no identity, and if it has no identity, few potential clients are going to consider it as a business that offers the products that they are looking for.

Multiply that problem by the thousands of brides-to-be who enter the bridal market each year in your local target area, and it becomes obvious that poor branding could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The solution is to ensure your branding appeals to consumers and sets you apart and above your local competition. How do you achieve this for your bridal business? Well, there is no one way, but several ways, as you are about to discover. Read More

Analytics

Cracking the Code with Analytics and Data

February 15, 2023 by Peter Brittain in Analytics

Hey there! So, you’ve landed at Slinky Digital, and let me tell you – we’re total data nerds here. Why? Because numbers tell a story, and we’re pretty darn good at reading them. From Google’s cool tools to diving deep into why Sally clicked that button on your site, we’re on it. Let’s chat about some of our favourite ways to do just that.

Google Analytics – It’s Like a Magic Mirror for Your Website

Ever wondered what folks are up to when they’re browsing your site? Google Analytics is kinda like having X-ray specs. It shows us what’s hot (and not) on your site. We handle all the setup jazz and make sure everything’s ticking just right.

We’ll serve you the juicy details – who’s visiting, their favourite spots on your site, and even how long they stick around. The real magic? Taking those numbers and sprinkling a bit of our SEO pixie dust to make them work even harder for you.

Taking a Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes

Picture this: Tom’s first click on your ad, then what? Mapping out that adventure, from “hey, cool site” to “take my money!” is our jam. By stepping into their shoes, we see the good, the bad, and the “oops, we can do better” moments. Read More

SEO

Is AI Content Capable Of Improving SEO?

December 15, 2022 by Peter Brittain in SEO

One of the newer concepts you may have recently seen regarding SEO for your business’s website is AI content. AI, which stands for artificial intelligence, is something that is becoming more prevalent in lots of areas whether it is business related or not. A prime example of AI is a voice-activated device such as Amazon’s Alexa which will respond to voice commands using AI technology.

If you want an AI example in the business world, there are chatbots that reply to chat messages from humans based on what has been entered. Admittedly, they can be frustrating, but when you consider that you can go through an entire chat conversation as though you were chatting to a human customer service rep, but are chatting with AI intelligence, it does seem remarkable.

As for AI content, let us examine what it is. Quite simply it is content that is written, not by a human, but by technology that has been programmed with vocabulary, grammar principles, and syntax rules, and when given a subject it will create content on that subject. Some of the most advanced AI creators can create content that some struggle to distinguish from content written by a human.

However, most writing produced by AI technology will still need to be checked by a human and in most cases edited so that when read it makes perfect sense. Read More

Digital Marketing

How Businesses Connect With Generation Z Via Digital Marketing

October 27, 2022 by Peter Brittain in Digital Marketing

One of the key principles of digital marketing, and indeed any kind of marketing, is that, for a campaign to have any chance of success you must know the audience that you are targeting. The greatest ad copy, most exceptional products and services, or lowest discounted prices will be for nothing if the marketing messages are not being seen by those most likely to need or want what is being promoted.

This is why so much time and effort is spent by marketers researching what specific audiences react positively to, especially when it comes to marketing messages. One of the ways this is done is to compartmentalise sections of the population by age. This goes a stage further by giving each of the age groups a title. Here are how those groups are most usually labelled and their respective years of birth.

1928 – 1945: Silent Generation
1946 – 1964: Baby Boomers
1965 – 1980: Generation X
1981 – 1996: Millennials
1997 – 2012: Generation Z
Early 2010s – Early 2020s: Generation Alpha

The group which is currently attracting a lot of attention from businesses of all kinds is Generation Z. These are individuals who were born in the final years of the 20th century and the first decade or so of the 21st century, and there are key reasons why this group is receiving so much focus. Read More

SEO

Common Blog Post SEO Mistakes And Their Remedies

August 7, 2022 by Peter Brittain in SEO

If you use a blog as the main means of creating and publishing content to support your SEO efforts, then you are doing more than many businesses do with their websites. Incredibly, some businesses get a fantastic website design, and then do nothing once it goes live to maintain and improve any rankings it has on Google.

That you have a blog is great, but one question we must ask you is do you feel that your rankings are a fair reflection of the blog posts that you are publishing? If, like many website owners, you are putting a lot of effort into creating content or having created content for you, but not seeing major upward shifts in your rankings, then please read on.

We say read on because the likelihood is that you are inadvertently making mistakes with your blog and its content that are stopping your rankings from improving, and we are going to highlight these possible blog post SEO mistakes to help you avoid them in the future.

Poor Titles

There are two main reasons that those who publish blog posts get their titles wrong. The first is that they do not do any keyword research to determine which keywords they should be including in their titles. Read More

Paid Advertising

3 Reasons Why Your Business Should Use Google Ads

August 2, 2022 by Peter Brittain in Paid Advertising

When it comes to online paid advertising, the clear number one platform in terms of revenue is Google Ads. It generates a comparable amount of revenue to the second, third, and fourth-placed platforms combined. When you consider that these just happen to be Facebook, Alibaba, and Amazon, it is an even more remarkable feat.

The fact that it is the top online advertising platform does not necessarily mean that Google Ads should be chosen just for that reason, although it is certainly a signal that it produces results if businesses invest so much of their ad spend into it. There are more reasons that resonate with what business owners wish to achieve.

Highly Targeted Advertising

With most media advertising, the targeting is very broad. Even having an ad in a niche magazine about pets is going to be shown to pet owners of all kinds, which isn’t a great help if you are trying to sell a dog training course. It is being seen by owners of cats, birds, fish, and reptiles. Even many dog owners aren’t going to be that interested if they’ve already got a well-behaved dog.

Compare that to Google Ads, where you can set up ads for specific search terms like “dog training course” and write the ad copy so it speaks directly to someone who is looking for a course to help them train their dog. Read More