Why is it wrong to write product descriptions like that?

First, they don’t give any added value to customers. Prospects don’t want to know every spec of a product and read a description as if it was written by a manufacturer; they want to know what’s in it for them.

Second, they don’t address your customer personality and the tone of voice they’d like to hear from your brand.

And third, such descriptions look and sound the same. They don’t help your ecommerce website stand out from the crowd of competitors.

There’s also another catch:

Even if you write product descriptions with the best ecommerce copywriting practices in mind, you still need to craft a countless number of them. It leads to the problem we all know as content duplication, and that’s what Google algorithms hate so much.

To avoid Google penalties for duplications, don’t plagiarize and rewrite product descriptions from competitors. Don’t use the same expressions over and over again because you think they are “words that sell.” Don’t stuff descriptions with the most obvious keywords in the hope of high rankings. Avoid common grammar mistakes and remember to check every text for plagiarism before publishing.

Long story short, consider the tricks of writing original product descriptions that would please both customers and search engines.

Here they are:

1. Watch Your Language

When you write dozens of descriptions, there’s a temptation to use general terms for every description to complete it faster. All those “world-class,” “top-notch,” “innovative approaches” and “the best solution on the market” with “cutting-edge technology” tell nothing about your product.

Forget about them. Use facts, figures, and numbers wherever possible to increase your credibility.

Also, avoid an adjective overdose. It’s okay to use some to boost customer imagination, but too many adjectives confuse readers and slow them down.

What to do?

Use only one adjective before a noun.

Avoid the most obvious adjectives: chances are, your competitors will use them too. Choose emotional words that make readers feel something. Don’t describe the obvious. Why write what your product looks if you can show it in the picture?

2. Use Citations

First, they don’t count as duplications or plagiarism if you publish them with a proper reference. And second, they can serve as social proof for your consumers to buy from you.

Even if you have the best product in the world, people may not trust you. They need referral recommendations to decide if your product is worth their attention, and that’s where positive reviews or real feedback from real customers can help your product descriptions shine.

Add their feedback to descriptions, structure them as citations with a link to their profiles, and include their photos for credibility.

3. Tell Stories But Be Concise

Know that people often scan content online rather than read it thoroughly, so make sure your product descriptions are short, sweet, and easy to read. For that, combine paragraphs with bullet points and “need to know” aspects. It will give you room for creativity and original text writing, and enable you to convey valuable information to consumers.

To develop more ideas for product descriptions, use storytelling.

Our brain retains 70 percent of information through stories; they give us an emotional response and make us remember. Storytelling in descriptions would help you not only avoid duplications but also make your product stand out from the crowd of competitors.

4. Add Value

People don’t want to know about the description of the product as much as they want to know what’s in it for them. How can they benefit from it? What makes it different from others on the market?

Create value in product descriptions. Focus on your buyer persona, write with words they use, and think of your brand tone of voice: how would you speak to them if selling in a traditional store? Answer the five W’s in your text and show people what’s in your product beyond its specifications.

Writing “for everyone,” you risk duplicating tons of other ecommerce websites and making your descriptions vague. Sell emotions, not products. This will help you avoid plagiarism and differentiate your store in the marketplace.

5. Synonymize and Paraphrase

When you’re short on time and need to write 50-plus descriptions for products of the same category, it becomes challenging to stay creative and write an original text for each. The smart use of synonymization will save you.

Deploy ecommerce SEO practices, not merely replacing words with synonyms or changing the word order in original sentences to keep your content original and fresh.

The same goes for paraphrasing. Use rich vocabulary and expand or shorten phrases wherever appropriate. Think of LSI and long-tail keywords, and forget about marketing buzzwords and vague superlatives.

Summary

Check product descriptions via plagiarism checkers to see if you duplicate other websites by mistake, and revise them accordingly. Write an original text for every product card; treat your consumers like humans, not numbers.

Map your sales process to see what you can optimize on your ecommerce website to engage potential buyers. Consider split testing your product descriptions to understand what formats perform better. Don’t be afraid of A/B testing, but make sure to optimize for positive customer experience.

And sales won’t take long in coming.

Lesley Vos is a regular contributor to publications on business, marketing, and self-growth. More posts from Lesley are available here.

The post Secrets to Avoiding Duplications in Your Product Descriptions appeared first on cleverbridge.

Note that keywords are what visitors use to get to your website, and Google ranks websites for the most relevant ones. It’s therefore vital to use them well for you to be able to drive the kind of traffic you want to your page.

That will only be possible if you do keyword research. While you cannot do it by yourself, there are tools that you could employ for no extra cost. Here are some of the best free keyword research tools.

1. Google Trends

Google is trusted. Therefore, it‘s only logical that this tool will get you what you want. Also, it’s always better to get information and keyword data from the most used search engine. Google Trends, as the name suggests, keeps track of how search trends keep changing. Note that users should not apply the same keywords all year round since search queries and phrases do not remain static. If you want to rank for relevant keywords, Google Trends is helpful tool.

2. Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker is another effective free keyword research tool with one of the most prominent keyword databases.

As searches become more specific, there’s an increasing need to use long-tail keywords. As much as the one-word keywords are still relevant, the long-tails lend themselves to more meaningful search results and can improve your site’s SEO. The tool will also help you with keyword analysis. That is, how much the keyword is being used, the keywords your competitors use and keyword difficulty.

3. Google Keyword Planner

This is another Google creation that you need for keyword research. Just like Rank Tracker, Google Keyword Planner also boasts one of the largest keyword databases. Among the many actionable insights include average monthly searches, keywords your competitors are ranking for, and a series of other metrics. You will also benefit from suggestions which will make keyword creation an easy task.

Being Google’s tool, you are already at an advantage. Google Keyword Planner is also user-friendly, and you will waste no time trying to navigate it.

4. Google Search Console

If you’re not looking to invest a lot in a paid tool, Google Search Console would be another good option. Recommended by countless SEO experts, this tool provides you with a list of keywords that are most searched during a given period. It will also provide you with keyword data on videos, images and content. The best part is that you can sync it with other tools like Google analytics, which enables you to identify richer insights

The interface is user-friendly, and if you’re new to it and you can always get training to help you navigate the features and functionality.
The role that keyword research plays in the success of SEO cannot be ignored. For this reason, you need to do everything possible to see to it that the keywords you use are relevant.

Dancun Kanguri is the content writer at keyword.com.

The post 4 Free Keyword Research Tools to Look for in 2019 appeared first on cleverbridge.

It’s no secret that ecommerce companies looking to thrive in an increasingly competitive market need to target these users by posting a consistent cadence of content promoting their products and services.

But how do companies utilize their accounts in a meaningful way, what type of content should they post, and how should they measure the effectiveness of their strategy?

Here are some tips you can use to ensure you’re not wasting your social media efforts and reaching prospects and customers efficiently.

Understand Your End Goals

With social media marketing, it’s easy to feel like you’re posting content into a black hole with little return on investment.

The truth is, your company’s customer base has specific needs and wants to be marketed to in a specific way. Assuming you know how to measure general success in terms of customer acquisition and retention, work your way backward from your end goals and identify how your efforts on your social media platforms can support them.

For example, if you’re a smaller, growing company trying to carve out a space with general awareness, look at the volume of traffic your social media platforms are bringing to your site and see if you can increase it.

On the other hand, if you’re a more established company with strong brand awareness, look to actual fans/followers and engagement metrics to identify how the public is relating to your social content.

If you’re a more niche market with a smaller customer landing strip, look at which platforms you’re using and the number of posts you’re creating and how that relates to actual conversions.

Ultimately, you want to avoid the generic social media “broadcast system” and be more thoughtful about what you want to achieve, and work from there.

Keep Your Social Voice Informal

More than ever, customers care about not just the value of the product they’re buying, but also the people behind that product. Social media represents a great way to create a more human persona behind simply what your company offers, and engage with your prospect and customer base on a human level.

Post photos of company culture, events and other less product-specific content to show your organization’s personality. This is particularly important in the B2B space where your business is less of a transaction and more of a partnership. Prospects can gauge a sense of the interactions that they’ll share with you over the long haul, particularly with your customer service and client success departments.

You can also ask questions and set up polls for your social media following to identify what they want, what their pain points are, what kind of improvements they’d prefer, and overall engage with them one-on-one.

Create a Value Proposition Specific to Your Social Media Base

If there’s nothing on your social media platforms that your followers can’t get from your website alone, then why would they follow you?

Incentivizing social media relationships with prospects and clients will help not only cultivate new fans and followers, but keep and further engage the ones you have already.

Offering discounts, promotions and other benefits exclusively to your social media following maintains a reason for them to continue following you. Secret discount codes, holiday deals, or special video content not otherwise offered are just a few ways to do this.

Connect with Industry Influencers

We’ve talked a lot about how important it is to not only sell to the market, but educate it with tips, trends and best practices. There’s no better way to cultivate customer trust than by investing just as much in your customers’ success as you do your own.

Use your social media channels to identify and connect with meaningful thought leaders and influencers in your market, and build a relationship through content swapping, shared product reviews, or offering insight into one of their blogs or case studies. You can be sure that prospects who research the market will find these top influencers, and they’ll ultimately find you as well.

Credibility is the hallmark of long-term customer relationships, and your social media channels can be a key outreach strategy to develop just that.

Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

Many unhappy customers may bypass the traditional customer service portal and instead take to Facebook or Twitter to complain. They know the general public will see these complaints and the company will be far more likely to act to prevent the bad press.

As an organization, take this opportunity to respond quickly and thoughtfully to these customer concerns. Offering a quick discount or other incentive will likely satisfy the customer and allow you to maintain their business.

Likewise, positive Facebook and LinkedIn reviews and positive tweets should be retweeted, shared and posted on your website. Customer testimonials are an effective credibility tool for your business and can encourage further customer acquisition.

Video Content is Far More Engaging Than Written Content Alone

As the onslaught of available content increases, our patience as consumers decreases. The more easily and more quickly companies can transmit their message the more likely consumers will engage with it. In short, you want video content and a lot of it.

According to Neil Patel, 80 percent of people prefer watching video rather than reading a blog post, and 82 percent would choose live video over any other type of social post.

Make sure to take full advantage of video product demos, a how-to instructional series, customer testimonials, and messages from the CEO or other leadership members. Easy-to-digest video content can educate the market around your business much more effectively than nearly every other type of content.

Use Paid Social Media Advertising

Prospects will likely find your social channels organically when they’re looking for them. But how about those who don’t even know they need your product and haven’t yet begun the research phase? Here’s where paid social media efforts can create a big win for your business.

Facebook and Twitter – and to a larger extent LinkedIn – offer a paid advertising model in which you can allocate a certain portion of your marketing budget and target social users based upon industry, geo and job title, among other filters. Getting your advertising in the social media feeds of key prospects is an effective way to get them in the awareness stage of your sales funnel, and ultimately close their business.

For more on social media best practices, check out these posts:

• Leverage Social Media as an Effective Branding Tool
• Four Ways to Use Social Media to Create Ecommerce Opportunities

Learn how cleverbridge can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow. We take responsiblity for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post 7 Social Media Tips and Tricks for Ecommerce Companies appeared first on cleverbridge.

As we look back on 2018, let’s explore the top 10 most-read items from our blog, decided by you, the readers.

1. Losing Money With Your Volume Pricing Model?

In the digital goods world, volume pricing is made all the more compelling because the cost of selling one additional unit is very low compared to physical goods. Producing and selling another license key for a piece of software or another virtual gift in an online community results in very little additional cost. Because of this high profit margin, digital goods companies frequently offer their products in volume. Here, we’ve identified three different volume pricing models for digital goods to help you evaluate your current strategy and make sure it is working for you. Read more.

2. The Difficulty of Being a Merchant of Record

Billing your global online customers is complex. To effectively and securely collect payments, you must, among many other things, open up merchant accounts, put payment gateways in place, manage contracts with global payment service providers, comply with PCI DSS, and abide by global taxation requirements. When you handle all these things on your own, you are acting as your own merchant of record (MoR). There are cases where it’s to your advantage to act as your own merchant of record. But there are also cases where accepting the responsibility of being the merchant of record has many disadvantages. Read more.

3. Customer Service KPIs: Reducing Contact Rates

There are two primary concerns with resolving customer inquiries: speed and quality. You can’t waste your customer’s time, and you must solve their problem. These two concerns are commonly at odds with each other, but there are ways to synthesize speedy and high-quality responses into a world class customer experience that also saves your business money. And it all begins with measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). Read more.

4. 7 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Models

Much has been said in recent years of the digital business-to-business model (B2B) versus the digital business-to-consumer model (B2C), in terms of scope, customer acquisition and retention, pricing, product variety, and most importantly, profitability. Many companies choose to focus their full efforts on one model or the other, while others attempt to hedge their bets by supporting a hybrid of both. Here, we’ll dive into some of the main differences between the B2B and B2C ecommerce spaces, and the key concepts necessary to support a thriving digital business, regardless of your end user profile. Read more.

5. Five Features of Effective Ecommerce Sites

To keep potential customers on your ecommerce site, it should include features and functionality that consumers now consider essential. Here are five features every effective ecommerce site should have, along with the reasons why they are so critical to converting online customers. Read more.

6. How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting the SaaS Market

The fervent push from enterprise to software-as-a-service within the last decade has enabled end users to sidestep some of the key hurdles associated with software maintenance and implementation. Chief among them include ease of installation and upgrades, streamlined testing and training, and minimizing an otherwise large upfront cost. As SaaS trends evolve further still, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have staked their claim among the topics dominating the SaaS conversation, as many analysts peg AI as the next big shift in the market. Read more.

7. Subscription Billing Models Defined

As more companies apply subscriptions to their businesses, they explore different ways to bill their subscribers. But which model is really best to use? And what are the pros and cons of the model you choose? In order to understand the complexity of subscription billing, we must first break it down into its parts. Here, we explore the basic combination of factors that define the various subscription billing models. Read more.

8. Vertical SaaS Segment on the Rise

Rapid growth in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry shows no sign of slowing down, with research firm OpenView Labs forecasting a 21.5 percent increase to $71.2 billion by the end of 2018, and the cloud market overall to hit $187.3 billion. The vertical SaaS segment in particular remains a significant driver of that growth, powered by an influx of digital businesses that focus on a specific industry. Unlike their horizontal counterparts – whose software suites are available to a much broader audience to maximize revenue and support scale – vertical SaaS companies maintain a narrower focus. Read more.

9. 7 SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce Companies in 2018

For any business with a digital presence – especially ecommerce companies that market and sell exclusively online – driving organic traffic to your website remains a constant challenge and a more integral part of the customer conversion process than ever before. Developing a product or solution that has value and fulfills a consumer need is obviously a significant part of the success equation. But how do you reach your audience in the first place? Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines will increase organic, relevant traffic, and ultimately broaden the top of your sales funnel – a key step in the evolving and competitive ecommerce market. Read more.

10. Factors Powering the Move Toward a Subscription Model

“By 2020, all new entrants and 80% of historical vendors will offer subscription-based business models, regardless of where the software resides. What began as a trickle a few years ago has become a stampede of vendors wanting to make a move to a subscription business model.” This statistic from research firm Gartner forecasts the subscription business model as not just an option, but a necessity when considering the acquisition and retention of customers, and ultimately the long-haul growth of your business. Read more.

Learn how cleverbridge can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow. We take responsiblity for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post cleverbridge’s Top 10 Most-read Blogs of 2018 appeared first on cleverbridge.

To that end, we’ve seen a significant push from the outbound methodology (reaching out to prospects through traditional efforts), to a more inbound approach (appealing to their needs and pulling them in to your sales funnel).

A vital part of this inbound approach should include a meaningful log of content that not only educates potential prospects around your company and product, but more importantly positions you as the expert in your marketplace.

Here are a few best practices for building an effective content marketing strategy as we move into 2019.

Educate the Market; Don’t Sell to it

Anyone who’s found themselves a target of a marketing campaign (yes, that’s all of us) has seen every item in the marketing mix from countless companies in both the digital and physical spaces. It’s hard for companies to break through the noise and differentiate themselves in a meaningful enough way to thrive – especially when competitors with far more brand awareness have a stranglehold on the market.

Instead of simply promoting your product, develop a cadence of blog posts, white papers, ebooks, infographics and other collateral that address the problems/solutions that your target audience deals with. This is an opportunity to build trust with a prospect and position yourself as not just a seller of a product, but a market thought leader and potential long-term partner.

Measure Your Key Performance Indicators

Just as important as developing quality content is measuring the effectiveness of that content in a meaningful, tangible way. It’s easy to post and deploy a piece of collateral into the market without a quantitative sense of how it’s influencing your prospects to enter and move through your sales funnel.

Putting an analytics criteria in place enables you to glean a baseline performance for your content marketing efforts and ultimately improve upon them month over month based on what you learn.

Depending on your business model and which metric supports lead nurturing, this may mean an increase in overall traffic, unique visitors, time on site, form fills, engagement with your “contact us” page, etc. Tools like Google Analytics are invaluable for this purpose.

The point is, although your content is qualitative, make sure you have a data-based system in place to ensure your efforts are supporting your company’s overall objective.

Repurpose Content in Various Formats

It’s no secret that consumers like to read what they want, when they want and how they want. Whether it’s long-form or short-form content, we consume on our own terms, regardless of where we are in the sales funnel.

When exploring a topic in your marketing strategy, it’s wise to develop content on the same topic across varying formats, creating a central hub in which your readers can learn on their own terms.

Data from a B2B buyers study reveals that 59 percent of millennials prefer videos and infographics before making a purchase, while 78 percent of older consumers prefer longer-form content like white papers.

The idea here is to develop a pyramid of content – where you can tap into a subject over and over again, positioning yourself as an expert on the subject – versus creating a series of disparate pieces that have far less impact on their own.

Personalize and Target Specific Accounts

Whether you’re speaking to a B2C or B2B audience, prospects continue to demand a more consumerized experience dominated by convenience, flexibility and customization. A meaningful way to deliver this experience is through heightened personalization.

A survey conducted by Monetate indicates that 94 percent of participants believe personalization is “critical to current and future success,” and more personalized lead nurturing delivers a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities. This mirrors a Forrester study that finds 92 percent of marketers say personalization has become a more meaningful strategy in their strategy discussions.

The key to personalization is gathering a rich well of data from your prospects. Utilize your marketing automation tool as well as services like Google Analytics to identify web behavior, page visits, asset downloads, etc., to understand the actual needs of your audience.

From there, you can build email campaigns, landing pages, social media outreach and suggest similar content that targets exactly why a prospect is searching for your product, and how your product specifically can fulfill that need.

Develop a Live Video or Podcast Series

Given the sheer volume and immediacy that the internet provides, consumers tend to invest less time and effort in absorbing information. As a marketer, you should consider that your readers (like many of us) have a busy schedule. This tends to lend itself less to engagement with long-form content and more to audio with and video efforts.

A Livestream survey found that 82 percent of consumers prefer hearing a brand’s live video or podcast than reading their social media posts or blog. And Facebook finds that users spend as much as three times more time watching live videos than recorded videos, with 10 times more engagement like comments and other interactions.

Luckily, the time and cost investment in utilizing this format is fairly low, it’s quite versatile and it applies a human personality to your company. Simple, cost-effective streaming services easily enable Q&A sessions with market experts, conversations with key members of your c-suite, product demonstrations as well as live event coverage, to name a few.

Learn how cleverbridge can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow. We take responsiblity for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post 5 Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy for 2019 appeared first on cleverbridge.

Traditional marketing efforts like email campaigns, affiliate marketing and paid social media campaigns remain an effective way to direct prospects to your blog, landing pages, or to sign up for a demo and contact your sales team. But in the world of ecommerce, sometimes that’s not quite enough.

Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines remains a vital way to maximize the volume of relevant traffic visiting your site today, and supporting consistent growth over time.

In this ebook, we explore best practices that you can implement to supercharge your search engine optimization.

Among the topics we cover:

• Understand how Google indexes pages by relevancy and popularity, and how to deploy best practices using a rich keyword strategy so your company appears on page one.
• Explore how you can optimize the title, meta description and H tags of a certain page to ensure your content appears in descending order of importance, so Google crawls it properly.

  

• Credibility is a key metric and should be one of the main focuses of your content. Use backlinks and linkless backlinks to up your website’s legitimacy.
• Learn how mobile, voice and image optimization can broaden your audience base and provide a sense of versatility in terms of how consumers search for and absorb content.

Like what you read? Go to our resources page for more free downloadable content on ecommerce and subscriptions.

The cleverbridge platform can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow globally. We take responsibility for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post Ebook: Learn How SEO Drives Organic Traffic to Your Ecommerce Business appeared first on cleverbridge.

On July 25 this year, we officially launched our performance marketing platform (PMP), powered by Partnerize. Over the past 12-plus months we have been gathering feedback from partners, publishers and clients, and identifying market demands around performance-based marketing. As part of this blog series, we will highlight the key features and benefits our new partnership can provide to software vendors looking to drive customer acquisition, and most importantly how the platform can help automate processes for our publishers.

Our performance marketing manager Nick Oswald kicked off this series on the day of the launch with “Introducing the cleverbridge Performance Marketing Platform.” Here, we’ll explore a feature that allows marketing managers to become proactive when it comes to maximizing the effectiveness of ad spend. Sounds like a dream right?

Each of us uses many different tools for managing performance-based marketing channels, and at the end of the month when we run our reports to provide insight to our C-Suite, we need to compile and pull data from multiple sources to get the full picture. By the time the reports have been created and analyzed, the month is already half over, making it difficult to optimize your campaigns, so that next month you will hit your targets.

Predictive Reporting Using Artificial Intelligence

With our PMP powered by Partnerize, our solution is able to offer predictive analytics, powered by artificial intelligence. With predictive analytics, our clients (advertisers) can understand the future of their sales and how that impacts specific campaigns and offers. This enables them to understand their ROAS (return on ad spend) before the month ends. Every marketer wants the most out of their campaigns and to ensure that their investments are profitable.

Partner Performance Forecaster

Imagine your world if you could see a glimpse into the future of your partner performance forecast. You can make changes as you see a decrease in sales, or if your offer is not driving the volume of sales that you planned. Your focus can be to optimize campaigns and offers as you see a drop in activity before it happens. It also helps you work better with your publishers and partners to maximize effectiveness together.

Not only can you run reports, but also set up alerts to notify you when there is a downturn in activity or unwanted shifts in your data, so that you can respond in real-time.

Being able to react to a downturn or shift in your data that was not planned can save your company money, strengthen the relationship with your partners as you work together on making edits throughout the campaign, and also gives you a head start on your monthly reports and budget planning.

For more information on the Performance Marketing Platform, click here.

Ready to learn more about how cleverbridge can help grow your online revenue? Contact our sales team to start the discussion.

Amy Carabini is the Senior Performance Marketing Manager for cleverbridge.

The post Become Proactive with Your Performance Marketing Reporting appeared first on cleverbridge.

Have you ever had a surprise that you’ve been dying to spring on someone? Or maybe you live a spoiler-free lifestyle and you can’t wait for your friend to get caught up with the latest episode of whatever you binged on last night. Well, that’s how we feel today. For more than a year we’ve been hiding a plot twist: cleverbridge’s affiliate marketers are actually performance marketers and we’ve been doing performance marketing this whole time.

Beginning today, we’ll now refer to our affiliate practices as Performance Marketing. It’s a new moniker, but the strategy hasn’t changed. Our advertisers’ success is our success, which is why we’re constantly looking to help them acquire and build long-term customer relationships with shoppers who fall outside the scope of other digital marketing methods. The performance model is simple: invest in what works, optimize what doesn’t.

The New Performance Marketing Platform

To take that mission even further, we have even bigger news. Today is also the launch of our brand new Performance Marketing Platform. We’re leveraging this powerful partner marketing solution from Partnerize to enable our advertisers to gain more actionable insights, foster more powerful relationships, and optimize returns on marketing investments more than ever before.

By collaborating with Partnerize, we’re now able to provide clients with best-in-class solutions to measure, optimize, and reward marketing partner and publisher performance, along with our vast experience in establishing profitable relationships with top-performing publishers that enables performance marketing success. Our Performance Marketing Platform provides everything you need to drive the greatest volume of sales and growth from partnerships, ultimately resulting in more site traffic, more customers, and more revenue.

Solution = Product + Expertise + Service

The platform change in itself is big news for us, but the Performance Marketing Platform is not the only part of our solution. Not only can marketers access a state-of-the-art platform, but you have access to our global team of experts as well. Utilizing our depth of industry knowledge and diverse regional backgrounds, the Digital Marketing Services team can help you get the most out of your performance program. We’ll be with you every step of the way to help you utilize the platform and apply best practices as you acquire, retain, and grow your customer base.

We don’t just offer advice. We also offer full-scale program management to fit your needs. Whether you need initial set up, publisher recruitment, or end-to-end nurturing and management, the Digital Marketing Services team has a solution that’s right for your brand.

Today has been several years in the making for cleverbridge. As digital marketing grows more and more valuable to customers looking for the right product at the right time, we aspire to meet them where they’re at to help them on that journey. Integrating our Performance Marketing Platform with Partnerize and shifting our focus to even more performance-based models is in service with that aspiration. We’re excited for a new future with more publisher relationships and better data-driven strategies. We invite you to come along with us.

For more information on the Performance Marketing Platform, click here.

Nick Oswald is the Performance Marketing Manager for cleverbridge.

The post Introducing the cleverbridge Performance Marketing Platform appeared first on cleverbridge.

When searching for information online, more mobile users are taking advantage of the convenience of voice search in lieu of fumbling with web apps and small, mobile keyboards.

As one of many ecommerce companies in an increasingly aggressive market, you’ll need to stay one step ahead of emerging search trends to maintain an edge against the bevy of websites competing for consumer attention. Let’s explore a few ways in which your digital business can ensure that voice searches are populating your site’s content pages in Google – a vital tool for guiding prospects into the awareness stage of the buying cycle.

Update Your Keyword Strategy

Because Google continuously updates its search algorithms to provide the most relevant results for users, a digital business is often forced to update its keyword strategy to adhere to a new trend just as soon as it’s mastered the previous one.

Packing as many short-tail keywords onto a page was soon replaced by the need for a much more thoughtful long-tail keyword strategy. The long-tail approach now requires further refinement triggered by Google’s more recent Latent Semantic Indexing, which ranks pages based on the overall context of keywords and how they relate to one another.

As voice search carves out a larger space within total search volume, ecommerce companies should consider how conversational search phrases will impact their keyword approach.

For example, a laptop or desktop search might consist of, “Best security software PC,” while a voice search may consist of, “What is the best security software for a PC?”

Adapt Content Pages Appropriately

As your company builds and updates its content pages, think in terms of how potential users of your product would inquire about their needs, and provide information that maintains a natural, conversational tone. As a jumping off point, surveying your customer service department may give you some invaluable insight into common concerns and trends.

A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page can be an effective way to build conversational content. Once you’ve identified common inquiries, dedicate a single content page to answering them. This will provide some additional voice-based SEO value, while slimming down the workload of your customer service team.

Occupy the Elusive Featured Snippet

A few years back Google implemented the featured snippet function in their search indexing, or as some refer to it, “position zero.” It’s essentially a highlighted content position that appears in a box above the No. 1 organically ranked page.

So how do you occupy that spot? Well, Google won’t tell us. Though experts agree that in addition to deploying commonly held SEO practices, a site featuring concise and explicit answers to commonly asked queries can significantly help your chances. The featured snippet represents an effective way to use voice search to your advantage because Google Home, Google Voice and other services often read back featured snippet content in response to an appropriate voice search query. For further insight on targeting position zero, check out these helpful pieces from Moz and Forbes.

Get HTTPS-Secured, if You’re Not Already

We’re all familiar with the “HTTP” before the “www” in web URLs. Without getting too technical, it stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. And “HTTPS” is the secure version of that protocol. What this means is that any information transferred between a website and a browser is encrypted, which offers a higher level of security.

According to Backlinko, 70.4 percent of voice search results maintain a secured URL, versus only 50 percent of Google desktop results. So those sites that use HTTPS will have a substantially higher chance of ranking in voice searches.

Maintain Strong Domain Authority

A website’s domain authority – or the rating that indicates the likelihood of a page ranking in Google – is important to consider for desktop and mobile search alike, but even more so for voice search, experts find. In short, the higher a company’s domain authority rating, the more likely they’ll appear higher ranked in voice searches.

Some common ways to increase domain authority:

– Boost shareability on social channels
– Increase inbound and outbound link portfolios
– Decrease bad or toxic links, and 404 errors
– Improve content readability and on-page SEO
– Maintain a fast page loadability

We’ve explored some of these issues in greater depth in a previous blog.

Keystone

The use of mobile voice services and voice-based devices has increased drastically over the last few years, with comscore predicting 50 percent of all searches – not just mobile – to be voice-based by 2020.

In light of continuous advances in technology and the evolving consumer behavior that follows suit, it’s becoming more and more difficult to know where online customers are coming from and where they’re going next. But according to forecasts, voice-based web searching is a strong prediction of what’s to come.

Want to learn more about our global commerce solutions? Contact our sales team.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. 

The post Prepare Your Ecommerce Business for the Rise of Voice Search appeared first on cleverbridge.

As SaaS trends evolve further still, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have staked their claim among the topics dominating the SaaS conversation, as many analysts peg AI as the next big shift in the market.

As AI becomes a more integral part of that evolution, let’s explore a few ways in which SaaS companies can take advantage of, and in some cases prepare for, market disruption in the months and years to come.

SaaS Automation

Artificial Intelligence essentially aggregates large quantities of data – in this case customer data – and distills it into automatic processes normally accomplished by humans.

As any SaaS company decision-maker knows, it requires an immense amount of intel, effort and manpower to keep customers engaged with their product, especially over time as their needs change. AI enables companies to refine and automate many of these customer experience processes, such as training and onboarding, marketing campaigns, upsells, and most importantly, ongoing customer service.

Customer service AI platforms like chatbots, which respond to and troubleshoot customer inquiries automatically, enable customer service departments to take on between 30-40 percent additional inquiries, according to experts.

That’s great news for revenue retention and churn reduction, as some 42 percent of customers show a heightened interest in a purchase following a positive customer service experience, according to a Zendesk study. Likewise, 52 percent say even one negative customer service experience will send them packing.

Supplementing AI technology with your customer service team can target the seamless cross-section between convenience, problem-solving and human experience.

Customer Personalization

Consumers demand personal experiences tailored to their unique needs. If they don’t receive it from your business, they’ll go elsewhere. And let’s face it, simply developing and installing a more complex series of features on your consumer app or interface may do little else but muddle the customer experience with extraneous options.

In addition to more individualized email campaigns and other customer communication, AI supports such features as voice control and natural language processing, and can acutely track user behavior to better customize functionality to their particular set of preferences. In turn, this hyper-targeting can support customer loyalty in the face of growing competition.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics may be the most vital of all artificial intelligence capabilities, as machine learning empowers an enterprise to identify and analyze not just what customers are doing now, but what they will do in the future.

The combination of historical data working in tandem with advanced analytics can track and form patterns to identify what a consumer’s next step will likely be: open an email, renew their subscription, buy a new product, or disengage from your brand all together, for example.

This depth of data can help you better personalize your marketing communications, segment and refine your customer database, and further customize the user experience before they make their next decision in the buying cycle. This active-instead-of-reactive approach can ostensibly help you identify customer needs even before they do.

Pricing Model Disruption

The traditional B2B SaaS pricing model operates on a per-seat basis, meaning the more users you have registered on the account, the more revenue you ultimately accrue.

Investing in AI capabilities, however, is designed to streamline and automate much of the end user’s experience with the software, likely requiring fewer people needing access to it. This may improve your end user experience and save your client money, but as a software provider, you’re working against your own pricing model.

This may require a rapid move from a per-seat pricing model, to one that is more value- or outcome-based.

“To succeed in any market, B2B marketing leaders must pivot from selling products to delivering outcomes,” according to a recent Forrester report. “The greater the digital content of your service, the greater the opportunity to migrate from asset rental to value-based pricing,” it says.

Ultimately, it’s an advantage for your business to enhance its technology using AI, and to benefit the end user’s goals. But in terms of revenue growth, adapting your pricing model should be customized to your value proposition.

One model may charge based on actual usage of the product, or a sales- or marketing-focused platform may charge based on leads or conversions.

“There is no perfect model, and each one has its pluses and minuses,” says Forrester Analyst Duncan Jones. “It’s about understanding the complexity and ROI of your offering, and aligning your pricing to that end.”

Keystone

The advent of Artificial Intelligence is far in the rear view, though its long-term application has miles to go. For companies looking toward the future, take advantage of the research and intelligence available, and invest in your business appropriately.

Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. 

The post How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting the SaaS Market appeared first on cleverbridge.