Monthly Archives

December 2018

Content Management

5 Top Web Designs That Will Take 2019 By Storm


2019 is coming in fast, and if you want to get that sleek, new look before your competition does, enlisting the aid of a digital marketing consultant is the best way to do it. It’s time to renovate those stale web design trends of 2018.

Check out these top 5 web designs for 2019.

1. Clean, Minimalistic Design

The days of cluttered images and overly complex web design are fading away. Since 2017, developers have started to change their website to cleaner, more minimalistic designs. Developers did so in anticipation of the mobile-first indexing revolution, knowing that getting it done early would mean a huge boost in their revenue-earning potential.

This brilliant form of “flat design” not only provides a cleaner look but also improves function as it reduces the amount of time it takes to load a webpage for both PC and mobile devices. It also benefits a website’s Google ranking as sites which prioritize quick load times are better ranked, something image-heavy websites can’t dream of.

2. Micro-Animations

Sometimes as web designers, you’ve got to learn how to appreciate the little things. This is especially true for micro-animations — a subtle trend that is quickly gaining traction.

A micro-animation can be a number of things. It can be something as simple as changing the color of a call-to-action button when the user moves their cursor over it. It can also be something a little more visually appealing, like a list of links expanding downward when a “hamburger” menu button—the three parallel lines stacked horizontally that you find on the top left or right of a website—is activated.

While this may seem inconsequential, that couldn’t be any further from the truth. Little animations like these actually help site visitors better understand its layout better, increasing retention by providing an intuitive and satisfying experience as they explore what you have to offer.

3. More Detailed Footers

Footers, as far as web designing is concerned, have mostly been overlooked, but 2019 is looking to change that. In most cases, it was a space on the homepage where visitors could contact information and little else.

Now, designers are looking to utilize that space in a much more effective and efficient manner. While it should still have your company’s contact information, it should also feature clickable social media icons that can send a user to your social media pages (hopefully so they start following you).

However, it won’t be limited to just those elements. In fact, it can be heavily improved upon based on what your particular niche or business is. Take for instance 360gardalife.com. This sports magazine/blog shares local sporting information around the Malcesine area of Italy – and they are really hitting it out of the park in terms of a footer.

Now imagine having a customized footer that a potential customer can access to personalize the information that they receive from your company. You can bet top dollar that user experience and customer reviews with your company would skyrocket in a positive way.

4. Better Video Backgrounds

Remember when I said that minimal-looking websites may take the cake in 2019? Well, they are going to have some competition with websites that will feature a video background. I know, hard to believe since websites that can load quickly will be scored better, but video backgrounds have also been shown to increase conversions – and that’s always a good thing.

Before we continue, it won’t be like a YouTube video playing in the background while you are trying to read a blog. When a user lands on your site, they may see the video playing in the background—muted, of course. Short video content commands users’ attention more than texts or images can because it delivers your message quickly and effectively. Because of that, users are more likely to stick around to watch the video.

Of course, the more likely they are to stick around means that your time-on-site metric is going to increase.

5. Non-Traditional Scrolling

For as long as the Internet has been around, users have become accustomed to vertical scrolling—top to bottom. Twenty-nineteen is looking to change that up a bit, offering a unique twist to scrolling and piquing potential customers’ interests.

Some sites are looking to embrace horizontal scrolling, where instead of the page moving top to bottom, it is moving from left to right. This offers a refreshing and attention-grabbing experience to potential customers that are getting to know your brand.

To illustrate this in action, picture yourself as an owner of a business that sells artisanal cheeses. When a user lands on your home page, they see a brief loading screen—we’re talking 1 to 2 seconds of load time here—and then they are greeted by a quick history of your business.

As they scroll, the history portion shifts to the left and now the home page is featuring a special cheese on sale for the week. At some point, the carousel of information—if you will—will stop, and the page can scroll vertically as normal to other portions of your homepage that feature the daily product review, customer reviews, accolades, video content, or even that souped-up website footer that you created.

Kick off the New Year with a fresh new website style and then reap the benefits of your investment. Contact your experienced digital marketing consultant at (956) 566-4998 to get started.

Digital Marketing

The Magic of Link Building and Earning


All right, time to confess. Earning and building links is hard work. If you spam too many links in your content, you risk losing your ranking on Google search as well as customer confidence. If you don’t earn any links to your website, you won’t be seen as the credible source of information that you are.

If my experience as a digital marketing consultant has taught me anything, it’s this: a little elbow grease in building and earning links goes a long way when driving traffic to your site. The more (and better quality) traffic you get, the higher the potential for making conversions and sales.

Today we are going to analyze the benefits link building and earning can provide to your digital marketing campaign.

What are the Benefits of Link Building?

You may be thinking, “Why would I need to worry about building or earning links when there are literally hundreds of other SEO factors that go into Google’s ranking system?”

That’s a fair question. In short, it’s because link building and earning helps:

1. Grows Your Traffic – Let’s imagine that you are a grapefruit distributor, and you’ve recently written up a blog post highlighting your fruit’s sweetness, tartness, and uniqueness.

Not long after, you are contacted by a highly recognized company (e.g. Food Network) and are asked if they can link a recipe to your blog piece. This is great news for your business.

If this company that contacted you has a huge Internet presence, and if they are linking out to your website, that’ll help to direct online traffic your way. Once at your company’s website, a properly placed call-to-action can entice site visitors to purchase your fruit. If they have found your website helpful and engaging, they may even interact with your social media accounts.

2. Provides Value to Search Engines – Remember how I mentioned earlier that Google ranking is governed by 200 other factors? Well, links have a high value in this list of factors.

This is why a lot of authority websites have top spots in Google’s ranking system. Many other websites are likely linking out to these authority sites, which in turn helps to build up their credibility even more. Think of it as a vote. The more “votes” a website has, the higher its position in the search engine results page (SERP).

To build off the example above, since your website was linked to an authority website, Google will recognize that you are a credible source of information regarding grapefruit. So when someone is searching for grapefruits, your page is more likely to show up on the SERP.

3. Increases Brand Awareness – In tandem with everything above, link building and earning can enhance brand awareness through “influencers.”

If an influencer happens to run across your product and begins to promote it, you gain access, in a sense, to their followers and audience. To illustrate, let’s say that there is a “grapefruit influencer” that has over a million viewers on their YouTube channel. One day while searching for new and interesting recipes, the enthusiast happens upon the authority website that originally linked out to you.

Later, you get a notification from the influencer that they would like to create video content featuring your grapefruit. Of course, you give the okay so long as they link out to your company website. You notice not too long after the influencer has created their content about your product, that your traffic metrics have grown substantially.

Through that influencer, through the authority website, and through your own efforts, you have effectively increased your brand awareness and brought in a new swarm of customers.

Summing It Up

Link building and earning can definitely help to draw more traffic to your website, but it must come with a delicate touch. If you’re looking for some tips on how to earn links, we have a blog just for that as well.

It’s important to know that you can’t just spam links in your blog post as Google looks down on that. Being renowned as a link-spammer rather than a purveyor of a quality product is a surefire way to lose reputation and ranking with Google and, more importantly, future sales.

Link building and earning is by no means a “kickback” kind of thing either. It takes a certain drive, a hustle, to earn these types of relationships with other websites. One shouldn’t focus so much on paying for links or spamming, but you should instead focus on producing quality content and connecting that content with the right audience for maximum brand exposure.

Do you need an expert’s touch to help make your link building happen? Look no further than Mauricio Piña, your experience digital marketing consultant. Contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to find out how I can help improve your digital marketing campaigns.

Digital Marketing

A Quick Overview of A/B Testing in Marketing


Digital marketing is a science, and like any science, hypotheses have to be tested in order to become an accepted theory.

Digital marketing consultants are like scientists analyzing the effects of digital marketing on target audiences. Better results get implemented in digital marketing campaigns that create revenue.

Today, we’re going to develop a better understanding of a test that can help you figure out where the weak points in your digital marketing campaign are and how you can utilize the results to improve your conversion rates. To do that, that means getting down and dirty in your conversion rate optimization (CRO) tests – also known as A/B testing.

Hold Up…What Exactly is A/B Testing?

The reason we conduct A/B testing is to give us clear insight into how one version of a campaign compares to another. Oftentimes, the differences between campaigns aren’t that drastically different from one another. It can be something as simple as switching up copy in an ad or experimenting with colors in your call-to-action to see if it encourages click-throughs.

Because of this, A/B testing is also known as split testing, and it is known as one of the easier CRO tests to conduct.

How Does A/B Testing Work?

Let’s say, for example, that your company website doesn’t have the best conversion rate. One day you come across a blog that states that placing a call-to-action (CTA) in your content helps to improve your conversion rate.

Blogs that were written before never had a CTA and now you want to run a little experiment. In this experiment, one blog post has a CTA—known as the “challenger” in A/B testing. The other is staying true to the older blog post guidelines where no CTA was written in – this is the “control.”

Before you post the blogs, you set a number of 500 visitors that will be used as a sample size of sorts, depending on your audience settings or preferences. These visitors will be distributed randomly, yet equally, to view either the challenger or control blog post.

After a set amount of time, that you’ll determine,  you’ll check out the results of the test to see which blog post has more leads and conversions.

What you might discover is that the blog without the CTA required too many steps for visitors to complete before they could find the featured product in your blog. We’re talking having to go into the sidebar, click “Shop,” search for the actual item, all while your hope they don’t abandon their cart.

On the other hand, the blog with a CTA encourages site visitors via copy and a link to the actual product page to quickly find the product and purchase. You might find that this particular blog improved conversion rates by 20 percent.

Once the A/B test has concluded, you might find it in your best interest to continue writing CTAs into your content. Later on down the road, you might want to run another A/B test to see if CTA placement is better at the top or bottom of a blog, or at the beginning rather than the end of video content.

And that’s A/B testing in a nutshell. Essentially changing portions of your various marketing campaigns – from social to blogs and everything in between – to see what works best to convert visitors.

The possibilities are endless!

Need some additional A/B testing marketing tips? Reach out to the digital marketing expert, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998.