Whether you’re optimizing your website, strategizing your social media, or designing digital advertising; you MUST BE creative and smart.  The following tips are both and will give you creative business boosting ideas for the web and a nice push for your online marketing plan. What are some great creative ideas for the web?  The things we do to optimize – take a look:

Go mobile!

With 79% of internet users conducting online shopping via mobile devices, you should be embarrassed if your website isn’t mobile-friendly. This is not optional, although many still treat it like it is. If you do digital advertising, don’t forget to create mobile-preferred ads that are tailored to this audience — and make it as easy as possible for them to convert. Direct link to your website and/or use call extensions so they can simply click to call your business.

Use more ‘human touching’ ads

Ads with super-high click-through rates generally speak to the emotions behind why your customer would want what you’re selling. For example, instead of writing an teenagerstudysmallad that just asks the prospect to register for your mountain climbing school, think about why someone would be interested in mountain climbing in the first place. One extremely successful ad said “Fluorescent lights are killing you. Be more than a warm corpse.”  WOW… that’s morbid.

Write content to help your audience

The best content for marketing is directed at helping and delighting your key audience. Understand your customer: know their pain points, what gets them psyched, and what keeps them up at night. Killer content address your audience’s needs and concerns! Try using keyword research tools to identify the questions your audience needs answers to — then deliver what they’re looking for. Creative ideas are the best for the web where attention-grabbing is essential.

Add a visual element

To ALL your content pieces on your website, your ads, and you social media posts — People get bored with text really fast! To keep visitors reading, it’s essential to have images breaking up your text. Don’t overlook the importance of a visual element, even in blog posts that are predominantly text-based.

Show and tell with videos

Video content, whether you’re trying to demonstrate how your product works or just educating and entertaining visitors, is incredibly powerful. Video not only draws in users, it sticks with them — retention rate for visual information can reach 65% vs. 10% for text-based info. Plus, customers who view product videos are much more likely to convert than those who don’t.

Get into symbols

Symbols and special characters, like exclamation points, dollar signs, and registered trademark symbols, are known to increase click-through rates. Don’t got completely nuts with the exclamation points though!  It may look like you’re trying too hard!!!??!

Invest in infographics

We know readers love visual content, and infographics are a prime example of linkable visual assets.  While the idea of creating a top-notch infographic may sound daunting, it doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t need fancy software — in fact, you can make a simple infographic just using PowerPoint!  You’ll find that Pinterest is a good resource as well.

Make a statistics lists

For an easy content marketing fix, collect interesting statistics on a subject related to your business and create a blog post about what you’ve learned. Massive lists of facts and stats are easy to create and extremely sharable — and other content creators will want to cite your research! (Man… maybe that’s what THIS IS!)

  1. Discuss Current Events: According to HubSpot’s research, nearly 80% of shared and/or retweeted content is about news, and more than 50% of that content is entertainment-related.
  2. Don’t Be Overly Self-Promotional: Become thought leaders!
  3. Include Links to Your Website: More than 50% of shares and retweets include links.
  4. Understand Your Audience: People follow others who they feel are thought leaders in their industry.  Your followers want content that is credible, intelligent, and valuable.
  5. Share and Retweet Others: “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” Enough said.
  6. Ask Others to Retweet You: If you have something valuable to share, you probably want as many people as possible to spread that content or message, and simply asking others to share.
  7. Consider the Timing of Your Tweets: When sending out tweets, timing does matter.

But I digress…  :)

See also 10 Tips For Creative Marketing

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