When to Look for Incremental Growth

/ Zach Heller

There are boom times for business, and there are slow times. This goes for entire industries as well as individual companies.

The typical business lifecycle looks like this:

  1. Startup

  2. Growth

  3. Maturity

  4. Renewal or Decline

This same lifecycle can also apply to individual product lines.

In the startup phase, everything is new and the company is still trying to match a solution to a problem in the marketplace. When a company is able to offer a solution at a price that consumers are willing to pay for, they move into the next phase.

In the growth phase, the company or product captures increasing market share. Sales and revenue are accelerating as the market expands and new customers are brought in.

Growth only sustains for so long, and when it slows a company will enter the maturity stage. In the maturity stage, growth is no longer so easy to come by. The market is fully saturated. Sales are somewhat more constant, and still sustainable.

During the maturity stage, the decisions that a company makes will set up the next stage. Either the company will find a way to start the cycle all over again – with a new product, new features, new markets, or a new revenue steam – or they will start to experience decline as competitors disrupt their industry and start to claw back market share.

What is Incremental Growth?

Incremental growth refers to those small gains that a business can make through pricing and payment terms, improvements in conversion rate or acquisition costs, add-ons or upselling, etc.

These are not the massive growth schemes that define a company to investors or to the marketplace at large. They are the small levers that people inside the company pull to help improve the bottom line and sustain competitive advantage.

When to Look for Incremental Growth?

There are people in every company who are there to make incremental growth happen. They are the marketers and sales people who are constantly experimenting and looking for ways to improve the conversion rate. They are the advertisers looking to increase brand awareness in the marketplace. They are the operations and financial professionals looking to save money and improve the internal processes that drive the company.

But incremental growth is never more important than during the maturity stage of a business’s lifecycle. At this stage, the real dynamic growth has slowed or stalled. There is danger of complacency, because this company and its leaders have gotten used to year over year growth and might not immediately know where to turn to in order to renew that growth into the future.

And that’s what makes incremental growth so appealing. In the short term, while a new long term strategy is in the works, it becomes critical to maximize value within the existing business.

Productivity growth, conversion rate optimization, more favorable pricing terms, and improved return on investment in marketing are all ways to sustain some level of growth even while the larger growth curve for the business flattens out.

Those who can pull the levers to drive incremental growth at a mature company are the unsung heroes that keep things moving in the right direction.

What Matters Most? SEO Tips to Boost Your Online Rankings – Guest Post

/ Zach Heller

The following guest post was written by Katrina Fernandez. Katrina is a hardworking individual who always gives her best. As a degree holder, she aspires to establish within the media industry. Expert in building online partnership, she's been working in digital marketing services, Local SEO Search Inc. for several years. 

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Search engine optimization (SEO) can often seem like a mysterious black box. After all, Google changes their algorithm hundreds of times a year, and they don’t share exactly what goes into their ranking system.

However, that doesn’t mean you’re helpless when it comes to using SEO to boost your online ranking. Making an effort to improve the areas we do know matter to Google can make a huge difference in your organic traffic, which brings in more leads and more revenue.

Focusing on what matters most is the best way to get the most return on your SEO investment. Here are the things you should do today.

Use Mobile-First Development

It’s no secret that Google loves content that looks great on smaller screens. In fact, after boosting mobile-friendly content in search results for a couple of years, Google moved all the way into mobile-first indexing.

This means that if you want to do well with your SEO, it’s in your best interest to focus on developing all of your webpages for a mobile screen first, and then add extra features for full-screen users. That saves you enormous amounts of time when it comes to troubleshooting your mobile rendering, and helps you avoid any Google penalties for being unfriendly to mobile.

What about webpages that already exist? The first thing to do is get out your cell phone and navigate your site. Make note of any problems – text that’s unreadable, overlapping elements, or pop-ups that obscure everything – and make sure your developers fix the problems right away.

Focus on Page Speed and Security

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Page speed and security matter a great deal to search engines, but they matter even more to your users. As a result, focusing on these two elements will give you a huge double win as you improve the experience of your visitors while also boosting your page rank.

53% of users will leave a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google will also drop your ranking if your site is slow. To solve speed issues, make sure your hosting is appropriate to your traffic level. Optimize images, video, and other page elements to load more quickly. Finally, take advantage of caching so that repeat visitors have an even faster load time.

What about security? If you don’t have a security protocol for your website (your domain doesn’t start with HTTPS://) then you’re well behind the curve. Way back in 2014 Google warned that HTTPS security was a ranking factor, and today users may be blocked from accessing your website if you don’t have it.

It’s not just search engines that care about security. Showing that you protect visitor and customer information is important to the general public as well. You’ll gain trust from your users if you make your security policy front and center – which will boost your leads and revenue over time.

Maximize On-Page SEO

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A lot of search engine ranking factors seem to be outside your control. However, the structure of your website, the keywords you use, and where you place your key content is all an essential part of your on-page SEO – which you control.

Make sure your website has a logical structure and is easy to navigate. Carefully consider the keywords you want to focus on. Don’t overlook longer keywords and locally-focused terms – often these will have the most impact.

Most of all, make sure you are regularly creating new content that is relevant and helpful to your customers. Answer key questions relating to your product or industry. Provide useful information in the form of text or video. Build trust and help your visitors see you as an authority.

If that sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. You can work with an experienced SEO consultant who can help you create and execute a high-quality strategy to boost your rankings through on-page SEO.

Manage Your Online Reputation

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, if you Google it! You want to make sure that when people search for your company name or industry, the information they find about you is accurate and mostly complimentary.

How do you do that? Step one is to claim your Google My Business page and make sure your information is fully filled out. From there, encourage your customers to leave reviews after each interaction. Hopefully, you’ll get a lot of positive feedback. This will not only help Google see that you’re a great company, but it will also encourage other potential customers to trust you as well.

With a great online reputation and a consistent presence across all platforms, you’ll make it easy for new customers to find you and realize that you’re the best provider for their needs.

SEO is Essential

SEO may not be your favourite topic, but in today’s digital world you can’t ignore the importance of your online stature. By following these tips you’ll be focusing on the most impactful SEO strategies, which will maximize the return you get for your efforts. Don’t wait – start today!

Solving for “What Do I Do Next?”

/ Zach Heller

No matter who you are, at various times in your day/week/year/career, you will run into this question:

What do I do next?

This an unavoidable question that people will coach you to avoid at all times. There are a variety of things that happen to drive this question.

  • You finish a major project without planning the next one

  • You need to shift your focus because you are stuck on a difficult project

  • You are waiting for new work to be assigned

  • You are responsible to setting the priorities for your team

  • You lose your job or change roles

  • You are bored or burnt out

Whenever you encounter the “what do I do next” question, it’s not fun. It feels like you are lost, or like you’re not holding up your end of the bargain. It causes folks to pause, to look away, or to worry.

But there are solutions. There are easy ways to answer the question when it comes up, and easy ways to prevent it from coming up as frequently. All it takes is a little foresight.

Here are a few solutions to the “what do I do next” problem:

  1. Ask someone.

  2. Keep a priority list.

  3. Long-term items.

  4. Research.

  5. Lend a hand.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into each of them.

Ask Someone

Who you ask depends on your particular situation. But there is almost always someone you can ask that question to.

It might be your boss, who can tell you with certainty what he or she wants you to be working on. It might be your spouse, who can help guide you through a rough career patch. It might be a peer, who can share what they are working on and offers ways that you can join in.

Regardless of who you ask, this solution is great because often times the worst outcome of the “what do I do next” problem is that we stew in silence for hours or days. This solution gets you out of your own head so you can solve the problem quicker.

Keep a Priority List

A priority list is a list of items to be completed, in order of highest value to lowest. If you have one, you will always know what comes next.

Sure, this solution requires some foresight and planning on your part (or the part of your manager). But if you have a list like this, you will never have to worry about what you should do next.

Long Term Items

Most of us have short term assignments and long term projects. How we work our way through them depends on the urgency and value of each item on our plates.

The beauty of long term tasks is that there are almost always ways to break them down into smaller chunks. And these chunks will serve as backups to whatever short term assignment you are working on now.

If you need a break from your current task, or you get stuck, just turn to the next piece of that long term project and check that off the list.

Research

Take advantage of breaks in the day to day work and learn something new. Research a topic related to your next project or pick up a new skill that will add value to your team.

When you are not sure what to do next, it never hurts to do a little self-improvement.

Lend a Hand

There may come a time when you don’t have anything to work on next. In those cases, you can do yourself, and your team, a big favor by finding a way to help out someone else.

Great job completing your assignment. Now look around you. Chances are, not everyone is finding the same level of success. Find out how you can help a friend or coworker complete their current task and build a bond that will benefit everyone going forward.

/ Zach Heller/ Comment
prioritization, productivity tips, adding value, marketing impact

Zach Heller

How to Tell If You Are Emailing Your Subscribers Too Often

/ Zach Heller

Marketers have been using email as a way to communicate with customers and prospective customers for many years now. As a marketing channel, email has consistently had the highest return on investment. That’s partly because email is so cheap that it’s practically free.

And because email works so well, it has often been the case that we, as marketers, come back to it again and again. Adding a new email to our existing campaigns is cheap and easy. And so we do, often without asking ourselves if it’s too much.

But at a certain point, logic would suggest, it is too much. We are emailing people too often, and driving them crazy in the process. When a company emails you too often as a consumer, you are turned off. When that happens, marketers risk sowing ill-will among their subscriber base and potentially losing customers in the process.

It should be obvious, but we want to avoid that. But how? How do we know when we are emailing too often? Where is the line between not emailing enough, and emailing too much?

The answer is simple: we test.

We already test everything else about our emails…

  • Subject lines

  • Content

  • Links

  • Offers

Why wouldn’t we test frequency?

When we test our emails, we are measuring which versions deliver better results. In a subject line test, we are measuring open rates. The subject line with the highest open rate wins.

In a content test, we are measuring click-through rates. Whichever design gets more people to click through to the website wins.

In a frequency test, we have to measure several metrics at once. First, we have to measure opt-outs and complaints. These are the best metrics email marketers have to measure how many people are turned off by emails. When someone takes action to unsubscribe or mark an email as spam, they are signaling to the company that this email crossed the line in some way.

But that’s not all we have to measure, because opt-outs and complaints rising do not, be themselves, tell us if our strategy is working. For that, we also have to measure conversions. A conversion might be a sale, or a donation, or a click through to an article – whatever you want your recipient to do. This is the ultimate success metric.

If opt-outs and complaints go up, but conversions also go up, your frequency test is still a winner. Because the new frequency is leading to a higher ROI, even if it’s turning some people off.

If opt-outs and complaints go up, and conversions stay flat or drop, your frequency test is a loser. Adding more emails did not lead to any measurable improvement in business outcomes. And you should go back to the old email strategy.

It’s that simple. Now that you know how to test whether you are emailing enough, start emailing more.

/ Zach Heller/ Comment
Email Marketing
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Zach Heller

Does SEO Conflict with User Experience?

/ Zach Heller

If you work with an SEO expert, you have encounter times when her recommendations or priorities conflict with the overall goal of improving the website. This will happen when content changes on the website are written for search engines and not for real people.

Let’s look at an example:

Say you are responsible for your company’s website experience. You sell books online, and some of your key pages are not the product pages for the books themselves, but the category pages for each genre of book that you sell. Your SEO expert tells you that “true crime books online” is a high volume keyword and so recommends adding that phrase into the text of the page sporadically, including in the main heading.

On the surface this is no big deal, but once the copy changes are complete, the page reads as if a robot wrote it and in the language that we use to communicate with other human beings every day, it sounds funny.

That’s because your SEO expert is writing for the search engines.

What should you do in this instance?

In my experience, user experience has to win out over SEO. While I agree that SEO is critical to any site’s success, at the end of the day you have created your website for people to use. And the user experience is priority number one.

A good SEO strategy understands that the user is the champion. We are solving for the user first, and the search engines second. And so every recommendation or assignment that they come up with should factor in the end effect on the user.

Most times, there is no conflict. Search engines prefer a page that loads faster, so does the user. Search engines prefer a domain with higher authority, so does the user. Search engines prefer a page that answers the question a user types in, so does the user.

Where conflict exists, it usually comes down to the phrasing that is used in the website copy. And though every attempt should be made to include text that searchers will use to find you on Google, it still must be written so that it can be read and understood easily.

Because at the end of the day, you are writing for the user.