The Essential Guide for Upgrading to Gutenberg

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WordPress 5 has arrived, and with it, Gutenberg has been introduced. There are a number of great additions that come with the update. However, there have also been reports of the update causing trouble with existing websites.

We’ve recently experienced the risks associated with upgrading WordPress ourselves when one of our clients upgraded their website from WordPress 4 to WordPress 5 as a security measure. The update responded well with most of the plugins used. However, there were a number of issues with the Page Builder which broke the website. Our team was successfully able to revert the website to the latest WordPress 4 update, which had all the security updates of WordPress 5 without the plugin compatibility issues.

If you are considering updating your website to Gutenberg, there are a number of things you need to know:

  1. Back up everything! This is essential in case the update causes anything on your current site to break.
  2. Update your PHP version and any plugins you are using. This will reduce the possibility of anything breaking when you upgrade to Gutenberg.
  3. Use a test server to upgrade a copy of your website to Gutenberg first. This will allow you to check for any potential issues and fix them without your live site being affected.
  4. Be prepared for your website to break temporarily after upgrading. Although Gutenberg offers a lot of new functionality, your current plugins may not function properly without being updated. Most issues will likely only require a quick fix. The test server is crucial to ironing out these issues without affecting your live site.
  5. The new editor looks different, very different. Gutenberg has dramatically changed the way WordPress sites are edited. If you do not like the new editor, the Classic Editor is available to use with Gutenberg.

If you are concerned that updating to Gutenberg will break your site, here at Milestone-Belanova we have an experienced team who are happy to help! Contact us today for a quote on upgrading your WordPress website to Gutenberg.

How To Run A Competitive Analysis

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Knowing where your business sits within a market and how you compare to your competitors is a critical part of your marketing plan. A competitor analysis can provide you with the needed insights to help shape your business’s approach and give you a leg up on your competition. Below is an outline of the five steps you can take to conduct a competitor analysis for your business.

Step One: Compare your website

  • What web pages do you and your competitors share? What pages don’t you share?
  • What features do your competitors offer on their websites?
  • How do your competitors make sales through their websites?
  • How do your competitors use their websites? (Is it a landing page? Do they sell products on their site? Do they even have a website?)

Step Two: Compare your social media accounts

  • How many social media accounts do you have compared to your competitors?
  • How many followers do you have compared to your competitors? (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube)
  • What type of content do your competitors share? (Videos, images, blog posts, quotes, tips, industry insights?)
  • How often do your competitors post on their social media accounts? (Once a month? Once a week? Multiple times a day?)

You can use this information to base your social media campaign off.

Step Three: Compare your strengths/weaknesses

  • What do you do well? What do your competitors do well? (Use this information to see where you can improve or where your strengths are).
  • What do you not do well? What do your competitors not do well? (Use this information to understand where your business could improve. You can also use this information to understand opportunities where you could improve on what your competitors are doing).

Areas to focus on:

  • Price
  • Product/Service Range
  • Product/Service Quality
  • Convenience
  • Longevity
  • Brand Awareness
  • Customer Service Standards
  • Hours of Trade
  • Turnaround Time
  • Marketing Collateral

Step Four: Competitive advantages

  • Review the factors that provide your business with a competitive advantage over your competitors.
  • Establish whether this is a sustainable competitive advantage or one that could be easily replicated by your competitors.
  • Review your competitor’s competitive advantages and do the same processes as above. What features, services, details or actions do your competitors have as an advantage over your business? How do they provide a superior service over your business?

Use this information to understand how your business could improve and whether you can replicate any of their advantages.

Step Five: Bring it all together

By the time you get to step five you should have a clear understanding of how your business stacks up against your competitors.

  • You will know whether your website needs work or if you are providing features beyond what your competitors are.
  • You will have an understanding of how your competitors are using social media and what you could do to improve or continue leading your social media campaigns.
  • You will know what your strengths and weaknesses are and whether your competitors share any of these. You can use these strengths and weaknesses to refine your business and improve on areas you may be lacking in.
  • You will have an understanding of how your competitive advantages compare to your competitors.
  • You will also be able to judge if your advantages are sustainable for future growth or whether they can be easily replicated by your competitors.
Download our FREE competitive analysis template today!

SEO vs SEM: What’s the Difference?

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Every day, 3.5 billion searches are made on Google – which translates to 1.2 trillion searches per year! With so many searches being made, it’s critical that your business takes steps to ensure your website is showing up for your customers. There are two popular ways of achieving this – SEO and SEM. These two methods use the power of search engines to increase your website’s visibility and attract more visitors. As they are so similar, SEO and SEM are often confused as the same process so we’ve outlined each and provided information on how they can benefit your business.

What is SEO? – ‘Earning traffic through unpaid or free listings’
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO for short) refers to the tactics businesses use to give their website the best chance of ranking highly in search engine results. Google is often the first place people turn to when they are searching for information – whether it’s to find the answer to a question, confirm a business address or view a product they hope to purchase. Showing up on the first page of Google results can significantly increase the number of people who discover and visit your website – it’s for this reason that SEO is so important for your business.

Search engines rank websites based on a number of factors that influence the legitimacy of the site. These can include:

  • Page loading speed
  • Content length/quality
  • Backlinks (other websites linking back to your website)
  • Mobile view (websites that offer mobile compatibility rank higher)
  • Social media links
  • HTTPS – read our article on the importance of HTTPS for your business

SEO’s goal is to ensure these factors have been met and refined to improve the chances of a higher ranking.

What is SEM? – ‘Buying traffic through paid search listings’
Rather than relying solely on the chance of appearing amongst the top-ranking organic search results (through the use of SEO), a business can have its website advertised above organic listings by opting for paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM for short). SEM has become a powerful marketing tool as the advertisements not only display at the top of search pages, but they can also be targeted to specific customers through keywords and copy

PPC: As the name suggests, the level of traffic directed to a website through its advert dictates how much the business will pay. Unlike traditional advertising, SEM provides immediate feedback about whether the advert is working or not so the business can continuously adjust the ad until they find results.

SEM is valuable as it can connect your business with customers who are searching for similar companies to yours but might not know you exist yet.

Which one is better?
As both SEO and SEM will provide different results for your website, it’s difficult to suggest that one will be better than the other. You should instead focus on discovering when your business may need to use SEO or SEM.

  • SEO – your website should have some form of search engine optimisation to ensure it ranks well in search results. The sooner you implement SEO, the better.
  • SEM – search engine marketing is effective when you want to increase your amount of visitors and gain more exposure. It’s also powerful to advertise a new product launch or a sale you are currently running.

5 Lessons Your Competitors Can Teach You About Your Brand

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Businesses have always been told to differentiate themselves from their competitors to remain individual and attractive in a busy market. However, our competition can sometimes hold the key to our success by allowing us to see how they operate, what they do well and what mistakes they make. Below are five key lessons you will learn by ‘keeping your enemies closer’.

  1. What your website should include
    For some businesses, their website is their shopfront and is how the majority of their customers interact with them. Take a look at your competitor’s website and see how it differs from yours. Understand what makes their site more (or less) attractive and what sort of content or features they use well. Also, consider how the style of their website may affect their visitor’s perceptions of their brand.
  2. How to engage on social media
    Social media can provide great insights into a company’s success based on how many people interact with their posts. How does your social media profile compare to your competitor’s? Consider the types of posts they are sharing and the frequency of them. There’s a fine line between over-sharing and not sharing enough. Use these details to improve your own social media pages and add elements your competitors lack.
  3. The price range you should be targeting
    One of the most important elements of a product or service is the price – and if it’s too expensive or perceived too cheap, consumers may head towards your competition. Consider whether a premium brand image sets your competitor’s price or if they are selling their products as a cheap alternative. Understanding where your competitors sit can provide a great idea as to which price range you should target.
  4. What segments are not being catered to
    Chances are you share most of your target customer segments with your competitors, and all compete to attract the highest number of clients within that market. However, analysing your competition can highlight the segments that are being overlooked and that haven’t been targeted yet. By moving in on markets your competition haven’t recognised, you can gain an advantage in the overall market.

  5. The importance of reputation
    The way your business is reviewed online can be the deciding factor for a potential client looking for your products or services. Scope out how your competitors are reviewed online to see where your business stands. Also look at how they reply to customer feedback. For example, if your competitor’s customer service is more highly rated than yours, consider how they typically respond to comments and questions (both positive and negative) as you may be able to implement this into your business.

Stop Talking To Everyone

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We all love the moment a buyer says ‘yes’. When they purchase your product or service, when they enrol in your course, buy your subscription, or vote for your candidate – we love a yes! Each of these ‘yes’ moments can lead to many different outcomes, but they all use one process known as the ‘buyer’s journey’.

The buyer’s journey is the process customers follow to become aware of, evaluate, and purchase your product or service. There are two ways the buyer’s journey can begin:

  1. You find them (outbound)
  2. They find you (inbound)

Regardless of how the journey starts, you have to find and allocate the necessary resources to nurture them along the way towards an eventual sale. Here’s an example of what that could look like:

Google Search → Landing Pages → Form Opt-ins → Email Campaigns → Media (Video/PDFs)

If you had an unlimited marketing budget, you would be able to set up an infinite number of ‘journeys’ all tailored to the individual customer, but the reality is you probably don’t. Budget practicalities demand segmentation. To be efficient and maximise your profits, you must segment your audiences. You simply can’t afford to talk to everyone – so fish where the fish are!

Businesses today have access to tools that will precisely measure which segments are responding best to which messages, whether they’re sale-ready or not, and how to give the buyer’s journey an ending the customer will be happy about. You are able to directly target those who are most likely to buy in, so why waste money on those who won’t?

Create high-converting buyer’s journeys
Each segment of your audience needs their own buyer’s journey because the way one segment receives a message may be entirely different to another. One segment may prefer videos over PDFs, and another might be made up of women, or people who live in Queensland for example. Every segment will react differently to messages making it so important to tailor each buyer’s journey to the individual segment. If you are successful with, say, one age group over another, focus your attention towards this and where your ROI leads you.

Need help with segmentation for your strategy?
Get in touch with us, and we’ll make a time to talk about improving your sales efficiency.

Is Google Shaming Your Website?

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Does your website collect sensitive visitor information such as passwords, credit card details and other personal data? If so, Google may be flagging your website as unsafe. As of October this year, websites without HTTPS and SSL are being penalised and marked as non-secure on Google Chrome – even if they don’t collect sensitive information.

So, what is HTTPS?
The protocols for passing information, such as login and credit card details, between web servers and clients, is known as HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure). With a standard HTTP connection, it is possible for unauthorised parties to hijack and observe the data being transferred between your visitors and your website. An HTTPS connection, on the other hand, will encrypt the data using an SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) preventing it from being visible to any third parties – keeping both your visitors and your website safe.

What does this mean for your website?
If you do not have an SSL certificate, your visitors will receive a notification warning them that your website is not secure and their data is vulnerable to attacks – this isn’t a great way to keep visitors coming back! Likewise, it means you are also vulnerable to attacks by third parties, and the data you store on your website could become compromised.

How can you secure your website?
There are two easy ways you can check your website to see if it is secure:

  1. In the URL bar, there will either be a padlock or the word ‘Secure’.
  2. The URL says, “https://”.

If your website is displaying either of these indicators, you and your visitors are safely connected through an HTTPS connection.

If your website isn’t showing any indication that it is using a secure connection, then you will need to obtain an SSL certification and enable it. You can contact your web hosting for more information on how to do this or feel free to reach out to us, and we can sort it for you.

eMarketing – Is It Still A Relevant Marketing Tool?

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Email marketing doesn’t have the best reputation. From marketing spam to ‘Nigerian Princes’ – it’s all become a bit messy. It also doesn’t help when you receive weekly emails from a business showcasing their new bikes for sale even though you bought one from them only two months earlier. It’s for these reasons why eMarketing has been given a bad rap and understandably caused people to switch off.

That doesn’t mean eMarketing doesn’t work though – it’s all about how you do it. Research has found 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media, and email campaigns generate six times more click-throughs than from a tweet. Clearly, eMarketing is still relevant and a great marketing option if used right. Here are a few basic questions to help improve your current eMarketing campaigns:

  • Is your data up to date
  • Does your data contain fields to segment by (Prospect, Customer, Industry)?
  • Are your mailing lists segmented?
  • Do your messages differ depending on which segment is being targeted?
  • Does your email template look professional and represent your brand?
  • Do your emails offer a call-to-action? E.g. ‘Read more’ or ‘Click for a free download’.
  • Are your emails consistent in their messaging and frequency?

You should have answered yes to all of those questions. If you didn’t, you might want to revisit your campaign to give yourself the best return on investment and your customers the most relevant information. Simply personalising emails improves click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversations by 10%, making it a great first step you could take.

EMarketing isn’t just a way to market and promote your products or services, it’s a tool to generate sales, build relationships and loyalty. EMarketing is relatively inexpensive, has excellent customer reach and provides a great ROI.

Why You Should Be Using Video Marketing

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Why You Should Be Using Video Marketing
It’s not hard to find a platform to market through, be it print, social media, online ads or email. But before people will even consider buying your product, you first need to grab their attention – which is no easy task! Video marketing could be the answer you’ve been searching for. As it turns out, the majority of people only have the attention span long enough for a short video and not much more – making video marketing a great way to target your time-poor visitors.

Video is popular
Video media accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic and 64% of all consumer internet traffic. In fact, there is more video content uploaded to the web in one single month than TV has created in the last three decades! People love videos. Why? It’s simple – reading is work. Every time you finish reading a sentence, you have to decide whether to read the next one or not, so if your website is text-heavy, chances are your visitors will get bored. A video is a great way to combat this and get through to your customers.

Video improves your email marketing
Videos aren’t only great for your website, they can also work wonders for your email marketing campaigns too. Simply having the word ‘video’ in an email subject line increases opens by 19% and click-throughs by 65%! Building a customer base through email marketing is a great way to expose new and existing customers to your business and products.

Video is more persuasive
Emotion and attention are the two most important elements of persuasion. It’s one thing to get someone’s attention, but if you aren’t able to emotionally connect with them, it’s a lost cause. Forbes research found 59% of senior executives would rather watch a video than read text. A video on your website or in your email campaigns can capture the attention of customers and evoke an emotional response helping to build trust and persuade them into a sale or further information.

Video marketing is the next step your business should be taking to connect with your customers. If you don’t have video content relating to your brand or products, contact us to see how we can help.