6 qualities that make up best online User Experience.

When users visit your website for the first time, you probably want them to spend time on it. To do so, you should make sure that your website captures their attention and provides what they expect to see when they click on a link or any referrals to your website. During spending their time on your website, users must feel pleased and have the best experience moving around your website. That takes us to the user experience aspect (UX) which is one of the most common important aspects in the digital marketing world.   

In general, user experience UX is defined as “person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and or anticipated use of a product, system or service. (1)”. In this blog, I will be focusing on the online UX which has to do more with the user's perceptions and responses resulting from the use of your website. To make users have the best experience on your website, you need to check out these 6 qualities that make up the good online UX:

1. Findability: here where you ask yourself whether your website was easy to be found and appeared high up in the search results or not. If the answer is not, then you should put more efforts on SEO.

2. Accessibility: ask yourself this question, Is my website easy to use anywhere and anytime? Does it work on all devices such as mobile, tablet, and desktop? Hopefully, the answer is yes, but if it is not then you should work more with the responsive design tools to help redesign your website because it should work on both all devices.

3. Desirability: when you visit your website, put yourself in your users' place and see if your website is interesting and ask your self these questions. Are you having a pleasant using it? Are you having a pleasant experience or you just dread to visit it? Answering these questions will help you to find out whether your website is desirable to be used or not.

   

4. Usability: here where you are going to be focusing on your website design such as header, footer, layouts, and navigations. In my opinion, the most important thing that should look simple and guide users easily through your website is the navigation design because it is your website's leading map. It should show the user where are they on the website and does not have too many options and confuse users. It should show the important information users will be looking for on or about your website.

5. Credibility:  Think with yourself how users or visitors are going to trust your website and make a conversion. You should make sure that you have user-generated content such as reviews, recommendation, testimonials, and so on. These are powerful things for authenticity and credibility to your website.

6. Usefulness: Of course, users want to leave your website with a value, with something interesting that makes them want to come back to it and visit it many times again. In addition, do not over look that your website should solve your visitors or users' problems. Think to provide more valuable content and services on your website. Make your users feel that they spent their time on a website that is really worth it.

Finally, the user experience is not limited just to your users’ experience and interaction with your website, but also with the products and services that are provided to them. So, make sure you have everything valuable and tailor to your audience interests and needs starting from your website design to their final touch-point with the products or services.

Sources:

https://www.redandyellow.co.za/wp-content/uploads/emarketing_textbook_download.pdf     

What is the difference between SEO and SEM.

As a digital marketer student, I usually use these two terms SEO and SEM interchangeably. However, I found my self using them wrong. In fact, these two terms are not the same. There is a difference between them in terms of optimizing your website.

Search engaging optimization(SEO) is defined as the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.(1) SEO includes two different activities which are on-page optimization such as keywords in a website's title, HTML tags, Alt attribution and off-page optimization such as social sharing tools and bookmarking tools.

 Search engaging marketing (SEM) is defined as a form of Internet marketing that involved the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS) through optimization and advertising(2).

If you look deeply at these two definitions, you will find the clue that SEM is comprised of SEO tactics and other search marketing tactics such as pay per click (ppc) and advertisements as well. As I mentioned above that SEM is to promote a website by increasing its visibility in search engine results, so that means to increase your website visibility on the search results, you need to use SEO first and then you use SEM to promote your website through paid search marketing.

Read more on SEO and SEM at https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/seo-sem-faqs

How to use Hashtags for a powerful marketing.

The main purpose that most companies use social media for is either popularity or profits. For-profits, companies use Hashtags for viral marketing which is described as an advertising strategy in which a controversial topic or issue is presented in a very exciting or interesting way that thousands of others will immediately share and repost the information. However, it is not easy for a starting brand to be popular on social media and to get a lot of followers and engagements. Therefore, the best way to make money of your social media account is to learn how to use hashtags for marketing your social media account and your marketing campaign. But, before I jump to the right use of hashtags, remember that hashtags are a sword with two edges. You all remember what happened with MacDonald in 2014 when they fault using hashtags on Twitter and response to a tweet on their chicken nuggets saying “please stop saying bad things on our good food”.

So, this example shows you how hashtags can destroy a trust that you may spend years to build between you and your customers. Another example of using hashtags successfully for the marketing campaign is Red Bull #PutACanOnIt. Though the hashtag was created by Red Bull, it was inspired by a photo the company found on Twitter wherein the photographer is seen holding a Red Bull can above a Mini Cooper to make it look as though it was a trademarked Red Bull car. The trend exploded as people around the world began creating their own images with Red Bull cans placed in unique positions.

Now, Let’s learn how to use hashtags successfully for your marketing campaign.

1. Keep your brand hashtag consistent and unique, and use it on all of your social sites.
2. Make campaign hashtags for your social contests and promotions, to generate more engagement and awareness of your marketing efforts.
3. Keep your business hashtags relatively short, so they’re easy to remember (and spell) for your consumers.
4. Monitor your brand and campaign hashtags to respond to people using them.

Read more on how to use hashtags for your marketing.

https://www.slideshare.net/TPG_Direct/how-to-create-a-successful-hashtag-marketing-campaign