December 8, 2023
​

This Week's Top Marketing News

Storytelling Through Visuals: Crafting Compelling Graphic Narratives

Use of storytelling in marketing has become a very popular and proven to be extremely effective for reader retention.

Visual components like photographs and illustrations hold a vital role in storytelling. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Not just any image will do. The visual elements you use should support and help tell the story spelled out in text.

Graphic novels and comics do an excellent job leveraging illustrations to tell a story with text to help guide along the way.

One effective visual storytelling marketing strategy is using infographics to help present complicated information in an easy to understand format. Dive into this article by Siddhita Upare even more to learn more.

Fish Food: Don’t make the images in your blog posts, landing pages, and website copy an after thought. Content creation focus on engaging the reader to help convey a message that will cause them to take action. Storytelling is a great method to help the reader relate and can be more influential with well chosen visuals that support and tell the story.

Read More

---

Vote Neon Goldfish as the Best Web Designer/Developer in Toledo

A big thank you to everyone who has reached out and congratulated us for being nominated. We appreciate your support and votes. Remember, you can vote for us one time every single day until December 15th. Not that we're asking you to do that but it would be super-sweet if you did.

Vote Neon Goldfish Best in Toledo

---

How To Turn ‘Meh’ Ideas Into Marvelous Content - The saying goes… no idea is a bad idea. But, what if it’s not the most exciting idea?

Boring or off the wall ideas can come from anywhere and sometimes from someone that has a lot of influence in the company. Rather than simply dismissing their idea, Content Marketing Institute has a simple structure to help explore the idea and determine if it can be molded into a keeper or should be filed away in the “maybe never” file.

This reminds me of the time that Justin wanted to deliver baked cakes to prospective customers to get their attention. Sorry for squashing your dreams buddy.

​

The Supreme Court is Set to Consider Giving First Amendment Protections to Social Media Posts - Right now, social media platforms have complete power to remove, promote, or limit the distribution of any posts as they see fit. Some people look at this as a positive by having someone police and filter out potentially harmful or untrue content. Others feel this is a violation of the First Amendment and these platforms should not have the authority to determine which content can be seen and which content is suppressed.

Love it or hate it, this could all change soon.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear 5 cases in the first half of 2024 where they will “reexamine the nature of content moderation - the rules governing discussions on social media platforms such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) - and the constitutional limitations on the government to affect speech on the platforms.”

This stemmed from oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court in October of 2023 where plaintiffs argued that elected officials using their social media accounts could not block constituents from posting comments on their pages. They argue that social media platforms are digital versions of public spaces like sidewalks and parks which “must remain open to free and robust conversation and debate”.

Additional items to be evaluated is if online discussions on social media platforms should not be considered the same as public forums and censorship considerations to minimize harmful speech supporting criminal and terrorist activity.

​

7 Sales Tips from Brent Beshore - Bryan Harris of the Lessons & Ideas podcast shares 7 sales tips he found in a simple tweet from Brent Beshore. These simple tips do a fantastic job of removing unnecessary complications from the sales process.

1. Sales is like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. My advice is you walk up and hit the ball.
2. Sales is about problem-solving and people. It’s not about solutions, technologies, chemicals, lines of code, or artichokes.
3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only… these 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval or peace of mind. If you try selling something other than these 4 things, you will fail.
4. People always buy aspirin (always) and only occasionally buy vitamins at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin.
5. All things being equal, people buy from their friends. So, make everything equal and make a lot of friends.
6. Being valuable and useful is all you’ll ever need to do to sell things. Help people out consistently and they will find ways to give you money.
7. No one cares about your quota or your payroll… they care about the problem you’re solving for them. There’s more than $100 Trillion in the global economy waiting for you to breathe it in.

---

7 Writing Tricks to Influence Your Website’s Dwell Time

Dwell time is the length of time a from clicking the search results to returning to the search engine to conduct another search. Search engines use dwell time as an indication of how well the search term used to visit your site aligns with the content on your website. A longer dwell time tells the search engine your site is a good match for that keyword increasing the likelihood that page will continue to rank for that keyword. This make dwell time kind of important.

Orbit Media crafted 7 writing trick to help influence your website’s dwell time.

1. Emphasize Content Introductions - Set up your articles with a hook and preview of what the visitor will learn if they continue reading. This helps them quickly understand what they’ll receive if they slow their scan and spend time reading the article.
2. Provide Scannable Structure - Most readers like to scan articles so format your copy to make it easily scannable with subheads and short paragraphs. This will make your text feel more inviting to read.
3. Use Bucket Bridges - Make sure your content sections flow together and use short sentences at the end of each section to build curiosity and make the reader want to continue reading.
4. Place CTAs - Use a call to action in the introduction or consider placing a unique value proposition in the middle of the body formatted in a slightly different way so it stands out.
5. Write Long Content - Quality, long-form content gives the reader more information to read taking them longer to consume it. Pretty straightforward.
6. Use Custom Visuals and Tools - Forego the stock photos and create engaging images that support your text copy. Consider incorporating a quiz, video, or infographic for the reader to interact with.
7. Include Relevant Links - The dwell time clock keeps moving if the reader moves on to another page of your website. Include relevant links inside your copy that leads the reader to other engaging content on your website.

Fish Food: All of these tips follow solid content creation practices that will not only help you increase dwell time but also deliver a better overall experience for your site visitors. Review your website analytics and identify popular content. Look for ways to optimize these pages of your website to increase dwell time increasing the overall quality.

Read the Article

---

Only around a third of ad dollars reach ‘intended audiences,’ ANA finds - One of the primary goals of all marketers is to maximize ROI. So, what happens when you find out that not all of your ad dollars reach your intended audience? You lose your frickin’ mind.

The Association of National Advertisers conducted a study of $123 Million in ad spend to find out where the money goes. This included 35.5 billion ad impressions between Septmeber 2022 and January 2023 from 21 brands like Nissan, Discover, and State Farm. They found only 36% of ad spend on demand side platforms actually reached their intended audiences an 23% of programmatic ad dollars went toward made for advertising website which are typical clickbait.

They suggest to use inclusion lists rather than exclusion lists to limit the gray area the algorithms can operate within. This is the main problem with letting platforms manage ad spend instead of humans. Robots are not always smarter.

​

Why a content gap analysis should be part of your SEO strategy - Content gap analysis is a tool to identify keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. This is an extremely helpful tool for conducting keyword research and uncovering new keywords to include in your marketing strategy. Content gap analysis is best done using specialized software that allows you to compare your website content against competitors. Neon Goldfish includes a content gap analysis with our SEO audit so hit us up if you’re ever interested in learning more about how this strategy can help.

---

30 Quick Ways to Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate

Getting fresh faces to your website is awesome but traffic alone is not enough. Most businesses want website visitors to perform a specific action before they leave their website. These actions are called conversions and should be a website KPI you’re paying attention to.

CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of making changes to your website to increase the number of actions a site visitor takes when visiting your website. You know, all those things you wish the people visiting your website would do like fill out a form to schedule a meeting, request a demo, join your email list, or download your killer ebook.

This article from Social Media Today shares 30 ways you can improve your website conversion rate packaged into a visually appealing infographic.

Some of our favorites include:

• Limit forms to as few fields as possible. Reduce friction by only asking the site visitor to provide essential information for the conversion.
• Use tangible action verbs. Avoid generic action verbs like “Click Here” or “Submit” and use more actionable text like “Start Receiving Industry News” and “Download 8 Easy Ways to Get More XYZ”.
• Clearly state the benefits of your product of service. Features and benefits do not sell, benefits and value does. Make it easy for the site visitor to understand how you are going to help them solve their problem.
• Create dedicated landing pages for pay-per-click ads. Stop sending targeted traffic to generic pages of your website… like the homepage. You cannot hope that visitor you just paid to come to your website finds what they should be looking for. Make it easy for them.
• Incorporate strong calls to action (CTAs) into every piece of content on your site. Clearly state what you want the site visitor to do and present it multiple times/ways throughout your content.

Be sure to click the button below (see what we did there) to read more.

Fish Food: Expressing gratitude and appreciation, thank you pages contribute to building positive interactions and relationships with your potential customers. So, start expressing your thanks on these pages to cultivate lasting connections and ensure visitors feel love beyond their initial interaction with your site.

Read More

​