F.A.Q.S





SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Our approach to SEO begins with a comprehensive, manual audit of both your website and competitive landscape. From that, we’ll know what your top priority tasks are and what can come down the road. We look at metrics such as indexing, relevancy, and crawlability or as we like to call them in the SEO space on-site, off-site, and technical optimizations. These factors determine Google’s placement of your site in search results.


Although social media is a huge driver of traffic and sales, failing to do the work for great SEO is a wasted opportunity. Regardless of how much engagement you get on social media, optimizing your site for Google and other search engines is a good business move. There are some customers that won’t ever find you through social media, so throwing the net a little wider can turn out huge results.



SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is the most powerful marketing tool of the past decade. It is perhaps the easiest and most effective way to get your brand in front of potential customers. Social media allows you to gather a community of returning customers that support and buy from you. It is also the perfect platform for ad campaigns.


Although some social media platforms are more effective than others when it comes to running ad campaigns and building a following, each has a different strength, weakness, and userbase. We don’t recommend that you pick just Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn—we’re going to run them all if they make sense for your business needs! Covering every base is important. That way, you’ll always be there for potential customers.


This is something that requires trial runs and testing out different content. Social media content strategy will vary depending on what your goals are. All types of posts can get great engagement when done correctly, whether it be text posts, images, polls, giveaways, direct messages, or something more. We’ve found the best strategy is to use them all if they fit in with your business goals.



PAY-PER-CLICK

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a streamlined way of getting ads in front of a target audience. In most cases, an advertising platform will sell targeted ad space to a business or marketing team. Due to the high volume of traffic that the advertising platform sees, it can pretty much guarantee a reasonable amount of clicks-given you can pay for them.


Pay-per-click is a lucrative form of advertising due to its targeted nature. As such, you’ll be paying slightly higher prices in return for more effective ads. This question is one of the most commonly asked, yet one of the hardest to answer.

The cost of your PPC ad campaign is going to depend on how long it runs, what demographics it targets, and how many advertisers are competing for ad space in the same market, keywords, or demographic.


While targeting the right demographics is important, choosing the correct keywords will give you the greatest bang for your buck when it comes to PPC. That being said, finding the right keywords can be a process, and will certainly require some trial and error.

When it comes to trying out different keywords, you need to know where to pull a good list from. There are lots of online resources for this. Some of our favorites are your website’s own analytics, watching industry trends, Wordstream, and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.


Pay-per-click is one of the most popular forms of advertising, and as such is an option on nearly every advertising platform you can think of. You can deploy PPC ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google search, LinkedIn, Ad Roll, and more.

Some of these platforms will be more effective than others or offer a wider reach. You should experiment with each of them to see what is best for your business. For example, Google’s PPC is more keyword-focused compared to the demographic-focused Facebook PPC campaigns.


There are a few areas that you can focus on to contribute towards your click-through rate and the final return on investment. Targeting the correct keywords and keyphrases as well as selecting the most effective demographics has a huge effect. Utilize A/B testing and market research to nail these down.

Another part of a PPC campaign that is often forgotten is the design and copy of your ads and landing page. If your ad is worded poorly, and the landing page is not intuitively designed, you shouldn’t expect a great conversion rate.



WEB DESIGN

Website design is important and can have a major impact on your traffic and conversion rates. There are reasons for this both aesthetically and in the context of SEO as well. Aesthetically, a website that is easy on the eyes and a breeze to navigate will keep users on the domain for longer. They will trust the company; good design makes researching and buying products easier for the consumer.

In terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a website that is designed effectively will decrease load times. In turn, this causes your site to be ranked higher on Google searches for the right keywords. Even something as simple as getting the images formatted correctly can return better results.


Web development and web design are two adjacent disciplines but serve different purposes. Web design is centered around the actual look, feel, and navigation of a website. This includes color schemes, menu placements, banner images, and much more.

On the other hand, web development is focused on what is happening behind the scenes of the same website. It’s what you don’t see, but what makes all the magic happen. This could be things such as domain management, website maintenance, data analytics, or other developer responsibilities.


Web design is important, particularly when it comes to eCommerce and other similar businesses. When choosing the platform to host your site on, it’s easy to get paralysis from all the options. The sweet spot is a platform that offers you the design freedom you need at a cost you can afford.

To go more in-depth on platforms you might want to take advantage of, check out our blog post “Top 3 Ecommerce Platforms to Market Your Business.”


Making your website mobile-friendly is one of the top SEO trends in 2022 for good reasons. Website development is moving away from being desktop-centric toward more mobile-friendly design and architecture.

Google is shifting the criteria for its SEO rankings, favoring your mobile site design. This may just seem like an extra layer of formatting to deal with, but it’s worth more than just an SEO boost. Globally, website visits from mobile devices have grown from 6% to 56% in the past 10 years alone! More users access websites on mobile devices vs desktops. To create the optimal user experience, mobile-first design is the accepted standard.


If you are fiercely independent and want to get your hands dirty, you’re in luck! There are plenty of platforms around the internet that will build a website for you, allowing you to tweak a template to represent your vision. These are useful and some are affordable, so why would you hire an agency?

Business owners hire agencies to do the web development and design of their sites because they view it as an asset to invest in. They are paying money in exchange for the professional skills and years of expertise that an agency brings with it. Because a website can make or break sales, this is the most common reason for hiring an agency.

See what web design from N2Q looks like here!



BRANDING FREQUENTLY

Your brand is the image of you that others have in their head. We’re not just talking visually, either. A company’s branding is the way everyone perceives it, and a business has the ability to mold that. You shape brand identity through more than just a logo.

Here are some key elements of a brand:

  • Brand voice (tone and language)
  • Color palette (primary and secondary colors)
  • Typeface (fonts and title designs)
  • Logo (symbolism)
  • Niche (experience or specialty)
  • Tagline (slogan, jingle)

Your brand is an integral part of your business. The correct branding will immortalize your company’s character and value among consumers. When you create a powerful brand image, you’ll build trust and your marketing will begin to produce higher returns for simpler campaigns.

Branding is important because it defines what your business does, why it does it, and who it’s for. The right branding will attract your target market and convince them of your superiority within a niche. For example, Apple’s emphasis on cleanliness and simplicity in their branding has aided the company in its efforts to establish itself as a straightforward and superior family of products.


Creating a brand is never quite as straight of a shot as you would expect. The process of branding your business should be lengthy and include multiple revisions. It’s important to clarify what your purpose, background, and aspirations are as a company. Once these values and the underlying story of your business is settled, you can create a cohesive brand.

The visual appearance of your brand is one of the most important factors. Everything from the color palettes to the fonts should be picked for a specific reason. To create effective branding you must consider your audience, the feeling you want your brand to evoke, your industry and more. Both aesthetics and research play important roles in branding.


While there are certainly overlapping characteristics between marketing and branding, they are not the same. Both represent what your company is and what it can do for your customers, but you can’t market without a brand! This is because the brand is the basis and the backbone of your company’s appearance, while marketing attempts to cater this image to different demographics.

You might compare a brand to your physical features, like your height and face shape. These define you, but are unchangeable. Marketing, on the other hand, is the clothes and accessories that you put on. Your style may change, but your identity doesn’t.


Branding your business is one of the most pivotal moments of its lifetime. This will dictate the impression that every possible customer will get when they first encounter your business. Branding is both an art and a science, bringing together design, market research, psychology, legality, and more together under one logo.

For these reasons, many successful business owners opted to hire on the knowledge and expertise of a professional marketing agency. When you are attempting to juggle every aspect of creating a company, your branding may suffer. Bring on board an agency that can create a branding package as unique as the business itself.



CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is exactly what it sounds like: Distributing content for marketing purposes. This may include things such as social media posts, blog articles, help guides, masterclasses, e-books, and more! These are targeted towards a specific audience to both attract and retain viewers, visitors, and possible customers.


At first, it may seem pointless to spend time and money putting content out onto the internet as a newly minted business. After all, isn’t the product or service the focus? Shouldn’t every cent go towards research and development? Content marketing doesn’t return as immediate of results, yet is just as important as other factors of a business strategy.

Content marketing positions your business as a subject matter expert, likewise building trust in your brand by providing educational info (and even entertainment). This same content is used by Google to rank your website through SEO standards, and building a following on social media brings similar benefits.


Curating your content correctly can make huge improvements to your SEO ranking as a business. There are many different factors that play in good SEO. For example, the length of your content and the quality of your inbound and outbound links tells Google that you are a reliable source of info.

Even the little things matter. Issues such as duplicate content will dissuade Google from bumping you up on the search page. The more relevant keywords your writing includes, the higher you will be placed.

Something as simple as even content refreshing is valuable to SEO as it shows the crawlers that a section is important as it is getting refreshed and updated content. Good content tends to be organic and growing, so where you can refresh or update key aspects of your content it is a best practice to do so.


Putting together and executing a good content marketing campaign can be straightforward, but the process may take longer than expected. Everything from your strategy to the content creation itself is often more complex than expected. Here’s a rough path to follow for effective content marketing:

  • Strategize: What is your brand’s purpose? Who are you trying to reach? What topics will be your focus?
  • Choosing channels: How will you distribute this content? (social media, webinars, flyers, SEO, etc)
  • Create content: Not just any old content will do! Create high quality content that your target demographic will consume.
  • Analyze: Your content marketing will be much less worthwhile without gathering the results and using the data to improve.

Few things are as difficult for an owner as managing content marketing alongside daily operations and other logistical responsibilities. This is where marketing agencies come in. Your content marketing goes a long way towards building a brand image, so it should be a priority. Hiring an agency means that you have a team of professionals making sure your content is informative and worthwhile.

For an idea of how this can change your brand’s online presence, head over to the N2Q Social Media and SEO pages.



EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing is one of the most well-known channels for engaging with consumers, yet it is becoming more overlooked each year. Email marketing is the usage of email campaigns to grow brand recognition and boost sales. With email clients, teams can now personalize and segment emails to better fit their chosen demographics.

Social media posts only reach some of your followers, but emails reach every inbox on your mailing list. It is a streamlined and effective way of touching base with your community.


The grand purpose of email marketing is to create a more personalized relationship with your customers. The direct line of contact makes email marketing a perfect tool for:

  • Strengthening customer relationships
  • Building credibility for your brand
  • Boosting sales
  • Targeting specific leads
  • Increasing your brand recognition
  • Creating more traffic to your website

Email marketing is one way to get in front of customers, but how do you know if it’s effective? This generally comes in the form of analytics. There are three particular ways we like to analyze the results of an email campaign:

Click-through rate shows us how many viewers proceed through your sales funnel. Bounce rate tells us how many emails never reached their destination. Sales increases can also be tracked by examining the time frame of the email campaign.


Email marketing includes content such as newsletters, promotions, and stories. These help your customer stay “in the know” about new opportunities and deals, as well as strengthening your relationship with them.

Other emails might include welcome emails, shipping confirmations, and other re-engagement emails. All of these can be co-opted for marketing purposes.


Email marketing is a key driver of website traffic, engagement, and ultimately sales. We know that each email matters, and that’s why we take care of them for you. Letting an agency handle your campaigns means that every email will be as thorough and effective as possible. Then, you can focus on what matters most: business.