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Website Hosting Explained

Posted on March 9, 2023March 17, 2023 by Phil

If you’ve ever wondered what website hosting is and why it’s important, here’s an example for you.

Picture Earth as the Internet.
Then imagine your website is a house in a town or city, in a country on earth.
And finally, your domain name (eg. www.back9.co.nz) is the physical Street Address.

So your domain name points people to your physical address… That’s how people know where to visit you right? Just like a website. We could get really complicated and say the more interesting your house is or the more exciting the things are that going on there then the more people will be searching for it. But now we’re talking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and that’s a whole other topic.

Website Hosting – Who owns what?

Just as a physical house needs a foundation, framing, plumbing, and electricity to function, so too does a website need a ‘server’ for hosting in order to exist on the internet.

When you’re living in a house you need to pay rent for that house right? Or if you buy it, you need to maintain it. You need to pay for rates and insurance etc. In most cases you can think of website hosting (using the house comparison) like you own the house but lease the land. In some cases with Proprietary systems like Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace, you are leasing the house too. Whilst you may own the things within the house (furniture etc = content) you don’t actually own the website (the house).

Hosting is the foundation of your website.

It’s what keeps your site online and accessible to visitors 24/7. And just like the physical house analogy, if any one of those essential components is missing or not up to par, your website will suffer as a result.

That’s why it’s so important to understand what you are getting in terms of website maintenance and hosting – and what are you actually paying for.

The Three Pillars of Quality Website Hosting: Speed, Security, and Support

When it comes to quality web hosting, there are three main pillars that must be taken into consideration: speed, security, and support. Let’s take a brief look at each one.

Speed

In today’s fast-paced world, people have little patience for slow websites. In fact, according to Google, 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That means if your site isn’t loading quickly, you’re losing out on potential customers or leads. When choosing a web hosting provider, be sure to find one that offers fast page-loading speeds.

Security

Another important factor to consider is security. Your website is vulnerable to attack from hackers who could potentially wreak havoc on your business if they gain access to sensitive customer data like credit card numbers or social security numbers. A quality web hosting provider will offer features like malware scanning and protection, as well as firewalls and other security measures to help keep your site safe from attack.

Support & Maintenance

Finally, it’s best to ensure you get more than just hosting. Website maintenance is a key ingredient in winning online, as it ensures your website is running smoothly. On the internet, things are constantly changing. Website browsers like Google Chrome, update frequently, as do third-party systems you may integrate with – such as Mailchimp or Facebook. By investing in a proactive maintenance plan alongside your website hosting, you can rest assured your website will stay up-to-date and relevant.

Now that you know a little more about what goes into quality web hosting, you will understand the importance of paying for quality. Find out how much it costs to host a website here.

SharpSpring and Salesforce: An Honest Comparison

Posted on March 7, 2023April 3, 2023 by Phil

Are you business owner or marketing manager looking for CRM software? If so you probably want to help streamline your operations and increase efficiency. And you may be considering either SharpSpring or Salesforce. Both of these platforms offer powerful features that can help businesses succeed. So in saying that, it is important to understand the differences between them. Let’s take a closer look at both SharpSpring and Salesforce to see which one is the best fit for your business needs.

Pricing

When comparing SharpSpring and Salesforce, pricing is an important factor to consider.

SharpSpring offers 4 plans ranging from $450/mo to $1,150/mo, depending on the size and scope of your business. All plans include unlimited users and standard features such as email marketing automation and lead management.

With Salesforce, there are 3 tiers of pricing ranging from $25/user/mo to $300/user/mo. The more expensive plans include additional features such as AI-powered customer service tools and advanced analytics capabilities.

SharpSpring and Salesforce Features

In terms of features, both SharpSpring and Salesforce offer comprehensive solutions that can meet most businesses needs. Both platforms offer lead management, contact management, email and marketing automation, website tracking, reporting & analytics capabilities, customer segmentation capabilities, and more. However, one key difference between the two platforms is that SharpSpring includes a built-in webpage (landing and blogs) builder. While Salesforce does not have this feature included in their plans. This means that with SharpSpring you can easily create custom Landing pages without needing any coding expertise or technical knowledge – something that could be a major advantage for small businesses that need to quickly create professional websites without breaking the bank.

The final Choice

Ultimately when it comes down to choosing between SharpSpring and Salesforce it all depends on your business needs and budget. While both platforms offer powerful features that can help businesses succeed in the long run they do have different pricing structures with slightly different features available at each level so it’s worth doing some research before making an investment in either platform. It’s also worth noting that both companies offer free trials so you can test out each platform before committing to a plan – giving you peace of mind knowing you’re making an informed decision about which platform is right for your business needs!

SharpSpring by Constant Contact

Posted on February 28, 2023April 3, 2023 by Phil

If you’re a business owner or marketing manager, you know that standing out from the crowd is essential. To do this, you need a comprehensive platform that can help you manage your lead generation, customer relationships (CRM), and over-arching marketing/sales campaigns. Enter SharpSpring by Constant Contact—a market-leading platform that can help you maximize your ROI and optimize your customer experience. Let’s take a closer look at what this platform offers.

What is SharpSpring?

SharpSpring by Constant Contact is a comprehensive marketing automation platform designed to streamline lead generation campaigns and customer relationship management (CRM). It helps businesses analyse their data to gain greater insight into their customer’s needs and preferences. Additionally, it allows users to create an unlimited number of automated campaigns with ease. This helps them target leads more accurately while saving time on manual tasks.

SharpSpring also offers a variety of integrations with other platforms. These include; MailChimp, Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and many more. These integrations simplify campaign setup and help users easily track performance across multiple channels so they can make informed decisions about their future campaigns.

Some SharpSpring Competitors in the Market

The main competitors of SharpSpring are:

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to help businesses of any size grow. It provides a range of features including automated workflows, personalized content, and analytics, in an effort to help companies build better relationships with customers and drive marketing ROI. See a comparison of Hubspot vs SharpSpring.
Salesforce

In 1999, the founders of Salesforce had a bold vision to create a customer relationship management system that was hosted on the internet and could be accessed via subscription. This ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) model was soon adopted across the tech industry. And has since revolutionized how companies manage their customers.
Act-On Software

Act-On marketing automation is designed to help businesses take their campaigns and lead nurturing to the next level. It provides useful features such as data analytics, integrations, and automated workflows, helping companies gain more efficiency in their marketing initiatives. With Act-On, users can explore endless possibilities in terms of creativity, testing, and launching new campaigns.
Infusionsoft (by Keap)

Infusionsoft (by Keap) is an all-in-one small business platform that streamlines and automates marketing, sales, operations, and customer service. It helps businesses save time by providing powerful tools for automation, lead management, and customer relationship management. With Infusionsoft (by Keap), users can create more personalized experiences for their customers and drive more engagement with their businesses.
ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a powerful communication and marketing automation platform designed to help businesses reach their goals. It combines multiple features, such as email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), and more, into one unified solution. With ActiveCampaign, users can create automated workflows, segment their contacts for targeted campaigns, and track customer journeys for improved engagement.
LeadSquared – Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)

LeadSquared is a comprehensive lead management and marketing automation platform for B2B organizations. It helps businesses acquire, nurture and convert leads into customers by providing powerful features such as lead scoring, behavioral analytics and segmentation. LeadSquared enables users to create targeted campaigns, track customer journeys and gain insights into their customers’ behavior to help them close more deals and increase conversions.
Ontraport

Ontraport is a marketing automation platform designed to help businesses increase their profits. It offers a comprehensive suite of features, such as email marketing, sales force automation, and advanced analytics, which allow users to create personalized campaigns and track customer journeys with ease. With Ontraport, businesses can segment contacts for targeted campaigns, gain insights into customer behavior and automate processes for maximum efficiency.
Autopilot

Autopilot is another marketing automation platform designed to help businesses increase their customer engagement. It provides advanced features such as email campaigns, journey mapping, and automated processes that allow users to create personalized messages for their customers and track conversations along the customer journey. With Autopilot, businesses can understand their customer base better, deliver more effective marketing campaigns and streamline customer engagement processes.
SendinBlue – Email Marketing & Transactional Solution for eCommerce Businesses & Enterprises

Sendinblue is a comprehensive marketing automation platform designed to help businesses reach their target audience and increase their sales. It offers advanced features, such as email campaigns, automation journeys, and segmentation capabilities, which allow users to create personalized communication for their customers and gain insights into customer behavior. With Sendinblue, businesses can increase conversions, analyze customer data and automate processes for maximum efficiency.
Eloqua (Oracle)

Eloqua (Oracle) is a comprehensive marketing automation platform designed to help businesses increase their revenue and engage customers. It offers powerful features such as email campaigns, journey building and analytics that enable businesses to customize messages for each customer interaction and track engagement in real-time. With Eloqua (Oracle), companies can understand their audiences better, deliver effective campaigns and improve overall customer experience.

Each of these platforms provides different features and capabilities depending on the user’s needs. For example, some offer basic contact management tools while others have advanced CRM capabilities that allow users to track customer interactions across multiple channels. Ultimately though all of them are powerful tools when it comes to managing marketing campaigns and optimizing lead-generation efforts.

The Benefits of Using SharpSpring by Constant Contact

SharpSpring is a powerful marketing automation tool designed to help businesses take their marketing efforts to the next level. This platform allows users to manage campaigns and track customer data in an effort to better understand their customers and increase their ROI. With SharpSpring, users gain access to a suite of features… These include email marketing, social media management, landing page creation, lead tracking, and more. Let’s take a look at what makes SharpSpring by Constant Contact such an effective tool for businesses.

There are plenty of benefits when it comes to signing up with Sharpspring for business owners and marketing managers such as:

Targeted Lead Generation

With Sharpspring’s detailed analytics system business owners can better understand their target audience’s buying habits. This is so that they can craft more effective campaigns in the future. This will allow them to generate more leads through targeted advertisements.

Automated Campaigns

With SharpSpring’s automated campaigns businesses can save time on a number of manual tasks. This includes such things such as creating content or sending emails which will help increase productivity levels significantly over time. Additionally, automated campaigns allow businesses to send personalized messages at scale which improves the customer experience greatly compared to generic mass emails sent out without any personalization or customization options available.

Accessibility

This is straight out the biggest benefit in our eyes. Having used a range of CRM and Marketing Automation software in the past, they all do mostly the same things. But I feel that the accessibility to almost any business is the biggest selling point here when it comes to SharpSpring…

Unlike other platforms where users have limited access unless they pay extra fees or upgrade their account, with SharpSpring all users have full access. And that’s regardless of their account type or budget size. This, therefore, makes it accessible for smaller businesses that may not have large amounts of money available for marketing expenses due to its low cost compared to other providers in the market today!

Agency Partner Support

Back9 Creative is an Agency partner of SharpSpring by Constant Contact which means our clients get access to one-on-one support from our knowledgeable team who have extensive experience in utilizing this powerful platform both strategically & tactically giving them an edge over their competition when it comes time to execute their digital strategies!

Benefits of Signing up with SharpSpring

When you sign up with SharpSpring, you’ll have access to all of these features and more. In addition to being able to design custom landing pages and track customer data in real time, you’ll be able to schedule automated emails and monitor your social media performance from one unified dashboard. All of this can be done from anywhere at any time – no need for expensive hardware or software downloads! Plus, with Back9 Creative as your Agency Partner of SharpSpring, you’ll get expert support whenever you run into issues or need advice on how best to optimize your campaigns.

SharpSpring having been recently acquired by Constant Contact, is going to become one of the most popular marketing automation solutions on the market today. This platform offers business owners and marketing managers an effective way to increase (and measure) ROI while staying ahead of the competition.

Plus when signing up with Sharpspring you get full support from Back9 Creative as your Agency partner of Sharpspring by Constant Contact which will help Amplify your business even more!

If you’re looking for a reliable marketing automation solution that’s packed with features yet still easy enough for anyone to use – then look no further than Sharpspring!

Bounce Rates Demystified: What Does It Mean for Google Ads?

Posted on February 23, 2023March 10, 2023 by Phil

If you’ve ever heard the term “bounce rate” and wondered what it meant for your business, you’re not alone. In this blog post, we’ll break down what a bounce rate is, how it affects your Google Ads campaigns, and what kind of bounce rate is considered healthy. So let’s dive in!

What is a Bounce Rate?

Simply put, a bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave without taking any other action. These are people who come to your website, take one look around, and then click away to never return again. This could be due to a number of reasons; either they found what they were looking for or they didn’t find anything that interested them. Regardless of the reason, their visit resulted in no conversions or sales; hence the term “bounce”

How Does Bounce Rate Relate to Google Ads?

When you run a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign through Google Ads, you want to make sure that your money is being well spent and that you are seeing a good return on investment (ROI). This means ensuring that the ads are targeting the right people. Furthermore with interesting content that encourages them to stay on your website. And long enough to take some sort of action like making an inquiry or purchase. If people are bouncing from your website quickly after clicking on one of your ads, then it means 2 things.

Either they weren’t interested in what they saw or;
They weren’t finding what they were looking for.

Either way, it means those clicks are essentially wasted money since no conversion was made. So in terms of the path to conversion, is your website doing as much as it could?

What Is Considered A Good Bounce Rate?

A good bounce rate really depends on the type of website you have. And can vary greatly depending on factors such as industry and user expectations. Generally speaking though, anything below 40% can be considered good. While anything above 80% should be looked at more closely. As this may indicate there’s something wrong with how users interact with your site. Or even with how relevant and effective your ads are at targeting potential customers.

Understanding bounce rates is key when it comes to understanding how effective your PPC campaigns really are at driving sales for your business. Knowing this information can help you make changes if needed in order to ensure that each dollar spent on advertising gets as much bang for its buck as possible! Being aware of these numbers will also give you insight into areas where improvements might be needed so that you can optimize future campaigns accordingly. After all, isn’t that why we use PPC in the first place? To drive results! So keep an eye out on those bounces! They tell an important story about whether or not users like what they see when they reach your site after clicking one of those shiny new ads!

Facebook: To Boost or Not to Boost? That is the Question!

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Phil

So you’ve got a Facebook page, and you’re trying to reach as many people as possible. There are a lot of moving parts when Marketing your business on Facebook. You’re hearing that boosting Facebook posts is the way to go, but should you really be boosting every post? Let’s find out!

What Does it Mean to Boost a Post?

Boosting a post essentially means paying Facebook for more attention. When you boost a Facebook post, it reaches more of your followers (or whoever you target) on their news feeds. And then it can be seen by more people who follow the same interests as your target audience. It’s important to note that when you boost a post, it will only be seen on Facebook. And not on other social media platforms.

When Should I Boost Facebook Posts?

It’s important to consider that boosting any old post might not be worth it. There needs to be something special about the content for it to be worth spending money on. If your post contains an event announcement, a discount code, or some other kind of exclusive offer, then boosting it can be beneficial because more people will see the offer and take advantage of it. However, if your post doesn’t contain anything noteworthy or valuable enough that would make someone want to engage with it further (such as clicking through to read a blog article), then boosting won’t really do much in terms of gaining traction or engagement from users.

It’s also important to consider that boosted posts have an expiration date – usually within 7 days. So if you’re looking for long-term exposure for your content then boosting might not be the best option either.

What are Alternatives Ways I Can Get More Exposure for My Posts?

If boosting isn’t right for you at this time, or you’re not sure. Don’t worry. There are still plenty of other ways you can get more exposure for your posts without breaking the bank. You can share your posts on other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram; use relevant hashtags in order to increase visibility; add links back to your website; comment on related posts; join relevant groups and communities; engage with influencers in your industry; use paid advertising options like Google Ads; and create high-quality content that gets shared organically through word-of-mouth (this one takes time but is definitely worth it!).

Boosting Facebook posts has its benefits but also its drawbacks – so is it really worth putting money towards every single one of your posts? Or are you better off actually running targeted ads (yes there’s a difference) The answer depends on what kind of content you’re posting and what kind of results you want from them. If you’re posting special offers or announcements then yes, boosting could help get those out there faster – however, if your goal is long-term exposure or better organic reach then look into alternative methods instead. Ultimately though, only time will tell if investing in each individual post was the right move or not!

10 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT In Your Marketing Right Now

Posted on February 16, 2023May 16, 2024 by Phil

You might be thinking, “What the heck is ChatGPT?” Well, here’s what you need to know…

ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence tool taking the virtual world by storm. ChatGPT can help you automate a range of things, including your marketing tasks. And whilst you may be asking will AI Put an End to Google, Content, and More? Well, it’s not likely in the near future at least, but in this blog post, we’ll discuss 10 ways you can use it in your marketing right now. So without further ado, let’s get started!

Person-using-AI-and-ChatGPT-on-a-mobile-phone

With ChatGPT, you can easily create and schedule social media posts for all of your channels. Simply enter in the text of your post, select the date and time you want it to go live, and hit “schedule.” It’s that easy!

2. Send out automated email campaigns

Have a newsletter or promotional email campaign that you need to send out? With ChatGPT, you can easily create and send automated email campaigns to your entire list with just a few clicks.

3. Use ChatGPT to Create landing pages

Want to create a landing page to capture leads or promote a product? AI makes it easy to create beautiful landing pages that are optimised for conversion.

4. Generate leads:

With ChatGPT’s powerful lead generation tools, you can easily collect leads from your website and turn them into customers.

5. Create and run Facebook ads with ChatGPT

Need to create some Facebook ads but don’t have the time? With ChatGPT, you can easily create and manage your Facebook ad campaigns from start to finish.

6. Analyze your marketing data

Not sure how your marketing efforts are performing? ChatGPT provides detailed analytics and reporting so you can see exactly how well your campaigns are doing.

7. Build custom reports

Want to build a custom report to track specific KPIs? With ChatGPT’s reporting builder, you can easily create custom reports to track any metric you want.

8. Automate customer support with ChatGPT

Marketing Automation has been around for years and we know it’s a powerful tool. With ChatGPT’s AI-powered customer support tools, you can easily resolve customer issues and keep them happy without lifting a finger.

9. Get insights from chatbot conversations

Not sure what people are saying about your brand on social media? With ChatGPT’s chatbot analysis tools, you can get insights into what people are saying about your brand on social media and take action accordingly.

10. And much more!

These are just some of the ways you can use ChatGPT in your marketing right now. To learn more about how these tools can help you automate your marketing tasks, sign up on their website!

There’s no doubt about it—Artificial intelligence is a powerful marketing tool that can help you automate many of your marketing tasks. So if you’re not using it in your marketing right now, because you don’t have time, then chat with us about how we can help. What are you waiting for?