BookAuthority.Org features our Book in “99 Best LinkedIn eBooks of All Time”
It is quite amazing to find out US-based ‘BookAuthority.org‘ featuring the Book authored by Marcom18 Founder Vikram Jethwani in the ’99 Best LinkedIn eBooks of All Time’ globally.
“I’m grateful to everyone who find such initiatives useful. We aspire to help out more and more businesses with digital tools and technologies that can create value for them and the people they serve. Being a B2B digital marketing agency, it is our goal to maximize the value we add to the businesses we assist,” said Vikram Jethwani.
Check out the complete list here: https://bookauthority.org/books/best-linkedin-ebooks
As featured on CNN, Forbes and Inc – BookAuthority identifies and rates the best books in the world, based on public mentions, recommendations, ratings and sentiment.
Why Your Ecommerce Site Needs Customer Reviews?
This article explains why user reviews are important for ecommerce websites in Kuwait and the United States than ever before.
Why they are becoming so relevant in a digitalized world?
There are five main reasons why reviews are one of the most important things for online stores.
- Reviews create trust.
This happens because they are independent opinion from people like you and me — the consumers.
It is not a brand sponsoring itself. But actually real people talking about their own experiences in using the product. A study reveals that the product that has only positive reviews sells more than a product with no reviews at all – about 70% more! This happens because people like to buy products which others found useful.
So if other consumers have tried this product before and reported they had good experience, at least you won’t have any surprises on the other end.
If you buy a product with no reviews at all. You don’t know what to expect from it.
What and this is actually what generates insecurity and frustration.
60% of Consumers Trust Reviews
- Better customer insights
Reviews are voluntarily generated in free format. This means they represent truly what customers want to say without any possible filter. When purchasing a speaker, for example, all consumers might start by searching for reviews about the sound quality and what other users have to say about that.
- Point of interaction
Reviews are a sort of interaction between a brand and its clients. Brands can sell more to customers through reviews, starting a conversation with them.
Their feeling, their perception about the brand improves to a great extent.
- Reviews improve SEO
Reviews mention product name several times and some more important keywords that are used by clients to search for the product.
This text improves relevance of a web page and search engines like Google will see it positively when ranking this e-commerce page.
- Reviews drive sales
There are plenty of numbers that support these affirmations. In fact 95% of people read reviews before purchasing anything, and more than 80% of them make their decision based on what others say.
Customers trust reviews as much as they trust their family and friends. Reviews are beneficial not only for the product but for the e-commerce site itself.
Another study shows the result of adding reviews. 42% of users reported increase in average order value with the inclusion of reviews.
So it’s a win-win for a ecommerce site in Kuwait, the US and all over the world.
I hope this explanation gives you a clear understanding about the role of reviews in e-commerce.
If you wish to know how you can encourage users to publish more reviews about your products, write to us by filling up the contact form.
Magento Vs Shopify Vs BigCommerce: Which eCommerce Platform Is The Best?
In this blog, we’re going to talk about the three major e-commerce website platforms – Magento, Shopify & BigCommerce.
Probably if you’re an e-commerce business you probably fall into one of these two buckets: you’ve built your business on retail and you’re looking to now grow your business online or you are already an online business and sell all of your products or most of your products on the Internet.
Well, I’m going to talk about all the three of the main platforms that you’re probably going to want to think about using now.
This blog is intended to be a general overview of pros and cons and the major platforms that you can use. There are other ones that say that they are e-commerce. They have e-commerce capabilities, but they don’t really compare to these three, in terms of robustness, stability and scalability.
So let’s talk about the first one i.e. Shopify.
I’m going to go through the pros and cons of each of them and who probably like types of business each platform would be right for. Shopify probably is the most popular one and there’s a reason it’s the most popular.
It’s because it’s the easiest platform to start a small out of your garage side hustle business. It is super easy to start. It’s just a little bit harder than maybe opening a Gmail account another benefit or a pro is that has some of the most beautiful themes out there meaning you can make your website look, fantastic just by buying a theme off of a Shopify designer or developer and there’s thousands probably millions of them to choose from so you can really make your website your own individual website.
Let’s dive-in into some other benefits of Shopify. It comes with a built-in blog so you can get your blog right away. That’s great for SEO. That’s another benefit of Shopify.
It’s relatively low cost. Although they do take a percentage to assess any money coming in any time somebody buys your product, they’ll take a percentage of that. So merchant fees is there, but generally super easy to use.
It’s what I would recommend to anybody starting a new business from scratch without a lot
of funding; with zero technical knowledge – Shopify is the place to go and there’s even some big businesses built on Shopify. MGMT, for instance, is a watch company. They currently use Shopify.
Well, there are a few downsides too. The first one is that as you start to grow you start to have limitations with regards to the customization of the platform. So there’s limitations on the number of products that you can list.
There’s limitations on the customization between the apps or the plugins that you’re using to operate your business. Things like cart abandonment, retargeting, website pop-ups and rewards programs, you know website credit things like that that becomes major limitation as you start to grow your business into the $500-600K in revenue and beyond.
However, Shopify does have an enterprise-level version called Shopify Plus that comes in to help larger businesses customize their customers web experience their user experience because they have an API that you can tap into there’s just more customization that you can
use but it’s also more expensive starts at about $2,000 or 2,500 a month just to use Shopify plus.
One more downside of Shopify is that you have to buy several plugins to build your e-commerce engine. Some plug-ins come free of cost. But as you want to grow your machine and really start to integrate the full-scale ecommerce funnel, you have to buy plugins from their app Marketplace and that can get pretty expensive.
Plugins range anywhere from twenty bucks all the way up to a hundred plus and a lot of times these are monthly membership. So you can be paying you can be shelling out a lot of money just for plug-ins.
It’s now I want to talk about the next platform is BigCommerce!
BigCommerce is another relatively popular platform and it’s kind of the middle between Shopify and the third one.
I’m going to talk about Magento and the reason it’s sort of in the middle and I don’t mean middle and ranking. I mean middle in its features. It doesn’t have quite as beautiful themes as Shopify.
If you use a Bigcommerce theme, it’s like less likely to look like a lot of other websites out there. So you’re going to need somebody with coding and designing knowledge to create custom site in order to really set yourself apart.
But BigCommerce does come out of the box with more capabilities than Shopify without buying the plugins that you have to buy in Shopify. So BigCommerce just comes out of the box with a ton of capabilities that are ready to build your e-commerce engine.
So as you’re scaling up past five hundred thousand dollars, you really want a lot of customization and you would want to list more products — BigCommerce is probably going to be a little bit better for you.
Then the third one is super popular. I believe it is used by more companies than both of the first two combined. There’s a reason for that and that it’s highly flexible.
You can literally build whatever you want out of Magento. So, a lot of technical teams and developers love Magento because there’s not a lot of limitation but the limitations that the first two don’t have.
First off, the cost. The cost to use Magento is more expensive $500-700 a month is probably the average range. The other limitation to Magento is that it doesn’t have built-in hosting. So, you have to use a third party hosting provider to just build your website whereas Shopify, BigCommerce come with built-in hosting services. They have built-in hosting into the membership.
So if you’re just starting out Shopify is a no-brainer but if you have a budget and you have a development team, and you’re ready to grow fast BigCommerce is probably going to be your go to framework and it will also allow you to scale up pretty fast Magento!
It’s probably better if you have a technical team either on staff or an agency that is ready to do some crazy customizations right away. You want to grow fast or you already have a retail built business that you want to automatically integrate all of your functionalities and all of your products into Magento immediately with super custom features – Magento is probably the better fit for you.
Although BigCommerce really does compete with them, you know on a lot of these features
and things so that’s just a super general overview of the three most popular platforms.
Let me quickly mention a few other ones out there just so you know, they are out there. WordPress, for instance, has platform called WooCommerce. I didn’t really mention that one because it has a lot of glitches and it has a lot of shortcomings.
It doesn’t work quite as well and it’s harder to scale another. I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there that are going to argue and say it’s all it’s out of the box and all it’s easy to use. There’s just some small things in security, some small glitches that you just have to understand and know in order to make WooCommerce work for you.
Let me know your thoughts and if you require any assistance with your e-commerce business plans, do not hesitate to contact us via the below contact form.
Have a great day!
AnkWak Interviews Marcom18 Founder Vikram Jethwani
AntWak interviews Vikram Jethwani, Founder – Marcom18. The interview is featured in byte-sized videos over the AntWak mobile app available on App Store (iPhone) and Play Store (Android) as well the website.
Checkout the interview in the form of video series here: https://bit.ly/3aeUaob
Accelerate Innovation & Growth W/ Mikel Mangold
Innovation is key to growth and development. With this in mind, we bring to you Mikel Mangold, a France-based entrepreneur who has been enabling incubation of new ideas that shape the future.
In this episode of ‘Mind, Money & Body’ Podcast, Mikel shares his insights about innovation, diversity and getting out of comfort zone. Mikel had been working in the Silicon Valley, US before moving back to his homeland in France.
Stay connected with us to get more insights on holistic success.
iTunes: https://apple.co/2LyheTm
Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3dzqW3X
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2WitRbz
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Marcom18.India/
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Lhs1RSnCmO8
Connect via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vikramjethwani/
Do let us know your feedback, suggestions and ideas for the forthcoming episodes.
Thank you.
With Gratitude,
Vikram Jethwani
Digital Strategist & Founder – Marcom18
Digital Marketing Plan For Real Estate Companies: The Strategy For The First 90-Days
So are you getting ready to do your digital marketing for your real estate business, but you’re not quite sure what you should do in your first 90 days.
Well, that’s a pretty common problem to have, we all had it at one point and you are probably going to have it if you don’t have it right now.
So I’m going to be walking you through this strategy sketch for your first 90 days with your online marketing.
Get your website up
The first thing you’re going to be doing is that of course getting a high-quality website set up.
A lot of people I think have unreal expectations in your first 90 days of any type of marketing but especially digital and digital marketing takes some time to build some of those.
So if you’re looking at search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing or anything like that in your first 30 days, it is a bit premature to do that.
SEO takes quite a while for sure.
Even if you’re doing PPC marketing as will go into here in a little bit, you are not going to have your campaign styled into that first month.
So have realistic expectations about your first 90 days. Okay.
This is your foundation set up and then you scale up after that right next.
One of the biggest things is you need to have patience in these first 90 days.
Because if we expect the world to change in the first 90 days and you expect a flood of leads coming in, it won’t work that way – first you’re not putting a flood of marketing out there. Second, both organic and paid marketing takes time to shape up.
I’m not saying that you can’t get a flood of leads coming in the first round of these. You totally can, but you have to put a flood of marketing out there to capture that in order to show you how to do that.
It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens by stacking marketing methods and systems on one by one, right? So have patience and stack your efforts.
Well, okay, we’re talking website that converts. A website that looks great on mobile. Well, not just as mobile friendly but looks great on a mobile device and performs well on all the devices that convert a visitor into a customer at a high rate.
This is the number one factor that we focus on a ton, which is why our clients get such great results. So launch a website that’s the first thing.
Let your customers connect with you
Let people can make that connection with you. They can see there’s a real face, a real person behind this company not a nameless faceless entity because with this clutter in the market,
you may not have that top-of-the-mind recall.
So the way that you stand out is by telling your stories by connecting on a personal level.
Just make sure you’re personalizing your content that first day, the first two days and for the first three days of launching your website.
If you’re creating a website from scratch just write really good engaging content and work on real credibility, putting real testimonials, real stuff into it.
The next thing you’re going to do as soon as you can is put tracking in place on that.
You would want to use Google Analytics and it is advisable to put your Facebook pixel tracking pixel over there too.
I would advise to do that in the first couple weeks of getting the website because it takes 5 minutes to do or we can do it for you.
Then next what I would suggest you to do is really make sure you have your unique selling proposition (USP) nailed here in those first few weeks of your online marketing.
What is it about you and your company that kind of stands out.
SEO & PPC Marketing
Then you start to do some Google pay-per-click (PPC) if you have a budget and if you have $500-1,000 a month for that you can start and then scale it up from there.
You can always tweak your website as it goes. You can always add more credibility. You can always add your Better Business Bureau logo later. You can always add those things. We always are looking for progress not perfection.
So get that site out the door in the first two weeks build some basic credibility out there and then you can always refine it from there.
Begin with SEO as early as possible. Pick maybe 2-3 keywords to focus on for your Market that are high leverage keywords.
And then if you have a tool to track your rankings, maybe start to put those keywords in there to track how your rankings are going.
Capitalize on Social Media Marketing
So right over here, we put our Facebook retargeting pixel on which we teach you how to do in a blog post on our website and then over here in month two or three we’re going to start turning on retargeting ads on Facebook and same thing.
You’re going to be tracking and refining your SEO. You’re going to a coach
or someone that you can go to ask him for advice on how to improve your SEO build some backlinks and build some strong social media signals.
And in this time, you probably going to get some citations. Okay, so your website listed on Yelp and yellow pages and all those citations.
We suggest between 20 and 40 to start in that first 90 days.
Meanwhile, if you require any assistance, just contact us anytime and we would be happy to refine your organic and paid advertising strategy, and make it happen for you.
