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Digital marketing is constantly evolving, helping businesses reach consumers through technology. Since the rise of social media, entrepreneurs and marketers have put their efforts in creating relevant, engaging omnichannel content and have sometimes lost focus of the old-fashioned website. But as we entered the age of Big Data, we will realize how valuable websites are for brands.

Compared to the fast-paced world of social media trends, websites are stable and allow brands to gather and own information about their audience, which can offer helpful insights in the quest for a better ROI. However, attracting visitors is getting more and more difficult as the Internet has become so rich and diverse in options. Here are ten ways to boost your traffic and grow your business:

1. Ensure a Smooth Browsing Experience

Your website is your business card. A polished, professional-looking landing page proves to the customer your attention to detail. Keep things simple and intuitive and don’t spam your visitors with countless pop-ups. Technically optimize page structure and image file sizes to make it load fast.

Check readability on multiple devices, different operating systems, and browsers. Think a customer might search your brand on the laptop but might have to make an order from his tablet or smartphone. Also, consider optimizing the site with a chatbot. This will turn the passive experience of browsing into an active experience of having a conversation.

2. Content Is King

You have some many opportunities nowadays to create diversified, engaging content. Add a blog section to your site and share insights about industry information or your company’s journey to better products and services. Get inspired by your own customer questions, from Q&A forums and social media group topics.

Further on, invite experts and leaders relevant to your field of work to guest blog and return the favor. Moreover, keep in mind that writing is just one of the options to produce content. You can make use of infographics, videos, and podcasts. Webinars are also a great way to attract new visitors and promote your expertise, as long as you advertise them properly.

3. Get People’s Attention

Even if your content shines, if your visits are low you can lose a lot of ranking opportunities. Not to mention the fact that people often tend to click on the generally-approved option. That means having lots of traffic will generate even more traffic, as this study suggests.

If you are struggling to boost the number of visitors on your website fast, you can use a traffic generator like Babylon Traffic. You’ll score better in organic searches and also, you’ll gain new visitors who will label you as an authority website due to your popularity.

4. Make the Most of Your SEO possibilities

As Google’s ranking systems have embraced machine learning, the era of keyword stuffing and ultra-optimized empty content is gone. But SEO is not dead, it has just become more respectful to the user experience.

Optimize on-page by adding internal links to fresh entries and by using keywords in the file names and titles of images, but also in those of video and audio files. Look for long-tail keywords using Google suggest or looking at the related searches of an already discovered keyword. Use them in headlines, subheads, and meta descriptions.

5. Build a Community

Your brand is really growing when your new visitors come back to your website. And in order to make that happen, you need to encourage a sense of community through all your marketing and promotional efforts. Include annual surveys to assess the performance of your business, but also of your communication channels, including the website.

Include reviewing options on your site and have a responsive comments section. Build a solid e-mail list: reward visitors who want to commit to your brand by offering their e-mail address with coupons, free books and studies or free access to a webinar.

As a conclusion, websites can become a powerful tool in supporting marketing campaigns, as they allow marketers and managers to find out information about interested consumers and interact with them. http://bit.ly/2gGlMrL #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

There’s a scientific term for when a word or phrase is repeated so many times that our minds become unable to process its meaning: semantic satiation. We’ve gotten to that point with the relentless calls for digital transformation.

I think the reason that digital transformation makes our synapses go numb is not just because it is talked about so much these days, but also because it is so hopelessly vague.

What’s said to be meaningful about the phrase is that it tells us not merely to modify the business with technology but to completely transform it. And it positions digital-native startups like Uber and AirBnB as murderous bogeymen relentlessly pursuing analog businesses down a dark alley to their deaths if they don’t transform right now.

Ill-Defined Urgency

Digital transformation does a disservice because it creates tremendous urgency with little specificity on how to do it or where to start—other than everywhere and right away. That’s a recipe for disaster.

This has become a cyclical danger. Back in the nineties, we had a tidier term for digital transformation: reengineering. It even had its own catchphrase: “Don’t automate, obliterate.” The idea was to redesign your business from scratch using a blank sheet of paper, with technology as the enabler.

The concept caused a great deal of excitement at the time because it encouraged organizations to break down work into discrete sets of tasks called processes (yes, that was a new word then), and take a holistic approach to improving those processes across the entire business, all at once.

Name that Tune

Is this tune beginning to sound familiar?

Organizations went wild with reengineering and created open-ended projects that questioned everything and usually wound up, often years later, resolving little—except whether the consultants who charged by the hour would get that boat they were dreaming of (they did), and whether CIOs would catch all the blame when reengineering failed (they were).

In fact, organizations could not obliterate, they could only automate—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because so many processes were still being performed manually. The reengineering craze settled down into an incremental march of automation. It culminated in the great migration to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and client/server computing, in part to deal with the nineties’ business bogeyman—um, bug—Y2K, which threatened doom via a couple of missing digits in organizations’ old mainframe systems.

Looking back, many pundits proclaimed reengineering a failure because it did not create the kind of revolutionary change that its champions had promised.

That’s true, but what gets overlooked is the movement’s sole enduring achievement: It forced business and technology into a permanent embrace. From that point on, businesses could not advance without technology. Meanwhile, no matter how far technology advanced, its adoption depended on organizations’ ability to adapt.

Start Making Sense

Business and technology are still doing an uncomfortable dance today. Except this time, technology has advanced to the point where it finally is possible to obliterate. The Internet has become a ubiquitous platform, with technologies such as cloud, AI, and IoT powerful enough to topple old business models and create new ones. And today, there is powerful external pressure for change from customers armed with nearly five billion smartphones.

There are so many options to consider that organizations are overwhelmed. Nothingburger terms like digital transformation rush in to fill the void, making things seem less complex than they are.

But oversimplification doesn’t help anyone. That’s why the SAP Center for Business Insight developed a study with Oxford Economics—to see if we could put something of nutritional value in the nothingburger.

After surveying 3,100 executives, we were not surprised to find that despite all the hype about digital transformation, very few have actually done it: Slightly more than 100 said that they had completed at least a few transformation projects spanning the entire organization. Thus, like reengineering before it, digital transformation has, for the vast majority of organizations, already settled back into the incremental pace of change we’ve seen for the last 20 years.

Where to Start

So how did the leading 100 companies get ahead of everyone else?

By starting where change was needed the most: 92% said they have mature digital transformation strategies and processes in place to improve the customer experience, compared with just 22% of others.

The investments have already paid off: 70% of leaders have seen significant or transformational value in customer satisfaction and engagement, compared with 22% of others.

But beginning with the customer experience also has another benefit: It provides justification for making changes in other areas of the business that don’t directly face customers, but affect the experience. This turned out to be the key to the leaders being able to complete projects across the organization when others could not. You can’t argue with five billion smartphones.

The Link Between Adaptability and Progress

But technology still can only proceed at the pace that organizations can absorb it. That’s borne out by the 100 leaders telling us that change management was their number-one challenge.

This time, however, leading companies aren’t leaving change to the consultants and blaming the CIO when it doesn’t work out. Instead, they’re acting directly to make their employees’ lives easier and happier. That’s reflected in the fact that 66% of leader companies are focusing on eliminating process roadblocks that interfere with employees’ ability to do their jobs.

These organizations are also trying to reduce fear and uncertainty by investing in employees and the tools they need to do their jobs—48% of the top 100 leaders said that investing in digital skills and technology was most important for driving revenue in the next two years, compared with only 30% of others. The leaders are also five times more likely than other companies to say that digitalization has already changed their talent management, and more than twice as likely as others to say that the changes will continue over the next two years.

In these organizations, people really do come first. And the numbers prove it: 64% of leaders say that their employees are more engaged, compared to 20% for other respondents, with those numbers expected to rise to 90% and 56%, respectively, in two years.

The leading companies have figured out the link between organizational adaptability and technology progress. By improving skills and focusing on talent management, they make their organizations more responsive to change. And since change is now all about technology, they can move faster and farther along the technology curve than their peers: 55% of leaders are already working with advanced technologies like machine learning, compared to just 7% of their peers, for example.

Our study demonstrates that digital transformation will not happen overnight. But at least now we know where to start and how to make it successful. The trick will be to improve the balance between technology progress and organizational adaptability so that we can move beyond incremental, episodic change—and get off this diet of nothingburgers.
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For more insight on digital leaders, check out the SAP Center for Business Insight report, conducted in collaboration with Oxford Economics, “SAP Digital Transformation Executive Study: 4 Ways Leaders Set Themselves Apart.”

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Christopher Koch is the editorial director of the SAP Center for Business Insight.

This story originally appeared on the Digitalist. http://bit.ly/2gEck8j #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

SAP BW/4HANA is a new, next-generation data warehouse product from SAP that, like SAP S/4HANA®, is optimized for the SAP HANA® platform, including inheriting the high performance, simplicity, and agility of SAP HANA. SAP BW/4HANA delivers real-time, enterprise-wide analytics that minimize the movement of data and can connect all the data in an organization into a single, logical view, including new data types and sources.

SAP BW/4HANA Changes Everything

Join us for our next #askSAP Analytics Innovations Community Call on October 26 when we will discuss data warehouse solutions that can meet your current and future business analytics needs in a rapidly changing data landscape.

* SAP BW/4HANA: The Big Data Warehouse for the Digital Enterprise
* Date: Thursday, October 26, 2017
* Time: 8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 5:00 PT CET
* Duration: 90 minutes
* REGISTER

Agenda

During this live call, you will:

* Hear about the current challenges and strategic trends driving innovations for enterprise data warehousing in the market
* Discover how SAP BW/4HANA integrates structured, transactional data from traditional systems with the massive volumes of social and other customer behavioral data as well as sensor and other machine data from the Internet of Things
* Understand how SAP BW/4HANA fits into the complete landscape of solutions from SAP to enable the digital enterprise with SAP S/4HANA, SAP Leonardo, and SAP Analytics
* Learn the most appropriate path for you to adopt or transition to SAP BW/4HANA for the maximum value to the business with the least amount of disruption

Expert Panel and Speakers

Eric Leicht, enterprise data warehouse (EDW) Architect with JJ Keller, will serve as moderator for the call. In addition, our panel of experts will include:

* Andy Bitterer, Chief Evangelist, Analytics, SAP
* Vamsi Paladugu, Director, Data and Analytics, Katerra
* Glen Leslie, Analytics Architect, SAP
* Marc Hartz, Lead Product Manager, SAP
* Andreas Forster, Predictive Analytics Expert, SAP

Join the Conversation and Bring Your Questions

Have any questions and comments about SAP BW/4HANA and data warehousing? You’ll have the opportunity to engage with our panel of experts with interactive Q&A. But you don’t need to wait until the webcast—send in your questions in advance by commenting in this blog post or via Twitter at #askSAP.

Learn More

* Product information
* Community
* Related Blogs

For more information on  #askSAP Community Calls and past webinars, visit:   www.sap.com/asksap

This article originally appeared on the SAP HANA blog and has been republished with permission.  http://bit.ly/2gFgqNq #SAP #SAPCloud #AI