Chicago Digital Marketing

What is Website Marketing for Chicago, IL Small Businesses?

Simply put, digital marketing throughout Chicago is advertising your products through online channels like websites, search engines, social media, email, or mobile apps.

Digital marketing means SEO or PPC advertising to most Chicago organization owners. While both of those services are used in internet advertising, neither fully explain the depth of a modern online advertising program for Chicago-based businesses.

Today's website advertising services often include dozens of digital marketing tactics, all working in tandem to help you increase visibility and conversions throughout Chicago, Illinois or nationwide.

The best Chicago internet advertising plans will include plans like:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, apps, sales funnels, etc) by using SEO, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, or paid advertising.
• Increase revenue for your Chicago small business through landing page creation, sales funnel development, and conversion rate optimization.
• Analyze how visitors navigate your digital assets to figure out improvement areas, retargeting opportunities, and conversion rates.
• Build trust in Chicago by using content marketing, video production, backlink authority building, reviews, and social proof.
• Create and nurture relationships with email, SMS, and social media.

If you live in Chicago, you probably love the Chicago Bears football team. Go Chicago Bears! In addition to marketing Chicago-area websites, our website marketing company also offers Aurora, Bloomington, Decatur, Elgin, Joliet, Naperville, Palatine, Peoria, Rockford, Schaumburg, Skokie, and Springfield small businesses and large corporations a professional digital marketing service.

Our Digital Advertising Services for Chicago Businesses

We're a team of online marketing professionals, just 194.1 miles away, who know and understand the latest website marketing trends for Chicago small businesses. We've helped drive traffic and drive conversions across more than 100 business industries in Chicago, and the rest of the country, so let's work together.

Search Engine Optimization Plans for Chicago, IL Businesses

To bring your website into the first page of search results throughout Chicago for competitive phrases you must take a holistic approach to search engine optimization within your website marketing plan. To show value to search engines, you need to review your off-page, technical, and on-page SEO.

Oftentimes, we find glitches with website performance, content quality, and backlink quality when we take on new businesses in Chicago. Each of these search engine optimization glitches can be resolved through technical, on-page, and off-page search optimization. Here's what each Chicago search engine optimization plan offers:

• Technical search engine optimization services for Chicago small businesses involve things like site speed, web hosting, website security, XML sitemaps, site architecture, structured data, and broken links. These affect how Google reads and traverses your content, and how visitors interact with your Chicago site. You'll typically need Chicago website developers to fix technical SEO issues, since they're often related to your website's platform or theme. Our developers are skilled in Shopify and WordPress.
• There are several factors involved with on-page search engine optimization for Chicago websites, such as content writing, internal linking, competitive analysis, frequently asked questions, page titles, meta tags, images, keyword research, content silos, and content writing. Improving these areas of on-page SEO will allow search engines to better understand the value of your content and recognize you as an authority on the subject matter within Chicago or the entire country. In addition, it will help increase important metrics like "time on site" for your visitors, which shows search engines you provided something of value to the search user. Content creation is an important part of your Chicago online advertising strategy.
• In Chicago, off-site SEO basically involves your backlink profile, which is the number of backlinks and domains pointing to your site, the naturalness of your anchor text and link velocity, the authority and relevancy of your backlinks, signals from social media, and more. It is important to drive natural backlinks to your website's homepage and interior pages to help search engines understand your Chicago website and content is deemed worthy of third-party recognition.

Your Chicago internet marketing plan can't be limited to just one or two parts of an SEO plan. A fast website that doesn't have content or backlinks isn't likely to rank on page one of search results. It's the same for other scenarios where two parts of SEO have been optimized, but one was ignored. Ensure that your Chicago competitors (and national competitors) can't just pass you by completing all the search engine optimization checklist items.

Chicago, IL Backlink Authority Building Strategies

We've discussed off-page SEO briefly, but it's worth mentioning again since Chicago business owners don't usually understand this part.

When you look at the first page of search results for competitive keywords and long-tail phrases, you will almost always find large retailers in product-specific search results and long-standing service providers in local Chicago search results. If you further review the exact pages of these search results you will often find the number of backlinks to those pages is far greater than your own relevant pages. That's because search engines use backlinks to figure out how authoritative a website is in its industry.

Using white-hat SEO link building plans, you can improve your own web pages by building quality backlinks to your homepage and interior pages. It is critical to see this as a long-term endeavor for your Chicago digital marketing strategy. Be consistent though! Don't start building backlinks for a few months and then shift your focus to some other search engine optimization plan for months or years. That lack of consistency is likely to prevent you from ever seeing your website in the first page of Chicago search results. Establish a link-building tactic that will build quality backlinks to your Chicago website from relevant pages and social accounts. You want to keep your Chicago website's backlink quality natural by not overusing exact-match phrases, buying tons of backlinks from private block networks (PBNs), or doing anything else black-hat.

When it comes to Chicago digital marketing, we use numerous white-hat link building techniques, including:

• Using the "Skyscraper Technique" to get a bigger, better version of a competing article.
• Writing in-depth articles to have featured on third-party websites as a guest post, which includes a link back to your Chicago website.
• Reaching out to high-authority websites to suggest content improvements to existing articles that may have become outdated, or didn't cover a specific topic relevant to your Chicago organization.
• Replying to HARO requests from journalists looking for expert opinions and feedback.
• Getting your website listed in industry-specific directories by scanning Chicago competitors (or national competitors) to find their most valuable business listings and NAP (Name, Address, Phone) citations.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) Tactics for Chicago, IL Businesses

Search engines use your online reputation in Chicago to determine rank positions, and your target audience uses it to make buying decisions. All kinds of decisions are made from this reputational signals, from choosing a local service provider in Chicago to shopping online or hiring a doctor or attorney for a personal matter. People love to read about the good and bad experiences others have had with your Chicago brand.

We can help Chicago organization owners develop a review generation program within their digital marketing to increase the rate at which past customers leave reviews. Usually this means collecting reviews on Google My Business, Yellow Pages, UpCity, Angi, Yelp, and other sites.

For ecommerce companies, we can help collect product reviews and company reviews. For an ecommerce business, it is important to collect reviews for both the quality of your products and the customer service experience of your Chicago storefront. Online shoppers in Chicago want to know the product they are purchasing is of sufficient quality or utility, but they also need to know you will be there to fulfill the order and answer questions after the sale.

For professional service providers, such as Chicago doctors or Chicago lawyers, we can help set up protocols for the collection of testimonials in your digital advertising service to make sure prospects always see a positive view of you. For example, we can collect reviews, monitor reputation, improve negative feedback, implement surveys, and improve your Chicago website's social presence. In some cases, even SEO can be used to help curate the best possible first-page results for your online reputation in and around Chicago.

When you ignore your online reputation, you risk losing long-term business, which often isn't noticed until it's too late. Don't let your localized competition take advantage of your online reputation. Take control now!

Chicago, IL Content Marketing Strategies

Businesses in Chicago use content marketing to attract, engage, and retain high-interest audiences by creating and sharing relevant blogs, instructional videos, case studies, white papers, and other digital content. This website advertising approach for Chicago websites helps establish your company as an industry thought leader, while also helping you dominate organic search results and the attention span of your target audience.

When your target customers in and around Chicago begin to identify your brand as the source of valuable advice or guidance you will find it is easier to guide them through your sales funnel. We help Chicago digital marketing clients put together the right content marketing plan for their specific industry and goals.

It is important to identify your target audience before starting a content marketing plan. This will help you understand the best media format for the content, whether that be informative blog posts, detailed case studies, informal whitepapers, best-in-class listicles, or drip email campaigns. It will also help you determine the best delivery method, which can be from social media, search results, or some other medium.

We often help implement content marketing tactics that involve blog content, custom graphics, infographics, podcasts, videos, email campaigns, whitepapers, case studies, surveys, webinars, checklists, listicles, and lead magnets. We particularly like using the case study method because it is a powerful tool for showing expertise as a leading Chicago internet marketing agency. These are all effective ways to market content if you implement them correctly within your Chicago small business.

Social Media Ads Services for Chicago, IL Small Businesses

The use of social ads in Chicago digital marketing involves PPC advertising being run on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. These social media channels offer a quick and effective method for connecting to your target audience by allowing you to select interests, behaviors, and demographics. However, the downside can be the added cost of setting up the campaigns, creating landing pages, building out sales funnels, and performing conversion rate optimization to ensure the paid advertising function as a proper lead gen or sales generation tool for your Chicago company.

By leveraging the data sources of social media platforms, advertisers can hyper-target their audiences to deliver personalized content based on demographics, behaviors, interests, and other factors. While this is an enormous opportunity for most established Chicago businesses, it can be an expensive method for businesses that aren't ready to take full advantage of social ads.

Our social media ads agency helps Chicago small businesses build out the necessary sales funnels and lead generation tools to make the most of their social ads. Our social ads company also recommends putting in place plans for conversion optimization and retargeting within these Chicago internet marketing services, both of which will help improve the return on ad spend you see within your campaigns. Let's not forget to mention the freshness of your ad creatives. When running social media advertising services, you must be mindful of ad decay and ad fatigue to prevent your campaigns from becoming stagnant and suffering from degraded performance.

Search Engine Ads Solutions for Chicago, IL Organizations

The use of Chicago search ads in digital advertising involves paid advertising being run on search engines like Google and Bing. You will find that Google campaigns and Bing ad campaigns offer a quick and effective method for connecting your Chicago company to an engaged audience that is actively searching for your products or services. The downside is the cost of setting up an effective and scalable paid advertising campaign, which often involves the creation of landing pages or sales funnels that are optimized for conversion opportunities.

We help businesses of all sizes build out the necessary landing pages and funnels to drive leads and drive revenue, which makes PPC advertising a cost-effective Chicago internet marketing strategy. For any search engine marketing campaign in Chicago, we recommend creating a plan for retargeting and conversion rate optimization to improve your return on investment.

Funnel Development for Chicago, IL Businesses

A sales funnel, or purchase funnel, is the visual representation of your customer's journey with your Chicago company. The illustration of a sales funnel, which is often referred to as a marketing funnel or revenue funnel, looks just like a physical funnel you'd use to pour a liquid into a container. The top of the funnel is always larger because it illustrates the large number of potential customers that might interact with your Chicago small business. The funnel narrows at the bottom to represent the various exit points within the sales process. Naturally, the bottom of the funnel is the smallest part because it represents the number of people who converted through the generation of a lead or the sale of a product.

The use of a sales funnel for your Chicago small business is more difficult than the explanation of its concepts. For example, some of the most successful sales funnels produce millions of dollars of value each day for their Illinois organizations. To develop a sales funnel that produces value for your Chicago business, you must put thought into the goal of the sales funnel and the type of sales funnel you want to implement.

There are numerous types of sales funnels, including premium customer funnels, free plus shipping funnels, affiliate sales funnels, self-liquidating funnels, automated webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, and dozens of others to consider. When you work with one of our digital marketing professionals, you will have an experienced internet marketer to bounce ideas off to help you determine the best type of revenue funnel for your business. Alternatively, if you don't have an interest in being involved in the process, we can research more about your business and industry to determine the best funnels to explore and test within your Chicago online marketing service.

Conversion Rate Optimization for Chicago, IL Small Businesses

There is almost no reason to neglect CRO within Chicago digital marketing tactics. This is a critical aspect of any type of internet marketing in Chicago since it directly impacts the ability of the marketing service to provide value for the small business or large corporation paying for the marketing service.

Boosting conversion rates can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Before you pursue a CRO plan, it is important to understand what it is, how it works, and how to evaluate the service. This is a time-intensive process that involves plenty of iterative research and testing. What makes it most difficult is the CRO tactics that work for one Chicago company might not work for a different Chicago business, even when both are in the same industry.

The most common CRO strategies include reducing form fields on contact forms, testing different call-to-action phrases, creating appealing headlines, implementing a sense of urgency, fixing mobile website issues, improving website speed, adding exit-intent popups, defining value for the visitor, and adding trust and social proof signals.

True conversion rate optimization for Chicago websites can become much more complex. To really dive into CRO, we must fully understand your business offer, your competitors, the strengths and weaknesses of your value proposition, how visitors are currently interacting with your digital assets, your online reputation in Chicago, and many other factors.

Email Marketing Services for Chicago, IL Businesses

You can use email marketing plans within a digital plan to grow brand awareness, boost website traffic, drive sales and revenue, bring awareness to your social profiles, engage past customers, and gain valuable information about your target audience.

We help our Chicago internet marketing customers use Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact for their email marketing campaigns. These are robust email marketing tools to create subscriber lists, segment your audience, and even develop email marketing drip campaigns.

The most important part of email marketing is developing a plan to generate your subscribers. We help Chicago email marketing customers build and nurture their email marketing lists by implementing email collection opportunities within lead magnets, exit-intent popups, checkout processes, lead magnets, exit-intent popups, checkout processes, and numerous other methods.

Lead Generation Tactics for Chicago, IL Companies

For local service providers in Chicago, the most important part of an inbound marketing program is lead generation. Not everything can be sold on the internet. For a lot of products and services, a phone conversation or in-person conversation is needed to close the sale. For these types of business industries, Chicago lead gen plans are going to be critical.

There are many types of lead generation strategies to consider, all of which have been tried and implemented by our digital advertising team at some point in the past. The most common lead gen plans include the creation of helpful content, retargeting past website visitors, nurturing past contacts with email marketing, engaging visitors with live chat, developing free tools for visitors to use, creating referral programs and affiliate programs, creating video content that can be shared online, setting up free webinars for visitors to attend, and offering helpful downloadable content in a lead magnet.

For most online marketing services where lead generation is a primary goal, our team will develop and implement one or more lead gen strategies in your digital assets to test what works best for your Chicago small business.

Video Marketing for Chicago, IL Organizations

As a full-service digital advertising firm for Chicago, we have our own in-house video production and video marketing department. This has been extremely helpful for content marketing strategies that required innovative video assets. More importantly, we've used our video production department for the creation of video ads on YouTube and video marketing within Facebook Ads campaigns. There are many good applications for video production within your Chicago website marketing plan. You can use videos to demonstrate unique products, teach new concepts, and improve visitor duration. You can also implement videos within Chicago digital marketing campaigns to bring life to paid campaigns.

Why You Should Invest in Digital Advertising for Your Chicago, IL Website

If you run a business in Chicago that sells products or services, you're going to need marketing to increase sales. You might be thinking about Chicago internet advertising plans over other, more traditional, marketing plans. Let's go over some of the great reasons to implement website advertising plans within your Illinois business:

• Digital marketing is often more affordable than other forms of marketing because it can be started at a low amount and scaled as success is measured.
• With valuable reporting tools like Google Analytics, you can learn how many visitors interacted with your brand, how long they stayed on your website, and if they came back to your website in the days, weeks, or months following their first visit.
• There's no shortage of phones, tablets, and desktop computers in Chicago. Why not choose a marketing format and medium that is able to follow your target audience anywhere they travel in Chicago or throughout Illinois?
• With digital, you can update it a lot more easily than with print, billboards, television ads, or radio commercials.
• In Chicago, digital advertising is one of the best ways to engage users. You'll have to work hard to get people to like, comment, and share your non-digital ads in Chicago!

How to Develop Chicago, IL Internet Marketing Campaigns

To start your online marketing service for your Chicago business, you need a plan with measurable goals. Your team needs to know what the business's ultimate goal is so you don't spend time on things that won't help.

1.) Identify your target audience

With a clear set of business goals in place, you can move on to identifying a target audience. It is important to understand who you are targeting in Chicago or beyond. Your Chicago website marketing efforts will be more effective when you use platforms your target audience is on and messaging that makes sense with them.

2.) Assess the requirements of your target audience

Now that you know your business goals and your target customer, you can make an informed decision about their needs and search intent. This will help ensure you focus on the right keywords for your Chicago website advertising and you align your content marketing strategy with the needs of your audience.

3.) Launch slow progress marketing strategies at an earlier stage

You should make search engine optimization your first priority if you're planning on using it eventually within your Chicago digital strategy. In internet advertising, SEO moves the slowest. Search engines take weeks or months to recognize and index the edits you make to your website, your content, and your backlinks.

4.) Develop effective landing pages or funnels of high quality

You should consider PPC advertising for your Chicago small business. You should consider creating a landing page or sales funnel instead of sending paid traffic to your service page, home page, or product page. Chicago paid advertising campaigns with high bounce rates and low conversion rates typically send traffic to a page that's not optimized for converting cold traffic. The best Chicago lead generation tactics employ the use of splash pages and sales funnels to lead people to the desired marketing outcome.

5.) Create automated email sequences for retargeting

Now that plans are in place for bringing traffic to your Chicago website, you should consider how to best interact with those visitors after they leave your website. You can't expect everyone who visits your website, landing page, or sales funnel to convert. Consider options like email marketing, SMS alerts, or tracking pixels to retarget recent Chicago website visitors.

6.) Plan for continuous testing

When these Chicago website advertising plans are in place you are ready to enter the testing and optimization phase. Monitoring the success of your campaigns, searching for areas for improvement, and even splurging on new ideas you read about in case studies or white papers. In every aspect of your Chicago digital advertising service, you should be optimizing conversion rates.

Why Choose WebCitz for Your Chicago, IL Internet Advertising Strategies

Our goal is to be your Chicago company website marketing partner! When researching Chicago website advertising firms, there are a lot of factors to consider. With more than 18 years of experience, you know you can trust the Chicago digital marketing tactics we suggest for your organization. These are often the same Chicago internet advertising tactics we use for our own lead generation and conversion rate optimization services. Our own online advertising campaign likely landed you on our website from Chicago.

Our digital marketing agency should be your choice for your Chicago small business because you feel we are the right team. We are only a short drive of 2 hours and 59 mins away from you in Chicago, or mere seconds away from a phone or email! Here are a few reasons we suggest considering our internet marketers for your Chicago marketing services:

• Our company has been around since 2004, so we have over 18 years of experience.
• We get most of our leads and new customers in Chicago from our own website marketing plans.
• You probably found us in Chicago after searching for a service we offer.
• We don't outsource Chicago digital marketing plans because we have our own team.
• You'll probably get an answer within a few rings if you call during regular business hours.
• We're consultants in WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify for any Chicago website marketing plans that need web development or web maintenance & support.
• We are actively engaged in ecommerce marketing services to help online retailers reduce ad expenses and increase return on ad spend in their digital advertising.

When it comes time for your small business or large corporation to start the search for Chicago internet marketing agencies, we hope you keep our online marketers in mind for the task. To start a discussion with the helpful staff at our online advertising agency, just send us an email or give us a call.

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