20 Stunning Social Media Templates for The New Year

November and December can be an exciting Holiday season, but designers can get super loaded with projects for creating various designs related to the new year. This ranges from promotional marketing offers, social media posts, and other digital marketing assets to even print media like postcards, invitations, and a lot more. Each year the designing trends vary, and based on that, designers have to pick up what works best for their project and use that to create effective designs.

The overload of new year-related designs leads to an overall dip in the quality of the designs. While browsing through social media, you will find many posts that are similar to each other. This happens mainly because designers spend less time creating original designs and using available ready-made designs. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using templates, but as a designer, you need to take care that you use creative and fresh templates that make your designs exclusive and stand out. To help you with that, we are proud to showcase these 20 amazing-looking social media templates for the New Year. 

1. Classy New Year Social Media Post in Golden Tone

The majority of designers will go for the routine red or green color for social media posts related to the new year. However, you can make your design stand out by using this very classy template with the new year wishes in the subtle background with a golden tone. The overall look of the post is very classy, minimal, and to the point. The light gradient in the background and formation of the Christmas Tree and gift using basic shapes makes the template a good choice for premium brands. 

2. Vibrant Colors Typography

If the first item was very simple, then this second is the opposite as it is very trendy and cool. The design is predominantly based on the smart typography created for writing ‘2022’. Vibrant colors are used throughout the design, and various party elements are sprinkled beside the number typography. The template is available in an editable format in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The designs are print-ready if you want to use them for New Year Party invitations or posters.

3. New Year Instagram Stories With Hand Drawn Illustrations

Instagram stories are at the moment one of the best ways to push out your content. Hence you cannot be left behind when wishing New Year through Instagram stories. You can use these ready-to-use stories that feature hand-drawn illustrations. In addition, it features two people in the party mode and many other party elements embedded in the design. There are four different designs available. You can either choose one or mix up the elements as per need.

4. End of Year Sale Instagram Bundle

New Year is incomplete with massive sales that the majority of the brands announce. If you are a Business-to-Customer company, you should also explore announcing an end-of-year sale for your brand. This Instagram bundle can be very useful for announcement posts. It allows you to wish your users a Happy New Year and offers a lot of creative ways to inform them about the sales. The bundle comes with a set of editable and ready-to-use stunning 60 animated Instagram stories and 15 posts. 

5. Social Media Post Template with 2022 Typography

For most of the projects, you will need to use standard social media post templates that adhere to the latest design trends. This editable template from Adobe Stock fits nicely for that. The base design is simple and uses basic shapes, flowing gradients, and contrasting colors. Four designs provide various content options, including event invitations and basic Happy New Year wishes. Because you get its editable file, you can always tweak the colors and content to fit your needs.

6. Chinese New Year Instagram Stories

The New Year holds a lot of important Chinese and other South-Asian people. If your brand wishes to target this demography, you need to design your creativity, keeping that in mind. This template can be very resourceful. It consists of 9 Instagram stories varied in color, design elements, and messaging, including sales announcements. The files are editable in Adobe Photoshop in the form of organized layers. The photographs are placed through simple, smart objects making it easy for designers to change them to add their photographs. 

7. Trendy New Year Cover Image Template

Apart from posts, you will also be assigned to create beautiful social media cover images. It is always a good idea to keep changing the cover images of your social media handle based on trending topics. This cover image template features two people with wine glasses in their hands and is well supported by new year party elements in the backdrop. The background is a heavy purple color, and new year wishes are set as nice typography. As you can access the editable file of the cover image, you can rescale it to use this image for all social media handle covers.

8. New Year Inspirational Quote Post Bundle

The New Year will also bring a lot of positivity and motivation, and a majority of this will be well displayed on social media in the form of quotes. We will see users reinforce their New Year resolutions in the form of inspirational quotes. This new year quote bundle package offers 100 quotes in PNG and JPEG format. They come with ready-to-post content. But if you need, you can always edit or add elements to the quote design. The good part is that these quote designs are very resourceful and can be used around the year.  

9. Trendy Christmas & New Year Social Media Posts

Many brands often wish Christmas and Happy New Year together and hence need such integrated posts. This pack of four social media posts comes with a combination of Christmas and new year. Both the festive wishes are included. The design overall is very trendy with the use of festive colors. Illustrations of standard festive elements like Christmas Tree, gifts, reindeer, and others, along with highly creative typography, are used. This template is highly recommended if you want to impress your userbase with your design creativity.

10. New Year Designs in Indigo Background

Time for change – is the message of this template, and it is very relevant. Designed on a good Indigo background, this new year’s social media template relies heavily on the number typography. 2022 is written creatively, including using a clock in place of number zero. Other than that, the design is kept simple, which lets the typography stand out in a better way. The design can be used in various forms for social media or even for New Year Party invites. 

11. Kids Related Instagram Stories Template

If you plan to wish Happy New Year through Instagram stories in a very loud and quirky way, then this template will be useful. The design of these stories is very smartly done. They include many elements related to the new year in the form of wine glasses, bottles, clocks, gifts, crackers, and more. There are four different layouts, out of which two layouts allow the use of photographs. You can use this space to personalize your festive greetings by including a photograph of yourself or your team, or your brand.

12. New Year Carousel Kit

Apart from new year wishes, many brands come up with creative content related to flashbacks or memories of the brand or people involved throughout the year. This New Year Carousel kit comes loaded with a variety of Instagram posts and templates that you can use for posting content related to New Year. While some of them are graphic-based, the majority of them are photograph-based. But the good part is that you get the editable files, so you can change the photographs or design elements as per need.    

13. Abstract Fireworks Instagram Stories Template

New Year is synonymous with fireworks in many regions of the world. The new year is always welcomed with a spectacular fireworks display. This sentiment is used in this Instagram stories template. Fireworks of different forms, sizes, and colors are created slightly abstractly. They are well placed on top of a dark blue background. These abstract fireworks make the stories look more creative and memorable. Because you get the editable files, you should add your branding in terms of logo and other content.   

14. New Year Party Instagram Post

Are you organizing a New Year Party and sending out its invites on social media? Then you need to get this template pack. You will get nine different creatives using which you can invite people for a party, wish them a new year, and inform them about your brand offers and other details. The design is kept simple with the use of basic elements along with photograph smart objects. Upon purchasing this set, you will get editable files nicely organized in layers, including smart objects for photos.

15. New Year Sales Instagram Story

Apart from standard new year wishes, you will also want to inform your users about the special end-of-year sale that your brand is offering. For that, you need to get this pack of new year’s sales Instagram story templates. The designs are flashy, and that helps you get users’ attention. It also allows you to include photographs of your brand or happy customers. Moreover, there is sufficient space for you to add your branding and all the sales details. 

16. Startup Style New Year Posts

While all corporates and customer-based brands are busy posting their new year greetings on social media, startups often feel left out. So we have specially included this template which has some highly creative social media posts for wishing the new year. The posts rely heavily on flat illustrations, which include standard startup design assets like idea bulb, hourglass, clock, target, and a lot more. When you get this pack, you get access to the open file, which you can use to change colors, text and add your own branding. 

17. Happy New Year Post Set with Flat Illustrations

Flat illustrations are one of the design trends you should use for your new year social media posts. This set offers six different designs for wishing the new year to the users. The overall layout and composition remain the same, but the festive elements keep changing along with the content placement. This is a smart choice for a template for brands who want to be perceived as cool, quirky, and trendy.

18. Oriental New Year Instagram Post

To add inclusivity to your designs, it would not be a bad idea to have oriental designs when posting the new year’s festive greetings. You can decide this based on your target audience. This pack of new year Instagram posts includes nine different creative designs. Orange and yellow are used as the base colors, and many design elements are set on top of it. The various designs include templates for promotional offers as well.  

19. Vibrant Social Media Cover Image

We have not missed out on including more social media cover images options. This template is very cool and can give your brand a very refreshing look. The year 2022 is written in fancy typography over a white background. Outline fonts are used above bold pastel color numbers, which is the highlight of the entire image. In addition, there are many new year party elements like masks, hats, confetti, and other elements. Do note that cover image sizes for all social media platforms are different, and hence you will have to use the editable file of this image to resize it.

20. Chinese New Year – Year of the Tiger

The year 2022 will be the year of the Tiger as per the Chinese calendar. Therefore you will observe many new year creatives using illustrations of Tiger or some other elements related to this majestic animal in the designs. This set of social media posts also uses a superbly designed Tiger Face illustration. The illustration is given a golden gradient based on black background, which makes it look further appealing. As the focus is on the Tiger, no space is given for other content. But you can edit and create space to add your branding. 

Conclusion

Designing social media creatives for the new year is a laborious and challenging task, given the huge number of such creatives made and shared. Hence designers must come up with something unique and creative, which makes the social media post more effective. The 20 design assets shared above have been collated from some of the most reliable sources. You can save time and use these templates to create visually appealing social media creatives for the new year.  

From all of us at WebDesignDev – Happy New Year!

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If you heard TikTok as the next big thing for optimizing marketing Return on Investment (ROI), you heard right.

Boasting a community of more than 800 billion active users worldwide, TikTok is the social media platform that you need to keep your eyes on for 2022.

No matter who your target audience is, you sure can find them on TikTok.

Leveraging the platform now would mean staying ahead of the curve. If you are in the B2C sector, this platform is even more critical to future-proof your brand success.

However, the question here is how?

Being present on the platform might give you the headstart but cannot deliver growth opportunities.

The true power of the platform is unlocked when you go beyond the basic optimization of your profile.

This blog post exactly answers this question. It gives you a complete roadmap on the ingredients that can help you grow your TikTok following in 2022.

5 Steps to create a highly Engaged TikTok account in 2022

Before we dive into the 9 factors that can prepare your brand’s account to draw massive engagement and traffic, it is critical to understand the foundations here.

TikTok has the massive opportunity of creating video content for your audience. However, the real engagement lies with its primary feed, the ‘For you page’.

This feature offers personalized content for each user based on their video browsing behavior history.

This means your content only stands a chance to perform when your audience likes your pages and videos, interacts with your content, or consumes them regularly.

The only problem here is that achieving this status is tricky.

You need the support of advanced techniques that can help you gain this position. What are these techniques?

In the following section, we take a look at these techniques.

1.  Know your audience

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This critical step might look obvious on the surface, but look closer. If you are not careful to find your audience, your content will inevitably fall flat.

To do this right you need to start researching your audience.

Before you lay out your strategy, map out your audience behavior. What kind of content are they consuming, when do they come active most frequently, what are their demographics, geographical locations. Get to know them.

With this data in hand, crafting content that is tailored for your target audience becomes much more tactical and result-driven.

Remember, the highest converting content always focuses on entertaining and educating its audience. This should be your primary goal here. This will help you foster real connections and build a community in the long term.

But this is not all.

There are many more strategies that you can use. Here are some advanced ideas on how you can learn more about growing your TikTok account.

 From creating short 60 second videos, participating in viral challenges, going live you test every format and optimize what works best for your unique audience.

Another key step to remember here is that your content should function as a lead qualifier by itself. There is no point in attracting traffic that is least relevant to what your business has to offer at the end of the buying funnel.

2.  Leverage technology

Tools might not look like an important element of growing your social media account. But believe us when we say, with the continuous growth of social media usage, nothing can help you better than social media management tools. They can leverage your way into growing your follower base in the shortest period of time.

While you are just starting, having a thin follower base is natural. At this stage growing your TikTok engagement can hugely benefit from TikTok growth tools.

Tools that help to reach your audience in the shortest period of time.

Although follower-increasing tools might not be a great option in the long term for engagement, it exactly solves your purpose during the initial days.

The sudden follower boost that these tools give to your account signals the algorithm of TikTok to promote your account with their relevant users.

From audience research to hashtag research, and follower growth tool, there is a tool for every critical task. Using all of these effects can take you one step closer to the engagement you want to achieve for your brand.

Here are a few tools that you can consider.

a)   Askattest

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When it comes to audience research, Askattest is a leading consumer insights platform that you have in hand.  No matter who your audience is and what you need to know about them, this tool makes it dirt easy for you to find insights that can help you create content that is tailored to your audience’s interests.

b)   InfluencerMarketingHub’s hashtag generator

Influencer Marketing Hub’s free hashtag generator tool helps you to generate relevant hashtags for your TikTok video in seconds. All you have to do is upload your video and wait till the tool generates your hashtags.

c)   FeedPixel

FeedPixel is a powerful social media management tool when it comes to managing your social media account on TikTok. You can use it to buy followers, views, and likes for your brand during the early days. The best part is it supports 75 languages.

3.  Optimize for visibility

If you thought optimizing your content quality and relea=vance for your audience would do the trick, then think again. Chances are you might get disappointed.

Here’s the thing.

You created awesome content for your audience, invested significant resources in it but your audience could not even find you. Does that sound like a mission accomplished?

On the contrary, it is far from that.

This is why hashtag research is so critical for ensuring content success on TikTok. It makes your content visible to a maximum audience that is relevant to the content. But, to do this right, you need to have a strategy.

Blend your hashtag category to create a well-rounded strategy. Include branded, trending, business-specific, and general hashtags. You can even add a few hashtags that target emotions.

Here’s an advanced hack.

While researching hashtags, you will see that TikTok will generate suggestions for you automatically. It also would show you how often the hashtag is used by creators across the globe.

If your content matches the context of any of these hashtags, chances are you can go viral.

4.  Build relationships

At the core of building a strong TikTok presence lies real human connections. Relationships that you grow with your audience through your content. However, here’s a little reality check.

You cannot create a robust marketing pipeline alone with TikTok. You need to think of your interaction with your audience as a whole. Take a 360º look.

A single point of interaction over TikTok wouldn’t develop your brand reputation in front of your audience. You need to integrate other channels too. Stay where your audience already hangs out. This would make your strategy comprehensive and alleviate the complete user experience of your audience with the brand.

Here’s what you can do.

Promoting your TikTok videos over other platforms is one of the best ways to improve outreach and engagement in the long term.

Ever noticed how many TikTok videos are viral on Facebook and Instagram? It is all because of the power of the cross-promotion technique for higher engagement.

Here, a key consideration is to focus on building a community. An ecosystem of like-minded people. Not only should you share your content, but you also need to ensure that you promote the content of other content creators in your niche.

This will help you boost your brand identity faster. But this doesn’t mean that you share other creators’ content that is not relevant to your unique audience. The sweet spot for you lies in content and audience relevance.

Yet another critical point to remember with TikTok engagement is that you need to actively engage with your audience. You are building a community here after all.

5.  Capitalize on Tiktok’s algorithm factors

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With time, marketing is increasingly becoming a game. Whether it is Tiktok or Instagram, understanding the algorithms and making your content appear on as many screens as possible is crucial to win this game.

Here are some of the top algorithm factors that you may want to consider:

1. For You page
2. User interactions
3. Account and device settings
4. Video information

But how will you make these algorithms work in your favor?

1. Make the first best impression
2. Use the most trending filters and sounds
3. Takes cues and tips from top Tiktok influencers
4. Keep the average watch time of your videos really short
5. Use the most trending hashtags
6. Leave your duet options open to others

Conclusion

TikTok is no doubt TikTok is the rising star of all social networking sites.

However, today’s truth still is that it is still not mainstream like other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Although it has already gained traction, it will be some time to become oversaturated.

Remember you still have the early adopter advantage. Leverage the platform right and you will experience a sudden spike of traffic and new customers even before you know. The best part?

Your brand presence can become dominant on the platform for your niche in the long term.

Author bio: Atreyee Chowdhury (LinkedIn)

Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Content Manager with a Fortune 1 retail giant. She is passionate about helping small and medium business owners and agencies achieve their content marketing goals with thoughtfully crafted SEO content. Be it long form articles and blog posts or website copywriting, email sequences or press releases, she has worked on every kind of format. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time.

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The XXI century is the era of flourishing of mobile technologies. It is difficult now even to imagine a person without a mobile device, and even more so a business person. Mobile technologies are present in almost all areas of business. Mobile ecosystems change and evolve daily through constant experimentation. Hundreds of apps are created every day for business, education, entertainment, and more. Each of these apps has a specific visual style and tone, depending on the direction and context of the app. Whimsy games – mobile app game development can be a good solution when it comes to a successful business app.

But what does the process of developing mobile applications consist of?

Idea

This is, of course, an idea. At the very initial stage, it is necessary to carefully think over the meaning of the future mobile application and what it will be used for. Then you need to decide on which platform it will be used. As a rule, now applications are written for two platforms IOS and Android at the same time, but if this is useless, or in no hurry, then the company’s specialists will help you make a choice in favor of one of the platforms after having analyzed the supply / demand market and competition.

Terms of reference

Before starting the development, it is necessary to obtain the technical specification from the customer. If it is not there, then the customer is given a brief for filling out. Special attention is paid to this stage, since the technical specification directly affects the technical features of the result. At this stage, the following types of work are performed:

• A description of the functionality of the mobile application is drawn up;
• Development terms are determined and agreed;
• Financial costs are calculated and a model of the settlement procedure is developed;
• A contract with the customer is drawn up.

Prototyping

In order to understand how the user will work with the mobile application, a graphical map of the interaction between the various screens of the program is created. At this stage, the development of almost all the functionality of the mobile application is carried out. At the UI design stage, specialists determine the principle of the application, the placement of functions and buttons on each of the screens. At this stage:

The functionality of the application is being worked out;

Application screen layouts are being developed;

Thinking over the connection of application screens and transitions on them;

Mobile application design

The design of all screens of the future application is created and various states are drawn for all scenarios of use. After the design concept is approved, internal buttons and icons are drawn, as well as all other graphic elements. As a rule, drawing the design of a mobile application involves usability research in order to make sure that the developed design concept is as simple and convenient as possible and will help users to solve the assigned tasks as quickly as possible.

Development

The TK and layouts of the application design are transferred to the developers and they begin to “create”. Programmers “transform” a static image into an interactive working model. The first version of the application is released.

Testing

The mobile application undergoes thorough testing, as a result of which a table of checks is created in which all errors are indicated and described in detail. In the process of designing an application, it is impossible to foresee all the errors of real operation. At this stage, a list of errors, shortcomings and shortcomings of the application is formed and the deadlines for their elimination are determined. Then the application is released with corrected errors and, if necessary, with changed functionality, which is indicated in the tables after trial testing.

Development of branded icons

The application icon is the “face” of any modern mobile application. The mobile application icon is an independent graphic element. The creation of this element is a multi-stage procedure with drawing an image in several sizes, as well as testing it on various device models. After the icon is approved, the mobile application is launched.

Placing a mobile application in Appstore and Play market

The application is submitted to the AppStore and/or Play market for publication. Each app is reviewed by the Google and Apple teams prior to publication. Publishing to Google Play takes no more than a day, which, of course, significantly gains in time from the AppStore, where the publication of an application takes at least 7 working days.

Online casinos have become extremely popular recently and this may be a reason to learn more about the development processes in this area: https://whimsygames.co/services/casino/.

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In order to promote your website and online business, you need to accumulate backlinks and take great care of your link profile. The building of such a strategy is relatively slow, but the profile should stay dynamic with the growing number of links. That will lead to promotion in the search results and expanding of business and its reputation. For more useful details, read this article further.

Link Profile: Why Should You Value It?

When the search engines emerged, the huge amount of links appeared to be the one and the most important issue in their work. Then different algorithms were created and nowadays a backlink profile is thoroughly analyzed for the priority and quality of links

Therefore, the quick building of links is insufficient. In order to benefit from search results, one should carefully analyze a link profile and introduce a link-building strategy.

The link profile indicates the quality. It is closely related to the following benefits:

• Getting to the top results of search mechanisms.
• Speeding up indexing of the page.
• Growing traffic of the site.
• Expanding awareness about the brand.
• Finding new clients.

So there are various issues for utilizing your link profile and many reasons to make it better. For example, you can gather new clients via this tool. Do not hesitate to discover more solutions here and based on them develop your own way.

What are the Valued Parameters of a Link Profile?

Both quality and quantity of the links are valuable, but what matters most? The amount of high-quality links is the main issue. The best top profiles have them from projects that are relevant, trustworthy, and reliable.

SEO services provide different methods for quality assessment. Interestingly enough when taking sites in the same area and analyzing them, the projects with fewer links often appear to be more strong with higher promotion. That means that you really do need to rely on quality as it comes first. One link from a reliable website brings more value than ten from unknown resources with low quality.

Therefore, if you want to promote your website, first and foremost, make an analysis of your website and its profile. Do not overestimate that issue, just keep in mind to gradually grow the number of links of high quality. That is the best strategy to become one day at the top positions in the search engine results. Developers and webmasters can definitely help you with a good strategy for link-building.

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If your business doesn’t quickly adapt to the moves in this digital era, it is bound to fail. One of the ways that businesses can adapt and take advantage of the times is by having a website. A website can help your business in several crucial ways.

The biggest way that a business website can help your business is by getting the business’s name out there. Everyone spends most of their time online today and you need to be in front of those eyeballs. There are still plenty of ways a website can help your business, though.

Below, you will find some of the essential ways in which a website can help your business.

Digital Marketing

Marketing has changed direction over the last couple of years, and digital marketing is taking center stage today. The bespoke web design can help you bring the idea of your website alive. Your business needs a website to ensure your digital marketing strategy is working well.

Digital marketing will help you drive traffic and leads through the site. You need to build your site early and get it dashing to leverage all the opportunities that come from digital marketing. If you do it right, you will get the right amount of traffic, leading to sales.

This type of marketing is also about social media, and one of the best ways various socials can be discovered is through the site. Your site and social media handles work hand-in-hand as part of digital marketing. You need to sync social media profiles with your website.

Brand

Brands are the biggest assets you can have in the business world today. Building a brand comes at a considerable cost, and having a website can help you. It would help if you still found ways to showcase your brand to potential customers.

Customers want to buy from an established brand, and having a website will show just that. You will easily showcase to the clients what you stand for, what you represent, and who you are – it increases the chances of selling to the clients.

A well-established brand is something that will set you apart from your competitors. But without a website, you will find it quite challenging to establish a credible brand. Your audience will need a place to find reliable and quality info about your business – something a website does easily.

Credibility

Your business needs credibility to survive and thrive. One of the best ways to build your business’s credibility is through a website. It can also increase the business’s credibility if its credibility is dwindling at some point.

An aspect of a business is that several people are into what you’re into. To ensure you stay ahead of the competition, you need to shore up your credibility. Your potential clients will easily trust and buy from you with the right website.

Clients will find it comfortable to deal with when you have a great, user-friendly website. The website needs to easily communicate all the info you want to share with your clients. And they will know precisely what they are buying into when they deal with you.

When you don’t have a site, there’s no credibility, no legitimacy. The business will suffer since customers want to put their money into what they can trust. Ensure you make the best impression with your website for first-time visitors.

Leads

For a business to thrive, you need to develop and cultivate leads. Leads are how businesses gain customers and make sales, and sites are the best ways to get them. For example, people can easily find you online when you have a website.

The site will increase the chances of the business getting leads. They’ll then be interested in the product and service you’re offering. The leads can then know more about what you are offering through the website – it provides an opportunity to get engaged.

On your website, you will also need to have your contact info if the lead knows how to get in touch. They’ll then have it in the back of their minds that they can get in touch if they need a service.

When you use your website the right way, though it may be costly to set up, it will provide you with a positive ROI. The best business investments are the ones with the best returns, and the website does just that for you.

Traffic

Google is the best way for your business to get noticed. With Google, your site needs to be optimized to show up when searching for the right keywords. When the site is optimized, you can easily get in front of the right eyeballs when they do a Google search.

You need to ensure that you have optimized the right keywords depending on your product and services. When optimizing the site, it also needs to be optimized for mobile searches. Most of the potential clients are online through the phone.

With an optimized site (PC and mobile searches), you will easily get in front of the customer without them struggling. This will increase your customer base immensely over time and increase your chances of making sales.

Announcements

Gone are the days when press announcements were made through newspapers. Today, most statements are made online, and having a site is the best way. You can put up announcements and updates through the website 24/7.

The customers will always get the correct information at the right time through the site. It can be an asset when you want to make relevant announcements and updates at any given time. You can even share the info at night or when you are away from the office and schedule your announcement to be sent at the right time.

You should sync any announcements you have for your website with your social media platforms. This will ensure that you are getting the right info to the right people at the right time.

Knowledge base/FAQs

The age of self-help is here. Clients will prefer to get the right info themselves without having you jump in to help them at every turn. For example, when they are shopping online for your products, they will want to know more about what they are buying into first. And this can be easily put up on your website.

Creating a knowledge base can be done by having frequently asked questions about the products and services, then answering them fully. They’ll thank you for helping them save their time, and they’ll know that you care about them as clients.

Studies show that 70% of visitors will look to the site first before calling your company. The site is the first impression and can make or break a deal. You need to ensure that it is up to date, has the right info, and looks professional.

Customer Service

Customer service is important for a number of reasons. First, you need to ensure that your clients enjoy top-notch service. The best way to do this is through the site and making it easy for them to reach out quickly.

For example, you can attach different contact forms on the website – for sending feedback, suggestions, and more – which will be easily delivered to you. You’ll then get back to them as soon as possible with the right answer or solution. And they’ll always know how they can get in touch with you if they need anything else from you.

Customer service also means getting their purchase done without any hassles. It’s important for both sides that there are no hitches when completing purchases or using services like free trials or refunds (if applicable).

When you have a site, your clients know that they can get in touch if there are any problems with their order or when using the service. You don’t want to lose out on potential customers because of poor customer service. And having a website ensures you handle it in the right way.

A website is a powerful tool for any business. It can help you get in front of customers without them struggling, increase your customer base and sales over time, and ensure that clients have the best experience possible with your products or services. This article has provided insights into how an optimized site can be used as a marketing tactic to drive more traffic to your company’s products or services.

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Design your way

A website is only as successful as its SEO strategy. While having a beautiful website design might look great, it doesn’t serve your business if no one can find your company online.

SEO is more strategic than one business owner can manage. It’s important to go to the professionals and consider outsourcing a company for your Long Island web design needs.

If you’re looking to take on the challenge yourself, here are 9 SEO tips to optimize your site and start growing traction.

Create Authoritative Content

Content on your website should always be informative for your audience. Google’s ranking system is going to focus on three key elements which are called E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).

The search engine looks for the quality content they feel users will find useful which comes from a credible source. To build authority, start focusing on writing content on your blog and landing pages that provide detailed information such as a guide or top ten lists.

Perform Keyword Research

Keywords are essential to boost your SEO strategy. These are words and phrases your audience is searching for online. This can easily be done through various platforms such as Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, or Moz Keyword Explorer.

More advanced companies use a paid service to have more detailed information. This allows you to see how much competition is out there for the keywords and phrases you want to rank for.

Consider Keyword Placement

Where and how you place your keywords is equally as important as generating them. Remember how we said it’s important to create quality content? This also means it needs to sound natural.

Utilize headings, titles, and URLs for your keywords. However, stuffing your content with the same three words over and over again looks like spam rather than conversational. Quality over quantity is the name of the SEO game.

Create Shareable Content

Backlinks are incredibly important to keep up with the competition mentioned in the keyword research. YoastSEO, a free plugin used in WordPress accounts, allows you to see how many backlinks happen to and from your content.

The more backlinks you have, the higher your content will rank in the search engines. Think about topics other companies will want to use for backlinks.

Answer FAQs

It’s easy to get stumped when generating new website content. Thankfully, you have a wealth of knowledge ready to be untapped. Think about the frequently asked questions you receive from your customers.

This is where you come in. These are the topics they’ll be searching for online so providing them with more detailed answers is a great way to send them to your website.

Look for the Content Gaps

While planning out your content strategy, you have to look at what your competition is doing. Look for gaps in your online searches where you can fill the holes.

If there’s a topic that isn’t being covered, this is your opportunity to elaborate on it. Plus, it means there’s less competition in the search engines giving your content a better chance at a higher ranking.

Update Your Content Consistently

Creating new content on a regular schedule can seem like a lot, but consistency is key. Build out a calendar for your content strategy. Don’t worry about writing overly lengthy articles.

You can be concise with your message while linking to other posts on your site to elaborate on more detailed information.

Don’t Forget Your Alt Tags

Alt tags, also known as alternative text descriptions, are how you describe your images and video content on your website.

This is important for website visitors who may use text-only browsers. Alt tags are also essential to give search engines the ability to locate your page.

Your Metadata Needs Attention

Metadata is the part of your content that provides information about the content of your page. This includes your title, subheadings, and page descriptions.

While there is metadata for keywords as well, it’s not as commonly used for your SEO rankings.

Summary

There are ample ways to add value for your users while generating new content for the search engines. SEO should always be one of the top priorities in your content strategy.

Make sure you’re doing your research. When in doubt, turn to the professionals. It’s better to spend time creating effective content than wasting time.

The post SEO Tips: 9 Key Elements Your Website Needs for Optimization appeared first on Design your way.

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Design your way

If you care about SEO traffic to your site, you might need to know a thing or two about technical SEO – such as what HTML meta tags are and why you need them, how to manage your website crawling and indexing by Google, how to optimize images for Google Image search, etc. You’re here to learn about the importance of the Alt text attribute and how to write it effectively.

What Exactly Is Alt Text?

Alt text is the short form of “alternative text,” which is a descriptive copy that appears on a webpage when the browser fails to render an image during a slow internet connection. It is also incorrectly referred to as an alt text tag. It is, in fact, an image attribute rather than a tag.

For this image, we could use an alternative text like “Jack-o-lantern on a dark background” or “Grinning Halloween pumpkin on a dark background.”

What is the Function of Image Alt Text?

The core function of alt text is to improve web image accessibility for visually impaired people who use screen readers. These texts are relayed by the screen readers to convey what the image depicts.

Alt text also improves SEO ranking by providing better context to images, which helps search engines index images correctly and drive organic traffic.

How Can Images Increase Traffic to Your Website?

One prominent place is Google Images. But, it is not limited to Google Images and there are multiple methods to drive more traffic. Visuals can significantly boost website engagement because users tend to click on images that appeal to them instantly rather than on links that lead to more texts.

Google made sure to utilize this trend and populate its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) with images and videos to show rich results to users. Therefore, make sure that Google is able to index the images on your website correctly. Otherwise, they would never appear in the image pack on the search results.

Whether or not images are the core concern of your site, optimizing them for SEO will improve website performance and Google Image search ranking.

Optimizing the metadata and alt text attribute for your website images will help Google search engine understand and discover them faster during online searches.

How Can You Add Alt Text to Images?

To manually add alt text into the HTML codes, you simply have to write the text within “” and put it after the image source.

Adding alt text to CMS platforms or e-commerce solutions is even simpler – just add the description in the corresponding admin panel field. Here’s how to add alt text to images in WordPress and Shopify.

Does Every Image on the Site Need an Alt Text?

The simple answer is, No. It’s best to add alt text only for the images that convey meaning and value to the users. Images used solely for design purposes don’t require alt text, such as background images. You can simply leave the alt text attribute empty (alt=””). As a result, the screen reader will entirely disregard this image. However, if no alt text is used, screen readers will detect the presence of images and read the title aloud, which might mislead the listener.

Incidentally, it’s better to define decorative images in CSS rather than HTML.

What Is the Best Format for Alt Text?

You may end up stuffing keywords into the alt text in an attempt to improve SEO and drive more traffic to your site, but this will do more harm than good. Google algorithms will consider such alt text to be spam and will not index it at all, lowering your site’s ranking.

If your alt text sounds natural, you’re on the right track! Preferably, it should provide context to the image and relate to the rest of the text on the webpage.

To ensure everything on your webpage sounds correct, you can set up a real screen reader to hear how well the digital texts turn into audio speech. You can also consider reading your website content aloud to someone over the phone. How would you phrase what you see on the image and make it sound smooth and natural?

What Are Considered Good Alt Text Examples?

A good alt text for this image could be:

“Top view of a rustic country still life with assorted home-made bread in the center.” (for a photo portfolio)

Or “Artisan brown bread served on a wooden farmhouse table with rustic decorations and small bowls of condiments around.” (for a bakery website or a photo portfolio)

Alt text such as “bread,” “bread and knife,” “bread on a table,” and similar phrases are not ideal alt text attributes because they don’t sufficiently convey what is shown in the image.

But that doesn’t mean you have to describe every element in the image. Excessively long alt texts will not flow naturally with the rest of the content on the page.

What Is the Ideal Length for Alt Text?

It is advisable to limit the alt text below 125 characters but it must count at least 5-7 words in length. (The above examples count 70 and 99 characters in length, including the blank spaces).

What Words Should You Avoid Using in Alt Text?

Avoid using “Image of” or “picture of” in alt texts because screen readers can tell from the HTML codes that it’s referring to an image. Specifying it would only lead to repetitions. Even search engines are aware that alt texts apply to images, so don’t waste space by mentioning the word “image” explicitly.

Should You Include Punctuation in the Alt Text?

Of course! Commas and periods must be included in the alt text. This will help screen readers understand the text and read it aloud more comprehensibly. If you don’t use punctuations, Google crawlers may misinterpret the text as keyword stuffing and flag it as spam.

Is It Important That Alt Text Describes the Image Correctly?

Yes, the alt text must correspond to the image accurately. Assume a red hat image is incorrectly described as a “blue hat” in the alt text; while it may initially be indexed as a blue hat, it will be removed from the search results once Google’s algorithm notices the inconsistency.

For an image with text written on it, you must include the visible text in its alt text.

(alt=”View of sunset mountains with a huge white “Hatta” sign in the distance.”)

Google can detect embedded text within images, so if you don’t include the visible text within an image in its alt text, it may flag the image as deceptive or spammy.

To summarize, alt text is one of the key contributing factors in improving your site’s SEO. It’s best to keep them short, specific, and succinct, but they must also be adequately descriptive to convey the context. The effort and dedication put into creating high-quality alt texts will be rewarded with organic traffic to your site.

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20 Digital Marketing Trends of 2022 To Follow

Technology and digital mediums are rapidly evolving and therefore, It’s no surprise that digital marketing trends for 2022 will see an overhaul. We have now very well reached the third stage of maturity for digital marketing. The first stage was where it was something new and shaping itself. The second stage was when it got stabilized, and brands worldwide accepted its importance and started using it. The third and present stage is the competitive stage, where brands will take all their knives out to beat their competition.

Another major change influencing the evolution of digital marketing is that the consumer, that is, the users, have started to realize that brands, one way or the other, are trying to sell them. Users have now become more aware of brands attacking their vulnerability, which largely impacts their buying decisions. Digital marketers are changing their strategies to mitigate these challenges. In this post, we try to uncover some of the digital marketing trends expected in 2022. It is best for all marketers to keep themselves updated about these trends and stay on top of it.

1. Content Is Still King, But Videos Are Kingmakers

There is no doubt that content will continue to be the primary driving force for marketing. However, the quality rather than the quantity would be important. Given the high amount of content being generated and consumed on various digital mediums, people now want good content tailored to them. And they don’t have time to read. Hence videos are going to completely take over. Short, to-the-point videos will help your content get better to reach and make it effective. So marketers need to start investing in creating good quality content in videos and push them out with a well-researched strategy.

2. The Cookie Business Is All But Dead

The potential sad news for digital marketers is that Google announced the death of browser cookie tracking by 2022. Without the right tracking, digital marketing will drastically reduce its efficiency. It will be like shooting arrows in the dark. But with GDPR, rise in data privacy movement, and other factors, this would happen someday. Rather than lament the loss, marketers need to find an alternate method of establishing good metrics to retarget users. 2022 will increase CRM tool usage to compensate for the cookie tracking loss.

3. Email Marketing is Not Dead; Rather, it is About to Return

Many marketing gurus have written it off, even some agencies have stopped using it, but 2022 will surprise you with the rise in email marketing. According to Statista, more than 4 billion people across the globe use email. This userbase is way more than all the social media platforms combined. Marketers can’t choose to ignore this target pool, but they will change the way email marketing is done. Rather than bulk mailing, brands will create segments for their audience and mail them customized content which will include effective gateways to the sales funnel.

4. It’s Time to Own Your Audience

With cookies tracking going away and increasing competition in almost all sectors, it will be hard for brands to segment their audiences. As a result, users are likely to be easily swayed by other brands. In addition, 2022 will witness a fall in the concept of brand loyalty. Hence you need to build a wall around your customers and own your audience. A good way to do this is through membership or subscription models. Apart from that, it is important to establish an audience manager in your marketing team that caters to the changing needs of the userbase.

5. Educate More, Hard Sell Less

Nobody likes a brand that hard-sells its products or services to them. If you get an email that shouts ‘buy my product,’ you are more likely to spam it. The same is true for any form of content you produce which is purely marketing-based. Rather, you need to take the longer route of educating the sector and passively market to your audience. This will validate the users and build a better trust bond that you can capitalize on later through sales. Building trust and confidence in the consumer will reap long-term rewards.

This is image is free to download with a trial subscription at Adobe Stock.

6. Personalization always Pays Off

Marketers have been saying this for a few years and will repeat the same in 2022 as well – personalize your marketing as much as possible. The concept of pacifying the buyers’ ego is centuries old in marketing. Now it needs to be used smartly in digital marketing. Make your customers feel heard and establish a personal connection using emails or social media. Establishing the feeling of being one big family will rise in marketing in 2022.

7. Automate As Much As Possible

If you are still maintaining your leads and analytics in an Excel spreadsheet, you live in a cave. There are hundreds of highly effective automation tools available that are low on cost and save a lot of time and energy. Find the right ones you need and deploy them to do the menial work for you while focusing more on important jobs. 2022 will also see a rapid rise in artificial intelligence in marketing. Chatbots are one good example of it.

8. Be Inclusive, Become a Voice

In today’s time, you cannot afford to be non-inclusive. Many ads have suffered backlashes and media outrages because their marketing content is offensive to some communities. People’s tolerance levels are very low, and social media helps spread the outrage quickly. Hence brands need to be extra cautious in ensuring that all their marketing content is inclusive. However, taking one step ahead, some brands take up a cause and become ambassadors for that.

9. B2B Marketing to finally Wake Up

Marketers may have at times ignored business to Business marketing. However, this will change in 2022 as we are now seeing such businesses finally waking up to the need for marketing to other businesses. Businesses that do not connect directly with consumers may have inherent inertia towards branding. But now, they too will invest in getting their digital presence reestablished. Creating special marketing strategies for such organizations would be the next task for agencies.

10. Sell Your Story, Not Your Product

Storytelling is going to take center stage in marketing. Marketers have seen this coming, but now storytelling is moving from good to have to must-have criteria. You need to focus on selling your brand to consumers, the story, and the inspiration behind it. If it convinces the audience, the products will sell by themselves. Hence you need to formulate a strong story and flow it in all the marketing content you generate in an effective manner.

11. Do Not Underestimate Facebook

A lot of marketers consider Facebook as a thing of the past and do not include it in their strategy. This is a mistake. It is still the social media giant, and it won’t just let itself become irrelevant. With the formation of Meta and the integration of Whatsapp, Facebook is about to take digital marketing to a whole new level in 2022. Hence stay prepared for it and keep pushing content and utilizing its mediums like pages, groups, and marketplaces.

12. The Return of Direct Mail Marketing

For those of you who have forgotten what direct mail marketing is, a gentle reminder is when brands send post mail to people with their marketing content. This form of marketing is considered obsolete, but few marketers have figured out how to integrate this with their digital marketing campaign, and hence you can expect to see rising use of direct mails. By making the mail a whole lot personalized, you can certainly ensure a good brand recall.

13. Voice & Visual Search To Increase

Voice search has been a digital trend on the rise for a few years, and it is also bound to impact digital marketing. With home devices becoming widely used, people now want to just speak what they want to search and then listen to search results. Hence it is important you include voice search marketing as part of your strategy. Another new innovation is the ability to take a photo and search. Like a T-shirt, snap it, search it and buy it.

14. The Start of Immersive Marketing

Immersive marketing is going to be the gamechanger, and we will see it rising in 2022. Brands have already started using virtual reality and augmented reality to sell. Now you can see how a furniture piece will actually look like in your bedroom before buying it. The same is with virtual reality. You can get a 3D tour of the new house you are buying. Marketers need to start working on platforms and content that can help in driving immersive marketing.

15. Micro-Influencer Programs To Be Preferred

Influencer marketing works well, but what will now work better is micro-influencer programs. People now get more influenced seeing a semi-celebrity from their town wearing the brand shoes rather than someone like Rihanna or Beyonce. This is because they can relate better to regional influencers. Hence, marketers are now targeting smaller influencers with lesser followers but a more loyal and niche audience.

16. Mobile-First Websites Is The New Norm

Amongst all the digital marketing buzz, websites are still very much relevant. But what will change in 2022 is that website development will shift to a mobile-first approach. More than 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, and this is rising fast. Hence brands need to make sure that their website works flawlessly on mobile devices. A good mobile-friendly website will create a better user experience and ultimately provide, better SEO ranking with a potential boost in sales. Regarding SEO, it’s important to note that if your site is built on the WordPress platform, the way your pages are indexed and ranked is a priority according to Google’s mobile-first indexing standards.

If interested, the image used here is a high-quality vector template set available for free with a subscription to Adobe Stock.

17. NFT and CryptoCurrency to Further Disrupt Marketing

Cryptocurrency is disrupting almost all sectors at the moment, and this includes digital marketing. There are many brands that have already started accepting cryptocurrencies. In 2022, we will see more brands following this trend. Another disruption is the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) concept. People have started creating and selling NFTs as well, and it will not be long since we will have eCommerce websites for the same.

18. Think Global But Go Local

Brands always strive to be more global so that they can have a bigger audience to sell their products. But they should not make the mistake of ignoring the local marketing aspect. Localized SEO is working wonders for brands, no matter how big or small. Make sure you have listed in the right manner on Google Marketplace and have other marketing campaigns in place to help get local engagement and a more loyal follower base. Next time someone searches for ‘best pizzas near me,’ your local restaurant has to come up on top of the search result.

19. Data is the New Oil!

There is no doubt that data is going to fuel the growth of the latest technologies. The right set of data points is needed for digital marketing to be more precise. Marketers are now going to focus on Google Analytics and other metrics they get from the digital platforms. These data will provide key insights for shaping their marketing strategies. Brands would increasingly want to shift from content-driven marketing to data-driven marketing as this will help them get better results.

20. Keep Thinking Out of Box and Surprise Your Audience

All the above trends are good to know and follow. But one trend that we will see in 2022 is going to be not following any trends and being unconventional. Do something that is completely unexpected. In a world filled with so much digital noise, it is hard to get people’s attention. That may need you to do something very pathbreaking and create a trend yourself. As they say in marketing, anything that gets you good sales is the right marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Digital marketing has seen a massive evolution in the past few years and brands are resorting to new practices to try and beat their competition. In this flurry of hit-and-miss practices, it’s important to remember the foundational principles of digital and offline marketing. Also, it is important to understand that not all digital trends can be relevant to you. Based on your sector and your existing practices, you can determine which trends will be effective for you and capitalize on them. Do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

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