June 2019

(MANCHESTER, NH | BOSTON, MA) – Millennium Agency, a recognized digital creative, content/social and PR firm, is pleased to welcome Alison DeLeo as their new Senior Account Manager. As Senior Account Manager, Alison has a sole focus on the day-to-day and overall relationships with Millennium clients to ensure their success. From playing a role in creating media plans to helping execute both print and digital tactics, Alison acts as the primary liaison between Millennium and their trusted clientele.

Alison graduated with a B.S. in Public Relations from Suffolk University in Boston Massachusetts. Prior to joining Millennium, Alison began her career in the digital media/buying sphere at some of the top advertising agencies in Massachusetts, before switching over to account management and client relations. With a strong background in both media and accounts, Alison’s rounded background has allowed her to wear many hats in the agency field and lend her expertise in multiple areas outside of her Senior Account Manager position.

When asked about her new role and working at Millennium, Alison noted, “I’ve always known about Millennium and have been so intrigued by this agency and all of their offerings. I’m excited to be a part of something great and continue to learn more each day as well as help clients achieve their goals. There is no better feeling than being able to assist a client and know they are happy with the work you have provided to them. Being able to build new relationships and help achieve goals is something I enjoy doing.”

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized boutique digital creative branding, content/PR and data analytics firm that unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate growth. We combine our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise and framework to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success.

Throughout the years, we have worked with leading technology/manufacturing companies and consumer brands, helping them connect with their customers. Our process is proven: we research the market, create the ideas, test the audience, and launch the brand – then we monitor, measure, and adapt for the best outcomes.

To learn more about Millennium Agency, call 877.873.7445 or visit www.mill.agency.

The average American is exposed to up to 10,000 marketing messages per day, making it more difficult than ever for marketers to engage with potential customers. So how can your business stand out from the crowd? The simple answer: create a buyer persona. Buyer personas are fictional profiles of your ideal customer. Creating detailed buyer personas for your business will help you segment your customers and provide valuable insight for smarter, stronger, targeted marketing campaigns.

Research Your Target Audience

Start by gathering relevant information about your customers through market research and analytical marketing platforms such as Facebook Insights and Google Analytics Audience Report. These powerful tools will help you find data about your Facebook visitors and website users such as demographics, location, interests, purchase behavior, lifestyle, and more.

Perform Interviews and Conduct Surveys

Interview your existing customers to get a deeper understanding of their psychological attributes such as habits, values, and hobbies. Alternatively, or in addition, conduct surveys to help define your buyer persona. Surveys can save time and resources, and many online survey companies offer analytics tools to help you sort and analyze your data.

Identify Customer Challenges and Goals

Talk to your sales and customer service teams to see what kind of questions they answer the most. What problems are your customers or potential customers trying to solve? What are your customers trying to gain by using your products or services? You can also search social media platforms for mentions of your brand, products, and services to find out what people are saying about you online.

Build Your Buyer Persona

Use the commonalities you discovered in your data collection to come up with more than one ideal type of customer. Outline each persona to include age, gender, location, income, profession, hobbies, aspirations, and fears. Then, take the general characteristics of your persona and narrow them down to a very specific personality. It can be helpful to name each of your buyer personas and give them a short biography. To create more depth to each persona, include:

“A Day in The Life” scenarios, written in the first person. By thinking about what a day in the life of your persona looks like, you can better understand their problems and objectives. For example, if your persona is ‘Diana,’ a full-time administrative assistant also working towards her CPA online, ‘Diana’ might say: “I work a nine-to-five desk job but I’m studying for my CPA at night so I can get a better job and help pay for college for my two kids.”
Objectives, goals, and responsibilities. For example, ‘Diana’ wants to “find out quickly if my kids will qualify for direct, subsidized student loans.” This targeted information allows content creators to tailor their marketing specifically toward the persona’s objectives.
Problems that the persona might face. For example, ‘Diana’ is pressed for time because of her full-time job and part-time studies. She also has limited use of the telephone for personal phone calls during the day because she is an administrative assistant. With that information, marketers could create online forms and FAQs about student loans that are relevant and easy to find.
Preferences, such as topics she has shown an interest in, personal communication preferences (email, text, online chats, telephone, mail), her favorite social media websites and how she uses them, her favorite content platforms and channels, and where she finds news and information.
Keywords and phrases she might type into Google’s search box. People typically search similar phrases to what they use in conversation. ‘Diana’ might search “how do I find information on what student loans my kids will qualify for.”
Engagement scenarios that pull together all the information about your persona. Create questions or concerns your persona might have and then provide answers to them via the content you create. Think about how your persona will interact with your content over time to find meaningful ways to link your content together.

Ensure that every piece of information in your persona is something your business can use, either from a content creation, sales, strategy, or marketing standpoint.

Create a Negative Buyer Persona

Use a similar process as explained above—just look for different qualities—to create a negative buyer persona, also known as an exclusionary persona. A negative buyer persona can help you understand who to avoid and who isn’t a good fit for your business. Ask your team what customers they disliked working with and why. Find out which customers were difficult to retain, and which customers generated the least amount of revenue. Knowing the characteristics of your negative personas will provide valuable insight into attracting the right leads.

Once you have created your buyer personas, you can start to personalize your messaging and branding campaigns. Create customer experiences, targeted advertisements, and blog and email content catered specifically to various personas. By targeting your messaging to distinct buyer personas and addressing their priorities and goals, your business will attract quality customers and increase sales while building brand loyalty and trust.

It takes time and effort to research and build buyer personas. Not sure you have the time or inclination? Give the marketing experts at Millennium Agency a call today.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

On-page SEO marketing is the process of letting Google know what your page is about to improve your search rankings. It includes making sure your website content is visible to search engines and ensuring that your website isn’t blocking any search engines.

On-page SEO marketing also helps Google pick up the keywords that you want to be ranked for, which sends traffic to your site. We’ve rounded up a list of easy-to-implement SEO marketing strategies to help you quickly improve your website’s performance.

Use Text Links for Site Navigation—Not Images

First, make sure your website’s navigation links are made up of text and not images. Images are almost always invisible to Google and other search engines. Include links to pages you want visible on your homepage. That way, search engines can easily find them and include them in search results.

Create Search-Engine Friendly URLs

Next, use clean URLs are logical and easy-to-read by Google and website visitors. An example of a clean URL is https://mill.agency/digital/three-secrets-to-email-marketing-success. Naturally, clean URLs are more sharable and linkable. As a result, they help increase search rankings and web traffic.

Be Subtle When Adding Keywords to Content

In the past, SEO marketers sprinkled dozens of keywords throughout webpages. They even added words that were out of context and created copy that was difficult to read—all in an attempt to manipulate their website’s ranking in Google. Search engines will now penalize you for this and flag keyword-stuffed content as spam. Google’s quality guidelines offer tips on how to weave your keyword naturally throughout your content.

Add LSI Keywords to Your Page

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords is an SEO marketing term for related phrases. It’s important to add these LSI keywords to your page because Google wants to deliver high quality, relevant content to its users. For example, if we wrote a blog about email marketing, Google would also scan our page for LSI keywords such as “email campaign,” “email blast,” and “email newsletter.” Google looks for these closely related terms to ensure that our blog topic is actually email marketing.

Fill Out Meta Tags

Finally, meta tags are sections of text on your website that provide data about your page to search engines and website visitors. Meta tags that are important for on-page SEO marketing include title tags, description tags, and keyword tags. If your meta tags are missing, Google will automatically use text from your website to create your search listing. Therefore, optimize your meta tags for search and include your keywords. You can manually change your tags in the HTML code. Alternatively, you can use the platform your website is built on or a plugin to make changes.

These tips offer a starting point for on-page SEO marketing strategies. If you are looking for more ideas to increase your website traffic, or if you need help implementing SEO on your website or social platforms, give the web designers and developers at Millennium Agency a call.

About Millennium Agency

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

Voice search is changing the world of digital marketing. By simply talking into a phone or voice-activated smart speaker, users can now conduct internet searches, order pizza, send or request money, set an alarm, and shop. And voice-enabled devices such as Alexa and Google Home are now ubiquitous. According to recent research from NPR and Edison Research, one in six Americans now own a voice-activated smart speaker.

As voice-activated technology becomes more popular among consumers, smart marketers should start optimizing for voice search now to adapt to this shift in consumer search behavior. Unsure of where to start with your voice search strategy? Here a few tips to ensure your business stays competitive in today’s voice-enabled world.

Answer Conversational Questions

People ask questions in a conversational manner using voice search. For example, instead of typing “best marketing agency in New Hampshire,” they ask: “what’s the best marketing agency in New Hampshire?” Therefore, focus on optimizing for full questions instead of abbreviated search terms.

Learn what questions prospective customers have about your business and services by conducting surveys, asking for feedback, and using Google’s autocomplete feature to obtain search query suggestions. Build your content around the answers to these questions.

Add FAQ Pages to Your Website

Ensure your website has a page for frequently asked questions (FAQs)—or multiple, keyword-friendly FAQ pages—to directly answer consumer questions. Voice search results are 1.7 times more likely to come from a FAQ page versus text-based search queries. Insert Q&A content into blog posts and articles to further optimize for voice search.

Optimize for Featured Snippets

A featured snippet (also known as the Answer Box) is a summary of an answer to a search query, which is displayed on top of Google’s search results. The snippet is extracted from a webpage and includes a link to the page, the title, and the URL. Optimizing for Google’s featured snippets is an advanced SEO technique explained in detail on the Moz blog and the HubSpot blog.

Google Home and Alexa only provide one answer to your query: the featured snippet. So, if you don’t rank as a featured snippet, your content will be invisible.

Create an Alexa Skill or a Google Action

Google Actions and Alexa Skills are functions that allow voice-activated devices to react to user commands and queries. Amazon boasts over 80,000 Alexa Skills worldwide—these include everything from voice-enabled cooking instructions to email management and package tracking services.

Many companies have created useful skills that enhance brand engagement such as Zyrtec’s AllergyCast weather and pollen count alert and Ask Purina’s dog breed reference guide. These are examples of useful skills that meet customer needs and support company goals. Be sure to create a skill with a clear objective that is aligned with your brand—and check what skills have already been created.

Voice technology is changing the world of digital marketing. To learn how to implement a voice search strategy for your business or organization, contact Millennium Agency today.

About Millennium Agency

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].

With Internet content trending toward video, marketers have turned to YouTube to publish videos and boost their brand’s visibility. And with good reason: YouTube is ranked the second most-visited site in the world and is visited by 1.9 billion logged-in users every month. But simply uploading great videos to YouTube and hoping for the best isn’t enough to gain an audience and foster business growth. In order to make your videos discoverable to a wider viewership, you must implement a YouTube SEO strategy.

Write a Keyword-Optimized Title

Just like you would when optimizing content on your website or blog, use a YouTube SEO tool to find popular topics and search terms for your video title. KeywordTool.io offers YouTube autocomplete suggestions and variations as well as keyword-based video tags and captions. Google Trends also has a YouTube search option. Once you’ve chosen a target keyword, make sure to use it just once in your 100-character title (including spaces), and keep in mind that titles longer than 70 characters will be truncated.

Add a Well-Written Description

Use the description field to write a click-compelling and well-thought-out synopsis of your video. Include information about your channel; metadata; and links to your website and social networks. Although YouTube gives you 5000 characters to use in the description box, prioritize keywords in the first few sentences because the first 150 characters will appear in your SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

Tag and Categorize Your Video

Tags help YouTube associate your video with comparable videos, which can expand your reach. Choose tags the same way you chose your target keyword, with YouTube SEO tools like KeywordTool.io or get keyword suggestions from the autofill drop-down results in the YouTube search bar. Unlike titles, tags don’t have character limits, so feel free to expand on your target keyword with phrases. Don’t forget to choose a category to group your video with similar content and gain exposure to more viewers who identify with your audience.

Create a Great-Looking Thumbnail

All YouTube videos have thumbnails: the static image that is shown to viewers when they find your video. Thumbnails should be accurate representations of the title and content of your videos. Customized thumbnails are preferable to automatically generated thumbnails, in fact 90% of the best-performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails. A video’s thumbnail is an important piece of your video’s metadata and is displayed in the Google search results.

Transcribe Your Video and Add Captions

Although YouTube transcribes every uploaded video, this automated process is not error free—you must proofread and edit the automated transcript or use a third-party transcription service. An SEO-optimized video transcript enables search engines to index the text of your video. In addition, captioned videos allow search engines to crawl the caption text and extend viewership (another part of the rankings algorithm) because they keep the viewer engaged for longer time periods regardless of their access to audio.

For more information on YouTube SEO, check out our blog on Video Marketing for Business Success or give Millennium Agency a call to discuss the best video strategy for your business.

About Millennium Agency

Linda Fanaras is the President and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Manchester, NH and Boston. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected].