by Awesome Author | Nov 1, 2021 | Marketing & Advertising
Ever since the pandemic broke the planet, time has only traveled quickly. Even though it seemed to stand still in the initial period, we are striking into the new year in a couple of months, and 2022 does not seem far off now. Moreover, we just planned how to commence and sustain a business in 2021. However, there are several other factors that you need to concur or ponder on to shape an ideal marketing strategy for the new year.
Image Credits
Still, the most critical question remains, how will marketing and advertising change after the cookie’s death? Besides, what does it define, and what is it known for anyway? We’re sure you heard the news of Google’s stand against third-party cookies in 2022. Well, this is quite a deal, provided that Chrome is one of the most famous browsers, accounting for around 70 percent of the entire market share. Nonetheless, the pandemic has had a considerable impact on maneuvering our habits. Speaking of which, the digital sector has become a new norm to do several things. Even if this period comes to an end soon, consumer habits are bound to remain for a prolonged period.
Be ready for such things:
- The digital marketing sector will become more critical.
- The Content marketing platform will become prominent and more essential.
- D2C or Direct-to-Consumer marketing will ponder and take the lead.
- Brands need to learn more about their clients, consumers, and potentials to administer and learn without relying on third-party data.
Yet another thing you need to remember is the customer retention program that businesses need to follow proactively. At present, most enterprises are looking at new opportunities and acquisitions. However, with the rising competition amid the digital space catching more and more fire, the customer retention program has never been more constant and essential.
1. Invest in Online Events
Online events like seminars, webinars, or product launches have been ideal for spreading a good amount of word about the brand to potential new ones and existing clients. These days, you will come across more brands participating in online opportunities like events and whatnot. Moreover, these avenues also provide these brands with a direct audience and available first-hand data.
Besides, such data can develop quality consumer profiles and sell the services directly to them. Such an action can also eliminate the requirement of relying on third-party insight or information, building a robust relationship with a direct audience. Speaking of which, such events might not bring a significant revenue at once but can contribute to promotions, free advertisements, and lifelong brand impression in the long term.
Image Credits
2. Own Your Audiences
In reality, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with other social media platforms, tend to own your brand’s audience. But, why would that be, you ask? Even if you have audiences on your social media platforms, you should worry. This is because one needs to start owning their brand’s audience. Speaking of which, when you fail to carry a message to your audience, they won’t react. Instead, they might ignore the message, disallowing you to monitor and advance through online advertisement and marketing.
Moreover, it might be because there are several dependencies and metrics in the modern age’s algorithm that can hinder and affect your message’s delivery. So, if you want to achieve a marketing noise and want your followers to react to your posts and updates, own them through the work.
3. Educate Rather Than Hard-Sell
Suppose you have a cannabis brand that you have been marketing for a long time now. In that case, how would you reach the audience? For a head start, Facebook (Metaverse) and other social media platforms do not approve paid advertisements for cannabis-specific products. In such a situation, what you need to ponder on is education. Yes, you read it right. Don’t forget that this is one of the controversial subjects in the universe. You have to update people on several therapeutic benefits of the product to sell them to your audience. Marketing for cannabis is much more advanced, and you need to spare the knowledge for people to grab.
Image Credits
Having said that, know that Apple, back in the day, also offered a space for its clients and consumers to learn more about their products. More such brands are putting themselves on the bandwagon and incorporating some geniuses to sell and convince people.
4. Simplicity Is King
You might be sick of the phrase that content is the king. In reality, simplicity and minimalistic approach are. An online viewer needs clarity and simplicity more than content. Clients and consumers do not want to check the same list of five things to enhance productivity. Now, they wish to see a unique twist or a blend of various subjects on one screen. So, what are you waiting for? Get on with the point and make it viable to the foreign viewership.
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
by Awesome Author | May 1, 2021 | Marketing & Sales
All companies use a form of content to increase their sales. Traditionally this has been done via advertising, leaflets, and business cards among others but for an online business, it’s different. You have multiple ways to connect with customers and you need to know how to maximize your content.
Here we’ll talk about how you can use content to increase online sales and what steps you need to take. Let’s get started!
High-quality content
Whether it is a video, image, or blog, you need to give potential customers something of value. You can make infographics with Canva, which is a great way to showcase what you’re selling.
You may have an amazing product but if your content is poor then you won’t get the sales you want. There’s no point in doing content for the sake of adding content. Yes, you want to be engaging often but if you do a low-energy video that is providing little value, people are going to turn it off.
It’s hard to stand out from the crowd but one way to do so is putting plenty of effort into whatever content you’re providing. This may be someone’s first impression of your business.
If the content is good, your following will grow and you’ll have more people enthused about your products. Being a good salesperson has a lot to do with passion, ensure that you’re putting plenty of passion into everything you do.
Be bold
The majority of people don’t like selling themselves. If you listen to a great salesperson, however, you’ll not only notice that they have a huge level of confidence in what they are selling but also in themselves.
You need to put yourself out there and don’t be shy about telling everyone how great your product is, this includes doing a form of content that may not be in your comfort zone. Many people simply rely on posts and images but that may not be enough.
Creating videos will enable a different type of engagement and allow you to showcase your product in a more personal way. With the likes of Animoto, it’s very easy to do. Even better than that is doing a live video as people will be curious as to what you’re saying.
Being bolder with your content will allow you to gain more engagement. This will help to increase your chances of getting the sales you need.
Make it personal
A great way to increase online sales is by getting people to invest in you as a person. We mentioned live videos and that’s a great place to start. You can also write a blog and share your journey and enthusiasm with whatever you’re selling.
You see this with many companies that put a name and a face to their brand. It allows for a personal connection that can make people more likely to buy from you. Adding a bit of personality to your online content can be a great way to increase online sales.
Become a strong brand
Whatever type of content you’re using, you want to develop a strong sense of brand throughout it all. Making a logo with Logo Creator is a great place to start as you need a strong image across all your platforms. Creating a strong brand means having logos, color schemes, and phrases that are unique to you.
Whether you are posting on Instagram or Facebook or creating a business card or leaflet, your message needs to remain the same. Having a strong brand means that people will become more aware of your business more quickly and this will lead to a bigger reputation and more sales.
Final thoughts
Using content to increase online sales requires time and effort. Focusing on quantity over quality is never a good idea and will be a waste of time. It’s always good to think ahead, think of new ways of engaging with your customers while also presenting a strong brand image.
This article was written by Gertrude Cunningham.
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
by Awesome Author | May 28, 2020 | Marketing & Sales
All of us in the events industry is seeing some stormy skies at the moment. Some have already felt the stinging rain of canceled events or missed payments, and the rest of us are waiting apprehensively, sure that a flood is headed our way. It’s in these unsure, stormy days when it’s wise to do everything we can to prepare for when there’s sunshine again. This is when systematizing your online marketing can be absolutely crucial to both making it through the storm in one piece, and also in thriving once we’re back in the metaphorical sunny days.
Every company’s marketing strategies are unique, but I’d imagine most will center around three primary outlets: Facebook/Instagram, your own blog, and Pinterest.
Facebook/Instagram
Conveniently positioned as “Everyone’s Favorite Quarantine Pastime,” Facebook and Instagram are a fantastic way to market your business broadly, and to encourage word-of-mouth sharing among your friends, your clients, and all their friends. Since pretty much no one is shooting right now, you may decide it’s a good idea to work through your back-catalog and highlight some favorite events or shoots from past years.
Showcasing past work has the double-benefit of:
- showing off your unique skill and artistry, and
- reminding people *just* how long it’s been since they had their photo taken.
Planting these seeds early and semi-often can help your business pick back up when all this is over, and might even give you the opportunity to pre-sell sessions or events and keep the income flowing in the meantime.
The best part is that you can do this for free, avoiding Facebook’s frustrating and confusing advertising metrics, and keeping your cash in your pocket. Facebook’s algorithm rewards photos that are easy to share and are widely embraced. That means that if your photos are beautiful and aren’t uploaded at too large a file size, Facebook will put them in front of more people. Additionally, the more engagement your photos get, the more people Facebook will show them to. So encourage likes, comments, and conversation, and be sure and put yourself in the middle of that to spur on further engagement.
BlogStomp can help you prepare your images for Facebook by sizing them perfectly and adding a logo/website watermark to ensure your friends’ friends’ friends can easily find where and how to get a hold of you to book their own session.
Preparing Facebook images in BlogStomp
Your blog
Where Facebook and Instagram have the advantage of the breadth of reach, your own blog has the advantage of depth. No other place on the internet is a stronger resource for seeing the full catalog of your photography work than your blog, so making sure it looks the way you want it to, showing off the best of the best of your work, is paramount.
While you have a bit of downtime, use it to go back through your blog — publish any not-yet-blogged shoots you want to show off, revise or re-dress any older posts that need a freshening up, and thoroughly examine the look and feel of your blog, ensuring that your site visitors don’t get bogged down or confused by any elements that can be removed.
While you’re at it, give a thought to your SEO. Consider which keywords you’re including in each post, and check for readability and flow. You might even want to revise older posts, as your business direction may have shifted over the years.
BlogStomp makes it easy to maximize your SEO with custom file names, and you can include alt tags and title tags when you publish directly to your WordPress blog.
Pinterest
So we know that Facebook and Instagram have their strengths in “word of mouth” online marketing (tag your friends, their friends see it, they send it to their friends, etc.) and your blog has the depth of SEO pull and evergreen content. Where Pinterest shines is in what we call “Stranger Sharing.”
Pinterest doesn’t rely on personal connections to serve up your content to people. If they get to pinterest.com and search “Springtime Farm Wedding” and you’ve got images on Pinterest with the phrase “Springtime Farm Wedding” in the description, they’ll see it. They may see it and like it. They may even see it and fall in love with your photographic style. There’s even a chance they’ll want to see more of your work.
Make it easy for them to find you by watermarking your images, being intentional about tags and keywords, and including your website URL in your descriptions and file names.
BlogStomp is essential in this online marketing process, too. You can create a style for Pinterest that is set to the width you want to share, then assemble unique collages sure to attract the right kind of attention to your website. Potential clients will do their part and search up the stuff they want to see, and BlogStomp will have done its part to help make sure they see your images first.
Create Pinterest collages in BlogStomp
And since many current blog themes allow you to activate a “Pin It” button on your blog images, using BlogStomp to rename each image or collage in a way that points people back to your website is invaluable when others share your work on Pinterest and forget to credit you in their comments.
Let’s get started
Ugh, sheesh — all of this sounds like just a TON of work.
Well, it sort of is. On the one hand, yeah, it’s a lot to get done. But on the other hand, what else have you got going on right now? : )
While it can feel like a lot to do, BlogStomp makes it easy (and, dare I say, fun?) to get it done. Let’s admit it — none of us got into photography because we wanted to spend endless hours in front of a computer working on our online marketing. These days, we all have a stronger relationship with our mouse and keyboard than we do with our camera. I honestly don’t know if the biggest threat to one’s photography career is creative burnout or carpal tunnel syndrome!
But BlogStomp is your way around all of that. For over ten years BlogStomp has helped tens of thousands of photographers around the world to prepare their images and marketing pieces. It is built to execute many tasks quickly and easily, and then to get out of your way.
The original article by Chip Gillespie was originally published at Honeybook.com
About the Author:
One of StompSoftware’s original founders and a Houston-based wedding photographer, Chip is the ultimate all-rounder helping to drive the development, user experience, online marketing and support of the business. He’s our man on the ground in our biggest market, and he wears one helluva mustache.
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
by Awesome Author | Aug 4, 2019 | Small Business & Entrepreneurs
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
With over 100 million startups opening each year, it is becoming critical for new businesses to improve their online visibility and stand out among their competitors. In the digital era, the basic rule for business success is to effectively use SEO to engage customers, establish your brand, and drive profitability.
In this post, I’ll discuss some basic, but effective SEO tips that will maximize your startup’s visibility and connect you with your target audience.
- Know Your Audience
- Optimize Your Website with What Customers Are Looking for
- Utilize Social Websites and Social Media
- Your Blog Page Is a Star
- Leverage Free SEO Tools
1. Know Your Audience
Most businesses assume that SEO comprises preset rules and standard techniques. However, the fact is that your firm’s SEO efforts largely depend on how well you know your audience.
Which industry are you in? Which SEO strategies are your top competitors using to engage audience? Where does your target audience spend most of its time? Which social platform are they active on? How much time do they spend on their smart device? The answers to these questions will help you create and optimize a tailored SEO strategy for your new venture.
More than half of the world’s population is active online looking for solutions to their day-to-day issues, expressing their opinions, and making decisions. Therefore, it is critical to identify your audience’s unique traits, online behavior, and preferences.
Image Credits
For instance, if you are an online yoga instructor, 80% of your time should be spent on understanding where your audience is likely to find you and take an action in your favour (sign up for the yoga retreat or recommend others).
If you are targeting health-conscious customers, chances are you may find them on health and nutrition tracking apps, fitness blogs, or social media sites. Engaging your audience through these channels will strengthen your brand visibility. Set up your listing in various online directories like Google My Business, Yelp for Business Owners, Bing, and Yoga Trail, enabling your customers to find you.
2. Optimize Your Website with What Customers Are Looking for
Once you have defined your target audience, it is necessary to pinpoint what they are looking for. Here, you need to consider two critical areas: what your audience is searching for and how they are conducting the search.
Study the user’s intent behind typing a particular keyword. For instance, your user initially searches for “musical instruments seller,” however, you eventually discover keyword variations like “musical instruments for sale” or “local musical instruments shop.” Incorporating each of these variations will boost your startup’s SERP ranking.
It is a good idea to do some solid keyword research and design your website in a way that it lands your audience on what they are looking for (your webpage or blog).
Once the searchers are directed to your website or mobile application, your ultimate goal should be to offer an amazing user experience (UX). Firstly, is your website mobile-friendly? With people spending an average of six hours per day on smart devices like mobiles and tablets, it is pertinent that businesses use Responsive Web Design to cater to various device types, thereby improving the user experience.
Users typically take 0.05 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on your site. What’s more, nearly 60% of searches on the internet come from mobile devices. Thus, in order to optimize your SEO efforts, you should leverage responsive web app development.
Focus on user experience to improve the site speed and ensure ease of navigation, thereby converting the clicks into conversions. Browse through the top UX design websites to learn how you can use the best illustrations, user interface, and branding to engage your audience.
3. Utilize Social Websites and Social Media
In 2017, 71% of internet users had an active social media account and this figure has only grown since then. The ever-increasing social network penetration is making it imperative for businesses to stay active on these platforms to engage their target audience and drive conversions.
Image Source Statista
StumbleUpon (now Mix) is one such social networking website that categorizes and recommends tailored content to users based on their personal tastes and interests. Thus, if a user has liked your webpage, it gets added into the StumbleUpon lineup and is featured to other users who are randomly searching on a specific topic using the Stumble button. Submitting your site to StumbleUpon can help you improve your social following and brand awareness.
Social media sites possess the largest demographics globally, making it critical for businesses to build a massive following on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and, Snapchat, among other platforms.
Image Source Statista
People aren’t merely interacting on these social platforms, they are using them to make purchasing decisions and recommend a product or service to their friends. Did you know that 70% of B2C marketers have acquired their customers through Facebook? That’s the power of staying active on social networking platforms.
4. Your Blog Page Is a Star
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 80% of B2B marketers and 75 percent of B2C marketers include blogging in their current marketing strategies. Devising an effective content marketing strategy for your blog can help you retain loyal customers, attract qualified leads, promote your brand, and nurture customer relationships.
The content presented to the target audience should be relevant, insightful, and value-adding. Serving your audience with the content they are looking for on Google is a sure way of getting their attention and engaging them on your website.
In order to improve your startup’s visibility, share knowledge, advice, or entertainment in consumable formats like blog articles, videos, podcasts, emails, infographics, and webinars. When you share informative content on your blog, you come across as a domain expert, thereby increasing your website traffic and generating conversions.
5. Leverage Free SEO Tools
If yours is a young startup, you will need to conduct keyword research, analyze competitor performance, track traffic and conversion trends for your site, and assess the performance of your content marketing strategy. However, technology has made it possible to effortlessly measure new business success with several effective and free SEO tools.
SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs can help you create a strong online presence without spending a dime. Another free SEO tool, SEO Minion is an amazing Google Chrome extension that analyzes on-page SEO, checks broken links and redirects, simulates multi-location SERP, and improves the CTR by boosting your site’s search engine ranking.
These SEO tools can help you gain organic traffic and nail the SERP ranking with the least marketing budget.
With the world going digital, new ventures heavily depend on fresh and organic traffic to stand out from the competition and drive business profits. Building your startup’s visibility allows potential customers to know about your products/services and helps strengthen your online brand reputation.
SEO has been a key marketing tool used by startups to thrive in today’s competitive business environment. Use the effective SEO tips shared in this post to improve your brand performance and conversions.
This article by Jaykishan Panchal was previously published on Smallbizdaily.com
About the Author:
Jaykishan Panchal is an SEO & Content Marketing Manager at E2M Solutions Inc. and implements cutting edge SEO strategies to help businesses strengthen their online presence. Apart from helping small and big businesses he loves to jot down valuable resources for Entrepreneurs, Start Ups, and Technology Geeks.
Featured Image Credits: Pixabay
You Might Also Like:
Learn More About Digital Marketing
by Awesome Author | Feb 3, 2019 | Social Media, Social Media Marketing
Social media has the potential to become the largest source of online traffic for any company. That distinction is now claimed by search engines.
While search engines do have a wider footprint and record more activity than social media, the ability of companies to reach out to their target audience and in person is what makes social media special.
You can target profiles and hence generate quality traffic from social media platforms.
Search engines have very little to offer to companies that don’t manage to get their websites ranking on the first page of search results. Social media too has its share of challenges but those are a little less overwhelming.
The odds are a bit more manageable compared to organic search engine optimization. There are more than two billion people on social media. There are dozens of social media platforms. How you strategize your social media outreach will determine the traffic.
image credits: pixabay
Here are ten tips to get traffic from social media platforms.
-
Know what to post. It is no secret that you need to come up with engaging content to intrigue your followers and the larger target audience so they check out the links or information and get redirected to your website. Normal posts, shares, and tweets, or images and videos will be of little help unless there is a content development and management strategy. The content can be anything from an article to an info-graphic, an image to a video.
You could share short or long content, in snippets or as a larger report hosted on your website. You could publish content directly as pages on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Whatever you choose to share must be relevant for your audience. For instance, very few teenagers would want to read a three-thousand-word post. Very few professionals will have the time to check out a five-minute video. You need to know how much time your target audience will be willing to give you, what format they would prefer to access and what kind of information they are looking for. Develop the content accordingly.
- Interactive content works better than one-way communiqués. Polls, quizzes, surveys, contests, and any kind of Q&A or inviting feedback will open up a channel of communication. Social media works best when there is two-way communication and in real-time. Twitter and Facebook have become phenomenally popular because of this reason.
Companies are using these mediums to engage with their audience live. When you are done with polls, quizzes, surveys, contests and feedback generation or addressing grievances, you should focus on content that will initiate a discussion. Contents that encourage or invite comments, where people have something to say will always score better than just close-ended informative content. The purpose is not just to share some helpful information but to get the reader to check out the website. Only that will generate traffic for you.
-
Once you know what to post, you should know when and where to post it. There are specific times when people of specific profiles come online and check their timelines.
Students wouldn’t be online when they are supposed to be at school. Professionals will not check the posts from brands they follow when they are in the midst of their first meeting or the end-of-day session at work. Homemakers will rarely be online when they are cooking breakfast, lunch, or dinner, doing chores or when they need to get groceries. Likewise, every social media platform has its periods of peak and off-peak activities.
Find out when your target audience is live or active and on which social media platform. Share your content when your target audience is online and has the time to check out your posts.
-
You can post your content at the best possible time after due research and even then, your traction could be limited. Be sure that your competitors will also do their homework and post at the same time. Hence, you would need to repost your content. If you repost frequently then you would just be spamming your audience. Time, you repost smartly and offer something new every time. Do not just share or re-tweet. Add a new fact or highlight something new from the post as you repost it or share it. This will keep the same post interesting and you can avert being deemed a spammer.
- You must become an influencer or you should use influencers. Associate with influencers on specific social media platforms who are followed by many and whose opinions are trusted by many. If these influencers endorse your posts or share your content, then you can be sure of having a windfall gain in traffic.
Some influencers offer their endorsement for a fee. You could try this route. You can also go for organic endorsements. In due time, your social media presence must command the influence to form and shape opinions.
-
Try to trend your content. You can use hashtags for easy indexing of content and also entice more people to check out the piece. You can sponsor a post or some content to pop up on timelines of people who don’t follow you. A trending topic will always have a larger outreach and you would witness a spike in your website traffic. Social media is all about expansive outreach and that is what you must focus on.
-
Always work on the credibility of your brand. Your social media presence should be impeccably trustworthy. Spamming, sharing poor quality content, or generating interest and then failing to satiate the needs of the target audience will erode the trust of the people and that can be hard to regain.
Trusted brands will always have more people willingly checking out the links or contents. Others will be shrugged off by the same people who still follow those handles or profiles.
-
Promotion or an amazing offer is the best way to generate substantial traffic immediately. However, it cannot be misplaced, mistimed, or poorly targeted. Do not put forth a discount for those who wouldn’t be in a position to purchase.
Do not come up with an offer that may look great on paper but doesn’t really help in reality. Do not promote everything but your bestsellers. Many companies commit this mistake of trying to prop up products that people don’t necessarily want at this time or the offers are not enticing enough. Go all out with your promotions if you want an exponential spike in traffic.
-
Consider social media automation. Automate daily posts, use software to track the traffic generated from social media, use analyses to study the outreach and the impact of every post, have auto follow-ups for any activity originating from social media such as a redirected user signing up for newsletters or making an inquiry.
These are some ways to make social media marketing more efficient, punctual, and organized.
-
Finally, combine social media marketing with email marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and other outreach programs for an optimum impact.
Often, the first communication doesn’t generate traffic or any traction, the second or the third point of contact does and they don’t have to be through the same medium
