Category: SMO

Your Internet marketing efforts range over many venues, from blogs, search engine advertising, and your own website. Social networks are a valuable addition to your Internet marketing roster, with Pew Internet reporting that 73 percent of adults use at least one social network, with Facebook taking the top network spot. Social media is the digital age’s version of word of mouth advertising, and knowing how to generate leads from your social media profiles is essential to creating a well rounded Internet marketing approach.

Media Fit for Social Networks

Consider your media options when you market on social networks. Instead of pouring money into an expensive commercial or informational video, consider creating media with socially connected tools. Forbes recommends looking at Vine, Instagram, and other services to create and host your marketing content. The challenge of this form of lead generation and sales is creating either a relevant clip in a limited time span, or choosing to focus on the viral or humor route and hoping that it brings enough recognition to your company and brand to create qualified traffic.

Social Network Advertising

Social network advertising opens up avenues to place your ads in front of a large audience, but the question is whether you get enough lead generation to make it worth your while. Adobe reports that Facebook click through rates have increased 275 percent. Much of the increase can be attributed to ads that are within the Facebook newsfeed, instead of placed off to the side of the content. You also pick and choose the demographics for Facebook advertising. Generating home insurance leads, for example, is a much simpler process if you target the age demographic more likely to own a home instead of renting. This method allows you to spend your advertising dollars in the most effective fashion.

Social Media Engagement

Learn the etiquette and rules of each social networking platform, and apply these lessons in conversations with potential customers. While it’s great to use social networks as a way to support existing customers, don’t overlook the potential use as a lead generation tool. Follow relevant industry hashtags, post about news that interests your demographic even if it isn’t strictly relevant to your business, and build up connections with your network to continue growing your brand awareness. Utilize hashtags to your benefit for visibility or for organizing group discussions on a platform such as Twitter.

Social Media Monitoring

Get a heads up about a viral marketing success coming your way, or a public relations disaster by using social media monitoring tools such as Sprout Social. These tools make it easy to interact with your potential customers and clients by steamlining responses, allowing you to schedule content, and letting you know who is mentioning you across multiple social networks. You want to cover as many relevant networks as possible, so this type of tool is also useful for keeping your profiles organized and active.

Social media marketing is a fantastic opportunity to build brand awareness and brand loyalty and it’s more relevant today than ever before. However, building your brand with social media is not as simple as just making some posts and watching the masses come soaring in to adore you. There is a process to success and there are also some things that should be avoided.

So let’s take a look at what you need to do to build your brand successfully:

Use Custom Social Media Design

A custom social media design will do more to build your brand awareness, help you stand out in a sea of profiles and show that you care enough about your accounts to spend that little extra time and effort on it. Nearly all social media networks offer some type of customization and those who previously did not are now making the change, due to popular demand.

When you use custom social media design, it’s also important that you maintain a common theme across all networks and it also helps if this design matched or complements your website design.

Practical tip: Consider hiring a professional graphic designer experienced in social media design to customize all your themes to match.

Interact and Engage Your Community

Once you have created accounts, you need to build a community. It’s not as simple as just expecting people to come by and chat. You need to give them a reason to participate. This is where it becomes very important to interact and engage your community. Your social media accounts are not your sounding board to blast info to the masses. Rather, they should be a community of like-minded people who come together to share ideas, opinions and interesting chat.

Take the time to ensure the content you’re posting is relevant and useful to your community. Invite them to join in or to submit their own content and ideas. Keep them involved in the process and they will keep coming back.

Practical tip: Recognize community members who frequent your social media and be sure to tag them, thank them and reward them (when possible). They will appreciate that you appreciate them.

Make Your Fans Center Stage

Social media helps you to nurture and strengthen the relationships you currently have with your fan base. If you want your customers to be loyal, you need to show them mutual respect and concern. So ask them questions, invite them to share and take part in your community and show them you appreciate when they do. Asking your followers questions shows you care about them and you’re inviting them to share their lives with you. No matter what product or service you offer, when they choose you, they are inviting you into their lives. So making your fans center stage shows that you equally care about them.

Practical tip: One way to recognize your fans is to do a ‘fan of the week’ contest and offer a small prize, a discount for your services or some other kind of recognition and thank you.

Be Consistent and Transparent

Trust is key to creating brand loyalty. If customers do not trust you, they won’t return and they certainly won’t tell friends and family about you. One top method of building trust is with consistency and transparency. You need to be open and honest with your social media communities. If you make a mistake, own up to it. Never give them a reason to believe you are being anything other than completely honest.

Practical tip: Don’t delete posts unless they directly violate your rules or the site’s rules (such as hate speech or vulgarities). Deleting posts makes the readers think you are censoring them or hiding certain information, especially that which might be negative.

Wrapping it Up

Every company dreams of that loyal fan- the one who is dedicated, passionate and praises the company far and wide. When you want to build a satisfied fan base like this, you need an excellent product or service, combined with extraordinary customer service and with some savvy social media marketing, you can push it all to the next level.

Ever since social media took over the internet, to say many were thrilled would be an understatement. It opened many opportunities for individuals, groups and even businesses. Many use social media to get in touch with family and friends, connect with new people, stay updated with trending topics and current events, share photos, videos, opinions, and contents, even to just spare time and for entertainment.

For entrepreneurs, it became an excellent platform to promote and grow their business. With billions all over the world using the different social media sites every single day, these became one of the go-to sites for companies who wish to succeed. According to statistics,  the number of active social media users will reach a staggering 3.02 million users. This is the very reason why owners of big and small companies, as well as digital marketers, need to include social media in their digital marketing campaigns.

However, basic social media know-how is not enough to succeed in your business venture. Yes, anyone can create their pages in the different social media platforms, but not everyone can grow their followers, gather enough engagements and make conversions. What you need is a concrete social media marketing strategy, and we’ve picked ten of the best ways for you to formulate one like a pro.

First, Determine Your Short-term and Long-term Goals

The first step is to know what your objectives are and creating short-term and long-term goals. Generic goals won’t do as you need to be as specific as possible to make betters plans to achieve ultimate results. It would be best to keep the SMART principle in mind when determining your goals.

Know Your Customer

Next, you need to know who your customers are, what they want, what they need, how they currently behave, and what social media sites they are using. Be as specific as possible when naming your target audiences like their demographics, their age bracket, location, and the like.

Know Your Competitors

Know who your competitors are, where their location is, what social media sites they are using and study their tactics. This will give you pertinent data as to what you can do get ahead of your rivals.

Create Social Media Pages

Now that you know where your target audience and competitors are, it’s time to create pages in those networks. But, before you go on creating accounts, make sure to take one step at a time. You don’t need to create a page for your business on every single social media sites. Start with the ones you know and usually use like Facebook and Instagram. This way, you’ll already have an idea on how it works and not be overwhelmed with a large number of pages you need to manage all at once.

Make Due and Diligent Research

Social media marketing trends vary and changes often, so make sure to make due analysis, see what you can include in your marketing campaign, see what competitors are recurrently doing and if their efforts are paying off. In short, analytics and the latest trends will matter once you start your social media marketing campaigns.

Be Creative when Creating Contents You’ll be Posting on Social Media

Creative, original and engaging contents are what you need to publish and share in your social media pages to attract followers and get better engagements. Make sure each post is useful, high-quality, well-written and is something that your target audiences will want to find on their newsfeed.

Align Social Media Marketing Efforts with Your Content Marketing

To get the best results out of your social media marketing efforts, one needs to ensure to make it work with your content marketing strategies. Make sure to use a tone that your target audiences will find easy to understand, the posts you will write are useful and engaging, your posts and websites are optimized and to respond to comments and feedbacks accordingly.

Optimize Contents

Just because you managed to publish great-quality contents, your job is as good as done. This is what rookies in the field of SMM usually do. However, a good digital marketer knows that optimizing your content for search and sharing is how you can win in this type of digital marketing. Make use of visuals like images, graphics or even videos, and be sure your posts are easily shareable. Lastly, don’t forget to engage with your audiences to build trust, credibility and good relations.

Drive Traffic to Your Landing Page

The number of followers and engagements are not the only things that will let you know if your marketing efforts are paying off, but the amount of traffic you get from social media to your website and how much conversions you make. So, make sure to link your posts and shares on Facebook, for example, include links that will lead your target audiences to your landing page. This way, you create and drive traffic to your web and increase your chances of converting site visits into revenues.

Take Advantage of Social Media Marketing Tools

There are tons of tools available that can help you with your social media marketing efforts. For example, you already have lots of posts you plan sharing to your social pages. You can use tools that let you automate and schedule posts to save time and energy. To make better contents or see how your campaigns are doing, you can use tools that can help you find in-demand keywords, trending topics and one that lets you check your analytics. Some tools are free, some needs payment to enjoy the full features. You can find one that will enable you to make the most out of your SMM efforts dream a reality depending on your budget and marketing needs.

These are ten of the best ways that every digital marketer needs to keep in mind to create social media marketing strategies that actually work. Remember that in SMM, the number of likes and followers may look rewarding, but the determining factors for your success are the number of engagements and convertibles you get from your marketing efforts.

Social media is a proven way to connect with masses as it helps to reach to people in almost every part of the world. Hence, it is an effective method from business’s perspective to engage with a vast target audience. Using social media, you can market your brand and stand apart from the crowd. If done in an effective and strategic way, you can utilize social media platforms for successfully establishing a new product and earning recognition.

These days, social media marketing is soaring with tons of adverts and promotional campaigns carrying information about different brands and ideas. In order to make your presence in this congestion, you have to employ some unique tactics that will help you achieve the target audience and persuade them for buying your products or services. By harnessing the power of social media, you can build a robust fan base who will turn into loyal customers.

Branding is an essential ingredient to generate long-term business. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc, help you unravel your brand to the worldwide audience who get opportunity to learn about it and its benefits. Thus, these powerful social networking platforms enable you to increase your brand awareness among the target audience or worldwide. You can utilize these platforms to the fullest to get better results by following some essential tactics as follows to build a strong brand identity.

Use appropriate number of hashtags

Use hashtags to join the conversation, but do not include too much hashtags, use only relevant ones. You can create a custom hashtag pertaining to your brand, but it’s wise to use commonly-used hashtags. Using a hashtag that relates to your brand makes sense as your fans and followers will automatically recognize your posts and content once shared on the social networking platforms. For instance #SamsungTips is a hashtag from Samsung which they utilize to share information and content about their products.

Convey brand value consistently

The key objective of branding is to generate a specific set of emotions and ideas in the minds of customers about the brand whenever he/she encounters it. Hence, a brand becomes strong when it conveys a clear message to customers and do it on consistent basis. By adopting a specific tone and format of language for all social media content to convey your message, you can accomplish this task.

Engage with audience to make a bonding

Your connection with audience should not only be limited to business. Extend your boundaries and engage with your audience on a personal basis. Through social media monitoring and direct response, you can make a one-to-one connection with audience to surprise and delight them. By delivering unexpected to your audience, you can make an emotional connection with them for instance, congratulating on customers’ anniversaries or other occasions helps you nourish a healthy bonding with your customers.

Update content regularly

Many well-known companies such as Disney, Coca-cola, and Apple, don’t need to remind customers of their existence as they are well-established brands in the market. But, others have to promote their brands repeatedly in order to get a strong foothold in the audiences’ minds. In this regard, regular update of fresh content makes a difference.

Keep interacting with your audience regularly so that your image in their mind won’t fade away. Connecting with your audience on a regular basis might be tricky only fresh ideas and content help you survive your identity.

Respond to your audience queries

One of the big advantages of social media for business is that it offers a direct line for marketing communication. You can establish and maintain a strong brand identity if you interact with audience address queries and help them find specific information relevant to your service on social networking platforms. It creates a deep bonding between you and your audience. In a nutshell, as a business owner, you should care about the feedback and comments posted by audience on social media.

Provide something valuable to your audience

The simplest way to grab attention of someone is by offering them something valuable in return. As in real life, it also works on social media, it means branded content should fulfill some consumer needs to get remembered. Quality content is core to this strategy, by providing unique, well-researched, and interesting article can help you catch attention of your audience and retain it for long time.

Be realistic and relevant

Social media is increasing at a fast pace and users are getting immense number of messages. To be unique in that cluster, you need to create something which is realistic and relevant to the interest of your audience. Hence, try to make you content entertaining, relevant to your brand, and importantly relevant to your audience to get a response.

Wrapping up!

Social media has opened a door to new way of marketing where businesses can connect with their audience directly and promote their products or services. Hence, it is great platform to establish your brand identity as it can reach to masses across the globe. However, to reach to your target audience effectively and influence them for your objective you need to prepare some strategies that will help you achieve this goal. With the tactics discussed in this post you may utilize the potential of social media to its fullest and ensure greater ROI by engaging with your audience. If you use social media wisely then not only you can build a strong identity of your brand in the minds of your audience, but you may also sway their buying decisions and get loyal customers.

This article is contributed by Jacob Colleen, digital marketing expert at Webby Central – Digital Marketing agency

With 2.23 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a powerful tool that you can use to promote your small business. It is a great way to connect with existing and potential customers, market new products & services, and generate sales.

Unfortunately, many small business owners do not pay enough attention to their Facebook business page after registration. Many entrepreneurs do not know what to publish on their Fakebook page & at what frequency. Several others are convinced that it is not worth the time and effort. For a successful Business Promotion on Facebook, familiarize yourself with these Facebook marketing tips:

#1. Your Business Goals

Before creating a semblance of a successful Facebook advertising campaign, just determine your goals and indicators with which you can analyse the success of your campaign. This will help you lay the foundation for Facebook marketing and achieve the desired ROI easily and effortlessly. Generally, Facebook marketing is done for-

#2. Create and Schedule Facebook Posts

If you publish posts on your Facebook Page regularly, a certain percentage of daily active Facebook users will get engaged with your brand. Just publish content for your target audience with a proper sequence if you want to use Facebook to generate the maximum benefits. Education and entertainment of Facebook fans should be the primary goals of Facebook Marketing. Add smiles to increase the number of comments and spreads by 33% and collect 57% more likes than the post without smiles. Always keep in mind that the interrogative posts receive more comments.

#3. Use Email Newsletters to Promote Your Facebook Page

Always keep in mind that Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based on your e-mail list. Therefore, create a .CSV or .TXT file with a single e-mail address for each individual line.  Click Audiences-User List and upload your file. With successful Email Marketing initiatives, you can make your Facebook Page go viral and increase its awareness as far as possible. You can use some good e-mail marketing tools for this purpose.

#4. Share Useful Content at The Right Time

You must note that every Facebook post has its conclusions. If you go into the conclusions of their posts, you can see the average time when your subscribers/fans/followers are online in great numbers. For example- if you are planning a queue of three posts, you should know the best time when the majority of subscribers are online and schedule your posts accordingly.

#5. The Use of Facebook Plugins

It is a very difficult task to perform Facebook marketing manually every day when you have a large base of Facebook Fans and Followers. So, installing a Facebook sharing plugin will help you to share contents easily on Facebook, to increase the visibility of your brand and the number of subscribers on Facebook easily and effortlessly.

#6. Facebook Pixel Remarketing

Any potential customer, who visited your website from any source of traffic, but did not make transactions, probably remain the phase of finding the best offer sooner or later. It is possible that they forget the first website they visited in the early stage of web browsing.

Always keep in mind that the Facebook Pixel will allow you to target people who visited your site earlier using Facebook ads. It is perhaps the best way for most of the traffic that comes from AdWords.

Just install Facebook Pixel by logging into your Facebook advertising manager. After this, install the Facebook Pixel code on your site. The process of data collection can take a day. So, return to the site’s traffic menu and select “people who visited certain pages of the site. Use those insights to create a list of people who visited certain pages of your site and target them from the next time to create more sales and leads.

#7. Regular Interaction with Facebook Community

Always keep in mind that the regular interaction and communication with your community on Facebook can build a strong trust, trust, and loyalty. Its most excellent result is the transition of subscribers to repeat customers and potential leads. Furthermore, Facebook can be used as a customer support centre to address their concerns quickly and offer the best possible solutions.

#8. Interaction with Another Facebook Page

As an admin of your Facebook page, did you ever communicate with another Facebook Page? If not, then be active and identify the pages your subscribers are following. Your comment to other pages will serve as a direct link to yours and help you to bring new leads, likes, and subscriptions.

#9. Images and Video Content

Always keep in mind that people love pictures and videos displayed on different Facebook Pages. It is because images and video content help people understand the subject matter easily & take the desired action. Several statics show that posts that include photos get 120% more involvement than usual and post with videos have 180% more involvement of users.

#10. Create or Join Facebook Groups

Create or join groups on Facebook to increase your page views and traffic, and make more business opportunities. You can create 3 types of groups on Facebook:

Final Words

In today’s highly digitized world, Facebook Marketing is important for the acquisition of new customers and business opportunities. Just follow the above-mentioned tips to meet your ambitious business objectives.

This article is contributed by Robert Sumner, writer with Media Fortress – Web Design and Small Business Marketing Agency