New Year’s can be disregarded as a holiday; however, with a rundown of New Year marketing thoughts, you will not commit that error. While the facts confirm that shopper spending drops in January, remember that it doesn’t vanish by and large. Saying a sensational goodbye, brands chose to get inventive and brilliant with their campaigns and posts. We should simply say that the outgoing year is somewhat a cornerstone for being more imaginative as of now. While a couple of brands go through the straightforward, innovative course, different brands choose to think critically and synchronize their New Year campaigns with their brand philosophy.
Here we investigate how creative ideas to ring in the New Year can be imaginative. The web-based media space shall look lively and brilliant as it is loaded up with New Year wishes. Everything necessary to craft an excellent marketing campaign is a brief period of imagination to keep clients energized after all the gift-giving during the holidays. Yet, assuming you’re low on both of those, we’ve assembled five plans to kick you off.
One of the most effective methods for increasing traffic is to discover what people are seeking right now and then develop your content accordingly. Examining the data should be part of your New Year’s resolutions. It is critical that you understand what people are looking for. If you have an online store, this might help you support discounts rapidly. Individuals, for the most part, start thinking about their lives as the year comes to a close, and they soon begin to set objectives for themselves.
During the Christmas or Hanukkah season, many businesses use email marketing software to send emails. Set your company out from the crowd by sending something before New Year’s Eve. If you feel the urge to stand out from the competition, you may even send an email before the New Year. More significant chances are being noticed since people’s inboxes are often overflowing with messages on New Year’s Day. Send out unusual ideas to certain groups of your supporters, as well as email-only details that you aren’t publicizing on social media or your website.
You may even include a discount code or recall a suggestion for your email to improve it even further. You might also organize a giveaway challenge for a select group of loyal customers. This results in highly valuable, watched content while also providing your brand a boost.
Request that followers submit Christmas recordings with their own clips and your selected hashtag, containing your product or both, and provide something enticing in exchange. Keep this in mind when you plan your January marketing strategy. Connect with your online media audience by asking them to submit remarks or tales that stirred them in the preceding year. It may be anything: a personal tale, a comment from a celebrity, or something they’ve read or seen. You might have the substance on several platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and even Facebook. Each of these has a unique set of engagement options.
Your content should also be tailored to your specific demands, utilizing catchphrases that have larger search traffic. This will also increase visitors to your website. Keep it short, to the point, and direct. Get some information about them or publish their New Year’s resolutions on Facebook for a chance to win a prize.
If you offered a prize for images of a holiday feast, follow up by asking how fans dealt with their other holiday chores. Afterwards, award them for something quirky and unusual that your customers did during the holiday season. It doesn’t have to be directly related to your business; this is more about building relationships. Consider New Year’s driven developments that will benefit your company the most. If you own a clothing store, offer a special discount on apparel, adornments, and splendor items that shine. If you own a liquor shop, combine a bottle of wine with a pair of wine glasses as a complimentary item to make festive bundles perfect for gifting as presents for New Year’s Eve celebrations.
Regardless of whether you’re not shipping a new product, having a unique discount on New Year’s Day is a great idea. To generate enthusiasm among buyers, the advancement should ideally be New Year driven. Begin the new year by giving discounts on a variety of items. If you’re stuck for new year’s advancement ideas and don’t have any new items to sell, simply reduce the items in your store!
While your Christmas sales may have ended, there may be clients who are waiting for greater bargains. This is a fantastic opportunity to provide those customers a chance to buy your stuff. Flash offers are fantastic New Year’s marketing ideas, and they can help you get your Christmas merchandise out. Get out your Christmas product and make it a point to get your clients to act right away. Many shoppers wait until after the holidays to take advantage of offers like this. Nonetheless, keep in mind that such consumers are unlikely to be your greatest future clients. Therefore this should mostly be considered as a way to get rid of excess inventory.
Obviously, you can’t anticipate the same high as you would during the Christmas sales, but it will help you sustain the dramatic decline that most company owners see in sales towards the end of the year. If you don’t want to perform another special task right now, you may extend your Christmas discounts until January or February.
Having a stale old website or physical store from the Christmas season shall never bode well with returning customers. Within a matter of a few days, not only do you have to try and list new products, but you must try and offer a new look and feel to customers for the New Year so that they are encouraged to look around and make more purchases. In order to execute this successfully, given below are a few ideas.
If you own a private company, efficient drop-offs or product deployments are critical to the success of your business over the holidays. However, the start of the year might be an incredible opportunity to launch a brand-new product. A fantastic new year’s marketing strategy would include significant promotional activities throughout December, which would eventually lead to product shipment. When the clock strikes midnight, you can ship the merchandise.
Rather than repeating commercials and promoting the same things, your new year marketing should focus on new products. Persuade your clients to try something out of the ordinary, something truly novel. People are incredibly open to change in the first two or three months of the year, so here is your chance to capitalize on that enthusiasm.
A simple tagline may do wonders for your company. If you’ve been doing your rounds, you’ve probably seen this tagline used more than once. You can’t expect your new year’s marketing effort to be productive if you keep repeating and using the same advertisements.
This may appear to be counterproductive because all of the gifts have been purchased and unwrapped, but the ideal customer for your product may be ready to purchase. This opportunity to sell will be bolstered if you purposefully promote this upcoming new product throughout December alongside your exciting holiday dispatches or bargains. On the other hand, you may also direct exceptional New Year’s freebies. New Year marketing ideas, such as this one, may help you create buzz about your business.
Despite the online sales boom, it is suggested that businesses that have an offline presence also focus on some unique marketing strategies to capitalize on offline business as well. This shall help in growing the brand in a very sustainable and proportionate manner.
If you have a physical presence, you may decorate your showcase window with a New Year’s theme. This is one of those misguided yet important New Year’s marketing ideas that you should use this holiday season. This may be anything like a New Year’s Eve theme in which your items are used. It’s bound to catch the attention of by-passers. You can also elect to display banners and standards in high-traffic areas.
You may use any assistance that is relevant to your business and is associated with the New Year; merely make an honest attempt to get people through the door. This might include areas like shopping malls and marketplaces where people go to buy New Year’s Eve treats. If people see your pennants there, your things will stick in their minds. This can help you create brand awareness, which can lead to transactions.
While the New Year time is great and everyone is in a festive mood, there shall be a sudden dip right after. As a shrewd businessman, you must try and stay ahead of the slump. Thus, by using creative marketing ideas, one can continue being the talk of the town and keeping their brand in the limelight by executing some fine planning before ringing in the New Year itself!
Deals do tend to fall down following the Christmas season. Here’s a suggestion that will make a huge impact in terms of energy: Launch a post-New Year’s Eve promotion. This arrangement can begin in the New Year with exciting discounts, and you may be able to attract customers to your business. If you own a physical store, consider everything your customers would require throughout a long day of profit, mostly winter products and fitness goods. Regardless of whether you want to try something pricey, you may get a simple upgrade that provides a good discount. You can advertise the advancement via web-based media as well as other marketing tactics.
You may also include goods in your promotion that will help clients achieve their goals. For example, a home equipment business may market air fryers to aid in the development of eating habits.
Having a development plan that expressly targets this group of customers may be beneficial to you. You may create an atmosphere in which your clients will be compelled to value their body for what it is worth. At the same time, you can progress to a stable way of life through advancement. Everything else being equivalent, you can run developments of clothing and even advertise them in this manner.
Disseminate these developments using all available marketing channels. You should also guarantee that the progress is for a specific product that is associated with the objective. You may persuade them to buy by emphasizing its benefits and giving a discount.
The highs and the lows of the Holiday season peak with New Year’s and then wanes off eventually. The above-given tips shall help you in both times. With credible New Year marketing ideas and tactics, you may capitalize on this event. Sending out offers, challenges, new products, and New Year’s greetings may go a long way toward building your brand’s image and increasing sales. So, what are you waiting for? Go get creative with your marketing tactics and win some customers!
Need help getting started? Our marketing specialists can help! Contact us today.
The holiday season is a critical time for corporate branding. In terms of how shoppers behave, the holidays are exceptional for the most part. Similarly, the holidays themselves are crucial for all businesses and thus, it is the best time to boost your holiday marketing efforts to manage corporate income. Buyers frequently spend more, going all out to spend on goods, meals, fashion, and everything else that goes into ‘living the good life’.
An all-around planned holiday marketing approach may help with infusing a significant rise in sales and retaining customers by strengthening relationships with them. Around this time, there is a lot of competition in the business world. They make every effort to close as many agreements as possible before the year comes to an end. Those that organize their assignments correctly earn a lot of money during this time.
A strong marketing endeavor can attract customers who are ready to spend by completing urgent or unplanned shopping or who are preparing for the year ahead and researching who to go with for particular administrations or commodities. To be at the forefront of their thoughts provides you an undeniable advantage over your competitors. If Christmas is still a long way off on your calendar, don’t sit idle since your opportunities will not. People generally start browsing for Christmas buying options well in advance of the big day. However, with so many variables to consider in your Christmas marketing, this is no easy task. So in this article, we’ve gathered all the information you’ll need to launch a successful Christmas campaign.
Christmas is a time to share the joy and have a good time. There are a lot of folks in the pub that are full of enthusiasm. Joining the Festive theme to your business marketing activities brings this spirit to your firm as well, making customer connections very straightforward. Brands may increase their revenue by leveraging the marketing effort of providing free gifts with each purchase during the holidays. It is an excellent method to engage in the Christmas spirit and give away free items. Indeed, even anything as simple as putting up designs in your business or hosting an internet-based Christmas-themed crusade on the web may effectively imply offers. It all comes down to your marketing budget and effort.
The returns will be satisfactory if you have a substantial financial plan and are well-versed in your target demographic. This will make it easier for you to achieve your goal of higher deals faster and in a shorter amount of time. It makes your consumers happy and gets them in the purchasing mood. You can provide something inexpensive that does not necessitate additional shipping expenditures. Finally, it is critical to recognize the power of free shipping.
Followers, active existing customers, and promoters of your content are all excited about the possibilities that should be capitalized on. It might be difficult to communicate with your clients in some instances; however, it is easier over the holidays. That is all anybody is talking about. It serves as an icebreaker for you to connect with them. It is an opportunity for you to get valuable knowledge that you can apply to improve your products and services. Segment your present clientele and send mailers to all of them informing them of the proposal. Remember that no two clients are the same, so remember to personalize them and add a touch of warmth.
Your supporters should be rewarded with early access to deals before the Christmas rush. This aids you in attracting consumers to purchase in advance of the holidays. It gives you the advantages to make transactions straight away, prior to the holiday, free for all. It makes it easier to supervise and fulfill orders prior to the holiday chaos. A sense of exclusivity and one-of-a-kind service will make VIP clientele happy and keep them shopping for a long time.
Your fans will feel special since they can obtain a good discount right now, before everyone else. Aside from emails, you might also communicate with your customers with SMS text. If they are connected to the internet through a mobile device, they are also monitoring their social media apps. This sort of marketing is specialized, and only a few companies employ it.
Aside from the standard blogging when on a long trip and so on, people are also seeking to present their friends and family. Because the number of online clients continues to grow, establishing a web-based media strategy is critical. For other firms, collaborating with superstars is the primary Christmas marketing plan. It generates awareness around your company since powerhouses will frequently post on all of their social platforms about the upcoming holiday shopping events.
To employ internet advertising, you must be consistent, precise, and not overly forceful. Content should be created and disseminated at various levels and at regular intervals. Computerization may aid in enhancing the impact of the proper material to be pushed out in the long run.
This marketing plan will aid you in reaching out to new audiences and increasing brand awareness. Influencer holiday marketing activities help you extend openness by targeting niche populations who are likely to move over at a rapid pace.
With online media freebies, a firm may increase its branding while also assisting its ardent customers. It is also critical for attracting a new fan audience that is not yet aware of your brand. A simple Christmas challenge idea would be to commemorate your product or service for the most imaginative replica, approach, or content. The winners receive free goodies, gift cards, and special privileges.
Establish and present a theme where the audience may interact with the company. Your social media platforms and website are important avenues via which the public may collaborate with you. A revamped landing page strategy and Christmas season content demonstrates a higher degree of devotion, which improves the customer experience. You may improve your site by adding major aspects that benefit from a fresh look, especially around the holidays. The Christmas season may account for over one-third of yearly sales for businesses, making it the ideal time to see a significant increase in revenue. As a result, optimizing your website for holiday visitors might be the most effective holiday marketing strategy.
Attractive display pages help the client find the information they’re looking for. If your promoting is consistent across the buyer’s feed, it adds to the constant buying experience. Plan guidelines and pop-ups that provide information about a large site-wide sale or a large bargain on an entire product category. Holiday-motivated calls to action are an excellent approach to get your online customers in the purchasing mood. Make an attempt to enhance these to get the most significant exchanges over the holiday season by utilizing the resources. If you’re a small entrepreneur, digitalization is your best friend.
Combos and Gift Packs are an excellent idea for holiday sales. They are extremely popular among customers since they provide more significant value than standalone items. They are also made available at a low cost. Certainly, every client looks for it. During the holidays, many browse with the intention of purchasing towards the end. They might not recognize what they’re looking for, especially if they’re looking for presents, which is why you should market. Assist them in making the purchase.
Customers are in a frenzy before the holidays to find that “perfect surprise” for their family members and friends. In the course of that pursuit, they will also make a purchase from a new player in the market. Businesses could consider using both consumer loyalty and client security in their statistical surveys.
Offering bundled items at low prices will increase the number of deals you obtain and raise your average revenue. It is fundamental, especially for internet-based enterprises. Make it more convincing by identifying the combinations or providing a hashtag to attract people from favorable channels. To create a more optimal arrangement, pair your smash hit goods with related products.
There might be a variety of reasons why clients are unable to take advantage of the offers. Many firms widen their Christmas marketing efforts in order to attract these clients. Foster a relationship with new clients by providing some incredible last-minute deals.
The largest concern for last possible moment shoppers is if the presents will arrive on time. Play on their emotions and prevail on them with streamlined service that is certain to arrive on time. Any marketing efforts, for the most part, allow new clients to find you. Because people buy throughout the Christmas season, marketing exposes you to a much larger pool of people to whom you may reach out to bring back customers.
Christmas is an excellent opportunity for you to gain valuable insights that you can apply to improve your goods. Consideration of offline channels may be a fantastic holiday marketing endeavor. Businesses should consider focusing on unconnected platforms such as TV and radio advertisements throughout the holidays to capture the attention of customers.
Engaging screen initiatives and TV advertising assist in reaching a larger group of people, making your Christmas marketing effort more productive. You may communicate with potential customers through unconnected channels who may have missed out on holiday deals through web-based channels.
If you have a large budget, you might run advertisements at various phases – Pay – per – click promotions, Google advertisements, Facebook promotional campaigns, and LinkedIn promotions. You may create a quest based on your interest group’s location. With the increase in digital purchasing, it is vital that your company be visible on the web and stands out from the competition. There are several instruments that aid with supervision at various levels.
Recognize and categorize your major interest group, then collect goal encounters concerning them. Learn about their preferred channels; do they prefer to consume info on their workstation or on their mobile device? These experiences aid in making educated marketing decisions for holiday promotions. Brands must expand or adjust their pursuit perceivability in order to join a possible client’s purchaser venture. With your Christmas branding exercises, provide straightforward yet illuminating information. Examine the potential effects of improving your profit plan, remember to provide free delivery for your promotion, and combine your brand with a consistent and quick purchasing experience.
You want to mine the information from different assets – site, online media, survey locales, outsider roads. Reviewing the presentation of the past Christmas data can assist you with understanding the conduct of your main interest group. You can become familiar with the past patterns better and what they meant for the development of your business. Requesting all the data will assist with characterizing targets for a superior holiday marketing strategy. Alluding to this report one year from now would assist you with refining your targets, objectives, and abilities for the following year’s holiday plans.
Right after Christmas, one can experience the bliss of starting life on a fresh page in the new year. Hence, post-Christmas, though the festive spirit may be dwindling, there is certainly yet a sizeable number of customers who are looking to splurge, exchange gifts and celebrate, so don’t dial down on the marketing; until the first week of January!
You may have seen a couple of Christmas marketing ideas that you have been executing as of no, a few activities that are ready to go, and some that require substitution in a way that sustains your holiday target of acquiring more transactions. The Christmas vacation is almost certainly the finest time to form a passionate relationship with your customer group. By segmenting your clients for a really tailored experience, making your deals simple to promote, and communicating the ideas and possibilities consistently via your platforms, you are positioning your company for maximum success for the next Christmas season.
New marketing trends emerge every year, but 2022 will be different. The pandemic significantly influenced marketing in 2020 and 2021. COVID-19 resulted in a substantial change in customer buying behavior, forcing brands to change the way they approach sales and marketing.
As the pandemic has almost subsided, brands are restoring their marketing strategies to normal. However, some new trends have emerged that businesses and marketers should watch out for.
Let’s a look at nine big trends that will reshape the marketing landscape in 2022.
In-person events have been slowly dying over the past couple of years. Though they still have their place, some people will continue to prefer in-person events, but a large chunk of the event marketing audience will move to hybrid events.
A whopping 97% of event marketers believe hybrid events will outperform any other event type in the future. During the pandemic, virtual events skyrocketed. Webinars and live streams took over the event marketing industry, as people didn’t want to risk going to in-person events.
Even though in-person events are now open, many people still prefer virtual events. They offer better flexibility and accessibility. Participants can save time and attend the event from anywhere, using any device!
Event marketers need to find a way to cater to both in-person and virtual audiences simultaneously. Here’s where hybrid events come into the picture. Hybrid events are in-person events streamed online. People can either attend the event in person or participate in it virtually.
Hybrid events will continue to be the most popular event type in 2022 and beyond.
Branding has always been a key driver of marketing success. More than 80% of customers buy based on trust, and the reliance on trust has only increased over the past couple of years. A survey in beauty and skincare eCommerce showed that around 60% of customers wouldn’t try new brands when shopping online. This makes branding more important than ever.
Storytelling is a great way to enhance your branding efforts. More businesses will tie their products/services to stories their customers can relate to instead of using hard selling techniques.
Organic marketing will also be on the rise in 2022. Paid advertising has traditionally played a vital role in branding for companies. However, with more businesses investing in ads than ever, advertising costs have increased. The average cost-per-click for Google Ads has been rising gradually over the last few years.
As a result, brands are more likely to invest in organic marketing. The focus will be to increase brand awareness organically, using blogging, YouTube videos, and social media content.
Organic marketing plays a vital role in branding because organic content is eternal. It stays on the internet forever, unlike paid ads that stop showing up once you stop paying for them.
Content marketing has been one of the pillars of digital marketing for years. Content marketing leaders experience a 7.8x year-on-year growth in unique website visitors. SEO, PR, social media, webinars, and podcasts are all a part of content marketing.
However, content marketing won’t be the same as it was a couple of years back. Back in the day, content marketing was more about quantity and less about quality. Since only a handful of brands were doing content marketing, businesses that published large volumes of content got more reach and awareness.
Content marketing has become more competitive now. Google has released algorithmic updates that reward good quality content and penalize high-volume low-quality content. Modern-day content marketing revolves around quality.
In 2022, content alignment will be crucial.
What does content alignment mean? Nowadays, most companies take a multichannel content marketing approach. They use SEO, PR, video, social media, and other various channels to increase their visibility and reach a greater audience. However, most content brands produce nowadays is misaligned. For instance, SEO is completely disconnected from PR and social media.
Let’s quickly understand the concept of multichannel and omnichannel marketing before moving ahead. Multichannel marketing includes using different channels to reach an audience. Omnichannel marketing includes using various channels but integrating all of them.
Omnichannel content marketing will rule 2022. Brands will publish aligned content to ensure credibility and better visibility.
When personalization first came into the picture, it soon became the new buzzword in the marketing industry. Every brand, regardless of its type and size, was adopting personalization. Fast forward to 2021, and personalization is the holy grail of successful marketing.
Over 90% of customers are more likely to shop after seeing relevant and personalized offers. This makes personalization an essential element of every marketing strategy. However, personalization is currently limited to addressing consumers by their first names and showing personalized recommendations only.
Things will get more creative and interesting in 2022. Personalization will expand to new channels and content types, such as videos, podcasts, articles, etc. Brands will multiply their efforts to communicate and engage with customers on a personal level. New channels will emerge, and customers will see personalization on every touchpoint.
The past few years have witnessed an exponential increase in the adoption of marketing technology. Marketing automation tools, social media scheduling platforms, and email marketing software are a few examples of technology in marketing.
There’s only one constant thing about technology: it keeps on changing. Since technology continues to evolve, new marketing technology trends have emerged. This time, automation and Artificial Intelligence are leading the way.
Some tasks in marketing are redundant and time-consuming, such as content posting, bidding on keywords in advertising, and sending emails individually to each recipient. Adopting automation automates these tasks, plus many more. Tools like HubSpot and MailChimp are popular marketing automation solutions brands can use to automate their marketing operations.
Another major MarTech trend is the increasing adoption of AI among marketers. Modern-day marketing is increasingly data-driven. Marketing teams need to collect and analyze data to predict customer behavior and make informed decisions. AI makes it easier. With AI, marketers can analyze historical data in quick time and understand their customers better. That’s why 72% of CMOs consider AI a major advantage.
Other technologies like virtual and augmented reality, data science, and beacons will also shape marketing technology in the upcoming years.
Google announced earlier this year that they’d scrap third-party cookies by 2023 to protect users’ privacy. This came out as a shock for many website owners. Presently, 37% of all websites use cookies, while 20.4% use persistent cookies.
Marketers will, therefore, need to find alternatives to third-party cookies. An effective alternative to third-party cookies is first-party data, which many marketers have already started collecting.
Customers nowadays want top-notch privacy and better control over their data. Instead of letting marketers passively track their information, they want to provide their information to brands they trust. That’s why collecting first-party data will be more important than ever in the upcoming years.
If you’re not familiar with first-party data, it refers to the information you collect directly from your customers with their consent. Marketers can also use tools like Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) or Google’s Privacy Sandbox to enable user targeting and personalization without invading their customers’ privacy.
But one thing’s for sure: data will become scarce in the upcoming years. Marketers will need to use interactive marketing techniques like surveys to collect customer information.
You can’t talk about marketing trends and not talk about social media. The past few years have been dramatic for social media. Several new social media trends have emerged that marketers should know about.
The first prominent trend is that short-form videos will dominate social media. The rise of TikTok and then Instagram Reels has made short-form video one of the most popular content types right now. People love short videos, and 68% of them will happily watch a business video if it’s under 60 seconds. Even YouTube has launched a short video feature — Shorts.
Along with short videos, live streams will be a highly popular content type in 2022 and beyond. Users watch live video 10-20x longer than recorded content. Hence, brands will conduct more live streams on social media in the upcoming years to increase watch times and drive more engagement.
Social selling is another prominent trend to dominate social media in 2022. Facebook and Instagram have launched a “Shop” feature to allow users to shop directly from the platform. Hence, the use of social media among eCommerce brands will increase, as they will look to leverage the Shop feature to generate more sales.
Thought leadership has never been more important. An average American comes across up to 10,000 advertisements a day and ignores most of them. In fact, close to 30% of American internet users use some sort of ad-block, up from only 15% in 2014. Clearly, people are immune to hard-selling, and marketers need to go beyond traditional advertising to engage customers and convince them to make a purchase.
Sharing thought-leadership content and educating consumers will be a popular marketing approach among marketers in 2022 and beyond. Every brand can utilize thought-leadership to increase trust and awareness, though it works exceptionally well for B2B businesses.
Thought-leadership content comprises any type of content that informs and educates consumers. It includes:
HubSpot is a classic example of brands leveraging thought-leadership to the fullest. They have a dedicated “Education” section that offers ebooks, guides, and free courses and certifications. They also have a blog where they constantly publish new articles.
Thought leadership will flourish in the upcoming years. Sharing free, valuable information to build customer trust will become a key trend among businesses in 2022 and beyond.
All the trends discussed so far revolve around digital marketing and advertising. Digital marketing has indeed grown exponentially. Digital ad spending in the US was $151 billion in 2020, compared to $107 billion for traditional ads. Moreover, digital advertising is projected to make up two-thirds of the total US ad spend by 2023.
Though traditional marketing has slowed down, it is nowhere near extinction. Several brands use traditional marketing to reach larger audiences and increase awareness, and they will continue to do so in the upcoming years.
However, traditional marketing is no longer the same as it was before. The major drawback to traditional advertising is the lack of connectivity and integration. A potential customer watches your ad in the newspaper, but what do they do?
Most brands ask consumers to perform an action, like visit the store or make a call. These actions are not trackable, and marketers can’t measure how their offline ads are performing.
Marketers have overcome this hurdle by integrating offline and online marketing. An effective approach many brands are using is to encourage offline customers to go online.
For example, several brands include their website URL or social media handles, encouraging users to take instant action. Many brands have adopted QR codes to offer omnichannel experiences to customers. Users scan the code using their smartphones to reach the destination URL.
Here’s an example of Nike using a QR code to promote its app in a brick-and-mortar store.
More marketers in the future will realize the benefits of integrated marketing and use it to increase reach and marketing performance.
2022 could be one of the most revolutionary years for marketing. A lot has changed in the past two years regarding customer shopping habits and how brands approach marketing. Marketers need to identify and embrace these changes and develop new ways to promote their brands in the new normal.
To drive marketing success, marketers will need to think outside the box and blend creative thinking with leading-edge technologies. Need help getting started? Contact us today!
A webinar is a live, online event that’s broadcasted to a pre-registered group of individuals who view the presentation from their computers. Webinars typically have both audio and visual components, and therefore webinar hosts need reliable computer technology and strong internet connections in order to provide the best presentation to their viewers.
The main purpose of hosting webinars is to generate leads and connect with targeted audiences. Both B2B and B2C businesses can benefit from hosting webinars, yet webinars are far more commonly used in the B2B space.
Webinars are a great option for presenting complex information to an audience. For example, reading the transcription of an interview with an expert as a blog post will be far less interesting to your audience than watching a live webinar of the expert being interviewed.
You can feature the following types of content in your webinars:
This is to say that webinars are not an ideal medium for all content. For example, simplistic, informative, and list-based content performs best when used in blog articles. Short-form content isn’t necessarily compelling enough to feature in a live webinar, which isn’t to say that short, simple content isn’t valuable information. But that type of content will probably perform better in a format other than the webinar format.
The following are content types that are probably too simplistic and too broad to feature in a webinar:
A good rule of thumb to remember is that webinars are designed to be educational and instructive. Anything less than a demonstration, tutorial, or discussion is probably not going to hold your audience’s attention for very long.
With that in mind, here are our guidelines to help you create a successful webinar.
Before you dive into creating a webinar, you first need to choose the topic and understand how to frame that topic correctly. As a demonstration, Q&A, or educational tutorial, your webinar should answer questions and address difficulties your customers typically have. The more specific you are when presenting the questions and providing the answers, the better.
Check in with your sales team to learn the sticking points that have prevented consumers from following through with purchasing certain products, then frame your webinar to address those sticking points. Or, if you sell SaaS, gather and review subscriber feedback, and present a webinar that demonstrates how to properly use a particularly challenging feature of your software.
Once you’ve selected your specific webinar topic and understand how best to frame it, you’ll need to choose the best presentation structure to convey the webinar information to your audience. Presentation structures include expert panel discussions, Q&As, single-speaker tutorials, two-person product demos, and the list goes on.
In order to choose the best webinar structure, you’ll need to consider how to effectively engage your audience, as well as take into consideration any production limitations you might have. For example, if you can’t professionally produce a panel discussion due to a lack of professional lighting equipment, and lack of multiple cameras and microphones, then you’ll have to present your webinar using a structure that you can manage.
One of the most important webinar production tools is the actual online platform you use to present your live webinar to your audience. There are many platforms out there that will meet your needs, but you’ll need to do your own research to decide which platform you’ll be the most comfortable using. Popular online resources to consider are ClickMeeting, GoToWebinar, and Zoom.
Ask yourself, how many webinar attendees are you expecting, and can the platform handle that many attendees? Are there costs associated with the online platform, and can you afford those costs? Will the platform support the presentation structure you’ve chosen? For example, will attendees be able to type their questions into a chat box for you to easily read and answer? Make a checklist of your needs, and then make sure that the online platform you want to use can meet them.
In order to present a smooth, professional webinar that your audience will appreciate, you’ll need to put a strong production and management team together. This team will consist of your on-camera host or presenters and your off-camera producers. Meaning, you’ll need to assign the roles of your team members who will handle planning the webinar, from creating the content script to troubleshooting technical issues during the live presentation.
It’s possible to pull off an excellent webinar using only four key positions. These key positions include the organizer, the presenter, the moderator, and the technical assistant. The organizer is your team leader who will oversee every aspect of the webinar, from framing the topic to approving everyone else’s work. The presenter is the on-camera expert who will be your primary presenter. The moderator handles responding to attendees’ questions in the chat box during the live webinar, as well as troubleshooting any issues that arise. And the technical assistants will manually oversee all technical aspects, from making sure the internet connection is intact to manning the cameras to fixing any tech issues that might arise.
The magic of webinars stems from the fact that they are truly live events. Webinars happen in real-time, and a lot can go wrong in the moment, which is why we strongly recommend that you practice your webinar in-house before the live event. Once you have your script and your team in place, set up a dry run and use employees from other departments of your organization to pose as your audience.
This type of dress rehearsal can help your presenter get rid of those jitters and give your technical assistants a chance to work out any production kinks. After you complete the dry run, ask your mock attendees for their feedback. If they mention any major issues, you will have plenty of time to fix those issues before the real webinar presentation.
The most important decision you’ll need to make in order to successfully promote your webinar is to first select the right date and time to broadcast. You’ll probably need to do a bit of research in order to figure this out. A good place to start is to figure out in what time zone the majority of your audience lives.
Is your audience mostly B2B or B2C 9-to-5ers? You might choose a midweek morning time slot, like 11:00 am on Wednesday. If your audience is mostly work-from-home entrepreneurs, you might have better webinar attendance rates with a Thursday afternoon or early evening time slot. Use Google Analytics to help you research, and if appropriate, you can even survey your audience to find out from them when they would prefer to attend. Then simply send out an email invitation campaign with the webinar link.
Webinars are essentially sales tools, and the main purpose of any webinar is to boost sales. That being said, your audience might not immediately jump to purchase your products or services after the webinar has concluded. This is when sending out a follow up email campaign comes in handy.
Depending on the complexity of the webinar content and the specific topic you covered, you may choose to send out a follow up email campaign later that day or later that week. If you deem that a follow up phone call would be more appropriate, then do it! The point here is that even the best webinars with the highest attendance rates will need to be followed by a campaign that’s designed to close sales.
That concludes the basic rundown of how you can create a successful webinar. Remember, not all content is complex and compelling enough to necessitate its own webinar, but for demonstrations and tutorials of your products or services, webinars can be wielded into powerful sales tools that help convert viewers into customers.
As we mentioned in this article, producing a quality webinar that looks and sounds professional involves many components, including a strong webinar script or outline, correct lighting techniques, and reliable technology. It also requires an organized follow up campaign to check in with your audience, gather feedback, and close sales.
If you’re not sure your business can create, produce, and market a quality webinar all on your own, FTx 360 can help. Our creative services department is full of experienced marketers and audio / visual producers who can design, film, and edit a custom webinar for you. Contact us to learn more.
Have your eCommerce sales plateaued? Have they dropped off altogether? What if your eCommerce sales are barely increasing?
There’s actually a lot you can do to drive online traffic to your website and boost eCommerce sales. We’re talking about digital marketing. Implementing the right digital marketing strategy can effectively increase the number of shoppers who visit your website as well as increase the number of sales transactions that occur daily.
You might be thinking, what is “the right digital marketing strategy” exactly?
The answer to that question is tricky, and could depend on the nature of your business and your target audience. For example, if you own a B2B company, then the strategies you use to target potential customers will be different than if you own a B2C retail store.
That being said, there are a handful of digital marketing strategies that will deliver powerful results regardless of your industry or market.
Here are five marketing tips and ideas for your eCommerce site to help you drive website traffic, turn visitors into customers, and increase revenue.
Your eCommerce website visitors will not be able to touch, examine, or handle the products you’re selling, which is why the visuals you provide on your site are so important. Even if you’re selling SaaS or other services on your website, we recommend that you enhance the visuals as much as possible. What do we mean by that?
Instead of merely using a few product photos, include many high-res photos and a zoom-in function that visitors can use to examine the product in question. If possible, use 3D images of your products as well, and integrate “turning and rotating” capabilities so that shoppers can get a 360° view of the items you’re selling.
Try including a video tutorial or virtual tour of your SaaS, if applicable. When potential customers are able to watch a video demonstration of how your cloud-based software interface works, they will gain a better impression of the platform and be more likely to subscribe, enroll, or buy.
Digital marketers know that it’s far easier to retain an interested customer than it is to interest a brand-new one in shopping for the first time. This fact is true for both brick-and-mortar retailers and eCommerce websites, which is why all types of businesses dedicate a substantiation portion of their marketing efforts to targeting their existing customer base.
Your eCommerce site should have built-in features that enable shoppers to create their own secure accounts. These accounts should also have a Wish List feature that shoppers can use to “save” items to their Wish Lists. You can design personalized email marketing campaigns to remind customers about their Wish List items.
This marketing idea works best when the Wish List reminder emails contain detailed, relevant information. For example, don’t just remind a recipient that they never bought the sneakers on their Wish List. Instead, include customer reviews of those sneakers, offer the recipient a “buy this product now” discount code, or provide them with another incentive that will reward them for acting fast.
User-generated content is any digital content that is created by users, consumers, and “regular people” and not by a company or brand. User-generated content is typically found on social media platforms, but you can also find UGC across the internet. For example, a Google My Business customer review can be considered a type of UGC.
User-generated content that features your products or services is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. When business owners like you recycle user-generated content on their own platforms, it has the same effect. UGC tends to resonate with consumers. Consumers trust the opinions of other shoppers far more than they trust traditional advertising claims, which is why you should definitely incorporate UGC into your marketing strategy.
Try turning five-star customer reviews into social media posts. Retweet and repost UGC that features your products or services. Partner with social media influencers and ask them to post “unboxing” videos that feature them opening your products and using them in such a way that inspires their social followers to try your brand.
In an article we published earlier this month called How to Set Up an Instagram & Facebook Shop, we discussed the importance of why eCommerce retailers should set up Shops on both of these social platforms, and you should definitely check out the article when you have time. The biggest point we made was that when eCommerce retailers decide not to set up social media “shops,” they actually miss out on a lot of sales.
You’re probably thinking that you don’t need mini-eCommerce shops on social media when you already have the real-deal i.e. a fully-functioning, responsive, mobile-friendly eCommerce website. We get it. But we’re here to tell you that, nope, you’re wrong #sorrynotsorry. For today’s consumer, convenience is everything, which means that unfortunately, your Instagram visitors might not be willing to navigate out of the IG app just to shop on your eCommerce site.
The marketing possibilities that will result from having an Instagram and Facebook Shop are endless. Once your Shop is functioning, you can tag specific Shop items within your social posts, Stories, and even in the description boxes of your Facebook Live broadcasts.
Our final marketing tip today will help consumers emotionally connect with your brand, which is necessary if you want to gain and retain loyal eCommerce customers. Feature your company’s values in your marketing campaigns. In other words, we recommend that, first and foremost, you advertise what you stand for. Once you convey to your audience your brand’s ethos, then you can suggest relevant products that they might be interested in buying.
Of course, not all of your marketing campaigns and social media posts need to be focused on the issues that your brand cares about, but a portion of them should be. This will benefit your sales, too, because while the sneakers that you sell might not be a “conversation starter,” the social issues that you care about certainly will be.
The more comments, likes, and engagement your social media posts accumulate, the faster brand awareness will spread online. And the resulting brand recognition will attract website visitors and increase eCommerce sales.
Do you need help marketing your eCommerce website? FTx 360 offers a full suite of eCommerce site development and marketing services that can help drive online traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers that return to shop time and again.
Our web designers work with scalable, easy-to-use eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. Allow our skilled experts to revamp your site to optimize conversion rates.
If your website already functions beautifully, but your conversion rate is low, consider trying our digital marketing services:
● Organic SEO—Our affordable SEO services will insert targeted, relevant keywords into your website content to generate organic, refined, and consistent eCommerce traffic.
● Local SEO—Our local SEO services can optimize your web pages according to the location or locations that you want to rank in to drive organic traffic.
● Social Media Marketing—Our social media specialists can design and implement outstanding social media marketing campaigns for your company that will attract users, convert followers into customers, and turn customers into brand ambassadors.
● Product Copy Creation—Our creative content writers can produce accurate, SEO-friendly descriptions for your products and services that will engage your website visitors and boost your sales.
● Payment Gateway Integration—Our webmasters can integrate the leading payment gateways into your eCommerce site so that you can provide your online shoppers with multiple payment options and secure transactions.
Contact our marketing specialists to learn more about how FTx 360 can help you stand out within your industry, retain customers, and plan for long-term success.
Across all B2C and B2B industries, the average email open rate is 21.33%, according to MailChimp.com. Once emails are opened, the average CTA click-through rate across industries is 2.62%. These are only a few statistics, but they provide valuable insights about how challenging email marketing can be.
Interestingly, 49% of consumers prefer to receive marketing offers via email, as opposed to other direct marketing methods such as snail mail, in-app mobile push notifications, and mobile SMS texts.
If approximately half of all consumers prefer emails over other methods, why then do so few recipients actually open those direct marketing emails?
There are many reasons, which include the frequency of emails sent among other factors, but the biggest reason of all has to do with the email subject line.
Intriguing, personalized, and relevant email subject lines directly impact email open rates. Generic, bland, and random email subject lines are the reason emails wind up unopened in the Trash folder.
Marketers know this, which is why 87% of them prefer email marketing to any other digital marketing method. But digital marketers are skilled experts at crafting clever-sounding email subject lines with such great hooks that recipients can’t help but click.
By the time you finish reading this blog post, you will also have enough tricks up your sleeve to know how to write click-worthy email subject lines.
Here are 8 tips for creating the best email subject lines.
People are always looking for ways to make their lives easier. If there’s a way to streamline it, DIY it, or just plain simplify it “for dummies,” consumers want to know all about it!
When you include “How To” in the subject line of your email campaigns, the open rate of that campaign will naturally increase. The reason for this is because people understand that there is no downside to checking out a new way of getting something done.
How To Stretch After An Injury
This email subject line is clearly selfless. The sender isn’t trying to sell a product. Anyone who wants to learn how to safely stretch after they’ve had an injury will definitely open this email, and even more amazingly, a lot of recipients who haven’t experienced an injury will still click and read so they’re informed in case they injure themselves in the future.
Intrigue counts for a lot when it comes to email subject lines. A good hook will get just about anyone to click. But crafting a hook that truly works can be challenging.
In order to write a great hook into your subject line that is mysterious yet relevant enough to get recipients to open the email, we recommend that you first figure out the message of your email and then reverse-engineer the subject line into a relevant hook.
Does Your Dog Love THIS More Than You?
An email subject line that contains a question is naturally thought provoking, and amazingly, when the question itself is missing a key puzzle piece, the recipient will feel compelled to open the email just to find out what that missing puzzle piece is all about. In the case of our example above, the recipient will want to know what “THIS” is referring to, and they’ll also wonder if their dog could love anything more than his human-parent. By opening and reading the email, they’ll discover the full question, “does your dog love our massager-brush more than you?” And they’ll also discover how to buy that massager-brush product.
The scarcity principle works. The scarcity principle is a sales tactic that suggests to consumers that there is a limited quantity of goods and that those goods are in such high demand that soon there won’t be any left.
Whether or not goods truly are limited is actually beside the point. Using the scarcity principle to your benefit will cause your email recipients to psychologically react with urgency. They will not want to miss out on the deal, discount, sale, or item, and will hurry to buy… or at least hurry to open your email.
Only 5 Spots Left!
Assuming that the “spots” or tickets that are remaining for purchase are relevant to the email recipient, this type of email subject line can be extremely effective in terms of motivating your recipients to open the email. Scarcity emails have actually been around for a while, and consumers have become familiar with the unadvertised benefits, which can include discounts, freebies, and front row seats, among other rewards for acting fast. Curiosity alone could be what pushes your recipients to open this type of email subject line.
Similar to how the “scarcity” email subject line has the power to create a sense of urgency in the minds of recipients, the “countdown” subject line has a way of lighting the same kind of fire under your email recipients, shall we say, rear ends.
This type of “countdown” subject line works best when it’s used in a campaign series that includes no fewer than 3 emails to your recipients.
Ending in 3…2…1… Don’t Miss Out!
Based on your recipients’ familiarity with your email address and brand, they should be fairly curious about what will be “ending” and when exactly the “end” will take place. But what we love most about this subject line is how it combines mystery and urgency into one powerful CTA.
In 2021, there is so much more to email personalization than including the recipients’ first names in the subject line.
Today’s consumers are desensitized to one-dimensional personalization. In fact, some consumers have become downright jaded about it! Instead of simply using a first name, try using as much creativity as possible, like we did in this example.
Becky Loves Fiction, So This Book Is For Becky
The personalization of this email subject line goes way deeper than using the recipient’s first name. We’re willing to bet that Becky’s first reaction when she read this subject line was something like, “my local drug store paid attention to the fact that I like to buy romance novels throughout the summer?” What will she do next? Probably open the store’s email to find out the name of the book they recommend that she buys.
Using “emojis” in your email subject lines can add a touch of fun and humor, but there is one caveat. There are certain recipient email domains that automatically “flag” and send-to-Spam any email subject line that contains an emoji, so you’ll want to do your research before you try this method.
That being said, including emojis in email subject lines has become popular in recent years. The trick to using this strategy is that you must replace a word with an emoji. Meaning, the emoji can’t be decorative. It has to be practical, like the one used in our example.
May We Have This
?
Why do we love it? Who wouldn’t love finding a flamenco dancer in the subject line of their email? Assuming that the recipients have shown interest in dancing in the past, when they receive an email subject line like this, they’ll definitely click to find out who is asking them to dance and the rest of the details.
How could we blog about subject line tips without including this classic idea—the “promotional” subject line? The fact of the matter is that, as a business owner, you’re using email marketing to boost sales, which means a large majority of your campaigns are going to be purely promotional.
That’s perfectly fine! Just make sure to punch up your promotional email subject lines so that they sound fun, creative, and mysterious, instead of bland.
$50 Today, $250 Tomorrow
We love this subject line because it’s both straightforward and intriguing. We would want to know about any $250 product, service, or class that only costs $50 today, and because we would definitely open that email to find out more information, we’re confident that your email recipients will, too.
ECommerce shopping cart abandonment is a part of life, which is why it’s important for business owners to have a system in place of recouping those lost sales.
This is where the “follow up” email campaign comes in handy. The fact of the matter is that follow up emails work, but only when the subject lines are eye-catching enough to compel recipients to open and read. Let’s take a look.
Psst… Did You Forget Something?
This email subject line is intriguing without sounding creepy, which is why we love it! Most consumers appreciate being reminded of things they forgot to do, and if you also include a “buy now” special discount code, your shopping cart abandonment follow up email campaign will succeed at recovering sales before that revenue is lost for good.
There you have it! Try these email subject line tips and measure which ones deliver the highest email open rate for your marketing campaigns!
Are you new to email marketing or looking for a digital marketing agency to handle your next email campaign? Give us a call or visit the FTx 360 website to discover the wide range of digital marketing services we offer. Our marketing specialists have worked with both B2C and B2B businesses of all industries to increase customer engagement and sales, and we can do the same for your company. Contact us today to get started!
Automation is the process of replacing manual, human tasks with technologies. Setting up an online auto-debit to pay for a monthly bill is an example of automation. Instead of having to remember to pay that particular bill every month and going through the online process of electronically submitting a payment, you instead set up an auto-debit, and the online banking platform will handle the work of paying the bill on time every month.
Saving time and effort, and reducing human errors, are just some of the benefits of using automation.
Your marketing tasks can also be automated to save you time and effort, and reduce human errors. Marketing automation is defined as any technology that manages the digital marketing processes you ordinarily handle by hand. Marketing automation utilizes artificial intelligence to a degree, as well as machine-learning strategies, and can streamline multifunctional, omni-channel campaigns for you.
Implementing marketing automation at your business enables you to interact with potential customers as well as loyal customers across email, web, social media, SMS text message, and any other method you would like.
Nowadays, automating your digital marketing is typically done via a marketing automation platform.
Any online platform that offers marketing automation in the form of Software as a Service, or SaaS, is considered a marketing automation platform. These platforms provide marketers with the tools to upload, organize, and schedule all of their digital marketing content and campaigns, including automating social media posts, blog article posts, and email marketing campaigns. Marketing automation platforms also integrate with content management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) software to centralize all marketing into one software solution.
In this article, we are going to focus on the two most popular forms of marketing automation that business owners like you can benefit from using, which are social media marketing automation and email marketing automation.
If you’ve already done your research and know all about marketing automation, and would like to discover the marketing automation solutions offered by FTx 360, we invite you to sign up for a free 30 day trial with our agency. You will only be asked to supply your business name, email address, business location, and telephone number. No payment information is required and there are absolutely no strings attached to this incredible offer.
Social media automation refers to automating various aspects of your social media marketing, which can include automating the publication of your posts, automating your responding comments, and automating the lead generation aspects of your social media advertisements, if applicable.
By automating certain aspects of your social media marketing, you can grow your business and optimize ROI while saving time. Social media marketing automation can also effectively support your efforts to spread brand awareness, engage potential customers, and gain social followers, all of which help promote your business.
Though there are indisputable benefits of using social media automation, many marketers believe that automating your social media marketing defeats the purpose and beauty of social media in the first place. Simply put, these marketers feel that social media marketing automation is actually anti-social, because it involves replacing human interactions with machine-programmed actions.
The social media marketing specialists at FTx 360 both agree and disagree. Yes, the beauty of social media is that social platforms enable users to socially interact with each other. But the fact of the matter is that if you want to post multiple times a day and every post generates a ton of engagement, you will not be able to keep up with interacting with every single follower. That’s just the way it goes.
You can greatly alleviate the amount of manual attention you give your social media accounts by automating your posts. This way, your social media posts will automatically publish. If you schedule your automatic posts days, weeks, and months in advance, it can free you up to spend your “social” time manually replying to comments and quickly tending to any customer service messages that come into your DMs.
To provide deeper insight regarding your social media content, we would like to introduce you to the 5-3-2 Rule. Any of the content categories we propose below can be automated. Then, as your social followers comment, reply, and interact with your posts, you can engage them further by responding.
This social media posting rule can be used as a content guideline. The types of posts you make should be diverse and surprising so that your followers remain engaged. For every 10 social posts you publish, here is the content ratio breakdown you can schedule:
● 5 out of 10 social posts should consist of relevant, shared content from third parties
● 3 out of 10 social posts should consist of original content with the exclusion of hard sales pitches
● 2 out of 10 social posts should consist of personal, opinionated, or ruminative content that humanizes your brand to help followers relate to you
As you can see, there is virtually no emphasis on using social media to make hard sales pitches to your audience. And equally important, about half of your social media posts should be shared links from other websites. That being said, you can schedule just about all of these social posts ahead of time using a social media scheduling calendar like the one that can be found on our resources web page.
Our resources web page also includes a free download of our Marketing Automation Playbook, a how-to ebook that will help you discover all the ways in which marketing automation can help you capture more leads, convert leads into customers, and increase revenue.
Whoops, we didn’t mean to digress. We just really love our social media scheduling calendar…
Another aspect of your social media posting schedule that you can automate is sharing your latest blog articles.
We all know that maintaining a blog is an excellent way to generate new SEO and attract new web visitors to your website or eCommerce site. You can maximize your business blog’s engagement factor and digital virality by posting the article links to Facebook, Twitter, and other relevant social media platforms.
Best of all, you don’t have to do this manually. Rather than copying and pasting the URL links of each blog article to your social media accounts as articles are published online, instead you can automate this process by linking your RSS blog feed to the social media accounts that you want those articles to appear on.
Depending on the blogging platform you’re using, connecting your blog feed to social media should be fast and easy. Just be sure to run a few tests to check the formatting and make certain that the article web links auto-generate the blog information that you want to appear in the social media post. Ideally, you want the article’s headline and primary image with a few lead-in sentences from the article to appear in the post itself. That way, your social followers will be intrigued, click on the link, and read the full article on your business blog. If the headline and image are thought provoking, you may discover that your social followers begin commenting right away, even before they read the article!
Automating your email marketing campaigns is by far the most popular form of automation. All digital marketers use email automation. There are many different types of email automation that you can implement, which we will cover in a moment.
First, we want to make the point that manually and personally sending out emails is ideal, but impractical. If your business is brand-new, you might be able to get away with manually sending every email and you might even love it, but composing a personal email every time simply isn’t scalable. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to implement email automation for certain workflows, and that’s okay. You can still retain as much personalization in your emails if you follow our advice.
The most helpful email automation campaigns to set up include:
● Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails
● Welcome Emails to New Subscribers
● Subscription Email Newsletters
● Promotional Emails
● Lead Magnet Onboarding Emails
● Re-Engagement Emails (After a Recipient Hasn’t Engaged for 3 – 6 Months)
By automating some or all of the above mentioned email campaigns, you can save a ton of time and effort, and that’s not all. You will also provide your visitors, customers, and subscribers with the professionalism they expect. You see, most people really enjoy receiving automated emails because these emails provide them with valuable content without the added pressure that usually comes with receiving a personalized email from a business owner.
Just remember to always include a CTA in your automated emails, no matter the reason for the email.
Then, the further along the sales funnel or customer journey someone gets, the more personalization you can give them. In fact, at a certain point in the customer journey, automation is no longer appropriate, so you should take customers out of the automation channel and email them directly to authentically engage them.
Are you convinced that using marketing automation to support your social media and email marketing campaigns will benefit your business? Good!
But how will you know which marketing automation platform to sign up for? That’s a great question. Not all marketing automation platforms are created equal or priced the same, which is why our digital marketing specialists put together a helpful research check-list you can reference while you shop around.
If, for some reason, you cannot find answers to these questions on a marketing automation provider’s website, then we strongly encourage you to call the provider and speak to a sales representative. Do not assume that the platform will meet your business needs and sign a contract before you know what features and services will and will not be included.
● What is the minimum licensing fee?
● What services are included for the minimum fee?
● How many contacts can you have for the base rate?
● What are the tiered rates and the number of contacts you can have for each tier?
● What is the minimum license period?
● Can you auto pay in monthly installments or do you have to pay for a full year up front?
● Have other businesses like yours used and loved the platform?
● Does the platform offer user training? Is training free, or does it come at an additional cost?
FTx 360 can automate your marketing activities across multiple channels. Our marketing automation services include platform selection & setup, and automation strategy & integration with your website or eCommerce store.
Our developers can assess and select the best APT platform for your unique digital marketing needs, and implement appropriate sales software such as HubSpot, SharpSpring, Salesforce, or Marketo on your business website for you. For custom efficiency, we use focused targeting, lead generation & management, and customer segmentation to keep your sales funnel organized and your leads converting. The right email marketing campaigns will be segmented, personalized, and automated when you partner with our marketing specialists.
Automation is the future of digital marketing, and with FTx 360’s automated campaign handlings your business will always be a step ahead of the competition. Contact us today to learn more.
The digital marketing specialists at FTx 360 publish a lot of content each month in the form of blog articles. These articles are designed to help business owners like you implement effective digital marketing strategies that benefit their brands.
In case you missed them, the informative marketing articles we posted this month were:
● What’s New on Instagram in 2021
● 6 Back to School Campaign Ideas
● Utilizing Social Media for Your Business
● Marketing Strategies for Pet Companies
● 5 Ways to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience
● How to Plan a Marketing Budget
You can click to read any of these full, original articles to learn in-depth information about the specific digital marketing topic listed above. Otherwise, check out the summaries of each article below.
Instagram has not stopped evolving since it was launched over a decade ago. Today, Instagram users can shop, video chat, watch IGTV channels, and engage with other users on the platform in countless ways. Businesses can advertise and interact with potential customers, all while building their brand and social media presence.
Instagram has launched many improvements throughout the first half of 2021, and more features are yet to arrive as summer turns to autumn later this year. There are upwards of twenty Instagram updates, upgrades, improvements, and new feature launches to watch out for in 2021—far too many to cover in one article. So, we focused our first August article on the following five new Instagram features that are most relevant to your business account:
● Messenger API Update
● Professional Dashboard
● Option to Hide “Likes”
● Suggested Posts
● Interactive Stickers for Stories
This back-to-school season, retailers like you want to deliver a marketing campaign that actually resonates with consumers. Your current customers, as well as potential ones, aren’t interested in hearing about your products and services unless your campaign messages speak to them personally and address their wants, needs, interests, and pain points.
Though it may seem counterintuitive to place your products and services in the background of your ads, this adjustment will help you convert consumers into paying customers. Your promotional content and messages should focus on personalization with the aim of conveying relevant offers that speak to the unique needs of each shopper.
With that in mind, try one, some, or all of these back-to-school campaign ideas:
● Email Marketing Campaigns
● Google Pay-Per-Click Ad Campaigns
● Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaigns
● SMS Text Message Marketing Campaigns
● Responsive Web Design Landing Page Campaigns
● Referral Code Campaigns
Integrating social media into your business strategy will afford your brand countless benefits, including helping you to spread brand awareness, expand your customer base, encourage online engagement with your brand, and increase the virality of your business.
Social media is such a powerful tool for business growth, in fact, that you don’t have to use every platform under the sun. Simply maintaining accounts on one or two social platforms will be enough to support your business needs and social media goals.
But how can you specifically utilize social media for your business? In our third August article, we suggested the following strategies:
● Schedule Organic Posts on Social
● Provide Customer Service Options on Social
● Run Sponsored Content on Social
● Cross-Promote Your Social Media Accounts
● Alter Your Social Content for Different Platforms
If you run a pet company, you understand that the love pet parents have for their furry friends is boundless. Pet parents delight in doting on their dogs and cats, taking photos of their pets, and connecting with other pet lovers online.
You can also connect with pet lovers online, boost your brand, and build your customer base, which is what this FTx 360 article was all about. To summarize, here are the best marketing strategies for pet companies that you can start using today:
● Create Educational Posts About Products
● Make Sure Posts Sound Personal and Not Promotional
● Ask Customers to Leave Reviews on Facebook
● Create Carousel Posts to Increase Viewing Time
● Launch a “Caption This!” Challenge to Boost Engagement
● Use “Insta Grid” as Tiles to Create a Bigger Picture
● Use Branded, Trending, and Location-Based Hashtags
● Encourage ReTweeting to Get the Word Out
● Tweet Photos of Adorable, Adoptable Dogs
● Create Grooming How-To Videos Featuring Your Customers’ Pets
● Use “Before & Afters” in Your Pet Care Tutorials
● Feature a Series on How To Register Pets as Service Dogs & Emotional Support Animals
● Cover Relevant Health Topics & Common Pet Health Issues
● Publish Articles Featuring Your Customers’ Pets
● Include a Newsletter Subscription Sign-Up Button
Customer experiences culminate in either satisfaction or disappointment. The result that ultimately follows is either increased business revenue or dismal eCommerce sales. Customer experience, or CX, is that critical.
You want your customers to have positive experiences when engaging with your brand online, but you might not necessarily understand what eCommerce elements will contribute to providing your website visitors with such an excellent customer experience that they successfully complete the online checkout process.
In this original article, we supplied in-depth steps and went into detail about the following five strategies you can implement to improve your eCommerce site’s customer experience.
● Offer Personalized Website Navigation
● Provide Customized Browsing Experiences
● Feature Customer Reviews & Testimonials
● Enhance the Checkout Process
● Build Brand Affinity with Valuable Content
There’s no alternative to getting serious about professionally marketing your business online, but what if you have no idea where to start?
Should you hire an in-house marketing team? Should you outsource your digital marketing to an agency? Most importantly, what is it really going to cost to launch digital marketing campaigns that successfully expand your customer base, retain loyal customers, build brand presence, increase revenue, and ultimately deliver a worthwhile return on investment?
If these critical questions have crossed your mind, then you’ve come to the right place.
In the full article, we went over how you can plan a marketing budget that will work for your brand. We strongly suggest you check out the original blog post if you want to specifically learn about:
● Why You Need a Marketing Budget
● How To Plan Your Marketing Budget
● Specific Digital Marketing Campaigns to Fund
● The Benefits of Hiring In-house Marketers ss. Working with a Marketing Agency
● How to Determine Your Overall Marketing Budget
A/B Testing, also called Split Testing, is a digital marketing method that uses two different versions of a single campaign to determine which content version performs better in terms of increasing social engagement and improving conversion rates online.
One version of the campaign content, called the A group, is the “control,” and the other version of the campaign content represents the B group, which contains the variation content. Testing different campaign content in this manner can inform a marketer like you which campaign version we should focus on and invest our marketing budget in.
In the world of digital marketing, the desired result is usually conversion, whether it be converting website visitors to newsletter subscribers, newsletter recipients to monthly subscription customers, or monthly subscription customers to brand ambassadors who use word-of-mouth marketing to successfully refer their friends and family to sign up for monthly subscription packages. You get the idea.
The use of A / B Testing can help you achieve tangible business goals, such as:
● Increasing Website Traffic
● Increasing Conversion Rates
● Lowering Bounce Rates
● Lowering Cart Abandonment
Our full article went over the steps you can follow if you want to ensure the best A / B Test results. To summarize, those steps are:
● Identify the Problem
● Identify Your Goal
● Pick One Variable to Test
● Create the Control Campaign (Test A) and the Challenger Campaign (Test B)
● Split Your Sample Groups Equally & Randomly
● Monitor the Results Throughout the Test But Do Not Alter Anything
One of the most powerful marketing tools you have is your website. Whether you have a B2B website, a B2C eCommerce site, or an SaaS platform that’s meant to target both B2B and B2C consumer groups, your website should be designed to pull in web traffic and keep visitors engaged long enough to do business with you.
Older, outdated websites simply won’t serve your digital marketing needs, and you’re probably aware of that. But what you might not be aware of is that your website could be outdated even if it isn’t that old.
In our final August article, we laid out how you can determine whether or not your website is up to date, and we also included the measures you can take right now to update your website if you determine that it’s outdated. But in summary, here’s what your business website or eCommerce site must include in order for it to be considered up to date by today’s standards:
● A Responsive Web Design
● A Call to Action On Every Web Page
● Fast Website Speed & Easy Site Usability
● Social Media Integration
● An Active Blog
Are you interested in partnering with a digital marketing agency? FTx 360 offers a wide array of digital marketing services at affordable costs. Whether you need web design & development, eCommerce marketing services, social media marketing, content marketing, blog articles and blog management, organic and local SEO, email marketing, marketing automation, PPC marketing, or reputation management—we do it all and love every minute of it! Contact us to learn more about what FTx 360 can do for your business and brand!
If you run a pet company, you understand that the love pet parents have for their furry friends is boundless. Pet parents delight in doting on their dogs and cats, taking photos of their pets, and connecting with other pet lovers online.
You can also connect with pet lovers online, boost your brand, and build your customer base. We’ve put together the best marketing strategies for pet companies that you can start using today.
As a pet supply store owner, your day-to-day operations revolve around assisting customers, stocking inventory, and making sure your prices are competitive. You might not be thinking about your brand’s online presence because it might not be immediately obvious how online consumer awareness about your brand could impact your business sales. Or perhaps you’ve ruled out social media marketing, having assumed you don’t have the time, money, or patience to deal with an additional hassle.
Lucky for you, getting into the swing of maintaining a Facebook business page doesn’t have to be a hassle and it doesn’t have to cost you a dime unless you use paid advertisements, which isn’t even necessary when you’re first starting out. By simply creating a Facebook business page that includes your store location and contact information, you can increase sales at your pet supply store. But how? The fact of the matter is that Facebook is a local search engine in its own right; one that’s on par with Google, in fact, and you should treat it like one.
Thanks to Facebook Graph Search and the fact that Facebook added a keyword search function as well as hashtags, having a Facebook business page is as valuable as having a Google My Business page. If you only have time to maintain one social media account, it has to be Facebook.
If you’re exceedingly busy, how can you get the most out of your Facebook business page while dedicating as little time as possible to posting? Here are three tips to focus on to get your page up and running on all cylinders.
Share your pet industry knowledge by posting expert tips that both educate and inform Facebook users about your experience-based insights, recommendations, and anecdotes. By creating educational posts about your products, you will subtly and effectively imply that your pet supply store is the best place to find the products you’re featuring on Facebook.
We really can’t stress this enough—sounding salesy will backfire. Your Facebook posts shouldn’t look or sound like advertisements. Frankly, Facebook advertisements that actually work don’t look or sound like advertisements. Instead, aim to present personal-sounding posts that focus on pet-parent lifestyles, the joys of having dogs and cats, and other pet-loving messages that only gently suggest your products belong in the overall picture.
Creating Facebook posts where you remind customers to leave reviews on your Facebook page is a good habit to get into. Depending on the privacy levels of your Facebook followers, you can actually tag their handles as you respond to their comments and thank them individually for their business. If it’s clear that a follower has recently shopped at your location, make a Facebook post just for them that asks them to post a customer review on your page.
Instagram offers its users a magnitude of personal entertainment, but personal socializing is no longer the primary reason people scroll through Instagram. Today, there are more than 25 million business profiles on Instagram. Instagram paid advertisements have the power to pull in more revenue, on average, than most traditional advertising campaigns. For pet retailers, Instagram can be an excellent tool to introduce your brand to users, engage with customers, and showcase your products, services, and pets for sale.
That being said, maintaining a personal Instagram account is not going to cut it in terms of marketing your pet retail business on social. So, make sure to switch your account to a “Professional Account,” which will make posting, commenting, DMing, and advertising far easier.
The trick to making Instagram work for you is to focus on the quality of your content first and foremost. Yes, posting regularly plays an important role, too, but Instagram values—and rewards—quality over quantity any day. And you’ll want to post a variety of content media, such as photos, videos, and graphics, on both your business profile and in your Instagram stories to increase interaction with your followers. Once you get the hang of this rudimentary, immediate form of interaction, you can try stepping up your Insta-game by using “Live,” a feature that broadcasts video content to your followers to watch and comment on in real-time.
If this sounds complicated, don’t get discouraged. You don’t have to use the most advanced Instagram features straight out of the gate. Instead, try the following content ideas.
Carousel posts are single Instagram posts that include up to 10 photos that users can swipe through. Instagram carousel posts are one of the most versatile marketing tools you can use on Instagram, which is why we’re mentioning them first. The longer a user is engaged with a post, the higher Instagram will rank the post. When posts rank high, Instagram will recommend them to users. By virtue of the fact that swiping through ten photos takes more time than scrolling past one, Instagram carousel can help your posts rank higher so that Instagram starts recommending them.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, a “caption this” challenge is when you post a photo that depicts a curious, humorous, or downright puzzling scene and ask your followers to caption the photo to help bring clarity to what’s being depicted. Posts featuring dogs and cats interacting in funny ways are excellent “caption this” subjects. As your followers caption the post photo in the comments section, you can respond to increase social engagement.
Post presentation is everything on Instagram. When users visit your Instagram business profile, they will either click the follow button or bounce away from your profile based on the initial impression your profile delivers. Using an Instagram layout template such as Insta Grid’s “Puzzle” can help you make an excellent first impression. With this particular layout, Instagram will “chop” a single photo into six posts so that once all six posts are published, all of the posts’ “puzzle pieces” form a larger, complete picture.
Animal shelters are busy organizations. Often staffed by volunteers, animal shelters and rescue organizations are pressed for time, have limited resources, and tend to be solely focused on the important objective of placing rescued pets into loving households. If you own and operate an animal shelter, you may not believe that marketing on social media can benefit your business in terms of assisting the pet adoption process. But this isn’t the case when it comes to the social site, Twitter.
Twitter has evolved a great deal since it first came on the scene over a decade ago. Today, Twitter users can post photos, share articles, and even include calls-to-action, or CTAs, in the footers of their posts. Though Twitter will always have a character limit—which means you’ll have to be short, sweet, and to the point in every post—the fact that you can include hashtags makes Twitter the ideal platform to connect rescue animals with prospective pet parents.
Twitter can even help your business to go one step further than marketing the adoption options at your animal shelter. Using relevant hashtags and location check-ins, you can recruit volunteers, build your list of foster homes, promote fundraisers, and connect with other animal rescue groups in your area, such as non-profit veterinarians that will neuter and spay your incoming feral animals from off the street.
Experiment with the following Twitter tips as part of your outreach strategy and before long, you’ll consider Twitter an invaluable tool in your adoption toolkit.
It takes a bit of research and a lot of creativity but using hashtags in your Twitter posts to get the word out about your upcoming animal adoption events is a must. Aim to include about 5 hashtags in each post, and use a combination of trending hashtags, location-based hashtags, and one of your branded hashtags. For example, #petadoption, #adoptdontshop, #petsofinstagram, #yourcityandstate, #youranimalsheltername will be more than enough hashtags to get the word out on social and get potential pet parents to your event.
Another excellent habit to get into—from time to time, try quoting one of your previous Tweets with the caption “ReTweet if you agree!” This Twitter strategy can increase engagement, build awareness about an animal rescue issue, and encourage conversations. You can also reward followers for retweeting your Tweets by offering a discount on your pet adoption fee with proof of a retweet.
Without a doubt, the most advantageous reason to use Twitter to market your animal shelter is that Tweeting photos of your adorable, adoptable dogs and cats will help you place them in homes. Unlike featuring rescue dogs and cats on your website, which can be cumbersome for web visitors to share, a Tweet is fast and easy to share on Twitter. A single post about a recently rescued dog, for example, can get retweeted exponentially in a matter of seconds.
People love watching pet videos on the internet. On Facebook and Instagram, short videos of adorable animals result in higher engagement rates than videos featuring other content. But YouTube has changed the game for pet and animal video content. As a video streaming social site that offers a multitude of video lengths, YouTube has become the home of a wide variety of pet video categories, from short DIY videos featuring pet care tips to reality TV shows about dog trainers, cat psychics, and horse whisperers.
For any pet care company that’s considering launching a YouTube channel, the undertaking will have its challenges, and once you get into the swing of things, you will notice obvious pros and cons. Firstly, understand that this is a crowded space. There’s a lot of pet content on YouTube. But if your business objective is to establish your brand as an authority within the pet care industry for the purposes of gaining local customers, marketing your pet care business on YouTube should bring you more benefits than drawbacks.
Offering viewers quality videos is hands-down the most important aspect of using YouTube to market your pet care company. This means using a professional-grade camera and the best lighting and sound equipment you can afford. You don’t need to aim to produce Oscar-award-winning content, but you should be prepared to meet YouTube’s standards of visual and audio quality if you want to convert viewers into customers. Posting regularly is equally important, and of course, being sure to put out content that pet parents want and need will be tantamount to your channel’s success.
Let’s say you have a camera, enough natural light, a decent lavalier microphone, and a brave employee who’s willing to be on camera… What are you actually going to shoot? Here are some content ideas to get you started.
If you’re just starting out on YouTube, producing 3 to 5-minute videos rather than long-form content is a reasonable goal that you’ll be able to manage. How-to videos will never go out of style on YouTube, which is why we recommend you aim to produce a series of short videos on how to groom dogs, cats, and even exotics. The viral potential of a chinchilla grooming how-to, for example, is immeasurable.
Another excellent short-form video content idea is to use “before & after” transformations of dogs, cats, and exotics. By using the time-lapse feature of your camera, you can show a complete makeover from a muddy puppy to a cleaned-up pup in a matter of 60 seconds. Include real-time footage of basic pet care, too, and present certain grooming steps in a tutorial format so that your video is both entertaining and helpful.
People greatly appreciate getting step-by-step assistance when they’re trying to accomplish a task that they know is over their heads. If you have any expertise concerning the paperwork and protocol of registering a pet as a service dog or emotional support animal, then offering viewers a detailed how-to on the subject is a must. Nowadays, more and more people have a real need for emotional support animals, but registering an appropriate animal through the proper channels can be intimidating. You will definitely boost your brand if you post videos on this subject.
Veterinarians are as important to pet parents as pet supply stores. Though pet parents may not take their dogs and cats to the vet as frequently as they pick up pet food, pet care products, and pet toys from their preferred retailer, the relationships they have with their pets’ veterinarians are no less valuable.
As a local business that provides in-person services, veterinarians must carefully geo-target their digital marketing efforts. Creating and maintaining a Google My Business page is a must. When you create a GMB listing, your veterinarian business and its location will appear on Google Maps, which means that anyone who is using Google to find a vet for their pet will see your business’s page, along with your website and other contact information, and get in touch.
You can enhance your online visibility by launching a blog on your veterinarian website and regularly posting each blog article’s URL to your Google My Business page. For example, if you publish one blog article per week, simply use the published article’s URL to create a Google My Business post. The content will automatically populate on your GMB page, and best of all, Google will assess the article’s SEO and elevate your GMB page accordingly.
Sounds easy enough, but what if you’ve never written a blog before? Where should you start? What should you write about? How can you get the most out of launching and maintaining a blog? Here are some pointers to start you off in the right direction.
When a pet parent realizes their furry friend isn’t feeling well, the internet is the first expert they consult. In other words, people use Google to diagnose potential pet problems even before they pick up the phone to make an appointment with their vet. By covering relevant health topics and common pet health issues on your veterinarian business blog, you can drive website traffic and influence local pet parents to choose your business the next time their pet is sick or injured.
Of course, you’ll need to get permission from your customers first, but featuring the dogs and cats of your real-life customers in your blog articles can do wonders for increasing online engagement and marketing your pet company. This community-building strategy will help other customers feel connected to your clinic, especially if you include a comments section beneath your blog articles where pet parents can discuss the topics at hand.
Including CTAs at the bottom of your blog articles is a must, and one of the most important CTAs to include is a newsletter subscription sign-up button. By collecting your readers’ email addresses in this fashion, you can let them know every time a new blog article is published, which can spark immediate web traffic and online engagement.
We barely scratched the surface in terms of the marketing strategies that can build your pet company’s brand online, but hopefully, this article has given you some ideas to market your business. If you’d prefer the social media experts at FTx 360 to handle marketing your pet business, feel free to contact us anytime. We offer pet shop website design and development, social media campaign handling, and content creation that’s based on pet industry market research. Grow your social audience and provide your customers with the pet information they want most.
In 2021, social media has gone way beyond digitally connecting friends online and providing a place for them to socialize.
Social media platforms are in large part providing businesses with secondary, virtual, operational hubs.
Take Facebook for example. Within this single social media platform, a company can promote products, maintain an eCommerce store, and handle customer service inquiries, all while posting regularly and engaging with followers.
If you’re a business owner who isn’t using social media as an extension of your everyday operations, you’re missing out on a major business opportunity that has the potential to expand your customer base and increase overall revenue.
Integrating social media into your business strategy will afford your brand countless benefits, including:
● Social media can spread brand awareness
● Social media can expand your customer base
● Social media can encourage online engagement
● Social media can increase the virality of your brand
Social media is such a powerful tool for business growth, in fact, that you don’t have to use every platform under the sun. Simply maintaining accounts on one or two social platforms will be enough to support your business needs and social media goals.
If you need help determining the best social platforms for your company, we recommend that you take a moment to read our prior article, Which Social Media Platforms Are Right For Your Business?
If you’re already clear on which social platforms will best serve your business needs, it’s time to get even clearer on how you can use those social platforms to grow your business, which will be the focus of this article.
Before you can really get started utilizing social media for your business, be sure to complete the following actions so that your social accounts are ready for action:
● Fill out your social profile(s) with your company’s telephone number, email address, and other contact information, and be sure to include a concise description of your business.
● For your Instagram account, add to the description box any affiliated IG account handles your company has, such as your customer service and help desk accounts; and be sure to add your branded hashtags as well, if applicable.
● For your Twitter account, keep your bio short and personable, and don’t forget to include your website and the Twitter handles of your affiliated accounts, if applicable.
● For your LinkedIn account, connect your business profile page to your website blog, if applicable, so that published blogs automatically post to your page.
Once you have all of your social media accounts set up, the next critical step is to add social media icons to your website, email signature, newsletter footer, and any other digital marketing tool your company uses. These social media icons should have clickable links that will direct users to your social media account.
Are your bases covered? If so, let’s dive into the specifics of what you can do to make the most out of your social media accounts.
You will experience far more engagement and social success if you regularly and consistently publish posts on your social media accounts, as opposed to only publishing posts ad hoc when the mood strikes you. Business profiles that consistently post twice a week end up generating more valuable social interactions than businesses that post three times during a single day and then fail to post for eight consecutive days. Adhering to a realistic posting schedule should be your first step towards effectively utilizing social media for your business. We recommend that you specifically integrate the following types of social posts into your organic posting schedule:
● Products & Services Posts that Use “Tags”—1x per week
● Contest or Giveaway Promotions—2x per year
● Posts with Hashtags that Target Your Audience & Location—1x per week
In addition to these specialized posts, be sure to develop a consistent posting schedule that features the kind of content and conversation starters that best represent your brand.
This social posting idea only relates to Facebook & Instagram, or any social platform that offers an in-app eCommerce store. Assuming you have set up your business’s social accounts as well as in-app eCommerce, the biggest benefit of using product tagging in your posts is that the click-through rates of your posts will increase, which will help you gain visibility and increase direct sales.
When a social media contest or giveaway is executed properly, it’s a powerful way to build immediate social engagement and long-term followers. Social users might not automatically know that your brand exists, but by including the right hashtags in your social contest, social users will quickly find out exactly who you are!
Did you know that every social media post has the potential to target your audience? By including specific hashtags you can help to target the audience you want. Location tagging can also help draw in the right audience, especially if your business has a brick-and-mortar location.
Businesses that use social media to the fullest provide their social visitors and followers with the option to shop directly on their platforms, ask questions, and leave comments. In other words, these savvy businesses provide customer service to their social visitors. Directly within the platforms, customer service representatives can respond to questions and concerns, as well as shift public customer service conversations into private DMs when it will best serve the customer. By providing social media users with customer service avenues on social platforms, businesses are able to meet customers where they are, which ultimately results in better customer satisfaction. Here are three tips you can use when integrating customer service into your social accounts:
● Amp Up the Human Connection by Being Personable & Humble
● Carefully Compose Any Auto Replies You Set Up
● Use Direct Message CTAs at the Bottom of Your Social Responses
The most important tip we can give you when it comes to integrating customer service avenues into your social accounts is to designate a real-life employee to manage the interactions and responses in a timely fashion.
The days of generic auto-replies are long gone, but unfortunately, a lot of businesses still use these canned, antiquated responses when it comes to social media. Yes, Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms provide you with auto-reply templates that can be used in your DMs and Chat Messages, but unless a real-life person is overseeing them, it could backfire badly.
If your staff is really pressed for time, then compose FAQ responses that they can choose from, and remember, as time-consuming as it may be to personally respond to every social question, comment, and DM, replying with personality and humility will get you a lot further in terms of building customer relationships than letting a chatbot spew out nonsense replies.
As your customer service representatives monitor your social accounts for the purposes of responding to user questions, comments, and concerns, they will need the option of shifting the conversation from the public feed to a private DM, or Direct Message. This option is now available. Your customer service reps can include a DM link to the bottom of their responding comments when interacting with users on social.
For as little as $20 per day, you can run sponsored content on Facebook & Instagram for a fixed duration of time and see a massive ROI. “Sponsored content” is a type of native advertising that is available to marketers on Facebook & Instagram. Chances are, you’ve seen more than your fair share of sponsored content on these joined platforms, and you may have even formed opinions about why they work. By placing sponsored content ads, you can target your niche demographic within a location radius, which means that your promotional advertisement will definitely reach your ideal customers. There’s really no downside to running sponsored content on the social media platforms Facebook & Instagram, especially if you run your ad for a limited time and with a specific business goal in mind. We recommend using sponsored content to promote “social only” discounts and to collect email addresses for your loyalty program, newsletter, and other marketing needs. But above all else, respect Facebook’s new “Personal Attributes” policy or your ad will never see the light of day.
● Obey Facebook’s “Personal Attributes” Policy or Perish!
● Offer “Social Only” Promotions
● Use Lead Generation CTAs
Let’s take a look at the specifics of these three pointers:
The Facebook Personal Attributes Policy was recently added to the list of “prohibited content” that Facebook restricts. If you’re going to run any kind of ad on Facebook, we strongly recommend that you become intimate with this policy. In essence, Facebook’s advertising policy prohibits the use of mentioning the “personal attributes” of the viewer, including but not limited to their ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and the list goes on. Think you can type the words “you,” “your,” “you’re,” and “other” in your ads? Think again… and read the policy.
A great way to generate, track, and analyze social engagement is to run a sponsored ad that features a discount or deal that’s only available to social users on social media. Exclusivity has long remained a strong promoting factor when it comes to successful sales campaigns, so by making an upcoming sale exclusively available on social media, you can gain followers, increase engagement, and boost sales, all in one fell swoop.
This type of sponsored content is the gift that keeps on giving. By launching a lead generation sponsored content campaign, you can collect email addresses that can be used indefinitely, even after your ad stops running. Just be sure to correctly insert your web-based privacy policy into the backend of the lead generation form. A fast workaround, if you don’t have a privacy policy published on your website, is to create one using Google Docs, set the “share” to “anyone on the internet with this link can view” and plug the Google Doc URL into the lead generation form… or call the marketing experts at FTx 360 and we’ll handle it for you.
One of the easiest ways to organically grow your social media followers and get the word out about your brand is to occasionally remind your followers that they can find your brand on other social media platforms. An effective way to cross-pollinate your audiences is to highlight the variety of content your other channels provide. For example, if you primarily manage Twitter and YouTube accounts, you can interest your Twitter followers in checking out your YouTube channel by highlighting the long-form video content you’re offering exclusively on YouTube. By providing different content on different platforms, which will be the focus of the next section of this article, you will give your followers a reason to follow you on every platform you use for your business. Apply the following tips to your cross-promotional goals:
● Use a Content Scheduling Calendar
● Expand Your Online Presence
● Make Trending Topics the Focus of Certain Posts
In addition to applying the specific tips we just listed, be sure to use social media to network with non-competing businesses and brands. By building your own professional network on social media, you can cross-promote with other brands to reach their audiences and vice versa.
Planning the publication of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly social media marketing posts can be daunting, which is why we strongly recommend you use a content scheduling calendar, like this one offered by FTx 360—2021 Content Schedule Calendar. By relying on a content calendar to organize your social posts, you can take the guesswork out of planning, which will bring you one step closer to reaching your marketing goals.
Using multiple social platforms has the power to expand the online presence of your brand, so long as you don’t spread yourself too thin in the process. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, pick only one or two social platforms to focus on and be sure that you’re offering unique content on each one. The more you interact on social media and the more you include your social handles in your emails, newsletters, and other digital correspondence, the quicker you’ll get the word out about your brand online.
If you’re struggling with a bit of writer’s block in terms of trying to figure out what type of content to post, try incorporating topical, timely, trending conversations into your scheduled posts. Depending on what’s going on in the world, what’s popular in the media, and what’s recently gone viral on social media, make a post about it! There’s only one caveat: do your best to stay away from controversial topics such as politics and religion.
As we mentioned in the last section of this article, offering different content on different platforms is one of the smartest social media marketing moves you can make. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when managing accounts on multiple social platforms is repeating identical content on every channel. Think about it, if the content you present is the same across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, why in the world would a single individual need to follow all of your accounts? They certainly won’t benefit from it if they do. Just because every Facebook post you publish could automatically post to Instagram, doesn’t mean you should actually use this function. Instead, tailor your content for each platform, or better yet, publish unique content on every platform account you manage. As you do, bear these rules of thumb in mind:
● Maximize the Visual & Minimize the Text
● Use Social Media Optimization Strategies
● Prioritize Building Relationships Over Gaining Followers
Before we take a closer look at each of these, we want to take a moment to emphasize that every social post you publish could and should feel like the start of a personal conversation with your followers. Inviting each follower into what feels like a personalized, one-on-one conversation will yield the greatest customer-relationship-building results.
Speaking in broad terms, all social media platforms are more visual than readable. Meaning, social posts that feature photos and videos perform much better than posts that only feature written text. Even Twitter, which has always been text-centric, has incorporated photos, GIFs, polls, surveys, and graphs to help users add visual elements. This is why we recommend that you amplify the visuals of your social posts and streamline your captions.
Social media optimization simply refers to using your social media networks to manage and grow your business’s online presence. There are specific ways you can accomplish this as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Key optimization tactics include using social media to direct visitors to your website, promoting the eCommerce offerings of your social account to convert followers into customers, and integrating lead generation forms into your promos and ads to collect valuable customer information that you can leverage in your future email marketing and / or SMS text message campaigns.
The final piece of advice that we’ll leave you with is to not be so hard on yourself when it comes to growth on social media. Social media automatically places a very high premium on followers, and there’s a user perception that social accounts with millions of followers are “better” than social accounts with only hundreds. The reality, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather than obsess over gaining followers and trying to attain thousands of followers as if doing so will give your brand clout, instead we recommend that you focus on building genuine relationships with your social followers, even if you only have one hundred. Remember, not every follower you have on social media will be your customer, but every relationship you build on social media with a follower will produce a customer for life.
Have you hesitated to look for a digital marketing agency to handle all of your social media and market your brand online? Have you assumed you wouldn’t be able to afford management services or a marketing specialist to develop your next social media marketing campaign? What if we told you that FTx 360 can work within any budget to create a stunning online campaign that influences people to love your brand? For more information about the social media marketing services at FTx 360 and how our team can benefit your bottom line without breaking the bank, contact us today.
"Marketing is enthusiasm transferred to the customer."
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