LinkedIn is an unusual case when it comes to online platforms. At the very exact moment, it’s a job-hunting portal, a promotional tool, an online forum, and a respectable business media website. It has more personal identifiable information on consumers than any other form of platform.
On Instagram and Facebook, few people know where you went to college or what organizations you donate for. However, on LinkedIn, all of that information is visible to your contacts.
As a result, marketing yourselves on LinkedIn appears to be a little distinctive. While publishing must-read announcements and communicating amongst your community in the comments thread are still crucial parts of a well-rounded business plan, there are several other things you may attempt.
Whatever line of employment you really like to advertise on LinkedIn, it all originates with your personal account. You should have an appealing account to reach prospective customers and clients. It should explain to people what you are doing personally and offer them an incentive to interact with you.
The header, title, and description of one’s account explains exactly everything one is capable of. Utilize your Professional profile to precisely identify yourselves – share what you do, what your goals are, and how it can contribute to others.
The entirety of your LinkedIn promotional campaign will be formed on the basis of your presence. Spending a lot of time now to fine-tune it will help you network further.
It is indeed crucial to maintain a consistent and up-to-date image for your organization, that has its own corporate, personal page. The graphics, colors, and information on this blog must match your homepage and other social networking accounts your company has.
The website should indeed be periodically updated to keep the company relevant and give the impression that it is still in operation. We’ve all come across a business’s presence on social media that is only refreshed maybe once every month, if at all, or even worse, hasn’t really been modified in seasons. Establishing a LinkedIn profile and then failing to update that is worse than possessing none at all.
Excellent material can be very specialized and should achieve two objectives. It must first educate people on how and where to resolve an issue or help others to do their respective jobs more effectively. It should subsequently position you as a public intellectual in that field. If you provide true value to the consumer, each facet will automatically lead to greater engagement. It’s just simple human nature, and it works.
Joining LinkedIn forums that are applicable to your targeted audience is a suggestion we provide to self-employed people. Even though this is a wonderful method to ‘hear in’ on some of what your consumers are saying, but local entrepreneurs may also have opportunities to contribute or make suggestions.
More crucially, even if you’re not in any engagement, you may contact people of forums you’re in. LinkedIn InMail is a terrific strategy that can save expense while creating relationships with prospective buyers because it piles up rapidly.
This is how to identify your perfect, fully prepared consumers on LinkedIn instantly: To begin, establish your personal Resource group. After you’ve established your network, go out there and connect with as many forums as you can as it enables you to pair up to 50 altogether.
The very next move is to choose which of the new organizations you’ve entered and begin prospecting on the Participants section. Once you’ve been authorized as a member of the team, go to Participants, then narrow down the queue of participants by browsing for certain job postings or other criteria to find your perfect candidates, and afterward offer individuals to enter your community by sending them a personalized proposal.
That’s when these individuals enter your LinkedIn forums, and you’ll have some of your “catch in a bucket” – all of your best pitchers in one spot! You have absolute authority over this Professional network, ensuring that no opponents gain access, and then you can share essential contributions and vital information with your customers.
Also, you can showcase your meaningful information about them without making outright sales techniques or spamming them. Moreover, you even have an e-mail database, a sales pitch of your most important potential and existing customers, and other features. This is an excellent strategy for establishing your business and generating connections to help your local business thrive.
Another way to grow your brand on LinkedIn is to enhance your e-mail list. LinkedIn offers you a feature to message 50 individuals at the same time. Make use of this feature and add as many e-mails as you can to your brand.
This will blow up your brand as it will be more prominent to other people. You can also set up a direct link to your e-mail on the e-mail signup page for more people to discover your brand. Personalize your e-mails and layout the detailed structure of what your brand has to offer if other brands sign up for your e-mail list.
Show interest in their e-mail list as well, as it helps you to garner good faith and image from other brands. Many successful entrepreneurs are known to follow this step to boost their page and, subsequently, their brand. Therefore, enhancing your e-mail list is an important step that will help your brand to grow.
It would be best if you had your brand and page pop up in individual users’ feeds. Therefore, you need to utilize the practice of sponsored updates on LinkedIn. It will push your posts onto pages of several other users. An impressive feature of “pay per click” and/or “pay per 1000” works for this.
Apart from choosing your location, age, and gender, you can also customize according to job title, name of the company, job function, specialization skills, basic skills, groups, and schools. This eventually helps the users choose their preferred industry while dodging the ones they are not looking for.
You can use sponsors to promote your brand and page to the audience you would like to cater to. This helps to put up good leadership and quality content in front of the targeted audience. The visitor count on your website can grow significantly if you can put out your firm’s content wisely through sponsors.
Sponsors target a specific audience to cater to, and it helps the visitor count on your website leading to subsequent prosperous sales for your brand.
LinkedIn is all related to digital marketing. For your marketing game to grow, you need to make as many connections as possible. Connections matter as you need to show up on the search results. This is only possible if you are connected with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-degree connections.
You can grow your connections on LinkedIn through several ways. The primary key to growing connections is to post and regularly update information about your firm. You can comment on connections of the 3rd degree as it will make your brand more prominent and help you grow. Personalize your connection requests by accepting users from your niche.
Another way to grow your connections is by participating in groups. Join groups that are related to your niche and actively participate. This will help with your website visitor count and help your firm grow.
A more convenient part of the LinkedIn marketing tool is filtering through the targeting option in your posts. The page admin can target posts by selecting the specifications required, for example, industry, geography, language, organizations, job, seniority, etc.
If you have a considerable amount of money that you can invest, then opt for LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn ads are available in various formats and optimize a brand’s growth by increasing its reach outside of its following.
You can even get personalized options and can address members by their names. The LinkedIn targeting system is beneficial for small businesses, as they can pinpoint who is interested in buying their product and who is not, therefore reaching the right audience.
To target the right kind of audience, you need to be actively engaged. Communication is vital in finding out your target customers. To promote your brand or company on LinkedIn, you need to keep posting updates and stories. It might sound like too much, but it works. Moreover, LinkedIn’s particular algorithm is biased towards content that has more likes, so post stories to engage your customers/potential customers.
You can also create posts that directly engage with your customers. Doing a Questions and Answers session with your followers can help you understand their demands. You can also post behind-the-scenes situations with your customers to keep it authentic.
You should be engaging with your customers in any way possible. Engagement ensures enhanced reach, suitable for your brand, and connecting you effectively with your customers. However, it would help if you stayed in the limelight when it comes to your customers. Here are some ways which will help you do that.
It would be best to do some networking to spread awareness about your brand and what it stands for. One way you can do that is by joining groups related to your business. For example, if your business deals with social media marketing, you can search “social media marketing groups,” and get a list of various groups there. Make connections in the group, and reach more customers.
Try to be consistent when it comes to posting and engaging with your customers. Uploading content at a regular time helps build trust with customers. So choosing a schedule and sticking to it will be great for your brand and the customers who will know when to expect content from you.
You can make all the substance you need; however, you shouldn’t post it if it’s not offering some incentive. It’s significant that each page on your site has fair substance, that is, something like three hundred words in length. Making content conflictingly can likewise hurt you. At the point when guests arrive at your site, they hope to find applicable data and related pieces that offer some incentive. On the off chance that they don’t track that down, they’ll likely look somewhere else.
It is also critical that you only discuss topics that are relevant to what you do. You could expand on a word that is completely irrelevant to your sector in an attempt to build traffic to your site, but you risk alienating your present audience as well as any additional individuals you wind up attracting in.
Some SEO pioneers examine the significance of creating good material over huge amounts of material. Google needs sufficient subtleties to discover what’s going on with your page and regardless of whether you can give the appropriate response individuals are searching for. If you present an incentive for individuals devouring your posts and exhibit authority, you can gather trust. When you have it, you should keep creating fresh material.
Individuals are probably not going to get back to your site in the event that you don’t routinely produce content. However, they are additionally far-fetched to return, assuming you just post around one theme. Groundbreaking thoughts are continually emerging, so regardless of the industry you’re in, you ought to have various things to expound on. Having new content being introduced through your channels can truly draw individuals into getting back to your website.
Each topic you expand on can assist you with growing your possible reach. In the event that you upgrade your substance for search, expanding on various points permits you to target various arrangements of keywords. With each keyword, you add that word’s search volume to your likely reach.
It is important to keep in mind that new firms should maintain a little more involved content process. Because they haven’t developed a substance library, they must guarantee that they handle their primary topics before moving on to related topics.
Streamlining your substance doesn’t end once you remember an objective keyword for your articles. Title tags and meta descriptions are fundamental components of search engine optimization that ought not to be neglected. Overlooking them implies a colossal missed potential for your content. The page title is as yet a significant positioning element for Google, so you need to ensure it’s advanced accurately for each page. It is recommended to add your keyword to the title if that is conceivable and ensure that your page title isn’t excessively long. If your page title is excessively long, chopping it down is inevitable.
Making content is extraordinary; however, search engines battle to comprehend the setting of your substance. You don’t need potential guests to see only 50% of your page title in the search results. These streamlining factors are considered via search engines when slithering your site; thus, they can further develop your content execution whenever done effectively.
Click-Through Rate gives some knowledge of how potential guests can tap on your site in the SERPs. On the off chance that you enhance your meta portrayals with a reasonable and appealing message on what individuals can find on your site, it becomes simpler so that they can check whether the data they’re searching for is on that page. The more probable individuals are to figure your site will give a solution to their search inquiry, the more traffic a page will acquire.
Once guests land on your site, the following objective is to keep them on your site. You don’t need your guests promptly ricocheting back to Google whenever they have perused something on your page. This is the reason you really want to urge guests to navigate your site. The ideal way of doing this is to make a call to action or CTA, which typically is a button that offers an activity to your guest. This can be, for example, a purchase button on an item page or a signup button for the bulletins. Don’t get carried away and attempt to have one fundamental call to action that stands apart from the remainder of your page.
Over the long haul, in the event that you produce top-caliber, important material, others will probably begin linking to it. At the point when that happens, Google noticed that different areas are remembering you as an expert in your space, which supports your search rankings. That is the reason outer links are fundamental to your SEO methodology. One more way of keeping individuals on your site is by adding significant inward links to different pages on your site.
By working out your content procedure, you will ideally acquire authority, and individuals will remember you are talented and reliable in your subject matter. This offers you the ideal chance to reference your own content through internal linking.
This is quite a significant piece of SEO and ought to be essential for your promoting endeavors. By adding internal links, your site guests and Google will realize what pages are identified with one another and can be intriguing when they’re searching for data on a specific subject. On the off chance that you have a library of related content, not referring to yourself is a mistake. Preferably, when guests go to your site, you will give an all-in-one resource to them. Fundamentally, they ought to have the option to visit your space and realize whatever they need to about your topic. So try to invest energy in your inner linking to make an extraordinary web page structure that keeps individuals on your site!
If your site isn’t dynamic enough with loading speeds or versatile while being searched, it is important for you to change your SEO technique, as you risk losing serious money! It is imperative that websites these days are mobile-friendly.
Around 4 years ago, Google changed to a system of mobile rankings. This implies that Google currently checks out the mobile rendition of your site to conclude how high your ranking should actually be. So if the desktop adaptation of your site is set up splendidly, yet your mobile site isn’t responsive by any means, this will be reflected in your rankings. Adversely, if that is the situation, make a point to deal with mobile search engine optimization. Today, over half of all traffic comes from cell phones. Also, that is the reason Google will, in general, lean toward versatile websites.
To set up your site for natural traffic from cell phones, you’ll need to guarantee that your site is responsive and that it loads in less than a couple of seconds. Versatility and page speed are significant positioning variables.
An extraordinary way of testing if your site is adapting well to mobile devices is to utilize Google’s test. This provides you with a sign of how effectively guests can use your page on cell phones.
In any case, don’t stop in the wake of really taking a look at this. The best exhortation is to visit your site on your own cell phone. Peruse your own site for some time and attempt to tap on each link, tab, and picture to perceive what occurs. Make sure that you do not stop testing the website until you are delighted. The Where, Why, What, When, and How, all should be satisfactorily answered! The bottom line is straightforward. Do not disregard mobile optimization in the event that you really need to expand your natural site traffic.
Conclusion
Generally speaking, it’s simple to foster these unfortunate SEO quirks and not put any time or consideration into further developing them. Notwithstanding, if you are growing positive routines and, as of now, setting a portion of the strategies discussed above in motion, it ought to be simpler and more viable to embrace the SEO flaws.
You don’t need one of the mistakes to cost you your rankings. Accordingly, by following SEO best practices, you can fuel results all the more effectively. On the off chance that you join these components into an undeniable SEO procedure, it can have a fantastic effect.
Indeed, even well-versed individuals can commit numerous normal SEO errors. It’s better to get familiar with the difficulties others have encountered and stay away from them in your promoting endeavors. You need an essential comprehension of SEO and to pose inquiries about specific strategies to guarantee your SEO techniques aren’t about attempting to deceive Google.
FTx 360 offers a full suite of marketing solutions, including affordable SEO services and online reputation management, at competitive prices. Whether you’re interested in our consulting services or would like to hire us to manage all of your SEO marketing needs, our team of experts can help your online presence grow. Contact us to learn more about our content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO marketing services.
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!
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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.
A call to action, or CTA for short, is a digital marketing term that refers to a prompt that invites users to take a specific action, such as clicking a button or entering their email addresses into an online field.
Call to action buttons can be found in every type of digital marketing campaign, including email campaigns, PPC ads, social media marketing campaigns, and even SMS text campaigns. In indirect forms of digital marketing, like blogs, you will also find CTAs such as invitations to leave comments below a blog article and social media posts that ask followers to “like, share, and follow.”
Common examples of CTAs include:
● Sign Up
● Subscribe
● Learn More
● Get Started
Call to action buttons help to guide potential customers through the buying journey. When you place smartly worded CTAs strategically across your online platforms, you can increase the CTR, or click through rate, of your campaign while simultaneously reducing the bounce rate. In short, CTAs improve conversions and boost revenue, results that every business owner should want.
Are you eager to incorporate effective CTAs into your digital marketing campaigns? Skip the article and contact FTx 360 right now! Or you can…
…read on to learn about the different types of CTA buttons you can use in your digital marketing campaigns to convert curious visitors into paying customers.
This type of CTA works best for businesses that sell software as a service, but can also benefit any company that offers subscription packages. According to GrooveHQ.com, offering a free trial can increase conversions by 328%. If you’re trying to sell a product or service that’s especially complex or “niche,” and your brand isn’t well known, then offering prospective buyers a free trial should set their mind at ease and generate positive word-of-mouth marketing in the interim. Once the free trial period has concluded, users will be all the more inclined to sign up for a paid subscription.
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You can use a Free Trial CTA on your website landing page, in a paid social media advertisement, or anywhere in-between. But you’ll first need to decide whether the free trial should be for 30 days or 14 days. It’s also a good idea to include a feedback survey towards the end of the free trial period.
Remember, the purpose of the free trial is to convince users to purchase the product or service, so aim to offer them just enough days to get them hooked. Then, be sure to keep an eye on the conversion rate of free trial users who end up purchasing the product or service after the trial has concluded. If users aren’t converting into customers, you’ll need to evaluate both the cost of the item and its perceived usability based on the feedback surveys.
When you state the greatest benefit of your product or service, your call to action will be all the more powerful. This type of CTA—the “Obvious Benefit” CTA—can be used to make a strong argument to consumers. For example, consumers might not automatically know that your product ordinarily costs thousands of dollars. By including the regular retail value as part of your CTA strategy, you can effectively convince people to buy the item at its current discounted price. You can use two buttons, or a blurb and a button, when designing your Obvious Benefit CTA, like we’ve done here:
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As you can see, the first line of the CTA states the obvious benefit of having a high-speed website. The second line of the CTA, which is the clickable button, clearly states what the visitor will receive once they click, namely their website speed will be analyzed. Obvious benefit CTAs are ideal for your email marketing campaigns, as opposed to paid social media campaigns, because email recipients are qualified leads, generally speaking, who will be more likely to click. Also, emails allow for a greater opportunity to make a structured argument to your readers.
The main thing to watch out for when using Obvious Benefit CTAs is the CTR. If your CTA click through rate is unusually low, it could be the result of convoluted or confusing verbiage used in the call to action itself. Are you trying to use a statistic to convince people to click? Make sure the statistic and its correlating point are crystal clear.
Social Proof CTAs are all about proving how popular your brand, products, and services already are, in order to convince consumers that they should give your business a try. In order to pull off using social proof in your CTAs, you’ll first have to gather data about your brand. What can you brag about? Do you have over ten thousand WordPress blog subscribers? Have you just surpassed fifty thousand YouTube followers? Whatever milestones you’ve reached as a business can be leveraged to develop a strong CTA. Just make sure that you aren’t embellishing your stats.
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It should come as no surprise that Social Proof CTAs work really well on social media. Try building a positive customer review into your Instagram CTA, or include the latest industry award your brand received in your next Facebook lead generation CTA. Even if your company is new and you haven’t garnered a ton of “social proof” yet, you can still leverage one of your recent achievements to create a powerful CTA, especially if you use video for your social post or ad.
Yes, video. Right now, social media video content far surpasses photo and image content when it comes to increasing engagement. When using video, you don’t need to write out your social proof in your caption. Instead, you can directly tell your audience why your brand is awesome and what you can do for them. For example, run an Instagram & Facebook ad campaign featuring a video where you tell viewers, “We’re the first organic vitamin company to obtain USP certification for ingredient purity and potency!”
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Are you looking for an affordable digital marketing agency to handle all of your marketing campaigns, including custom lead generation strategies that utilize the CTAs we covered in this article? FTx 360 offers social media marketing and email marketing services that include campaign handlings and marketing automation to simplify your life and change the way you do business. Contact us to learn more.
Effective content marketing campaigns have the power to increase SEO ranking as well as web traffic and convert visitors into customers. But what makes a content marketing campaign “effective”?
The fact of the matter is that no two businesses are completely the same, which means you aren’t going to find a one-size-fits all solution. Your content marketing strategy will need to be as unique as your brand, and speak to your unique audience.
To help you to define your audience and leverage their interests, here are 5 content marketing tactics that work:
Do you know your audience? In order for your content marketing strategy to increase website traffic and successfully convert site visitors into customers, you first need to identify the audience you aim to target. Not every consumer is going to become your customer, but by understanding who your ideal customer is, you can avoid wasting time and effort marketing to the wrong groups.
Create a buyer persona for your brand, or many buyer personas, based on your current loyal customer demographics combined with distinct criteria about your ideal customer. You can define your brand’s buyer persona by conducting market research using Google Trends and Uber Suggest. Then, compare the data you find there with your CRM data to flush out the specifics of your ideal customer.
Google Trends will provide you with critical data regarding the existing consumer demand for businesses like yours. Simply plug a relevant topic or term into the search bar. Google Trends will show you the historic interest in that topic as well as a list of relevant searches. From there, you can gain a sense of what your ideal audience is interested in, compile targeted keywords, and leverage those keywords in your content marketing.
Ideally, each of your optimized marketing campaigns should connect to its own landing page. When marketing guru Neil Patel did this, his internet search traffic nearly tripled. By plugging relevant keywords and longtail keyword phrases into both his marketing campaigns and their associated landing pages, Patel was able to funnel web traffic and seamlessly convert interested consumers into paying customers, and you can do the same.
Also referred to as a lead capture page, squeeze page, or single property page, a landing page is a destination web page that appears once a user clicks on an SEO research result or the CTA of any type of digital marketing promotion. For example, if your email marketing campaign includes a subscription CTA, whichever recipients click on that subscription CTA will be directed to the subscription landing page where they can sign up for a subscription.
By creating one landing page per content marketing campaign, you will be able to track which campaign is delivering the highest conversion rate and ROI. If your social media campaign is out-performing your Google AdWords campaign, for instance, you might decide to pull the ad and pour the reserved funds into your social media campaign. Ultimately, using multiple, targeted landing pages will help you make better business decisions, in addition to driving web traffic, generating quality leads, and turning leads into customers.
No matter which type of content marketing campaign you’re planning to launch, the more you define and target the audience, the more successful the campaign will be in terms of enticing consumers to click, learn, and buy. Segmenting your audience into multiple customer groups can be challenging, depending on the type of content marketing campaign. For example, a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign will not allow you to target your audience as tightly as the average email marketing campaign, which is why we’re going to focus on email marketing to explain this particular content marketing tactic.
When it comes to email marketing, specifying and targeting multiple recipient groups is not only possible but faster and easier than other forms of content marketing, as we mentioned. Try segmenting your email recipients by first grouping them based on product or service needs, and then grouping them based on age.
● Recipients younger than 18 years = buying behavior determined by guardians
● Recipients aged between 19 – 30 years = good long term buying potential, but lower expenditure per order
● Recipients aged between 31 – 45 years = buying behavior based on additional needs such as children, dependents, current financial burdens, and other factors
● Recipients aged between 46 – 60 = buying behavior based on increasing financial constraints associated with retirement, multiple homes, lingering dependents, and other factors
Interestingly, while consumers younger than 30 years might spend less money per order, they will actually take much larger financial risks when purchasing than consumers in their mid-40s. This isn’t a fixed rule of thumb, but rather a loose guide you can use when segmenting and targeting your email recipients.
This content marketing tactic is really a two-punch strategy, and the first punch has to do with targeting millennials and Gen Z aged consumers. The second punch is the marketing tactic itself, which is to provide adaptive content to those millennials and Gen Zers. Let’s take a look.
Millennials make up nearly 80 million citizens in the US, and Gen Zers make up a whopping 90 million. Combined, these consumer age groups exceed any other in the United States alone. What makes millennials and Gen Zers so unique is that unlike Gen X and prior generations, millennials and Gen Zers grew up using advanced computer and smartphone technology. Because they were raised with evolving technology, millennials and Gen Zers have the highest expectations in terms of how brands use technology in their marketing.
One way you can successfully attract and retain the attention of a millennial and Gen Z audience is by using adaptive content in your marketing campaigns. Adaptive content is any content that utilizes personalization so that the user experiences ongoing, seamless interactions with your brand. Yes, we realize that probably sounds abstract. Adaptive content is a somewhat abstract concept, so here’s what you can do to provide one of the most valuable forms of adaptive content: invest in a responsive web design. A responsive website design will allow users to pick up where they left off when they visit your website from multiple devices.
Our final content marketing tactic is ideal for anyone who might not be able to generate a lot of original content themselves. Remaining consistent, especially when publishing blog articles, is the key to retaining and engaging your audience. That being said, a lot of business owners might not have enough creative juice to regularly write and publish blog articles. Instead of dropping the ball and becoming inconsistent, try curating and publishing content from other platforms and blogs.
The trick here is to reach out to other blogs that do not compete with your own business. For example, if you’re a pet retailer, reach out to the local veterinarians who have successful blogs on their websites to see if you can re-publish their most popular articles on your own platform. As long as you get their permission and give them credit, the partnership will benefit both of your businesses.
Social media content curation can even benefit you when you don’t necessarily forge a formal partnership with a complementary brand. You don’t need permission, per se, to repost, retweet, or otherwise share content from another social media account. Use your best judgement and give credit where credit is due, and by incorporating content curation into your social posting calendar, you will be able to greatly enhance your overall content marketing strategy.
Would you like help implementing the content marketing tactics we covered in this blog post? FTx 360 offers affordable digital marketing services, including responsive website design services, email marketing services, marketing automations services, and social media marketing services. Contact us to learn more.
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!
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.
There has been a fair amount of controversy in the last five years regarding how marketers should write web content so that Google elevates the search engine ranking of the site in question.
One camp of marketers insists that website content, such as web pages, product descriptions, professional services, and blog articles should be written so simplistically, straightforwardly, and concisely that anyone with a 6th grade reading comprehension level will be able to understand it. This camp believes that content should be written for people, albeit people who aren’t necessarily the sharpest tools in the toolbox.
Another camp of marketers operates as though the sole purpose of publishing written content online is to elevate website search engine ranking, and therefore all content should be composed to maximize the chances that Google bots will determine the website’s content is “valuable.” This camp believes that content should be written with as many popular SEO keywords as possible so that the content pleases Google bots and Google’s ever-changing algorithms even if doing so causes the actual verbiage to sound awkward, stilted, or downright grammatically incorrect.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of my ideal customer, neither a 6th grader nor a Google bot comes to mind… But I digress.
Does content that consumers love tend to rank poorly on Google?
Will content that’s written for the specific purpose of maximizing search engine ranking automatically repulse living, breathing web visitors?
Why do Google bots exist if they’ve been programmed to value what consumers despise and penalize what consumers value?
The answers to these questions can be summed up in a single statement: Google bots have been programmed to mimic consumer behavior and value what consumers value.
In other words, the entire “content controversy” is based on a faulty assumption.
You see, professional writers tend to insist that excellent writing has the power to render the need for SEO techniques obsolete. On the other hand, professional webmasters and SEO strategists tend to presume that strategic SEO is so effective that it can elevate the search engine ranking of even the most poorly written drivel. These two diametrically opposed mentalities have caused marketers to split into those two camps I mentioned.
If you ask me, massive egos are to blame…
The fact of the matter is that content must be well-written and also utilize effective SEO techniques. You can’t favor one over the other and expect your website to positively impact your business revenue.
Let’s cut to the chase. You want to learn the characteristics of “well written” content, and you want to understand how you, as a marketer, can ensure that the content you write satisfies the quality criteria for both consumers and Google bots.
Step one is to free yourself from the mindset of those “camps” I’ve been referencing. The rest of the steps are laid out in this article, so keep reading.
Your business is unique, which means your customers are unique individuals with unique needs. This means that the content you write should speak to your audience. You can identify your audience and understand who your ideal customer is by analyzing your Customer Relationship Management data as well as your web traffic reporting and analytics data.
Do not become seduced by the prospect of writing content for a broad audience as if doing so will result in acquiring new customers. It will backfire. Meaning, if you write your content in such a way that caters to people with a low reading comprehension level even though your ideal client holds a graduate degree, earns a seven-figure salary, and places a high premium on credentials and expertise, you will only end up turning off the people you want to do business with.
Instead, be polarizing.
There’s no real risk of excluding consumers who were never going to become your customers anyway. However, there’s a real benefit to composing your content in such a way that it exclusively addresses a niche audience. In fact, intentionally writing for a niche audience will organically boost your search engine ranking when it comes to consumers who use longtail keyword phrases to find business websites that offer very specific products, services, and solutions.
This type of consumer will be more likely to quickly convert into a customer once they land on your website, which is far more beneficial than having one hundred consumers land on your website who never buy.
Write your content as though you are speaking to your ideal customer, one-on-one. If your customer base is largely comprised of ten-year olds, then speak to them in their language with their vocabulary, remaining mindful of their limited attention span.
Use the following checklist as you write:
● Identify and use the best word choices
● Find and use high-ranking keywords
● Understand your niche audience
● Speak to your audience in their language
● Study your competition
● Write with confidence, challenge existing opinions, be polarizing
● Create a content template based on your high-ranking content for future use
If you’ve been keeping up with the FTx 360 blog, then you’ve already read several articles about SEO, including What Is SEO?, How to Spot Negative SEO, and Ways to Increase Web Traffic. For tips on how to determine which keywords and longtail keyword phrases to use, be sure to check out those articles.
Then, in order to compose effective content that Google bots will love just as much as consumers, keep the following pointers in mind as you write:
● Understand SEO copywriting
● Incorporate keywords in your headline
● Optimize for clarity
● Understand on-page SEO
● Build sentences and paragraphs that naturally utilize longtail keyword phrases
● Google boosts articles that are at least 2,400 words
● Google elevates the ranking of websites that have longer visitor engagement sessions
Ready to analyze the real technical side of your website to ensure that Google bots will love, love, love your website? It’s time to talk about Robots.txt.
The term “robots.txt” is shorthand for “robots exclusion protocol.” A robots.txt file is a website text file that’s sole purpose is to inform search engine robots, including Google bots, whether or not robots have permission to “crawl” the web page that the robots.txt file belongs to.
What this means is that Google won’t automatically crawl your website by virtue of the fact that your site exists, in the same way that your neighbor won’t automatically enter your house just because it’s right across the street. Before Google crawls a given web page, its robots will first read the robots.txt file for permission and instructions.
Do you want to permit Google to crawl every page on your website? Maybe. Or maybe not. That’s up to you. If, for instance, you have indexed your website with archived content, you wouldn’t want Google to crawl both the featured content and its archived duplicate, because Google will penalize the duplication and demote your ranking.
You can “disallow” Google bots from crawling web pages by setting the appropriate allowances and disallowances within your robots.txt files.
Where can you find your robots.txt files in order to review and modify the permissions?
Simply type your website’s URL into the search bar, followed by “/robots.txt.” Let’s use FTx 360 as an example. Type the following URL into your search bar:
https://ftxdigital360.com/robots.txt
You will notice:
User – agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
That exact information is what Google will adhere to prior to crawling our website pages.
What does yours include? Be sure to review your robots.txt files for each of your web pages and make sure that the files reflect what you want to allow and disallow.
In the rare event that there aren’t any robots.txt files associated with your website, Google will proceed as though they have full permission to crawl and index your entire site. If that’s okay with you, then there’s nothing you need to do. Robots.txt will be your friend across the board.
But if you prefer certain pages of your website not to be crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines, then you’ll need to create robots.txt files and meticulously list the permissions you want in place, blocking Google from any pages you don’t want their bots to crawl.
Cleaning up your robots.txt files is an integral aspect of ensuring that the web page content crawled and indexed by bots are elevated on Google’s search engine ranking so that visitors discover and read them.
Are you familiar with the digital marketing term, “cloaking”? If not, you aren’t alone. I’ve been writing digital content for over eight years and only recently have I been introduced to the concept of “cloaking.”
Anyone who has ever dared venture into the online dating world has likely been the victim of some degree of cloaking. You chat with what you believe to be an attractive individual on the dating platform, only to discover when you finally meet them in person that they are 20 years older and 80 lbs heavier than their profile pictures indicated…
Yikes!
In a nutshell, “cloaking” can be defined as falsely representing your URL content to Google’s search engine spiders for the purposes of luring online users to your website. Similar to a washed-up 45 year-old who uses his nephew’s handsome bodybuilding photos in order to score dates on OKCupid, “cloaking” involves providing Google with an inaccurate portrayal of your website in order to elevate search engine ranking and drive web traffic.
There are many reasons why “cloaking” is a big no-no in the digital marketing world, but the biggest of all is that businesses that use cloaking as an SEO tactic ultimately end up turning potential customers into infuriated website visitors.
When a potential customer uses Google to search for the best mechanic in town and your website appears in the first page of the search results, you better be a mechanic. If you’re selling used cars instead, you’re going to have one very irritated website visitor.
Now, chances are, you would have never heard of cloaking if not for reading this article. You might be thinking right now that you’re in no danger of “cloaking” your website in order to “game the Google system,” so why am I bothering to tell you about cloaking in the first place?
Because there are unethical digital marketing agencies out there who attempt to use cloaking without their clients’ knowledge in order to “deliver outstanding SEO results.” These agencies like to boast that they’ll get your website on the first page of Google’s search results, only to end up using unethical tactics to succeed. Worst of all, despite elevating their clients’ websites on Google, they provide virtually no ROI, because deceived website visitors obviously do not become online customers.
What are the “cloaking” red flags to look out for when you’re considering partnering with a digital marketing agency? Are there warning signs that can help you avoid these disreputable “cloaking” agencies? And if you’ve recently discovered that the digital marketing agency you’ve hired has “cloaked” your website, what can you do about it now?
Let’s take a look…
Cloaking is not only unethical, but unlawful in 2021. Ethical webmasters employ search engine optimization techniques as they index the websites they build. This is fine. But how can you tell whether a webmaster has used ethical SEO techniques or illegal ones? You can find out for yourself what a digital agency has been up to by investigating their clients’ websites. Here’s what to look for:
● Check for AdWords cloaking scripts, PHP URL cloaking scripts, and URL cloaking scripts
● Review the SERP directly by turning on “Preserve Log” in “Chrome DevTools,” switching your user type to “Googlebot,” and going to the website directly from Google to compare the “Googlebot” content to the “online user” content
● Use a “cloaking checker” tool, like the one offered at Dupli Checker
Needless to say, if you discover any prospective marketing agency has used cloaking for their clients’ websites, run.
When Google discovers that a website has used “cloaking” to elevate SEO ranking, then Google will blacklist the website, period. It is very hard to bounce back once you’ve been blacklisted. Protect your business so that you don’t hire an agency that resorts to these unethical SEO tactics. Here are the questions to ask potential webmasters and digital marketers before you sign a contract:
● Will you use PBNs to increase my website’s rank on Google?
● Will you republish high-ranking web content for me in order to maintain a favorable SEO ranking?
● Will you maximize SEO and backlinks by assigning a team to leave comments under all my website’s blog articles?
If a marketing agency answers “yes” to any of the above questions, run. It’s a very good idea to familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines prior to interviewing your agency candidates.
What if you recently discovered that the digital marketing agency you’ve been working with has used cloaking and other “black hat SEO” techniques, which have now backfired, resulting in your website being blacklisted by Google? Can you recover? It’s possible, but recovering won’t happen overnight. That being said, here are the steps you can take today to submit a “reconsideration request” to Google:
● First navigate to Google Search Console > Crawl > Fetch, and fetch the web pages from the affected portions of your website
● Compare your web content that is fetched by Google to the web content your online users see and resolve all variations between the two so that the content is the same
● Finally, check all redirects on your site and remove the faulty ones that send users to an unexpected destination and / or ones that utilize “conditional redirects”
● Once you’ve completed the above steps, submit your reconsideration request to Google
If you do not want to attempt resolving the Google violations yourself, preferring instead to hire a reputable marketing agency, then just be sure to relay to the new digital marketing agency the specific Google penalties you’ve received. Did you receive a “partial match” penalty or a “site-wide match” penalty? Let the new agency know so that they can focus on fixing the specific violations.
Cloaking, or “black hat SEO,” is the result of plugging misleading content into Google for the specific purpose of optimizing SEO. In technical terms, this is accomplished when the marketer provides Google’s bots with a “server-side script,” i.e. a Google-friendly variation of the website. How would a website know that a “visitor” is a “search engine robot” and not a real user? Rather than digress into a detailed and highly technical explanation of how that’s done, let’s put it this way: Artificial Intelligence has come a long way.
Originally, A.I. was not developed for the purposes of helping unethical marketers to lie, cheat, and steal. But very unfortunately, mastering the best A.I. strategies in order to inform Google’s bots of URL content is what led fraudsters to invent “cloaking” in the first place.
You see, web developers, SEO strategists, and digital marketers are supposed to provide Google bots with URL information. This information must be truncated. For example, if a website sells over 500 products, the URL description that is written specifically for Google is obviously not going to include mention of all 500 products. Savvy SEO strategists will therefore choose to highlight only the most SEO-friendly products to mention within the Google-specific “scripts.” If organic coffee is the most popular product a website sells, for instance, then the “scripts” used for Google will focus on organic coffee and won’t mention the other 499 organic produce, meat, and tea products that are also for sale on the site.
Hopefully, by this point you see the distinction between acceptable SEO strategies and unethical “black hat SEO” cloaking.
The big takeaway to remember is that if real, living, breathing users love your web content, then Google bots will, too. Always write for people. Never write for the sake of pleasing algorithms if doing so comes at the expense of providing quality content to actual people. After all, Google bots are not your potential customers, people are, so be sure to keep the horse in front of the cart if you want to elevate your search engine ranking on Google.
Are you looking for a reputable digital marketing agency to develop your website, write your content, and handle your SEO? FTx 360 offers web design and development, content writing, and SEO marketing and optimization services for businesses of all industries. If you’ve been the victim of black hat SEO, we can fix it, repair your reputation, and put you on the fast track to building trust with consumers. Contact us to speak with our webmasters, content writers, and experienced marketing strategists today.
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As a business owner, you’re probably aware that social media should play a role in your digital marketing strategy. But which platforms should you invest your time in?
There are many social media platforms to choose from. In fact, new social platforms hit the internet regularly, which can be overwhelming for business owners who are trying to keep up. The good news is that you don’t have to. When it comes to using social media to promote your business, accrue followers, and increase brand awareness, there are only five major platforms to consider. Those are:
● YouTube
Should you create profiles and attempt to publish on all of these platforms? Absolutely not. As counterintuitive as it may seem, if you try to tackle managing accounts and publishing content on all five of these social media platforms, you will cause the adverse effect of diluting your brand and weakening your digital presence.
Ensuring that social media marketing works for your business will depend on choosing the right platforms. Each social media platform offers users a different experience. Each platform provides brands with advantages and disadvantages. And each social platform must be carefully analyzed for its business marketing potential. In this article, we will assess the major platforms listed above to help you determine which ones will best serve your marketing goals.
In order to reach your social media marketing goals, you must first get clear on what those goals are. Social media goals can range widely from one business to the next. Some companies strictly use social media platforms to sell directly to consumers. Others choose platforms that will enable them to collect thousands of followers, because building general awareness about their brands is their greatest goal. Company owners who want to promote their B2B businesses might expect their social media marketing efforts to result in gaining podcast subscribers and website visitors since those are their two biggest conversion channels.
What are your social media marketing goals? Your answer will depend on the following factors, so first ask yourself:
● What type of business do you own?
● Who are your clients or customers?
● Which social media platforms do they spend the most time on?
● What type of information do you want to impart to your targeted audience via social media and what would be the best content form to communicate that information to them?
Let’s take a look at each question, the possible answers, and how your particular answer will inform your social media marketing goals.
The first major differentiator is whether you own a B2C company—”business-2-consumer” company—or a B2B company—”business-2-business” company. The industry in which your company operates is the second major differentiator. B2B companies that operate within the manufacturing industry, for example, will have very different social media marketing goals than B2C companies that operate as pet supply stores, golf & country clubhouses, or 24-hour diners. Certain social media platforms will serve B2B companies better than B2C ones, while other social media platforms will benefit retailers more so than restaurants, all of which we will examine further in this article. For now, simply identify the nature of your business.
This question goes much deeper than what meets the eye initially. The answer we’re looking for is all about customer demographics, customer interests, customer favorites, customer “pain points,” and the list goes on. You really must know who your customers are if you want to engage them online using your social media content. Do you have a digitized Point-of-Sale system at your retail location? Are you using Customer Relationship Management software at your hospitality business? Do you have a customer loyalty rewards program in place at your quick-serve diner? Any of these software tools can tell you exactly who your clients and customers are. Simply review and analyze all of the valuable customer data that has been historically recorded. You can access this data via the reporting function of the software.
We admit, if you already knew the answer to this question, you probably wouldn’t need to read this article in the first place. Obviously, you want to focus your social media marketing efforts on whichever social platforms your customers spend most of their time. That being said, determining which platform your current customers—and also your potential customers—spend the bulk of their time on isn’t as straightforward as it should be. Answering this question will require research, but the good news is that there are several independent websites that have conducted this kind of research already by comparing user data from one platform to the next. Not to mention that any social platform that is a publicly traded company has to provide key demographic information as part of their financial reporting transparency obligations. Check out Facebook’s Investor Reporting website.
In terms of identifying and reaching your social media marketing goals, this is the most important question you will ever answer. Social media is all about interaction and engagement, which means that you must understand what kind of content your customers want to find on social media in order to provide them with content that will effectively engage them. For instance, if you own a holistic dentistry practice, your customers are probably concerned with the toxins that are known to leach out of dental fillings and implants, and the dangers that mixed metals are suspected to cause in the human body. The dental materials you use, as well as your services, are toxin-free. So, how can you communicate this information to your potential customers, quelling their fears while educating them at the same time, all while using the most accommodating social media platform to relay your message?
As you can tell, a great deal of thought goes into figuring out what kind of information your customers are seeking online and which content form will be best to communicate that information to them. In the next section, we will look at each social media platform to help you understand how using it could benefit your business and to also help you eliminate the platforms that are less likely to serve you, your customers, and your marketing goals.
Each social media platform has a fluctuating number of daily users, and depending on the specific demographics of those users, your business could have access to a very deep pool of potential customers if you choose to market your company on those platforms. But is it better to be a big fish in a small pond, a small fish in a big pond, or a fisherman who casts the widest net possible? Only you will know what is best for your business. Here is the social media platform information you can use to assess which platforms will be right for you.
A veteran social media platform that has been around longer than the others on this list, Facebook is by no means passé. Yes, there are newer, more trendy platforms out there, but in terms of ideal user demographics and the ability to connect businesses with new customers, Facebook remains an excellent choice for social media marketing.
● Over 2 billion active users visit Facebook daily
● The biggest demographic on Facebook are male users (19.3%) and female users (13.2%) between 25 and 34 years of age
● 75% of social media users with an income of $75k or more are on Facebook
By using Facebook as part of your social media marketing strategy, you will be able to attract users and gain followers organically. Simply posting content regularly, using relevant hashtags, and replying to comments as they come in will do wonders for gradually building brand awareness and converting visitors into customers over time.
But that’s not all Facebook can do for your business. What makes Facebook one of the best platforms for B2B and B2C companies who ultimately want to increase revenue is its targeted digital advertising platform.
Between running PPC advertising campaigns and selling goods to customers from the platform itself, Facebook has helped to transform a lot of companies into eCommerce powerhouses, and it can do the same for your business.
Bottom line, Facebook is an excellent platform for B2C companies that want to post micro-content to increase brand awareness, gain followers, stimulate social engagement, and convert followers into customers.
Founded in October of 2010, Instagram hit the social media scene and instantly won over a multitude of users across the world. More so than any other social media platform, Instagram is all about the visual. As the ideal platform to post photos, images, graphics, and viral memes, Instagram has taken over and dominated the social media marketing space for businesses who sell products that “give good photo.”
Instagram really isn’t a listening and learning platform. In terms of fostering conversations, it pales in comparison to Facebook, but that doesn’t mean this platform is any less valuable. In fact, Instagram can do what Facebook can’t, which is present the beauty of life in a visual format with no distractions such as written commentary, website links, random polls and surveys, and other chaotic options that tend to be presented on the average Facebook feed.
● 200 million+ Instagrammers visit at least one business profile daily
● 70% of shoppers use Instagram to discover new products
● Instagram’s potential advertising reach is 928 million users
If you’re already convinced that including Instagram in your social media marketing is a must, you aren’t alone. That being said, Instagram tends to benefit businesses in the B2C retail consumer goods space where the primary customer demographics are teenagers and young adults.
Bottom line, Instagram is best for B2C retail companies, especially when those companies primarily sell on an eCommerce platform.
The social media platform, Twitter, was launched back in 2006 and frankly, most users did not comprehend its potential for about ten years. Once upon a time, Twitter had a primitive look, Tweets were referred to as Updates, and Followers were referred to as Friends. Most Tweets were basic if not random, and because Twitter lacked the visual components of Facebook, as well as the number of characters one would need to write a paragraph, many users were initially confused about how they were going to use the platform to connect with friends.
But today:
● 77% of Americans who annually earn $75k or more use Twitter
● 80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials
● 71% of Twitter users say they use the social platform to get their news and stay informed
The last statistic sums up everything you need to know about Twitter. Twitter is an information-spreading platform that serves news outlets and organizations that either cover or contribute to current events. Twitter tends to be politically charged and entire debates can unfold within a single thread of Tweets.
That being said, certain business owners can get a lot out of using Twitter for their social media marketing. Since Twitter is a real-time social media platform, every Tweet you post is equivalent to sending a group text message to the entire world. Currently, a Tweet can be up to 280 characters, which allows you to make a complex point, and because you can also share website links, Twitter is an ideal platform to drive traffic to your business blog or YouTube channel where visitors can gain even more information from you.
Thanks to hashtags and the immediacy of the platform itself, Twitter offers businesses a way to engage with their audiences in real time, having complete conversations. Your business can also take advantage of trending topics on Twitter by retweeting and commenting on whatever is going on in the world.
Bottom line, Twitter will serve B2B and B2C businesses that want to spread information, comment on current events, and elevate their professional authority within their industry. If your company serves a specific community, has a non-profit mission, or interconnects with the world of current events, then using Twitter as part of your social media marketing strategy could greatly benefit your business.
LinkedIn has had a slow evolution in terms of joining the ranks of well-known social media sites. Considered the world’s largest professional network on the internet, only in recent years has LinkedIn been regarded as an authentic “social media” platform. It wasn’t until LinkedIn provided newsfeeds and the ability for users to post blogs and other content that it joined the ranks of social media. Initially, LinkedIn was used strictly as an employment-oriented online platform that connected professionals and aided job seekers in obtaining the best positions on the open job market.
● More than 70% of LinkedIn users are from outside the USA
● 90 million LinkedIn users are senior-level hiring managers and 63 million are in decision-making positions at their companies
● LinkedIn makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites & blogs
LinkedIn is an interesting social media marketing option. While it doesn’t have nearly as many users as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined, it has far more marketing potential than you might think. If you own a B2B company that does international business, you really can’t afford not to be on LinkedIn.
One of the biggest benefits of using LinkedIn is that you can be a big fish in a small pond. Unlike Facebook and Instagram that have crowded newsfeeds, there are fewer users on LinkedIn to compete with. And the users who actively use LinkedIn have specific goals in mind, such as connecting with relevant businesses, reviewing the resumes of qualified professionals, and gaining insights about their industries by reading newsfeed articles.
If you use LinkedIn to the fullest, which includes publishing posts regularly and updating blog articles to your business profile, you can potentially build massive awareness about your brand in a relatively short amount of time. And best of all, because LinkedIn isn’t crowded with consumers, you don’t have to advertise on the platform. Simply post regularly and use relevant hashtags, and you will reap the benefits of advertising without spending a dime thanks to LinkedIn’s algorithms.
Bottom line, LinkedIn is best for B2B companies that can commit to regularly publishing informative blog articles. If one of your social media marketing goals is to elevate your brand’s expert standing within your industry, then using LinkedIn is for you.
Last, but certainly not least, is YouTube. YouTube exclusively offers video content, though some channels publish audio-only files with a static image that fills the video field. When an internet user wants to watch video content, YouTube is the social media platform they go to, hands down. In this sense, YouTube has virtually no competition, not even from Vimeo. If you’re prepared to create professional-looking video content, then using YouTube for your social media marketing could prove more effective than all other platforms combined.
● 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube and 89% of YouTube users come from outside the USA
● The number of channels earning six figures per year on YouTube grows by 40% every year
● YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world after Google
In order to publish video content on YouTube, you will have to pick an account package that’s appropriate for your business size. Owners of startups can first use YouTube’s free publishing services and then when you grow, you can upgrade to one of their paid service options. The best part about YouTube, and there are many, is that the platform itself is a search engine. When you correctly categorize your channel and videos, and add hashtags, users will be able to easily find you. YouTube also provides analytic tools to help you gauge video performance.
YouTube can provide your business with an additional stream of income if you gain enough subscribers to your channel, which is something that other social media platforms simply do not offer. Bear in mind that there’s a significant delay on payouts, but once you earn the minimum dollar amount, which triggers the automated payment process, YouTube will email you an alert.
What kind of video content should you publish on YouTube? The answer will have to do with what your specific customers want to see. But here are a few ideas to get you started:
● Webinars, Tutorials, and How-To Videos
● Candid Customer Testimonials
● Q&A Videos
● Trailer Videos
● Stats Videos
Bottom line, when it comes to which social media platform businesses should use to publish video content, no platform compares to YouTube. Whether you own a B2B or B2C business, if you want to reach a massive audience using video content, then you must publish on YouTube, period. You can also take clips of your videos to use as micro-content teasers on Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms as part of your strategy to drum up interest and drive traffic to your YouTube channel.
Hopefully, this article has helped you refine your social media marketing goals and aided your decision as to which social platforms to invest your time, money, and efforts into. The real trick is to pick only one or two social media platforms to focus on, rather than attempting to manage every platform under the sun.
Want personalized, hands-on social media marketing assistance? FTx 360 offers social media marketing services to B2B and B2C businesses of all industries. Our team of marketers specialize in both macro and micro-content, and know how to make the most out of each social media platform so that you gain a growing audience and provide your customers with the information they want most. Contact us anytime to find out how FTx 360 can benefit your bottom line without breaking the bank.
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