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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An online social media strategy is critical to a successful business plan in any market. Because social media networks are among the most successful ways to reach a more extensive potential customer base, it’s critical to comprehend the why and how of the most vital digital marketing tips. We’ll go over how social media may help businesses in the tobacco industry, as well as answer a few key concerns concerning vape marketing in this article.
As consumers began to prefer tobacco-free items, smoke and e-cigarette outlets began to spring up all over.
While the smoking and the vaping sector is gaining popularity, there are significant challenges in operating this new business. If you own a business, you probably believe that online promotion isn’t the only way to go these days but also a need. When you’re searching for innovative ways to promote your vape store, below are among the most effective ways to just get out in front of millions around the world.
But then, how do you use vape branding to your advantage? What’s the greatest approach to attract visitors to your business in an organic way that is convenient for them to locate you and engage with your brand?
Examine the most effective vaping products, marketing strategies, and how much you can take your business to greater heights.
Read to learn all the innovative and extensive ways of smoke shop marketing 101.
Social networking is growing at the same rate as the vaping industry. Social media is something that both citizens and merchants use to connect with one another.
As a cannabis or vape store owner, using social media to develop a strong relationship with your subscribers while showing your latest items is one of the most effective marketing techniques.
You can give a dynamic tale about your items by maintaining a regular online presence. Plus, you can indeed publish photos but also videos online and do a live stream to keep your fans updated.
Sustaining with your social networking sites might be exhausting, but that is why you must develop a marketing plan that will result in visibility for your business.
You may not be familiar with all the numerous methods you may use to advertise your shop and interact with someone if you’ve considered vape promotion. It all ultimately boils down to maximizing your efforts and keeping track of which areas attract the most demand. Examine what the opponent is doing, then discover how to use it even superiorly while simultaneously ensuring that your client is as localized and targeted as conceivable.
You must make sure that the company is reachable to everyone who requires it digitally. This is the greatest place to put clips on YouTube and feedback. These customers are now on the verge of making a purchase and only need a little additional motivation.
Before we can get into all of the social networking site ideas, you’ll need to get your business known; there are a few guidelines and general principles you should be aware of. Countless people still wonder if you can promote vape businesses on Facebook or not. According to FB’s policies, ad campaigns must not advocate the purchase and use of illicit, pharmaceutical, or addictive substances. The same can be said for most other popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or any other major social media platform. “How and when and where to promote your smoking business without having your profile blocked by the authorities?” is the query. An organically planned strategy is the approach you should have.
Most companies hire marketing messages to increase interaction and engagement because of the fast statistics and a crowded marketing environment. Smoke businesses cannot run sponsored posts on these social networking sites since the promotion of any substances is forbidden.
As a smoke business, all of your traffic must come from biological fertilizer. The recommendations below will assist you in creating relevant, framework-approved social media accounts for your vape and smoke business.
Let’s check out the following:
Creating instructional material is one of the most effective ways to advertise your business brand. People will always look for news and analysis, especially as it relates to smoking and vaping. If you publish content that provides knowledge to your subscribers and future consumers, they will continue to infect your branding and engage with your content. Despite violating any restrictions, if you produce content that tackles the technicalities of smoking, you’re providing consumers a place to believe in you and, as a result, your business.
Here are a few measures you can try to to increase the impact of your social media marketing on brand recognition and eventual click-through:
If you’re trying to sell a prohibited item, you’ll have to think beyond the box. Illustrations and statistics, as well as freely distributable slideshows, can all help you expand your outreach. And even without sponsored content, the more retweets your image receives, the wider your exposure will be.
Although your content marketing should be acceptable, your rewards and freebies can be personalized.
If the execution of your event follows their regulations, social networking officials will not be able to take action against the prizes you provide to your audience. In fact, if your survey questions appear to be unconnected to your restricted goods, you may indeed be able to increase your score.
It may seem self-evident, but don’t break the regulations in the hopes of your adverts slipping between the cracks. They aren’t going to. If they really do, they will indeed be removed swiftly, and your profile may be terminated as a result. It’s not worth taking the risk, particularly if you’re advertising numerous ads at the same time.
If you’re going to take a chance and publish an ad anyhow, do not utilize any restricted keywords. Avoid phrases like ICO, bitcoin, cryptos, mortgages, commodities, and binary options if you work in financial technology. Consider safer options such as blockchain, fintech, and technologies.
Consider again, if you assume you can enhance totally random content that connects to a business landing webpage. You’ll be discovered someday, if not instantly. Social networking sites have improved their power to verify relevant links and react to detected or notified articles.
Illegal commodities frequently have their very own set of rules, and disobeying them might put you in dire straits. Agencies frequently monitor social media for infractions, so familiarize yourself with the regulations before posting information on the internet.
Blogs are among the simplest ways to produce a large amount of high-quality content, create your business, and attract website visitors. If you write blogs for a company webpage, you can share an illustration with a URL to the weblog on social networking sites. People who follow the connection on social networking sites go onto your webpage, where they can look at your items and learn more about your company. Blogging is also an excellent tool to develop your marketing strategy and convey your business’s identity and objectives. Moreover, the narratives and ambitions behind a company interests’ people and blogging provides the ideal venue so that you can distinguish your brand.
It’s crucial to keep your material current, broad, and slightly elevated no matter where you are or how much section of the e-cigarette market you work in. Stay relevant and maintain a competitive advantage by staying current with patterns and social media campaigns. Plus, updating your SEO skills and working on them while composing blog content is a good idea. Blog entries, leisure photographs, quotations, animations, and clips are all good options. Be creative with how you offer articles, but keep an eye on trends and stick to a steady posting schedule.
Before we start, you should really consider these things. Do you go back to a brand or a store that you kind of like? Your response is perhaps most definitely yes.
Tobacco and vaping stores will be in the same boat! When a customer discovers a store they enjoy, their commitment grows dramatically. It’s almost as though they represent your company’s brand manager.
For this dedication, it’s simple to persuade customers to submit evaluations after visiting your store.
However, bear in mind that tobacco businesses might be intensely competitive. When a buyer becomes faithful, they are unlikely to shop elsewhere. The difficult aspect is going to have a new customer into the buyer journey in the first place.
To stay competitive, many vaping establishments may provide incentive programs to attract further clients. You can establish evaluation programs for your store using loyalty programs that capture personal consumer details, Facebook, and other contact information.
The more positive ratings you possess, the easier it is for potential customers to choose your brand during the buyer lifecycle.
Influencers enlist the help of people who have a substantial social media audience. Content creators have a high degree of satisfaction among their supporters, so when you hire social influencers to grow your business, you’re receiving a lot of high-quality coverage that you’d otherwise wouldn’t receive elsewhere. The two sorts of promoters you could use are micro-level and macro-level influencers.
Such people have a large following (typically over a million or even more) from a wide range of populations. Since macro-influencers don’t cater to a particular social media fan, an advertised product or service will gain from clicks rather than real transactions, making them great for marketing communication.
Micro-Influencers, on the other contrary, are great for generating traffic and persuading people to purchase your goods. These communicators typically have a following of 10,000 to 100,000 people and cater to a particular hobby or personality. You may see a bunch of leads and revenue come in your direction if your company identifies the proper micro-influencers.
Your specialization is going to be all about you.
You may not be conscious of all the numerous new methods you may promote your store and interact with if you’ve considered vape marketing. It all ultimately boils down to maximizing your assets and keeping track of which areas attract the most demand. Examine what the rival is doing; next, find out how to use it even superiorly while simultaneously ensuring that your target is as localized and targeted as feasible.
You must make sure that the company is available to anybody who wants it digitally. This is the greatest place to put up clips on YouTube. These customers are now on the verge of making a purchase and only need a little additional motivation.
Your cigarette store’s internet visibility will grow if you have a holistic approach that incorporates greedy algorithms, social networking sites, and evaluation branding.
Your smoking or Vaping Company’s promotion is not tough. Although there’ll be some obstacles to overpower, don’t let anything stop yourself!
It’s not all inherently flawed when it comes to advertising restricted products on the internet; it simply takes a little more originality and hard work. Need help getting started with your marketing plans? Contact us today!
New marketing trends emerge every year, but 2022 will be different. The pandemic significantly influenced marketing in 2020 and 2021. COVID-19 resulted in a substantial change in customer buying behavior, forcing brands to change the way they approach sales and marketing.
As the pandemic has almost subsided, brands are restoring their marketing strategies to normal. However, some new trends have emerged that businesses and marketers should watch out for.
Let’s a look at nine big trends that will reshape the marketing landscape in 2022.
In-person events have been slowly dying over the past couple of years. Though they still have their place, some people will continue to prefer in-person events, but a large chunk of the event marketing audience will move to hybrid events.
A whopping 97% of event marketers believe hybrid events will outperform any other event type in the future. During the pandemic, virtual events skyrocketed. Webinars and live streams took over the event marketing industry, as people didn’t want to risk going to in-person events.
Even though in-person events are now open, many people still prefer virtual events. They offer better flexibility and accessibility. Participants can save time and attend the event from anywhere, using any device!
Event marketers need to find a way to cater to both in-person and virtual audiences simultaneously. Here’s where hybrid events come into the picture. Hybrid events are in-person events streamed online. People can either attend the event in person or participate in it virtually.
Hybrid events will continue to be the most popular event type in 2022 and beyond.
Branding has always been a key driver of marketing success. More than 80% of customers buy based on trust, and the reliance on trust has only increased over the past couple of years. A survey in beauty and skincare eCommerce showed that around 60% of customers wouldn’t try new brands when shopping online. This makes branding more important than ever.
Storytelling is a great way to enhance your branding efforts. More businesses will tie their products/services to stories their customers can relate to instead of using hard selling techniques.
Organic marketing will also be on the rise in 2022. Paid advertising has traditionally played a vital role in branding for companies. However, with more businesses investing in ads than ever, advertising costs have increased. The average cost-per-click for Google Ads has been rising gradually over the last few years.
As a result, brands are more likely to invest in organic marketing. The focus will be to increase brand awareness organically, using blogging, YouTube videos, and social media content.
Organic marketing plays a vital role in branding because organic content is eternal. It stays on the internet forever, unlike paid ads that stop showing up once you stop paying for them.
Content marketing has been one of the pillars of digital marketing for years. Content marketing leaders experience a 7.8x year-on-year growth in unique website visitors. SEO, PR, social media, webinars, and podcasts are all a part of content marketing.
However, content marketing won’t be the same as it was a couple of years back. Back in the day, content marketing was more about quantity and less about quality. Since only a handful of brands were doing content marketing, businesses that published large volumes of content got more reach and awareness.
Content marketing has become more competitive now. Google has released algorithmic updates that reward good quality content and penalize high-volume low-quality content. Modern-day content marketing revolves around quality.
In 2022, content alignment will be crucial.
What does content alignment mean? Nowadays, most companies take a multichannel content marketing approach. They use SEO, PR, video, social media, and other various channels to increase their visibility and reach a greater audience. However, most content brands produce nowadays is misaligned. For instance, SEO is completely disconnected from PR and social media.
Let’s quickly understand the concept of multichannel and omnichannel marketing before moving ahead. Multichannel marketing includes using different channels to reach an audience. Omnichannel marketing includes using various channels but integrating all of them.
Omnichannel content marketing will rule 2022. Brands will publish aligned content to ensure credibility and better visibility.
When personalization first came into the picture, it soon became the new buzzword in the marketing industry. Every brand, regardless of its type and size, was adopting personalization. Fast forward to 2021, and personalization is the holy grail of successful marketing.
Over 90% of customers are more likely to shop after seeing relevant and personalized offers. This makes personalization an essential element of every marketing strategy. However, personalization is currently limited to addressing consumers by their first names and showing personalized recommendations only.
Things will get more creative and interesting in 2022. Personalization will expand to new channels and content types, such as videos, podcasts, articles, etc. Brands will multiply their efforts to communicate and engage with customers on a personal level. New channels will emerge, and customers will see personalization on every touchpoint.
The past few years have witnessed an exponential increase in the adoption of marketing technology. Marketing automation tools, social media scheduling platforms, and email marketing software are a few examples of technology in marketing.
There’s only one constant thing about technology: it keeps on changing. Since technology continues to evolve, new marketing technology trends have emerged. This time, automation and Artificial Intelligence are leading the way.
Some tasks in marketing are redundant and time-consuming, such as content posting, bidding on keywords in advertising, and sending emails individually to each recipient. Adopting automation automates these tasks, plus many more. Tools like HubSpot and MailChimp are popular marketing automation solutions brands can use to automate their marketing operations.
Another major MarTech trend is the increasing adoption of AI among marketers. Modern-day marketing is increasingly data-driven. Marketing teams need to collect and analyze data to predict customer behavior and make informed decisions. AI makes it easier. With AI, marketers can analyze historical data in quick time and understand their customers better. That’s why 72% of CMOs consider AI a major advantage.
Other technologies like virtual and augmented reality, data science, and beacons will also shape marketing technology in the upcoming years.
Google announced earlier this year that they’d scrap third-party cookies by 2023 to protect users’ privacy. This came out as a shock for many website owners. Presently, 37% of all websites use cookies, while 20.4% use persistent cookies.
Marketers will, therefore, need to find alternatives to third-party cookies. An effective alternative to third-party cookies is first-party data, which many marketers have already started collecting.
Customers nowadays want top-notch privacy and better control over their data. Instead of letting marketers passively track their information, they want to provide their information to brands they trust. That’s why collecting first-party data will be more important than ever in the upcoming years.
If you’re not familiar with first-party data, it refers to the information you collect directly from your customers with their consent. Marketers can also use tools like Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) or Google’s Privacy Sandbox to enable user targeting and personalization without invading their customers’ privacy.
But one thing’s for sure: data will become scarce in the upcoming years. Marketers will need to use interactive marketing techniques like surveys to collect customer information.
You can’t talk about marketing trends and not talk about social media. The past few years have been dramatic for social media. Several new social media trends have emerged that marketers should know about.
The first prominent trend is that short-form videos will dominate social media. The rise of TikTok and then Instagram Reels has made short-form video one of the most popular content types right now. People love short videos, and 68% of them will happily watch a business video if it’s under 60 seconds. Even YouTube has launched a short video feature — Shorts.
Along with short videos, live streams will be a highly popular content type in 2022 and beyond. Users watch live video 10-20x longer than recorded content. Hence, brands will conduct more live streams on social media in the upcoming years to increase watch times and drive more engagement.
Social selling is another prominent trend to dominate social media in 2022. Facebook and Instagram have launched a “Shop” feature to allow users to shop directly from the platform. Hence, the use of social media among eCommerce brands will increase, as they will look to leverage the Shop feature to generate more sales.
Thought leadership has never been more important. An average American comes across up to 10,000 advertisements a day and ignores most of them. In fact, close to 30% of American internet users use some sort of ad-block, up from only 15% in 2014. Clearly, people are immune to hard-selling, and marketers need to go beyond traditional advertising to engage customers and convince them to make a purchase.
Sharing thought-leadership content and educating consumers will be a popular marketing approach among marketers in 2022 and beyond. Every brand can utilize thought-leadership to increase trust and awareness, though it works exceptionally well for B2B businesses.
Thought-leadership content comprises any type of content that informs and educates consumers. It includes:
HubSpot is a classic example of brands leveraging thought-leadership to the fullest. They have a dedicated “Education” section that offers ebooks, guides, and free courses and certifications. They also have a blog where they constantly publish new articles.
Thought leadership will flourish in the upcoming years. Sharing free, valuable information to build customer trust will become a key trend among businesses in 2022 and beyond.
All the trends discussed so far revolve around digital marketing and advertising. Digital marketing has indeed grown exponentially. Digital ad spending in the US was $151 billion in 2020, compared to $107 billion for traditional ads. Moreover, digital advertising is projected to make up two-thirds of the total US ad spend by 2023.
Though traditional marketing has slowed down, it is nowhere near extinction. Several brands use traditional marketing to reach larger audiences and increase awareness, and they will continue to do so in the upcoming years.
However, traditional marketing is no longer the same as it was before. The major drawback to traditional advertising is the lack of connectivity and integration. A potential customer watches your ad in the newspaper, but what do they do?
Most brands ask consumers to perform an action, like visit the store or make a call. These actions are not trackable, and marketers can’t measure how their offline ads are performing.
Marketers have overcome this hurdle by integrating offline and online marketing. An effective approach many brands are using is to encourage offline customers to go online.
For example, several brands include their website URL or social media handles, encouraging users to take instant action. Many brands have adopted QR codes to offer omnichannel experiences to customers. Users scan the code using their smartphones to reach the destination URL.
Here’s an example of Nike using a QR code to promote its app in a brick-and-mortar store.
More marketers in the future will realize the benefits of integrated marketing and use it to increase reach and marketing performance.
2022 could be one of the most revolutionary years for marketing. A lot has changed in the past two years regarding customer shopping habits and how brands approach marketing. Marketers need to identify and embrace these changes and develop new ways to promote their brands in the new normal.
To drive marketing success, marketers will need to think outside the box and blend creative thinking with leading-edge technologies. Need help getting started? Contact us today!
The liquor industry has evolved over the course of the past few years as consumers have shied away from visiting bars, and have instead opted to enjoy their liquor at home.
As a result, there are a handful of consumer trends that have emerged within the alcoholic beverage industry which have revealed the following:
● Alcohol Products Are Diversifying
● Packaging Design Is Becoming More Important
● ECommerce Is Beating Out Bars
● Convenience Is Key
● Unconventional Ads Beat Out Classic Ones
What can liquor retailers, wholesalers, and producers do to stay relevant and front-of-mind with consumers?
In this blog post, we’ll go over three marketing tips that will help grow your liquor business in these challenging times.
Alcohol is part of our culture and has contributed to the fabric of American society for hundreds of years. Today, the United States produces roughly 52-billion gallons of alcohol annually, which represents over 15% of the total production of beverages, including non-alcoholic beverages.
There is certainly money to be made in the liquor industry whether you own a bar, run a brewery, or manage a vineyard. Distilled spirits alone saw a 5% increase in sales during 2019 as compared to the prior year, and the pandemic of 2020 didn’t slow that steady growth down one bit. In fact, nationwide lockdowns may have caused a spike in liquor store alcohol sales. In terms of in-store sales, the biggest competitor of liquor businesses aren’t other liquor businesses, but rather cannabis retailers…
So, how can an alcohol brand like yours retain customers and increase sales when consumers are becoming more and more attracted to cannabis? You obviously can’t boast the kinds of cognitive benefits and other health claims that cannabis brands have been getting away with, but you can differentiate your brand by accentuating the experience of indulging in your liquor products. In other words, your marketing should be all about “lifestyle,” “experience,” and “social culture.” But the presentation has to be unique and outside of the box—waaaaay outside. Research how your competitors, both alcohol and cannabis, are framing their brands… and come up with a brand image that totally goes against the grain. Your branding and advertising should not resemble anyone else’s, period.
In order to stand out, focus on “storytelling.” For both your advertising campaigns and the actual design packaging of your products, try to depict a vivid “story” that captures the lifestyle image of your brand. The goal here should be better styling and stronger stories. This concept should be applied to the look and feel of the bottle itself, the branded label design, and any other packaging aspects, especially if your product is boxed. Most importantly, your packaging should match your advertising to present a unified, memorable brand.
A clever marketing strategy that has been on the rise within the liquor industry is to offer consumers paid subscription options. If you’re a liquor brand wholesaler or retailer, or own a liquor, wine, and spirits store, you can trigger a sudden boost in sales by offering your customers the opportunity to sign up for monthly subscription packages.
Yes, this will involve developing an additional order fulfillment workflow that will also require a secure website platform to process payments and automate various aspects of your subscription cycles, including shipping operations, but the benefits will far outweigh the initial investment. When customers realize they can have their favorite liquor delivered to their home once a month, saving them time at the store and saving them money for ordering in bulk, they’ll feel inclined to at least try the service.
Try offering a no-commitment trial for new members, and also offer a slight discount for long-term members who opt-into auto-pay or a large discount for members who pay for an entire year up front. There are many incentives you could try, just remember that personalization is key, and you can never go wrong with surprise-and-delight freebies. Meaning, surprise and reward subscription members for their patronage on milestone dates and anniversaries with your brand by including mini-bottles or other thoughtful freebies in their boxed order.
There are a lot of bells and whistles to think about when you’re running a subscription service as part of your liquor business. Similar to the branding of your product packaging, the packaging of your monthly subscriptions must also capture your unique brand. Instead of working with multiple designers for your branding, advertising, and packaging, it’s best to work with one branding agency, like FTx 360, that can meet all of your marketing needs. We offer creative services to handle designing your branded packaging.
Advertising on the social media sites Facebook and Instagram can be treacherous for brands that sell liquor products, but this isn’t to say it’s impossible. Simply approach your social media ad campaign strategy with eyes wide open… and don’t blink.
Here are the sobering stats. Alcohol brands pay the highest advertising Cost Per Click on Facebook than brands of any other industry. Their CPC cost averages about $0.20, which is due in large part to strict Facebook regulations regarding ads featuring alcohol, and also due to the flooded market. There are a ton of alcohol and liquor brands that invest in ongoing Facebook ad campaigns, and you will have to compete with them.
Interestingly, more than 80% of alcohol marketing campaigns on Facebook appear on Facebook’s News Feed. That might not be where you want your ad to appear, but once you understand that News Feeds is more likely to feature your ad than any other area of Facebook, you can tailor your branded advertisements accordingly to increase the CTR. Be advised, however, that any kind of advertising on Facebook will come with risks. The CPC jumped more than 122% between 2017 – 2018, and though the CPC tapered off between 2019 – 2020, the CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, actually increased by 76%.
Advertising on Facebook is costly, yet highly beneficial when it comes to increasing brand awareness and also driving in-store sales. We aren’t interested in discouraging liquor business owners like yourself from launching targeted Facebook campaigns, but we strongly recommend you partner with an experienced digital marketing agency like FTx 360 for all of your Facebook advertising.
There you have it—our top three marketing strategies for liquor stores, liquor brands, and liquor wholesalers.
Would you like a team of experienced designers and digital marketers to rebrand your liquor business and market your products online? FTx 360 offers affordable content marketing and digital marketing services that can help your brand stand out from the competition and stay front-of-mind with consumers. Contact our marketing specialists to learn more.
Were you too busy this September to read our digital marketing articles? Not a problem! We’ve put together brief summaries of each informative article that you can check out. If a post interests you, simply click on its title to read the full-length version!
Throughout September, we covered:
● How to Set Up an Instagram and Facebook Shop
● Facebook Marketing Do’s and Don’ts
● What Is Marketing Automation
● 8 Tips for Creating the Best Email Subject Lines
● 5 Marketing Tips and Ideas for Your Ecommerce Site
● 5 Powerful Restaurant Marketing Strategies
● How to Utilize Call to Action Buttons
Let’s take a look…
Instagram and Facebook now offer a new platform feature called Shop. Barely a year old, Shop is an eCommerce feature that enables your visitors to purchase your merchandise directly from your social profiles. Yes, by utilizing Shop, your Facebook profile is transformed into an eCommerce store unto itself, likewise your Instagram profile.
This article was a step-by-step how-to guide for setting up a Shop on Facebook. We chose to focus on setting up a Facebook Shop because it will easily link to Instagram, enabling you to sell on both platforms.
There were five major sections to the how-to guide, which covered the Facebook Shop itself, setting up Commerce Manager, importing your catalog of inventory items, selecting payment method options, and finally defining your shipping standards.
Your Facebook marketing strategies have the power to either grow your brand quickly or waste your time. You don’t want to be pouring your time and energy into using marketing strategies on Facebook that are destined to fail, which means that your top priority should be to research the strategies that will work and avoid the ones that won’t.
In no particular order, here are the biggest don’ts:
● Don’t buy Facebook “likes”
● Don’t constantly push your products or services
● Don’t use too many hashtags in your posts
● Don’t use click bait headings
● Don’t argue with customers, followers, and visitors in public
And here are the do’s:
● Do use your website to promote your Facebook page
● Do broadcast branded messages using Facebook Live
● Do respond quickly to Facebook comments and DMs
● Do post compelling content to start conversations
● Do share articles and other relevant information your followers will appreciate
In this article, we went on to define the different Facebook Business Manager administrative roles that you can assign to your employees and laid out five key marketing areas to be mindful of as you create, schedule, and manage your Facebook marketing, so be sure to read the full article when you can.
Automation is the process of replacing manual, human tasks with technologies. Setting up an online auto-debit to pay for a monthly bill is an example of automation. Instead of having to remember to pay that particular bill every month and going through the online process of electronically submitting a payment, you instead set up an auto-debit, and the online banking platform will handle the work of paying the bill on time every month.
Your marketing tasks can also be automated to save you time and effort, and reduce human errors. Marketing automation is defined as any technology that manages the digital marketing processes you ordinarily handle by hand. Marketing automation utilizes artificial intelligence to a degree, as well as machine-learning strategies, and can streamline multifunctional, omni-channel campaigns for you.
Any online platform that offers marketing automation in the form of Software as a Service, or SaaS, is considered a marketing automation platform. These platforms provide marketers with the tools to upload, organize, and schedule all of their digital marketing content and campaigns, including automating social media posts, blog article posts, and email marketing campaigns. Marketing automation platforms also integrate with content management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) software to centralize all marketing into one software solution.
To learn more, check out the full article that goes into detail about social media automation, email automation, and other forms of marketing automation that can make your life easier.
The subject lines of your emails can either make or break the open rates of your email marketing campaigns. Creative subject lines influence recipients to open, read, and act on CTAs, all of which you want!
In this article, we laid out 8 tips for creating the best email subject lines, and also broke down how you can put our tips into practice, so be sure to read the full article if you need hands-on ideas. Otherwise, here are 8 types of email subject lines you can use to increase the open rates of your campaigns:
● The “how to” subject line
● The “mysterious” subject line
● The “scarcity” subject line
● The “countdown” subject line
● The “personalized” subject line
● The “emoji” subject line
● The “promotional” subject line
● The “follow up” subject line
Implementing the right digital marketing strategy can effectively increase the number of shoppers who visit your website as well as increase the number of sales transactions that occur daily. There are a handful of digital marketing strategies that will deliver powerful results regardless of your industry or market, which was the focus of our fifth September article.
Here are the five marketing tips and ideas that we covered to help eCommerce sites drive website traffic, turn visitors into customers, and increase revenue.
Your eCommerce website visitors will not be able to touch, examine, or handle the products you’re selling, which is why the visuals you provide on your site are so important. Instead of merely using a few product photos, include many high-res photos and a zoom-in function that visitors can use to examine the product in question.
Your eCommerce site should have built-in features that enable shoppers to create their own secure accounts. These accounts should also have a Wish List feature that shoppers can use to “save” items to their Wish Lists. You can design personalized email marketing campaigns to remind customers about their Wish List items.
User-generated content is any digital content that is created by users, consumers, and “regular people” and not by a company or brand. User-generated content that features your products or services is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. When business owners like you recycle user-generated content on their own platforms, it has the same effect. UGC tends to resonate with consumers.
ECommerce retailers should set up Shops on both their Facebook and Instagram social platforms. The marketing possibilities that will result from having an Instagram and Facebook Shop are endless. Once your Shop is functioning, you can tag specific Shop items within your social posts, Stories, and even in the description boxes of your Facebook Live broadcasts.
Our final marketing tip will help consumers emotionally connect with your brand, which is necessary if you want to gain and retain loyal eCommerce customers. Feature your company’s values in your marketing campaigns. In other words, we recommend that, first and foremost, you advertise what you stand for. Once you convey to your audience your brand’s ethos, then you can suggest relevant products that they might be interested in buying.
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 the 5 content marketing tactics we covered in our sixth September article:
● Create brand buyer personas
● Launch multiple, targeted landing pages
● Segment your email recipient list
● Use adaptive content
● Curate content from other websites
The restaurant industry is chock-full of competition. In order to stand out and succeed, restaurateurs must provide diners with delicious meals and impeccable service, and that’s not all. Restaurants must also provide diners with convenience, community, and conversation. In other words, today’s diners expect to have an excellent experience, from the moment they decide to dine at your restaurant to the moment they sign the bill, and beyond.
For this reason, we dedicated one of our September articles to helping restaurants market their menus and locations to local diners. Here’s what you missed:
Mobile apps spell convenience, plain and simple. Does your restaurant offer customers a mobile app with ordering and payment options? This is not to be confused with a responsive web design that functions smoothly on smartphones, though it wouldn’t hurt to make sure your site is responsive. If you haven’t launched a mobile app for your restaurant, consider investing in a white-label app.
Successfully marketing your restaurant can be tricky due to the fact that you’re not aiming to target a nationwide or worldwide audience. Quite the opposite, in fact, your goal as a restaurateur is to draw a local crowd of customers to your business. Using the hashtag #foodie on Instagram and maintaining a recipe blog are actually not going to cut it. Instead, focus your marketing locally by enhancing your Google My Business page.
Customer loyalty rewards programs have long since been proven to be one of the most effective marketing strategies for increasing customer retention and boosting sales. For restaurants, loyalty programs can be especially beneficial because they incentivize diners to try new menu items, increase order sizes, and return more frequently. You’ll want to choose a loyalty platform that comes with a mobile app and integrates with your online ordering system.
It’s almost as though certain social media platforms were made for restaurant marketing. They say that experiencing a tasty meal begins with drinking in the sight of the food. You can give your diners a virtual taste of all that your restaurant has to offer by posting high quality photos of your dishes on Instagram and Facebook. An even better marketing idea is to include videos on Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and YouTube that feature your chefs and cooks preparing your most popular meal items.
Consumers rely on customer reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. Unlike other types of businesses, restaurants face extreme challenges because they must provide excellent food and outstanding service. A perky waitress is not going to make up for a bland dish, for example, which means that one subpar aspect of a customer’s dining experience can lead to a low-star review. Restaurants are held to such a high standard, in fact, that you would be remiss to overlook the importance of online reputation management and marketing. Even if you receive a poor customer review, there’s a lot you can do to correct it both publicly and privately.
Our final September article covered how to create the type of CTAs that users can’t help but click.
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
But nothing we do here at FTx 360 is “common.” So, here are creative CTAs you can use in your next digital marketing campaign:
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.
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.
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. Ask yourself, what can you brag about? 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.
That concludes all of the articles you missed this month. If you’d like to learn more about what FTx 360’s digital marketing services can do for your business, contact us to speak with a marketing specialist who knows your industry.
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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Yes, Analyze My Website Speed
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.
The restaurant industry is chock-full of competition. In order to stand out and succeed, restaurateurs must provide diners with delicious meals and impeccable service, and that’s not all.
Restaurants must also provide diners with convenience, community, and conversation.
In other words, today’s diners expect to have an excellent experience, from the moment they decide to dine at your restaurant to the moment they sign the bill, and beyond.
They want ordering and dining options that are convenient. They want to feel welcome when they dine-in, and when they post photos of their meals on social media, they want to feel like they’re part of a community. Whether ordering delivery from home, picking their orders up from the curb, or meeting their friends at your restaurant, your customers are going to want to talk about their experiences online, in either a positive or negative light.
If you’re only offering food and beverages at your restaurant, you’re missing out. But the good news is that providing your diners with so much more than just a menu isn’t beyond your reach.
Give your diners an excellent all around customer experience by implementing these 5 powerful restaurant marketing strategies that are designed to help you retain loyal customers and increase revenue.
Mobile apps spell convenience, plain and simple. Does your restaurant offer customers a mobile app with ordering and payment options? This is not to be confused with a responsive web design that functions smoothly on smartphones, though it wouldn’t hurt to make sure your site is responsive. If you haven’t launched a mobile app for your restaurant, consider investing in a white-label app.
Here are some reasons to provide your customers with a mobile app:
● Consumers prefer in-app ordering above any other online ordering method
● Restaurant mobile apps help to increase customer loyalty
● A mobile app is a digital marketing tool that will give you direct access to your customers
Successfully marketing your restaurant can be tricky due to the fact that you’re not aiming to target a nationwide or worldwide audience. Quite the opposite, in fact, your goal as a restaurateur is to draw a local crowd of customers to your business. Using the hashtag #foodie on Instagram and maintaining a recipe blog are actually not going to cut it. Instead, focus your marketing locally by enhancing your Google My Business page. Add the Bookings feature to your GMB page, and enable the Check In feature on your social media pages.
Increase local SEO by incorporating the following ideas:
● NAP optimization is as simple as adding your Name, Address, and Phone Number to your business website
● Plug local SEO into your website content and GMB description to rank as high as possible on SERP
● Use geo-targeting in any social media advertisements you plan on running
Customer loyalty rewards programs have long since been proven to be one of the most effective marketing strategies for increasing customer retention and boosting sales. For restaurants, loyalty programs can be especially beneficial because they incentivize diners to try new menu items, increase order sizes, and return more frequently. You’ll want to choose a loyalty platform that comes with a mobile app and integrates with your online ordering system. We recommend the Loyal~n~Save platform.
Loyalty programs benefit both diners and restaurants in the following ways:
● Restaurant loyalty members dine 20% more often and spend 20% more per visit
● A loyalty program is a powerful marketing tools that enables you to launch email marketing campaigns, SMS text campaigns, and in-app push notification campaigns
● Loyalty programs include built-in CRM that will help you maximize the personalization of your marketing campaigns
It’s almost as though certain social media platforms were made for restaurant marketing. They say that experiencing a tasty meal begins with drinking in the sight of the food. You can give your diners a virtual taste of all that your restaurant has to offer by posting high quality photos of your dishes on Instagram and Facebook. An even better marketing idea is to include videos on Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and YouTube that feature your chefs and cooks preparing your most popular meal items.
Consider the following your high-quality action plan:
● Encourage your customers to post photos of their meals on social media to increase word-of-mouth marketing
● Add your best photos and videos to your Google My Business page, and thank your online reviewers who do the same
● Include high-quality photos in your email marketing campaigns
Consumers rely on customer reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. Unlike other types of businesses, restaurants face extreme challenges because they must provide excellent food and outstanding service. A perky waitress is not going to make up for a bland dish, for example, which means that one subpar aspect of a customer’s dining experience can lead to a low-star review. Restaurants are held to such a high standard, in fact, that you would be remiss to overlook the importance of online reputation management and marketing. Even if you receive a poor customer review, there’s a lot you can do to correct it both publicly and privately.
Guard your online reputation in these ways:
● Respond to all reviews, both positive and negative, but avoid using autoresponders
● Strategically use loss leaders, such as a free dish or drink, to reward positive reviewers with surprise-and-delight and to assuage unhappy diners who left negative reviews
● Hire an online reputation management and marketing agency to leverage positive reviews and mitigate negative ones
FTx 360 offers unique, sure-shot marketing techniques for restaurants that are designed to attract and retain customers while spreading brand awareness locally across social media platforms and Google.
Our digital marketing services include website design & development, eCommerce solutions, content writing & marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and other creative services that will transform your restaurant business into a growing enterprise.
Contact our marketing team to get started.
A/B Testing, also called Split Testing, is a digital marketing method that uses two different versions of a single campaign to determine which content version performs better in terms of increasing social engagement and improving conversion rates online.
One version of the campaign content, called the A group, is the “control,” and the other version of the campaign content represents the B group, which contains the variation content.
Testing differing campaign content in this manner can inform a marketer like you or me which campaign version we should focus on and invest our marketing budget in.
A/B Testing is most often used for email marketing content and social media ad campaign content, but of course it can be used to test any digital content campaigns you wish.
An example of using A / B Testing in a non-marketing scenario would look something like this:
A 4th grader named Tommy has a hypothesis that a plant that receives adequate sunlight will grow faster and appear healthier than a plant that does not have access to sunlight. In order to test his hypothesis, Tommy buys two plants of the same species and size. The plants have been potted with the same soil. He places one potted plant on the windowsill where there is direct sunlight. He places the other potted plant in his closet where sunlight will not reach it. Every day for two weeks, he waters both plants with exactly five ounces of water.
The result that he discovers confirms his hypothesis. At the end of two weeks, the plant which received adequate sunlight grew significantly and now appears healthy with bright green leaves and flowering buds. By contrast, the plant which was kept in his dark closet looks nearly dead.
Since the only differentiating variable between the windowsill plant and the closet plant was the presence or lack of sunlight, Tommy is able to confidently conclude that plants that receive adequate sunlight will grow faster and appear healthier than plants that are deprived of sunlight.
Sure, this example might seem overly simplistic, but the big takeaway that you understand from the A / B Testing of the two plants is that with the exception of sunlight every single variable was the same, i.e. the species of the plants, the quality of the soil, the amount of water used daily, and even the indoor air quality. The only difference between the A plant and the B plant was the sunlight variable.
In the world of digital marketing, an example of an A / B Test could look something like this:
As an adult who waxes nostalgic for the career he almost had in horticulture, Tommy now works as a digital marketer, has an overwhelming mortgage, and often contemplates whether he should yank his children out of public school. He also has a hypothesis—the email marketing campaign that he’s about to launch, which includes a paid subscription sign-up CTA, will perform better if the email includes an incentive offer associated with purchasing the subscription.
The goal of the email marketing campaign is to convert recipients into paid subscribers, and Tommy needs as many new paying subscribers as he can get, because he has that mortgage and those kids to think about….
So, he creates a copy of his email campaign, naming the copy “Test B” and naming the original “Test A.” The only difference between the two email campaigns is that the A Test (original) does not contain an incentive offer, whereas the B Test includes an incentive offer.
Tommy composes a sentence regarding the CTA incentive offer, which happens to be a free ebook download, and plugs the sentence into the B Test email template. Concerning the B Test email, anyone who signs up for a paid subscription will have access to a download link to receive the free ebook.
He launches both email campaigns, the A Test and the B Test, and waits… for two weeks.
Low and behold, at the end of the trial period, Tommy checks the performance of his A Test versus his B Test, and discovers that the B Test, which contained the free ebook incentive, resulted in almost 300% more paid subscription sign-ups than the A Test.
Tommy determines he will enroll his children in the nearby Montessori school that he passes every morning on his way into the office.
As the two examples demonstrated, A / B Testing is a scientific method that’s used to compare two different variables for the purpose of determining which variable will perform better and yield a desired result.
In the world of digital marketing, the desired result is usually conversion, whether it be converting website visitors to newsletter subscribers, newsletter recipients to monthly subscription customers, or monthly subscription customers to brand ambassadors who use word-of-mouth marketing to successfully refer their friends and family to sign up for monthly subscription packages. You get the idea.
A / B Testing is also used in digital advertising campaigns that appear on Facebook & Instagram, Google AdWords, and other online platforms.
A / B variables can be as simplistic as the color of a CTA button, or as complex as whether the CTA is a lead generation form versus a Shop Now button.
When used to compare digital marketing advertisement versions, the A / B Testing stage can last a few weeks to a few months, and the investments for both test campaigns tend to be low. Then, once the marketer ascertains which test campaign performs better, the failing test is pulled down and a large financial investment is then pumped into the winning campaign.
Using an A / B Test to compare two different options that could be used for one campaign variable will yield the clearest results. Meaning, when all campaign elements are identical except for one, you can conclude that if one campaign performs better than the other, it is because of the different variable.
For this reason, A / B Testing works best when only one variable, or campaign element, has two versions representing the A and the B. The results of the sunlight vs. darkness test told Tommy to “use” sunlight if he wants his plants to “perform” well. The results of the incentive offer vs. no incentive offer told Tommy to “use” incentive offers in his email campaigns if he wants the campaign to “perform” better, i.e. to successfully convert recipients into paying subscribers.
That being said, there is another form of A / B Testing that compares many different campaign elements between the A Test and the B Test. This form of A / B Testing is called “multivariate A / B Testing.” When this complex version of A / B Testing is implemented, it can be harder to pinpoint which specific variable or variables performed better.
For instance, let’s say you run a multivariate A / B Test for a website landing page. The goal of the landing page is to generate leads. In order to generate leads, the landing page uses a CTA incentive, which is a “locked” webinar. In order to unlock and watch the webinar, the visitor must complete the CTA. Both landing pages are identical except for the following variables:
● The Design Layout
● The CTA
● The Content Font Size & Color
The A Test uses a design layout that does not match the brand’s logo or website. The CTA is an email opt-in form. The landing page content uses an extremely large, purple font.
The B Test uses a design layout that so closely resembles a major competitor that it’s inevitable this thing is going to wind up in court. The CTA is a “Tweet This Now” button, and the landing page content uses a red, moderately-sized, cursive font.
A few weeks, or perhaps a few months go by, then the performance results are analyzed.
Did the A Test generate more email leads? Or did the B Test render more Tweets? How would a Tweet even generate a viable lead in the first place??? (Bonus points if you caught that critical error!) Which landing page succeeded?
As it turns out, Test B had more Tweets than Test A had emails… but what does that mean?
The data is, for lack of a better term, a pile of confusion.
Does this mean you should avoid launching multivariate A / B Tests? Not necessarily. If you have experience analyzing A / B Test data and feel confident you’ll be able to differentiate the performance results of many competing variables at once, then multivariate A / B Testing could potentially provide you with a wealth of valuable insights that help you launch an extremely successful campaign.
In fact, the following are the pros to launching multivariate A / B Tests:
● Provides valuable insights regarding the interactions between multiple content elements
● Provides granular data regarding which campaign elements positively or negatively impact performance results
● Enables marketers to compare many versions of a campaign, not just two, and conclude which one will have maximum impact overall
But multivariate A / B Testing also comes with cons:
● Can be highly complex and might require an expert to conduct an analysis of the resulting data
● Requires significantly more traffic than a normal A / B Test in order to render statistically valuable results
● Too many campaign variable combinations could cause the results to be too difficult to interpret, rendering the entire test and its associated costs a waste of time and money
If you want to launch a multivariate A / B Test but don’t want to go it alone, then give us a call. The marketing specialists at FTx 360 will make sure your test campaigns result in performance data you’ll be able to analyze easily… and yes, we’ll analyze the data for you, too!
So, you’re ready to get down to business and devise a digital marketing A / B Test. You’ve done your research and you’re already excited about improving one or many areas of your business. You envision achieving tangible business goals as a result of using A / B Testing, such as:
● Increasing Website Traffic
● Increasing Conversion Rates
● Lowering Bounce Rates
● Lowering Cart Abandonment
Here are the steps you should follow if you want to ensure the best A / B Test results.
Why do you want to launch an A / B Test in the first place? Have you launched a blog that isn’t getting any web traffic? Have you noticed that your Facebook “Shop Now” native ad hasn’t resulted in higher eCommerce sales? Do you suspect the subject lines of your email marketing campaigns are the reason your emails aren’t being opened? Before you can solve the problem, and before you will know how to solve the problem, you first must identify what the problem is.
Once you’ve identified the problem, you can identify the goal you’d like to accomplish using A / B Testing. The more specific your goal is, the easier it will be for you to reach it. For example, if your promotional emails aren’t being opened at an acceptable rate, you’ll want to make note of the current open rate and then decide what the goal open rate should be. Meaning, if the current email open rate for your promotional campaigns averages 8%, you might set an open rate goal of 16%. This is a tangible goal that you will be able to compare your campaign data with easily.
As we covered in this article, if you’re new to A / B Testing, then you should start with testing only one variable, or campaign element, as opposed to testing multiple variables at once. The precise variable you decide to test, however, should relate to both the problem and the goal you’ve identified. For instance, if the problem you’re facing is a low open rate on your email campaigns and you’ve set a goal of doubling the open rate, the only variables that pertain to your problem are the email subject line and the email lead-in description that appears in recipients’ inboxes. Those two variables are what your recipients can see, and based on what they see, they will either open your email or delete it. Choose to test only one of those variables. Let’s say, the email subject line.
This step is straightforward, but will be the most time consuming. It’s time to actually create the two email campaigns and set them up in your email automation software. Make sure that both tests are clearly labeled and that the different subject lines appear perfectly. Hopefully, you’ve spent adequate time researching how to write email subject lines that increase the chances of recipients opening them.
While splitting your sample groups might not always apply to the particular A / B Test you’re running, let’s take a look at this step anyway since it’s relevant to an email marketing campaign A / B Test. In this instance, you obviously can’t send two emails to the same recipient list, so you’ll need to create two recipient “groups.” The two groups should contain a cross-section of your subscribers that includes all demographics. Meaning, both groups should contain all ages, both genders, both new and old subscribers, both high-spending and low-spending customers, and so on. This is opposed to one group containing loyal, high-spending, mature subscribers and another group containing new, low-spending subscribers, which would skew the results.
Once you launch your A / B Test email campaign, automating that the A Test goes to one group while the B Test goes to the other group, you can kick back and allow an appropriate amount of time to go by. Depending on the nature of the A / B Test, you may want to let a few weeks or a few months pass. In the case of our email campaign, waiting a full week will be enough. The main point here is that while your tests are running, you can monitor the evolving results, but do not alter your campaigns.
After an appropriate amount of time has passed, you can analyze the performance of the A Test versus the B Test. Compare the results of each test to the goal you set for yourself at the onset of your campaign. Which test performed better? If so, how much better? Did either test meet or exceed your goal? Simply put, whichever test performed better is the one you should invest in moving forward.
FTx 360 can handle your campaigns and implement A / B Testing you can trust. Contact us now to get started or to learn more about what our digital marketing specialists can do for your business.
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