Social Media Marketing Archives

Social Media 101: Choosing the Right Platform for Small Business Owners

In an age where more people are signing up for social media every single day, who would love to tap into potential prospects who can turnout to be your next client?

It won’t be surprising if business owners – old and new – would absolutely raise their hands to capture the attention of online users who love to logon to their accounts on a daily basis. These social media fans are a target audience for businesses that know what channels to tap and engage people properly.

Brands who want to have a meaningful relationship with their target audience have learned that engagement is a continuous process. This means that conversation between the brands, through their chosen brand ambassadors and even the office front liners, and their target audience is a never-ending loop. As such, the success of these conversations will make a difference whether fans would turn out to be loyal brand followers.

Posted in Social Media Marketing | one respons

How Facebook Groups Can Help You Increase Your Organic Reach

Years ago before any of the major social networks popped up on the internet every little niche had their forums on the web. Some of them had tens of thousands of active users talking about anything you can think of. From restoring cars to training your dogs.

All you had to do was perform a search in the reigning search engines of the day, and you could find a great forum to participate in and started building relationships with the people on the forums.

Nowadays, Facebook Groups have pretty much replaced those niche forums. This is great from the user point of view because you can participate in 30 groups at the same time and it all runs through your Facebook newsfeed.

What we’ve seen happening over the last year though is that more and more people and brands are moving away, migration from Facebook Pages to Facebook Groups. This movement is understandable because Facebook made it harder and harder to get any of your fans to see any of your updates unless you pay to boost your posts.

There are, of course, ways to get better engagement on your Facebook page, even without ads, but at the end of the day, it is becoming harder every day to get noticed, to appear in the newsfeed of your fans without payments.

One of the other reasons why Facebook Groups are becoming more and more popular is because you can build a real relationship with your target audience.

Between the migration from old school forums and Facebook page owners, Facebook Groups has created an ecosphere where every target audience is actively reading and engaging with posts. A Facebook Group allows for a two-way interaction, where group members can post messages and ask questions as well.

In this post, we will be looking how you too can use this great medium to your advantage, how you can build real relationships again with your audience on top of Facebook.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Inbound Marketing | 5 responses

How To Get Started With Social Audio For Your Business On Anchor

For consumers to get excited about something, for a potential customer to be compelled by something it comes down to attention. Attention, not impressions. So while some companies focus around getting as many impressions as possible on their banner ads, great marketers focus on attention.

Your leads, your customers they need to consume your content.

Over the last couple of years, there have only been two places that have gotten the attention of consumers. The first one is mobile, and all the social networks that are built on that mobile experience. The second one is content marketing.

After all, content marketing is just solving the same problems that your product solves through media you create and promote. You’re helping your customers making their life better by handing them solutions so they can empower themselves.

Within content marketing, you can see a trend moving towards more visual content. Businesses are moving towards Snapchat and building brands on Instagram. According to Cisco in 2019 video will even present 90% of all internet traffic.

The second big trend in content marketing is audio. Edison Research created a report with fascinating statistics about this trend. And while it is not only about podcasts, but also about online radio, streaming, social media and beyond, this post will focus mostly on the podcasting part.

Some number to give you an impression though:

Podcast Listening Grew 23% Between 2015 and 2016
21% of Americans ages 12 and up have listened to a podcast in the past month (13% of the USA listens to Spotify monthly, and 21% of the country uses Twitter.)
64% of podcasts are being listened to on a smartphone or tablet.
Weekly podcast listeners consume five shows per week on average

So how can you and your company take the most out of this growing trend? That’s where Anchor.FM comes into play.

For those who don’t know what Anchor yet is, it’s maybe best to let them describe themselves:

The new Anchor lets you broadcast your voice, clip external sound bites, mix in full-length tracks from Apple Music and Spotify, take call-ins from your listeners, and add interludes created by world class sound designers and musicians, all from your phone. Plus, everything on the new Anchor can be heard on iOS, Android, Amazon Echo, Google Home, web, and in your car via Bluetooth.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing | 3 responses

Using Instagram For Your (Small) Businesses, A Complete Guide

In the previous post on our site, we talked about Snapchat, and how you can make use of this great social media platform to drive sales for your company. Nowadays, however, it seems you can’t talk about Snapchat and not use Instagram in the same sentence.

Indeed, even generally speaking, when creating a social media strategy for your business, Instagram is a force to be reckoned with.

According to a 2014 study by Forrester Research, Instagram even has the highest engagement rate for brands among all social networks. The engagement they see happening on Instagram (4.21 percent) compared to Facebook (0.07percent) and Twitter (0.03%) is staggering.

In other words, Instagram engagement is 58 times higher per follower than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter!

User interactions with brands' post as a percentage of brands' fans or followers

Instagram has the highest engagement rate for brands according to Forrester Research in 2014

And with the power of Facebook behind Instagram, it means that sending great targeted advertising, etc. is easy. Instagram is an easy to use, free platform, and the only thing it requires is a smartphone to set up an account and start using it.

Still not convinced? Research done by MDG Advertising shows that 67% of consumers consider clear, detailed images to be very important and carry even more weight than the product information, full description, and customer ratings. This makes Instagram a unique opportunity for your (small) business to reach your clients and visually tell your brand story.

If you think indeed, Instagram is a platform you would like to invest your time in, download the app (if you aren’t using it already on your phone) and let’s dive straight into how you can use Instagram for your company.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing | 10 responses

8 Marketing Automation Mistakes You Might be Making And What To Do About it

Marketing Automation, the process of automating parts of or maybe even your entire marketing funnel. In an ideal situation, it helps to guide your prospect through their buyer’s journey with relevant and timely communications. Communications that help nurture them from a prospect to lead, to a customer and in the long run even to brand advocates.

Marketing Automation works in parallel with the efforts of your sales team. It can shorten their sales cycles, decrease the cost per lead and improve customer retention.

Sounds like an ideal world scenario right?

It sounds like such a holy grail that according to research by Pardot in 2013 at that time already:

A quarter of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using marketing automation, along with 76% of the world’s largest SaaS companies.

And although marketing automation adaptation has exploded in the last couple of years, too many marketers still make a lot of mistakes in the implementation and usage of their marketing automation tools. Like any tool, marketing automation is only as good as the person using it. If you fail to set up your tools in a proper way this can lead to frustration in the short team and lots of missed opportunities in the long term.

So what are some of the most made mistakes by companies of any size in regards to marketing automation and how to fix them? Let’s dive in.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 15 responses

7 Industry Experts Share Their Best Kept Social Media Secrets

Every company is different; every social media network has its quirks.

If you’re a startup, it can be difficult to get started with your marketing efforts on social media. How did other companies deal with these struggles?

Are you looking to step up your social media marketing game?

Wondering what tools and tactics the pros are using?

We asked some top social media experts to share us their tools and tactics. The question we asked all of them was:

If you are starting out with your company, maybe you’re in the pre-launch phase or your just launched the first version of your product. How do you build your social media following when no-one ever heard about you yet?

How did you build engagement with your new followers and how did you attract them in the first place? What networks did you use?

Can you describe your ultimate growth technique for building and launching your company on social media and how can people implement that for their companies?

In this article, we’re going to look at their answers, and you’ll discover seven ways you can start and stay ahead of your competitors on the social media curve. This is who they are, from William Harris (Elumynt) to Sujan Patel (Web Profits) and all the brilliant minds in between.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Inspiration | 6 responses

6 Content Creation Tips For More Relevant Visitors

After learning “How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Strategy” and “8 Content Marketing Mistakes That Are Costing You Leads”, you’re already having a running start with your content marketing plan. And of course, you’ve got to because online ads are working less and less.

You’ve begun to see that by using good content you can start working on your company’s branding and brand awareness.

Even better, after working hard for some time, you manage to become an online authority and get that sought-after expert status 😉

By using content marketing, people will start to see you as the expert in your domain. With you being perceived as the expert, your content will get more backlinks, shares, likes, retweets, etc. which in the end will result in more visitors to your website.

Visitors will start to notice you; they think you know what you’re talking about, that you’re always informed about the latest trends AND that you’re ready to share all these tips for free with them. All in all, this is resulting in you leaving a fantastic first impression.

The end goal for you? Trying to convert these visitors into a customer of course!

Consistent usage of relevant, engaging content will attract more visitors, and more (relevant) visitors will, in the end, turn into more profit for your business. In this article, we will dive into six tips for content creation. Six tips to keep that content machine running.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing | no responses

Pin It on Pinterest

Awesome, actionable marketing advice. Delivered weekly.