SMM

Best Ways to Generate Leads on Twitter

2 Comments / Digital Marketing, SMM
Best ways to generate leads from twitter

Today, most businesses are leveraging social media marketing to reach their target audiences, expand their customer base and maximize profits.

One of the popular social media platforms being leveraged to generate leads is Twitter. It is about 330 million monthly active users, which makes Twitter one of the favourite platforms for marketers. You can generate a significant number of leads on Twitter but only with the right set of hacks.

Today let us discuss some useful Twitter hacks you can use for lead generation:

1.Twitter bio

Your Twitter bio says a lot about who you are. It is your brand introduction to the users of the platform. When writing your bio on Twitter, keep the following points in mind:

twitter bio| netilly blog

  1. Share who you are, what you do and why it is special and unique
  2. Provide your right contact information
  3. Have a call to action
  4. Why they should follow you?

You can also include trending hashtags of your niche to attract more people and always provide the link to the landing page of your website in your bio.

2.Header image

Images always play an important role in marketing. They can change the feel of your page and convey a lot about your brand.Images generally attract more attention than plain text; that is why you can include relevant text in your header images. Include text such as your brand’s tagline or any catchy line about the company. So let your header image do the magic.

twitter bio| netilly blog

You can also put a call to action in your header image. As an example, the below header image has a call to action button for event booking.

twitter header image 2| netilly blog

3.Posting on a scheduled time

It is always better to tweet when the majority of your audience is online as it ensures better reach of your posts and higher chances of engagement and lead generation.

You can find a lot of information on the internet about the most appropriate time for posting on Twitter.

However, you are more likely to figure out the best time for posting for your specific business or brand through trial and error. If one time does not result in much growth, try to research and post at a different time.

4.Write effective tweets

 Twitter is all about intelligent tweets. Tweets can be in the form of only text, images, videos, blog links etc.

If your tweets are not interesting, people will not follow you or engage with you.

So while tweeting, keep the 80/20 rule in mind. This means that your posts should be 80% informative (which can be self-curated content or sharing content of others) and only 20% should be about your promotion.

If you only keep promoting your brand, then people will start running away from your page.

Keep your tweets balanced and share about trending topics to reach more people in your audience. Your tweets should leave an impact and give something of value to the user in the form of education, information, humour, news, facts, motivation, etc. because, in the end, it is all about engaging with your audience.

5.Hashtags

Twitter has always been known for the use of hashtags. Before selecting hashtags, you can use hashtag analytics tools to research about trending and popular ones.

twitter hashtags| netilly blog

It is important to note that you should only use hashtags which are related to your niche and not use trending ones which are totally unrelated to your domain.

6.Study your competitors

It is always better to stay updated about your competitors. Studying what your competitors are up to is always beneficial when creating a social media campaign.

You can check your competitors by using the search box. For e.g.: if you are a beauty salon, you can type any keyword from your niche like ‘makeup’, so that you can find who your competitors are, and you can study their marketing strategies and create an effective approach.

twitter blog

7.Twitter chats

Twitter  chat is a great way to engage with your audience and expand your customer base. It allows you to hold discussions on various topics where you can showcase your expertise and build more trust among the audience. They are helpful to increase networking and connect to people of your industry.

It helps in increasing your twitter followers  and prospects as it creates brand awareness among your people . You can also check out the world’s largest list of Twitter chats.

Twitter chats are conversations that are created at a particular time for specific hashtag. You can host your own twitter chat also by selecting a relevant topic and predermined time.

If you plan your twitter chats effectively, you can understand your audience even better

8.Twitter ads

Ads are always a great way to reach your potential customers, and today social media ads allow you to choose and customize your audience based on various factors such as demographics, keywords, events, behaviours, interests, follower look-alikes, movies, TV shows and a lot more.

Ads serve a great tool to reach your audience, and the customization, which Twitter Ads offers is excellent for lead generation.

twitter ads| netilly blog

9.Pinning your tweets

pin tweet| netilly blog

 Everybody wants their best content piece to be showcased in front their viewers. You can do so by pinning your tweets.

Pinning your tweets allows your audience to view your best piece of information at the top. Pin the tweet which has a link to your website or any landing page having a higher potential of lead generation.

When you pin a particular tweet, it always remains at the top of all your tweets and that way, you can always direct them to the desired web page.

10.Identify the audience 

This is the most important step that many skip before creating a marketing plan. Social media offers multiple ways to know and find your target audience. Finding your target audience is a very crucial step if you are keen to attract a good number of leads.

Every business is different, and so is its target audience. You can also segment your audience on Twitter in order to create successful marketing campaigns.

Identifying your audience is a prerequisite for any hack you wish to act upon. When you know who you want to reach, your marketing will work more effectively.

11.Engage with leads off Twitter also

This means that you can also engage with your prospective lead on emails or via messages.

While contacting your lead through email or message, keep in mind that you don’t end up nagging them with your messages, rather plan effectively what you want to send and when.

When you engage with your audience directly, it reflects that your brand cares about them and also makes your audience feel more connected with you at a personal level.

12.Landing Page for Twitter users

You may link your Twitter leads to your homepage but it better to direct them towards a different landing page which is only for your Twitter followers where you can ask them to subscribe to you for latest updates.

Collecting email addresses of your leads is  an essential step in your marketing funnel.

Conclusion:

Twitter is a very popular social media platform and is an excellent platform to generate leads. The hacks we have discussed today to generate leads on Twitter will help you to optimize your lead generation efforts and also help in expanding your customer base.

If you find this article and the tips given in this article useful, please share with us in the comments section below.

If you’d like to discuss how Twitter can help your business or brand, then please drop us an email or leave your contact details and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our social media specialists.

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Top 15 Hacks to Increase Followers and Engagement on Instagram

14 Comments / Digital Marketing, SMM
Top 10 hacks for increasing instagram followers.

 

Did you know Instagram made its debut in 2010? Yes, you read that right. In a short span of time, Instagram has become one of the most powerful and influential social media platforms.

Currently, it is the second most engaged network after Facebook and has more than 60% of its users logging in every day.

Specifically, businesses such as travel, fashion, or food, segments where the target audience tends to  love visuals, have a tremendous opportunity to engage with their audience on Instagram, where 80 million photos get uploaded every single day.

Everyone wants to increase followers on their Instagram account, but it is a not task which can be accomplished in a day or two. It is a cycle of practices you have to implement to make your brand stand out on the platform. Eventually, engagement is the ultimate goal of any Instagram post. If your audience is not engaging on your Instagram posts, then all your efforts are of no use.

top 15 hacks to increase followers and engagement

So let us discover some useful hacks which can help increase your followers and boost engagement of your Instagram Page:

1. Cross-promote Instagram posts on other channels

Social platforms are all about cross-promotion. If people like a page on one platform, they are also likely to like it on other platforms. You can promote your Instagram account on various platforms to increase your followers. Many Social Bookmarking sites also let you share a link to your other social media handles.

According to a study of one billion Facebook posts, pictures posted on FB via Instagram get 23% more engagement.

So leverage other social sites to promote your Instagram page, this is a great way to increase Instagram followers naturally and organically.

2.Post at the right time

You may be putting in a lot of effort in generating unique content for Instagram, but what is the use if it does not reach your audience.

Just posting on Instagram is not enough. You need to check which time will give you the best output. And to do that you can check Instagram Insights.

Instagram Insights gives you a full picture which will help you to create your marketing plan. You can figure out on which days and at what time is your audience most active, and you should keep that in mind while posting.

If you post keeping in mind your audience online timing, you will automatically see a boost in your engagement. Further, your post will have a better chance to appear in more feeds when your audience engages early with your content.

 

If we talk about Netilly, our followers are most likely to be on Instagram between 6 pm-9 pm, so we try to post around that time. Every small bit counts!

3. Use all the features

Instagram is known for releasing new features every now and then. Be it posting videos, boomerangs, stories, polls, questions, Igtv, ads, etc.

Instagram is all about interaction with your users, and Instagram has given you a bag full of different ways to do so. Widen the horizon of your Instagram marketing by using all the features Instagram provides to the fullest.

You can increase followers of your Instagram account by using all the features Instagram provides you.

As an example, you could reach new customers by building an Instagram ad, and by making your posts unique and creative, you can make them follow you. 

4.Create shareable and engaging content

Social Platforms are for people. While it is an excellent platform for marketing, but people don’t join these platforms to get promotional content.

People like to see compelling content on social media and will only follow the pages which gives something new and valuable to them.

If you want to increase followers on your Instagram account, you need to be one of the two following things:

  1. A big name in the market like Coca-Cola, Levis, etc. as people are curious to connect to big brands like these.
  2. A unique content creator.

People like to see content that motivates them, educates them through facts, or did you know or makes them laugh. Create content keeping yourself in the viewer’s shoes. Until a user cannot establish a relationship with your content, he or she would not like to follow your page and engage with it.

But if you hit the right chords, your page followers will increase and can even get shared among the follower’s networks.

People are always hungry for unique and exciting content. If you give them that, then you can also smartly sneak in your sales post in your Instagram profile.

Let’s say you are a dog walker, you can make an Instagram page where you can share various tips for dog care, habits, etc. and sometimes promote your services. The key is to promote your services naturally and not stuff your audience with that.

People will only follow a page if they are getting something out of there.

For example, Femina Magazine puts out a lot funny, motivational, and relatable posts on their official profile. People like to share these type of posts in messages, feed, or even as stories which helps increase your followers.

5. Use video content

Video marketing is a great medium to convey a message without using too many words. Videos are a great way to leave an impact on your audience and also quickly give them content.

Videos give more engagement than image posts on Instagram, especially when the videos are long. For videos more than 60 seconds, you can leverage the IGTV feature. While uploading videos on IGTV do select the option to ‘post a review’. This helps in promoting the video through feeds.

Instagram is popular with video sharing, and you can use this fact in your Instagram marketing. The more people view and share your video content; the more will be the engagement and followers for you.

6. Leverage the power of Insights

 

Insights works like magic and gives you the information you need to post the right way.

You can view your audience and seek details about what percentage of your audience is male or female, the country or city to which they belong, and at what time they are most active.

You can also view insights for each post individually and understand what attracted your audience to a specific post and how much engagement did you get. Studying Insights wisely and making changes according to it will help you gain the followers you are looking for.

7. Use hashtags wisely

Instagram lets you use up to 30 hashtags in a single post. Hashtags are important keywords which you associate with your posts. Using correct hashtags will help people find you.

You can see how to select the most relevant and popular hashtags for your post with various hashtag finder tools.

It is not advisable to use hashtags that have huge competition and are associated with lot of public posts.

8. Be consistent and create a brand for yourself

If you have visited Neil Patel’s Instagram page, you will find that all his posts use his brand colours which are orange and white. When you are repeatedly exposed to that, your mind memorizes it and associates those colours with that brand no matter where you see it.

Similarly, many big brands use this concept to create a permanent memory in the public’s mind.

You can also use this to boost your posts on Instagram. Create posts with same font styles and keep the colour shades constant, so that people start remembering them and that will eventually increase your brand value.

See how all the posts of Neil Patel on Instagram are in the white and orange theme; this helps in establishing brand consistency.

9. Instagram bio is also useful

Your bio is what tells the user about your page and what you represent. Many people follow a page by looking at the bio of your Instagram page. Bio is a short description which you give on Instagram, which defines your page.

You are only allowed to use 150 characters in your Instagram bio, so you need to choose wisely.

Use your bio to create a unique and exciting description of your page which pushes the user to follow you. Use the right keywords and make your Instagram Bio useful.

10. Use polls or host a photo contest to engage your followers

Polls and contests lead to higher engagement as they have a direct call-to-action for your followers. Throwing a poll is easier as you don’t need to announce any winner for same. Further, followers who have participated in a poll or contest pay more attention to your account to see the result.

You can search for previous contests by using popular hashtags such as #photocontest and #contest and work out details for your contest. Promote it big time and ensure once the contest ends, you do announce the winners across your social networks.

11. Make posts that are saveable

Have you seen the save option on Instagram?

This feature allows you to save Instagram posts that you can view later at any time. People like to see posts that they can save and share with people.

12. Ask questions in captions

Social media is all about engaging with the audience and making them a part of your conversation. Having questions in your posts you share or in captions can help you get more engagement as it works as a call to action for your audience.

13. Do Instagram Contests

Contests are a fun way to interact with your audience and grow engagement. You can host contests for giveaways such as quizzes, puzzles etc. People like to participate in contests and it works for both the brand and audience equally. The brand gets more engagement and likes and the audience gets something in return!

Instagram followers | netilly blog

14. Comment on big accounts regularly

Well, this may not be directly linked to your page but it is very helpful. Comment on 10-30 big accounts daily. This way you can get noticed by others and they may find your page interesting. Doing this consistently will surely help you gain more followers

15. Reply to all comments

People always like brands which are active and connect with their audience. To make your audience engage with your posts more, always reply to them. This shows that you are active and your audience is important to you.

So, always reply to your audience to gain trust and good image in their eyes.

To Wrap Up

These are the effective ways to grow your Instagram account, enhance engagement, and increase your brand’s awareness. Please do share with us your experience after implementing these hacks.

If you’d like to discuss how these hacks can help your business or brand, then please drop us an email or leave your contact details and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our SMM Specialists.

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Essential LinkedIn B2B Marketing Strategies in 2024

10 Comments / Digital Marketing, SMM

linkedin b2b strategies

Do you know LinkedIn is responsible for 64% of all visits from social media platforms to business websites?

Gone are the days where LinkedIn was just another platform for professionals to connect. It has become one of the most dynamic marketing platforms, especially for b2b lead generation. According to LinkedIn stats ,93% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective platform for lead generation.

LinkedIn is flooded with corporate profiles of companies,soto stand out and increase your lead generation; you need a strong and effective LinkedIn b2b marketing strategy to get a good ROI.

Does LinkedIn work for B2B lead generation?

LinkedIn is specifically designed for businesses. It is somewhat similar to Facebook but has a different concept to it. LinkedIn allows people to make connections and showcase their business profiles. Through LinkedIn, you can seek jobs, hire people, and also generate marketing leads.

Not only individuals but companies too can make their pages and showcase their services and products. 

What started as a social media platform for businesses, has now become one of the most successful marketing channels.

LinkedIn is currently responsible for 97% of social media leads to a business!

Yes, you read that right!

Be it individuals or companies, LinkedIn serves all. It offers unique marketing solutions that help to showcase businesses, services, and products. LinkedIn profiles have become one the most trusted channels, and the quality of your LinkedIn profile translates to your presence in the market.

Effective LinkedIn B2B Marketing Strategies

1. Be prepared before you dive in

Most companies create their social profiles without fully understanding their business needs and their target audience. Before starting with LinkedIn for b2b lead generation, study in-depth about what services does LinkedIn offer and how they can be leveragedas part of  your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

LinkedIn provides a feature in which you can segment your audience and filter based on different parameters. 

Identifying your target audience is the most crucialfactor which will determine your LinkedInstrategy and help generate b2b leads. 

For generating b2b leadswhich may turn to conversions, you need to press the right nerve. Understanding what problems your target audience is facing and bringing a solution to the table will help convert leads to paid customers.Many companies post generic content that may or may not help their target audience.

The key aspect of generating leads is to understand what your audience is interested in and what problem of theirs can your company solve.

Also, research about your competitors  they are doing. And then create a strategy to do things better than them, which will make you stand out from the rest.

It is important to understand that one glove does not fit everyone in the marketing world, every company needs a different business strategy, and just being a doppelganger of your competitor won’t help.

2. Structure your company page tactfully

Your company page on LinkedIn plays avital role in creating a pipeline of leads for your company website. So you can’t take chances by overlooking the essentials for your company page as below:

· Use a relevant image that showcases your brand.

· Include a compelling and clear pitch in your company description in the About Us section.

· Include your website URL, industry, and additional company information just below the About Us section. LinkedIn uses this information to make you appear in searches on the platform.

· Do share your physical location as your potential leads may be interested in knowing it.

· Include your LinkedIn page on your company website, your blog posts, and wherever possible.

3. Don’t be sale centric

The primary purpose of companies to exist on social media is to promote their businesses, but the key to be successful on social media  is not just to promote your products or services.

Are they contrasting, right?

Stuffing or overloading your page with sales-centric posts is a sure-shot way of driving traffic away. 

Try to keep the balance of 80:20, where 80% content you post is educational or consists of solutions your target audience is looking for and keep the rest 20% for your sales posts.

The key is to keep the right balance between your social posts. The more engaging posts you create, the more people are likely to stick to your page and your b2b marketing strategies are likely to bemore successful.

4. Use LinkedIn targeting options

It is easier than ever to send across personalized ads to every professional in your target audience.

LinkedIn offers a variety of matched audience features such as regular text ads, sponsored content, sponsored InMail, etc. Apart from this, you can easily manage your dynamic ads through your campaign manager.

Dynamic ads are those that change its content and profile image dynamically depending upon the target audience. Such ads are suitable for attracting new followers to your company page.

Additionally, you can also retarget the visitors already in your sales funnel by leveraging LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences Tool.

If you present each potential customer different ads which are suitable specifically to their needs, it will increase the chances of conversion.

5. Use LinkedIn groups

Linked groups are a great way to make connections and to represent yourself as a pioneer in your field.

You can start your own LinkedIn group for your company or join the most trending ones. LinkedIn Groups allow you to make connections with people or companies who share the same interest or are interested in your services. You can put this on the priority list for b2b lead generation on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn groups, you can showcase your expertise and build creditibility and trust within the community. The social profile of your company and how much trust people put in you will eventually help you to gather profitable b2b leads.

LinkedIn groups will help improve your authority and represent your company in a different light.

6. Company description matters more than you think.

You might be thinking that profile description does not matter much when it comes to generating b2b leads through LinkedIn, but that might not be working well for you.

According to semrush.com-

“Your LinkedIn profile may be the first thing that a potential lead sees before they know anything about your company or role. For this reason, you must offer a clear and concise description right off the bat. Your profile headline and summary is the best place to do this. Again, be sure to use language that is directly applicable to the leads you want to attract.”

Make your profile description as short and complete as possible. Reflect what your services are and who you want to cater to. Companies/people like to read short and precise text, and with increasing usage of smartphones and the internet, people are in a hurry.

Instead of including very long descriptions, it is best to have your description easy and worth noticing. Pick each word with a purpose behind it and always keep the intent of the potential buyer in mind.

Also, keep in mind to pick the right image; Images reflect your business. It talks to your potential lead.

Invest time in selecting the best image, which is relevant and screams professionalism too.

 A crisp description, combined with a relevant and accurate image, will work wonders in attracting your potential customer.

7. LeverageLinkedIn Analytics aggressively

Regularly checking what content got more engagement from your audience is a sure-shot way of generating b2b leads. By evaluating LinkedIn Analytics of your company page,you can dive deep into identifying how many new followers you have attracted and how well your campaigns are performing.

Further, bykeeping a track on LinkedIn Insights, you can try to widen your sales funnel. Insights can give you a lot of valuable information such as your audience’s professional background, title, industry, etc.through which also you can segment your audience and run successful campaigns. 

Conclusion

These are some of the marketing strategies to generate b2b leads from LinkedIn and to achieve better results, you need to make all these strategies work.

Getting leads is not just one ingredient recipe; you need the right blend of all the strategies to prepare a perfect dish.

The strategies will not work overnight, but you have to make constant efforts to make your company stand out.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your business with LinkedIn B2B strategies, please drop us an email or leave your  contact details  and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our LinkedIn marketing expert.

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Branding | Building a strong brand through Social Media

12 Comments / Branding, SMM
Image used for the blog post building a strong brand through social media in 2019, posted on Netilly official blog

What comes to your mind when you think of Pizza or a soft drink?

Dominos and Coke, right?

Do you wonder why?

Well, that’s because of ‘Branding’.

Branding is essential in this digital era. It’s like that strong pillar of a building that keeps it from falling.

89% of B2B marketers consider brand awareness as the most important goal, and about 91% of them promote their brand using content marketing methods.

Branding is not just about having a logo and a good-looking website for your company; it’s something more than that.

Human psychology is the foundation of brand building, and if you understand consumer behaviour, then branding is half done.

In this article, you’ll learn how you can build a strong brand using Social Media. But before that let’s understand: What is Branding and Why is it important for any business?

Having a name, logo, and design, differentiates one company from the other but that’s not branding, it’s the basics to get started with.

Branding, in a real sense, is about making a memorable impression on consumers and representing what your business is all about. It’s a recursive process that requires time and effort.

So, what’s the importance of branding?

Why should you consider making it a part of your marketing strategy?

Imagine, you have opened an offline store that sells handcrafted products.

You have an active website, social media pages, contact number, and everything else that is required.

But you don’t get enough leads.

Now, when you set up a branding strategy for the same product and go all out and promote it on all social media platforms, the chances of getting more leads increases.

Not just that, branding your company or business effectively also makes it memorable, increases visibility and consumers are more likely to buy from you when compared to your competitors.

In a survey conducted by Nielsen, 60% of shoppers said they purchase products from the brands that they know, and 21% said the reason for buying a specific product is that they liked the brand.

How An Effective Social Media Strategy Can Enhance Your Branding

Social media is the place where all your existing and desired customers hang out. In such a case, it’s highly essential for you to get started with Branding on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.

There are about 3.5 billion active Social Media users globally; you can’t risk not using these platforms.

To help you get started with branding, we have come up with an easy guide, after thorough research.

Decide Your Target Audience

First things first, know your audience. This is a crucial step, and it requires a lot of market research and social listening.

While it’s an important step, it’s often neglected, and that’s the reason why most of the businesses fail to establish their brand.

About 48% of consumers believe that brands can help them by providing them better products and services based on their needs.

Think of your business; if it’s about photography, then your target audience is more likely to be found on platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

Similarly, if it’s a B2B product, then you may consider working on your LinkedIn and Twitter handles.

So, the reason why it’s necessary to decide your target audience at first is that they should be able to resonate with your brand. By defining your audience, you can cut out on other social media channels and focus on the ones that are aligned with your business goals.

Choose The Right Social Media Platform

Once you’ve figured out your audience, it’s time to pick the best social media platform for your business.

It’s a time-consuming process to work on all social media channels, given that there are so many of them.

You might as well need a person to handle your social media. Now, that will surely burn a hole in your pocket.

So, to save yourself from this, all you need to do is, pick just one or two platforms catering to the needs of your audience as well as yours.

This will help you stay focused and reach out to the right audience.

That’s not it!

Next, you need to develop a strategy to make your online presence effective.

For instance, if you’ve decided to work on Instagram, then your next steps would be, finding the right hashtags and appropriate images for your posts.

Define your unique factor

Everyone is online, working hard to build their brand. It’s quite challenging to add up to that noise and shout out to people to look at your brand instead.

Well, you can do so by giving a reason to consider your brand by showing them how you are different from your competitors.

Your value, your qualities, and your benefits are the only things that can differentiate you from others.

What is the core value of your business?

How is it helping others solve their problem?

What is one thing that is unique about your brand?

If you have the answer to these questions, then you have your unique factor already.

Build a Brand Voice

Your social media content is nothing but your brand voice. The kind of posts that you share reflects your brand’s personality. So, it’s essential to develop your social media voice.

But how do you do that?

Showcase your company culture across different online platforms. If your company is innovative, then be creative with your social media posts or share innovative content. Whereas, if your company falls under the entertainment category, then it’s not right to share innovative posts, you would instead share entertaining posts and videos.

You choose how you want to be perceived by your target audience. So, build your brand voice.

Be Authentic

In a bid to outrank their competitor, brands and businesses end up playing with their customer’s feelings by making false promises.

According to a survey by Sproutsocial, the number one thing that a consumer wants from a brand is honesty.

Refrain yourself from excess self-promotion because according to Buzzstream, 45% of consumers are more likely to unfollow a brand on social media in such case.

So, make sure you’re honest to your customers.

Post content consistently

“Consistent action creates consistent results,” says Christine Kane.

People have limited attention span; they switch between different apps and platforms multiple times in a day.

If you want your brand name to be fixed into the minds of people, you’ll have to be consistent with your posts.

It’s important to show up every day on Social Media. Otherwise, people will forget you.

To get your brand noticed, a minimum of 5 impressions is necessary.

Besides being consistent with your posts, it’s also necessary to be compatible with your topic.

So, instead of posting about a thousand different things that’ll only confuse your audience, it’s better to decide what kind of topics are best suitable for your business and share content about them regularly.

Provide value to the audience

What makes someone hit the follow button?

The answer is, Value

People tend to follow you only when you provide value to them by either sharing something valuable, exciting and thought-provoking, or solving their problem.

According to a Harvard Business Review, 64% of consumers said the primary reason they have a relationship with the brand is because of their shared values.

Building a brand is not as easy as it seems to be; it requires you to come up with your own branding strategies that add value to the customers.

For that, you need to take all the above steps seriously.

Conclusion

Building a strong brand through social media is not as hard as reaching out to people in-person and advertising your product. So, think about it. You have an excellent opportunity to increase your brand awareness by leveraging the power of social media.

Your social media presence is what your brand is all about. So, make sure it sends out the right message.

Now, that you know how to build a brand, get started with it and do share your experience with us.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your business or brand, please drop us an email or leave your contact details and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our Branding expert.

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What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?

84 Comments / Digital Marketing, SMM
image for blog social media marketing

A decade back, nobody could have imagined that communicating with people anywhere across the globe would become so fast.

Today not only can one connect within a fraction of seconds but also share pictures, videos, and documents over the internet so easily and instantly!

Sharing live updates, stories, experiences, or moments through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are an “in” thing.

In fact, social media has become an essential part of people’s everyday lives. From teenaged youngsters to septuagenarians, everyone alike is hooked onto the social media apps on their mobile handsets.

With an estimated 4.1 Billion internet users and nearly 3.1 Billion social media users, the landscape for today’s diverse social media has drastically changed.

According to a survey done by ‘The Manifest’ of more than 600 social media users, people regularly access a variety of social media channels via a mobile app or computer web browser.

Further, an interesting but scary revelation from the report is that the average person will spend nearly five years, four months of his or her life on social media.

Image showing a pie chart with distribution of time a person spends on various social media platforms
Image Source: mediakix.com

Time Spent on Social Media = 5 Years, 4 Months in a Lifetime

86% of people use social media at least once daily out of which 72% use it multiple times every day.

These numbers are bound to grow, as most people are becoming increasingly dependent on their social networks for advice.

People use social media platforms to reach out to their friends, relatives, or colleagues for things like medical advice and travel recommendations.

Facebook is literally a country by itself, with over 62% of North Americans using it. And that’s just one of the many social media platforms.

With so many people on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., these channels have become revenue generating customer-bases for businesses across the globe. How? Simply through something called ‘Social Media Marketing.’

Social media marketing (SMM) is the use of social media websites to market a company’s products and services and generate organic (free) traffic to their sites.

This helps in optimizing the website’s position on search engines, i.e. it will be seen in the first few results as anyways 90% of users browsing the internet to search something do not usually look any further than the first page of the search engine.

Many businesses also promote their products or services directly on social media platforms.

SMM provides businesses with an effective way to reach new prospects, engage with existing customers and promote their brand, mission or tone.

Creative and engaging marketing on social media can bring phenomenal success to businesses by creating brand visibility and even driving leads and sales.

In fact, SMM has become an integral part of the digital marketing strategy of most small and big businesses as well as professionals and freelancers.

How does SMM work?

SMM experts use social media ad campaigns and various other strategies to develop messages and ‘sticky’ content and have people engage with it.

Individual users share those posts with their online social community of family, friends, and colleagues resulting in the matter going viral.

This strategy provides several benefits upfront, such as:

  • The content reaches a wider audience that an SMM manager may not have been able to access otherwise.
  • Shared content carries an implicit recommendation when sent by someone whom the recipients know and trust.
  • Cost of SMM is low compared to traditional marketing approaches like advertising.
  • Unlike traditional advertising where the reach and effectiveness can’t be measured, social media platforms provide accurate insights into engagement metrics ( like the number of people reached, number of clicks, the number of views and resulting actions).
  • Sticky content gets a user’s attention and increases the possibility that he or she will conduct a desired action, such as purchase a product or service or else share the content with others on social media platforms. This, in turn, helps in search engine optimization (SEO).
  • Some social media ad campaigns encourage customers to share their feedback, such as product reviews or comments, which is an excellent way to engage directly with the people.

Further, many social networks allow users to provide detailed personal, demographic, and geographical information, which enables marketers to tailor their messages such that it is most likely to resonate with the intended users.

This helps companies ensure that the marketing campaigns are specifically targeted at the right audience.

To be able to measure and quantify results for the money, time, and efforts which have been put in ‘marketing campaigns’ is an essential goal for any business.

Social media platforms have in-built data analytics tools that allow marketers to track how successful their efforts have been. Also, the impact of SMM efforts on the traffic data on a website can be monitored using Google analytics.

Some of the metrics used to measure the success of an SMM campaign include the number of likes on a post, the number of shares and reach (can be monitored using tools like BuzzSumo), the number of click-through rates and views and finally, the sales funnel created through the leads generated.

If we dive deeper into SMM, there are primarily two ways of doing SMM promotions- active and passive.

Active SMM Promotion

If sharing your content on various social media platform is a task in itself, then no one is going to do so. Forget people doing copy and paste links of your content across various social networks.

To encourage social sharing among web users, active SMM promotion is the way forward. Active promotion means adding links such as social media sharing buttons (as below) to the content on your website.

You can add these social media buttons to your blogs or content on the website with simple code that allows users to share your content across the web with just a couple of clicks. In WordPress, these buttons don’t even require any plugins.

Image showing the social media share buttons that enable users to share content on different social media platforms

Social networks which can be used for SMM campaigns are listed below (Most have their own terms of use):

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • Quora

With the above mentioned social media platforms, companies also have the option of launching paid ad campaigns to reach wider target audiences, thus improving traffic on a website or a specific web page.

Passive SMM Promotion

Passive SMM promotion refers to promoting activities on social media platforms by updating statuses, publishing images, videos, tweets, or posting blogs.

Traction through passive promotion is achieved by creating content that works well on the individual platform as each platform is different. On one, blog content may work whereas on another, a video may do better and on another probably, pictures dominate.

Hence every platform requires a different strategy but, in the end, whatever content is posted, must be informative and engaging so that people share it more and more with their online communities.

This kind of promotion also seeks customer’s direct feedback real-time, which can be further analyzed to enhance their brand experience.

Preparing an SMM campaign for your business

Before you start creating SMM campaigns, consider your business’s goals. If you for launching a social media campaign without a proper strategy in mind you’ll possibly get lost as it’s like roaming around a jungle without a map

When defining your social media marketing goals, here are some questions to ask:

  • What are you expecting to achieve through SMM?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What message do you want to pass on to your target audience?
  • Which all social media platforms would your target audience use?

Your SMM strategy should be driven by your business type. For example, a travel business can get a lot of traction from a strong presence on Instagram or YouTube being highly visual platforms.

A business-to-business (B2B) company might find more leverage on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Apart from a right SMM strategy, here are a few quick best practices for your social media marketing campaigns:

  • Create engaging content. Can’t emphasize this enough how important it is for your SMM campaign. Until your content is appealing, it will not fetch you any result. Getting a like on a post is easier than getting a comment, so ask people question in your posts or videos to give you feedback.
  • Share your social media posts multiple times. Once anything is out of sight, it’s out of mind. People need to be reminded continuously about your brand for their subconscious mind to register it. Make sure you post regularly.
  • Create a reliable brand image. Your business brand identity, whether it’s a value system or fun or trustworthiness, should remain consistent irrespective of which social media platform you use as each platform has its own unique style and voice.
  • Do a regular competitive analysis to observe the trends. One can get valuable data for keyword research and other marketing insights by keeping an eye on competitors’ social media posts. Consider using the same technique or social media platform, which seems to be working for your competitors and try to do it better than them.
  • Make your presence felt on social networks. Make sure you participate well on the social web by creating conversations and not just uploading photos on social media. Be known to the social community.

 Conclusion

What is Social media marketing? 

It is just use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. 

Social media with such extensive use presents an incredible opportunity for marketing. In fact, for a few people, consistent use of social media even opens up career prospects.

Through sharing content n social media with friends, influencer and blogger Christina Vidal made a career out of it. She is a full-time traveler and now has nearly 75.5k followers on her Instagram account. She uses social media multiple times every day.

So it is better to learn social media marketing (SMM) now instead of losing in the long run.

If you find this article and the tips given in this article useful, please share with us in the comments section below.

If you’d like to discuss how SMM can help your business or brand, then please drop us an email or leave your contact details and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our SMM Specialists.

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How does Content Marketing help Drive Organic Traffic to a Website and aid SEO?

60 Comments / Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, SEO, SMM
How does content marketiing aid seo

You must have possibly heard that – getting traffic from a search engine is hard, but buying traffic is easy. Though garnering organic (free) traffic is no cakewalk, but it’s the best way to get traffic for any business for two reasons.

Firstly, around 80% of web users ignore paid ads in search results. Secondly, it sends you the most targeted traffic, and once you do it right, its free traffic.

In fact, more than 51% of content consumption in 2018 was majorly driven by organic search. Hence, boosting organic traffic for your website or content is the best way forward!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to get organic traffic, and the ROI proves to be higher as time elapses.

Building organic traffic through SEO is undoubtedly the hardest effort you’ll ever put into your website. But the time and effort on this can essentially become the most significant investment.

Reason being the SEO content you put on your website today will drive traffic not only today or tomorrow but for the long term probably several years from now.

This is not the case with paid Google AdWords, which will not get you any traffic the moment you stop paying. That’s why focusing on enhancing organic traffic through SEO is an effort worthy enough for the long-term.

When it comes to following the right approach to garner more organic traffic, Whitehat SEO is the best way to stay on top of traffic that is sustainable as we discussed in our beginner’s blog on SEO.

Let us now dive a little deeper to understand how SEO boosts organic site traffic at no cost except your time.

How Content Marketing and SEO complement each other

SEO works like a navigation tool for customers to seek the right information and content. Businesses invariably depend on marketing mediums like social media and email to propagate their content.

Both SEO and content are the critical ingredients for an efficient and effective digital marketing plan. 

Customers query on a product or service goes typically through a search task on the search engine to get a glimpse of the available information.

Seeking the right target audience for content using social media and email campaigns is a difficult task. Here the SEO tool acts as an enabler to find the relevant customer with the specific need at present. Reaching these active and relevant customers with the appropriate content would create awareness with the right audience. 

Hence, Content marketing and SEO complement each other to create an effective digital marketing plan.

In content marketing, you can frame the appropriate content by visualizing the keywords which customers would use during their online search for information. This would lead to improved visibility for your content. As a result, the customer gets to view your content and brand whenever he keys in the keywords aligned to your content. This initiates the stage of awareness and helps to build a funnel.

Relevant content leads to a higher ranking on the search engines and enables cost-free visibility online. This helps enhance your brand awareness and attract relevant customer traffic on your website. Higher the customer traffic to your website, the funnel size grows accordingly

SEO and Content marketing together can get new leads.

SEO and content marketing work together to help you reach new leads through search engines like Google. SEO and Content marketing together can get new points.

Content Marketing and SEO are two different approaches; each has its distinct strengths. But they become more useful when they act together. SEO is more like a direction signboard and Content is the pitstop to the destination.

SEO becomes instrumental when the content creation is on the lines of the customers’ mind map. At the same time, Content would be highly recommended by the search engines only when supplied with the relevant keywords. SEO needs to supplement Content to ensure successful execution of your Online marketing plan.

Create Quality Content & Optimize Old Content at Reposting

The intent of creating content is not to fill the website pages or blogs just for the sake of doing it. Publishing valuable content that renders value to its readers is the reason behind the search engines, ranking a good content website higher.

Your website is a representation of your business, and usually, it’s the first impression a potential customer may have of your business.

Essentially your website is a representation of your business, and it forms the first impression about your business in a potential customer’s mind.

You shouldn’t be publishing low-quality blog posts just as you wouldn’t deliver a crappy product or service,

In fact, when you publish unique and information-packed content, it acts as an ultimate marketing strategy where the content ranks higher for relevant keywords.

With search engines becoming smarter over time, they can weigh the content you have posted. If the content is good, it is ranked higher, and that is how organic traffic reaches the website or blog.

So before hitting the ‘Publish’ button, give your content everything you can.

Further updating and republishing older blog posts with new content and good images or insightful videos can grow organic traffic by as much as around 111%.

Using Long Tail Key Phrases

Primary keywords have higher search volumes. However, broad two or three-word key phrases are highly competitive. So rather than going for the most popular keywords, it is better to use keywords that are more specific to your product or service.

Instead of sticking to the addition of two or three phrases of keywords switch to long tail key phrases.

Let’s take an example – if you are running a digital marketing agency, then instead of trying to rank for the term ‘digital marketing agency’, narrow it down a bit more and go for something like ‘digital marketing agency for real estate’.

This will narrow down your content ranking for those specific keywords that are more relevant and will lure potential leads to your website with higher chances of conversion.

Long-tail key phrases are likely to be closer to what a real user would be typing into a search engine while looking for something on the web. Thus the long tail keywords have lesser competition and higher relevancy.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is purely a genuine way to earn links that are valuable to your website. Publishing your content on a high authority website is a perfect way to garner more eyeballs. Make sure you post quality content on these websites and expose it the way you present your own blog on social media channels.

Apart from this, some of the best practices to consider when guest posting are:

  • Aim for publishing guest posts only for trusted websites with high domain authority and decent traffic.
  • Create content in and around your niche o reach your ideal audience.
  • Create relevant backlinks to some of your blogs or content on your own website.
  • Engage with the readers regularly by responding to their comments irrespective of whether it’s a guest post on someone else’ website. This is a great way to build a rapport and establish a relationship with those visitors. 

Create & Use Relevant Internal Links

You need to work strategically to create powerful internal links in your blogs and on your website to guide your visitors to more relevant content.

This can boost your search rankings by keeping visitors on your website for longer. But this will happen only if you have used links in a way that are natural and relevant for the reader and not created just for the heck of creating an internal link. Ultimately internal links should add value and provide relevant information to the visitors.

Once a page is ranked higher in a search engine, you can internally link it to other pages on your website. This way, you can embrace the SEO aspects for those other pages also to possibly get high ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

There is no shortcut to it- all you need to make sure is that you keep good links and keep removing the bad ones periodically. However, don’t overuse internal links else it will look like spam.

Utilize Social Media Promotion 

It has become imperative to build a substantial presence across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Google understands that recommendation for any shared content, on all these social media channels by people within their trusted social community, is a great signal to rank that content or website higher.

All of the social media marketing (SMM) promotional activities help to get your brand and website address out on the internet. Write content worthy enough of sharing and add share buttons within your content and website so that people can share your content or website easily.

Monitor Regularly 

It is very crucial to monitor what is happening within your domain. Use tools like Google Analytics to track visitors to your blog and website.

 You can fine-tune your content after analyzing where the visitors are coming from and what keywords they searched.

It is also advisable to monitor your competitor’s social profiles to see what’s working for them and try to do it better than them.

Try to be in Google’s Good Books 

Avoid using any unethical ways to get good ranking on search engines as it’s unwise to be on Google’s wrong side. You should always look for increasing organic traffic ethically or else be ready to get hit with a Google penalty sooner or later.

Achieving good ranking in search engines through ethical means might be a time consuming process, but eventually, it gives good results in the long term in terms of increasing organic traffic.

Don’t buy inbound links or build cheap links. Also, don’t publish low quality or plagiarized content.

Instead, get into the habit of creating quality content that aids users and provides a solution to what they are looking for. Eventually, that will drive more organic traffic than any other alternate shortcut ever will do. 

Conclusion

Hard work always gets the best results, and it’s no different on the web. If you are looking for more organic traffic, you must put more effort into it. 

That means giving your best effort every time, identifying the niche for content, understanding good and bad backlinks, knowing your keywords, guest blogging strategically, staying on Google’s good side and lastly you need to consistently implement all of these to create an organic reach over your competitor.

The most important task is to closely monitor what SEO technique is bringing you more organic traffic. Once it is identified, keep implementing it consistently to get results that are organic and gigantic. 

If you have any questions or need assistance about building organic traffic for your website, please leave a comment below or drop us an email. We will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our SEO experts.

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