Results for: social media marketing strategy

Why Retention Marketing Is the Ultimate Growth Strategy

Steven on May 15, 2020

What keeps a business going is its solid base of consumers that are loyal to its products and services. Although the purpose of promoting your brand is to widen the reach of your business by acquiring new customers, focusing on the consumers that already patronize your brand is quite profitable too. This business strategy is called retention marketing, which gives special attention to an existing consumer base.

What is Retention Marketing?

Growth in business is often perceived as the expansion of your audience. But the philosophy of retention marketing underlines the importance of building a solid connection with your existing base to make sure that you are consistently profiting off their patronage.

While customer acquisition focuses on getting new people to buy your products, retention marketing makes sure that these new customers, together with your past buyers, come to you for their subsequent purchases. This is the reason why retention marketing is a very powerful business growth strategy for small and big companies alike.

To enhance your retention marketing plans, you can even dive into your existing audience’s intent in browsing the Internet. Referring to this search intent guide can help you understand what your consumers search for and why. By knowing what types of things they search related to your industry, you can effectively address their needs and solve their problems.

There are a lot of marketing strategies out there that will boost business growth, and retention marketing is just one of them. But it’s good for your brand to employ many different strategies to reap more benefits.

Powerful Retention Marketing Strategies to Catalyze Business Growth

Retention marketing is proven to reap profits and ROI, but not everyone’s familiar with this strategy. If you’re just hearing about retention marketing now, don’t fret! Here are a few retention marketing strategies to start you off on your journey to maximizing your loyal customer base.

1. Foster an open and approachable brand community

Photo courtesy of Retha Ferguson via Pexels

One of the most basic customer retention strategies is to build a brand community for your consumers. A community is a place, virtual or physical, wherein people come together because of their shared experiences and beliefs.

Having a brand community gives business owners and consumers the platform to converse with like-minded people connected by loyalty to your brand. This sense of belonging to a community will strengthen their ties to your products, which will translate into repeated sales in the long run.

2. Regularly ask feedback from your customers

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Another retention marketing strategy is to collect feedback from customers. Whether in the form of formal surveys or through online threads, garnering comments from consumers can help you relate with them.

This will help you perceive why they choose your brand over others, or why they don’t. Data from this feedback will augment your overall marketing campaign assessment. Asking your market what they like or dislike about your product is one way to know how to improve your service and retain customers.

3. Invest in corporate social responsibility activities

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Corporate social responsibility is not just about staying true to your brand’s values and helping the less fortunate. It’s also a compelling reason for your customers to remain loyal to you.

A study done at the University of Valencia in Spain discussed the effects of corporate social responsibility on consumer brand loyalty. The findings indicated that customers appreciated the brand’s social awareness and these brought on positive perceptions of the brand.

4. Offer premium subscriptions or memberships to encourage loyalty

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Another popular retention marketing strategy is to provide subscriptions or memberships to your brand. It’s a good way to update your consumer base about new products or services. In addition to that, provide exclusive offers in their subscription or membership to encourage them to get these promotions.

Subscriptions and memberships don’t have to be paid. “You can produce a newsletter that

regularly delivers news and trends to your subscribers. Make sure your content is original and relevant to your customers, so they’ll be likely to maintain the subscription to your updates and retain loyalty to your business”, says Marie Fincher, a Head on Content at TrustMyPaper.

5. Provide generous regular discounts

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What any consumer likes the most are some discounts, promotions, and free offers.. Reward your loyal customers by providing them with generous price slashes. You can use this tactic to conduct clearance sales or to sell products that don’t usually do well with the consumers.

You can give loyalty to member discounts or seasonal discounts, depending on the business goals you want to achieve alongside customer retention. Regularly update your customers about these promos to encourage them to buy from your business.

6. Set yourself apart from competitors

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Standing out in the industry is one way to maintain customer loyalty. This doesn’t need to mean that you take jabs at your competitors through advertising. You can set yourself apart from the competition just by producing content and products that stay true to your businesses’ values and vision.

You can also do this by extending efficient customer service to your consumers. Make sure that as much as possible you address their concerns and grievances. You will foster customer loyalty when you focus on improving your consumers’ experience with your products.

7. Maximize customer testimonials

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When you provide excellent customer service and your products are of high quality, you can expect positive feedback from customers. Whether in the form of product reviews or comments on your social media posts, these testimonials are invaluable.

Collect these testimonials together and publish them to let others know how much your consumers trust you. In the process, thank your customers for their kind feedback to strengthen your connection with them.

8. Build a learning environment for your consumers

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Customer retention can also be fostered around a learning environment. Provide your consumers with new and relevant content about your products and the industry. This will make you a valuable source of information for your customers.

You can also give them free how-tos and listicles to improve their skills. This will encourage them to patronize your content consistently, and in turn, purchase from your business instead of your competitors.

9. Take complaints seriously

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Aside from taking note of general feedback about your products, you should also be on the lookout for customer complaints. These are very important comments about your brand that should not be taken lightly. If you take these complaints seriously and address the senders immediately, you will showcase your business’s integrity.

You can avoid losing customers when you address complaints as soon as possible. Unsatisfied customers are likely to patronize another brand, so if you want to retain your audience, you should learn how to prioritize addressing their complaints instead of just underpinning the positive feedback you get.

10. Be transparent about mistakes

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Finally, customers stay loyal to brands that own up to their mistakes. When you fall short of customer expectations, say you delivered unsatisfactory products or responded to complaints late, you should not hesitate to apologize.

You’ll lose customers if you choose to ignore your mistakes. Your customers will want to hold you accountable for failing to provide good service. If you fail to responsibly address these concerns, you risk losing them.

To effectively manage any retention marketing strategy, you should first study your audience thoroughly. You can start by using data-driven strategies to collate data about the people who always purchase from your business. Here, you’ll know who your most loyal customers are, which will help you narrow down your target for your retention strategies.

Connecting with your consumers should not stop with just the sale of your products. In the same breath, maintaining consumers should not just be about having them buy products from you again and again. Retention marketing will bolster business growth only if it’s based on a deep understanding of your customers.

You should strive to build a connection with them that will eventually turn into consumer loyalty. Loyal customers are easier to retain, and they are also more likely to recommend your business to family and friends, increasing your loyal customer base.

Digital Branding

How to Use Digital Marketing in 2020

Steven on April 2, 2020

Digital marketing is an industry where everything happens with lightning speed.

Every year new trends appear while others pass into history. There is hardly a company that does not invest in marketing activities today. Software development agencies, eCommerce and even your favorite coffee-house at the corner, all use different means to promote their businesses.

Today, it is important to build a whole digital marketing strategy to maximize performance and minimize expenses. Let’s jump right into juicy details and learn what it takes to build successful marketing activities in 2020.

What is Digital Marketing and Why Use It?

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing activities performed on the Internet. Today, it consists of a wide range of marketing efforts and includes content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, paid to advertisements, etc.

Consumers spend a lot of time on the Internet surfing social media, looking up information and entertaining. In most cases, if you need to reach the target audience, the online world is the best place for that.

Digital marketing forms the basis of all marketing activities for a company. Embracing it, you will be able to stay competitive. Moreover, customers expect companies to invest in marketing so that they have the ability to interact with their favorite brands online.

Main Types of Digital Marketing

As was already mentioned, digital marketing consists of different activities that companies engage in to attract new clients and retain existing ones. Let’s take a look at the main types of digital marketing that can be applied in 2020.

Search Engine Optimization

You’ve probably heard a thing or two about SEO. During the process, you need to optimize the website and its content to make it rank higher in search engine results.

Search engine optimization includes both on-page (you perform directly on your website) and off-page activities (one that you perform outside your website but in relation to it). The first type of SEO usually includes working with keywords, meta tags, etc., while the second encompasses link building, guest posting, etc.

Content Marketing

Content marketing directly correlates with SEO. The main purpose of this marketing activity is to improve brand awareness with the help of content, including blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, etc. For example, if your company provides software development services, you can write an article “How much does it cost to develop an app?” explaining to the readers of your blog how your company approaches app development.

Social Media Marketing

The promotion of brand and content through social media channels is a common practice both among big and small companies. Based on the type of business you are running, you might need to engage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Content that your share on social media should be fun, interesting, and created with less formality. Often, companies show the behind-the-scenes life of their companies and people that back-up all their operations.

PPC

Pay-per-click ads are thriving and bringing great results for companies that utilize them wisely. Aside from the most famous Google Ads, almost every social media offers such services. You can set up paid campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even on Quora.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the type of marketing activity when you pay other people or companies for promoting your services and bringing new customers. It is based on providing your affiliate partners with links that direct users to your website. You either pay some percentage from the sales generate from a brought customer or operate on the per-customer-based basis.

Email Marketing

Even though some say that email marketing will be dead soon, today it brings no less significant results than it brought a few years ago. Companies use email marketing as a way to communicate with their audience, promote content, offer discounts, tell about holiday sales, invite to events, and much more.

Influencer Marketing

In 2020, the number of social media users worldwide has surpassed 3.8 billion. For some companies, including eCommerce, fashion, and lifestyle, there is no better way to reach a target audience.

While the creation of your own dedicated group of followers on Facebook or YouTube can take a lot of time, you can speed up the process of building brand awareness with influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing entails cooperation with influencers, people or organizations that are widely known for having an expert level of knowledge and social influence in some specific field. When choosing such influencers, it is important to pay attention to their target audience and whether it relates to your target audience and niche.

Digital Marketing in 2020: Final Thoughts

With thousands of companies offering the same services and products, the need to invest in marketing activities has never been so pressing. There is a saying that if a business is not online, no one will know about it.

Digital marketing is a complex approach to business promotion that requires the participation of a whole group of specialists. Still, for small and medium businesses, it is possible to select up to three types of activities and concentrate all the efforts on them and later move to others.

Author’s Bio

Ana Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a custom software development company in Ukraine. She has been researching the field of technologies to create educative content of distinct topics including app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting, etc. The opportunity to deliver information for people who want to understand more about IT and app development processes is something that inspires Ana. You can get in touch with her on LinkedIn or reach her at ana.lastovetska@mlsdev.com.

Digital Branding Personal Branding

Where Is Content Marketing Going in 2020?

Steven on March 26, 2020

In the field of internet, promoting your content is a race, and ‘content marketing’ is leading this race.

Yes, SEO has made gains in this race over the years, but content marketing is still at the forefront. In fact, other areas of marketing exist only because of content.

Everyone is fisting off content. Isn’t it? Think about it. What would you have optimized if there was no content for search engines to index?

Similarly, if there was no content, what would you post on social media? Nothing. If there was no content, then how would you communicate a message that resonates with an audience?

In content marketing, ‘you never know everything.’ New tactics and strategies emerge every day, and there are thousands of them. You ‘can’t use them all.’ You have to decide on useful trends and include them in their strategies.

In this blog, we will focus on the ‘most popular trends’ of content marketing and what direction it might be headed in 2020 and beyond.

1. Tell your story through visuals

Visual content has been trendy for a long time, and it will remain that way, because, honestly, we’d rather see images than reading. Internet users, especially the millennial generation and Generation Z, are always short on time. You must appeal to their imagination through your interactive content.

According to Pew Research, social platforms that feature visual content, like YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram, reign supreme among adults. In fact, YouTube continues to be the most popular and widely used platform among U.S. adults. The video-sharing platform is used by 73 percent of adults, topping even Facebook.

Source

Additionally, a HubSpot survey revealed that 56 percent of users aged 25-34 years prefer video content from the businesses they support. The numbers are telling you that visual content is trendy, and more marketers will use it in 2020.

But wait, if everyone is using visual content, then how can you stand out in the flock? Simple answer: engage the readers with catchy visuals. Be ingenious and tell your story.

2. Purposeful content

When we look for something on the internet, we only want the content that gives us ‘the exact answer we need.’ In 2020, marketers will increasingly target queries to provide a purposeful answer for users.

They will come up with content tailored to the interests and desires of people. You have to find a balance between the information and the promotional message of the brand.

As the competition in the digital landscape gets fiercer, brands will find it harder to rank for popular keywords. If everyone is creating quality content, marketers will need to adopt ways to set their content apart from the lot.

To stand apart, your content must carry certain qualities. According to Growth Proton.com, effective content must adhere to three core values:

Efficiency
Accuracy
Excellence

Keep your content unique. Add some numbers in it. Keep the tone conversational. You do that, and you will have satisfied customers with answers to all their queries.

3. Memes

Add memes. We all like to chuckle. Don’t we? Memes have emerged as engaging marketing content. It can hit all the right spots in people’s minds. It has a personalized effect that is reflective of your brand’s personality.

Memes are so effective that they are can make you presidents of the U.S. According to Bloomberg, presidential candidates have a meme strategy to reach out to millennials and Generation Z.

Now you know how vital memes are?

The viral tendency of memes makes it a useful tool to increase your reach and widen the customer base. If I like a meme, I will share it. Right? There is your chance of free promotion.

4. Podcasts

Podcasts have been growing exponentially over the past few years. According to the UK’s Office of Communication, 1 in 8 people now listen to podcasts each week. This indicates an increase of 24 percent over 2018, and it will only grow from here.

Statista also reported that the number of podcast listeners in the U.S. has almost tripled within a decade. Podcast publishers now achieve millions of streams and downloads per month.

Increasing demand for audio content means that it is now essential for marketers to initiate a podcast and help their brand establish some credibility within their field of expertise.

5. Optimize content for voice search

The use of voice search is rising thanks to voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. If I can search with voice, why would I write?

According to Voicebot.ai, 33 percent of users searched through voice every month in 2019. In September 2018, the same number was 25 percent. Stats are telling you that people are talking more than they are writing.

Since Google voice search and AI-powered assistants work differently, content marketers need to optimize their content for voice search. Engage with the audience conversationally and create content based on those conversations. Such content will incorporate long-tail keywords and address voice queries of the audience.

6. Double down on your SEO efforts

Your content can be great, but you still have to tell it to people. It will only happen when you rise to the top of SERPs. Now, the focus is on SEO strategies and to deliver an excellent user experience.

This decade will also see more investments in tools that can automate and make SEO easier. Businesses will compete to show up in the featured snippets (also known as Position 0) to stand out from their competitors.

The sky is the limit here. You can achieve ‘top ranking in the search’ through an effective content marketing strategy that addresses the audiences’ needs.

Final words

The above content marketing trends will likely be on every marketer’s mind this year and the years to come. However, businesses don’t need to abandon the strategies that have worked for them in the past.

Utilize these trends and bring simple changes to improve their understanding of your audience and their needs. As they say, “Sometimes, the simple changes bring great success.”

Digital Branding

5 Best Twitter Marketing Tips for Your Startup

Steven on March 10, 2020

Twitter does not just claim one of the top spots as a Social Media Platform, it is also one of the best platforms used by the business for promotions.

While it is being already used by most businesses for promotions, there is no doubt that new and growing businesses can make use of it for more business and increased reach among the masses.

Twitter can play a crucial role in scoring new clients and business for many start-ups that keep popping up almost every day. Several innovative startups begin with great motives and ideas that could really make a difference; however, because of the lack of proper marketing, many of them fail to gain recognition.

Here in this piece, we take a look at the top Twitter Marketing Tips for Startups that can help you make your business flourish, starting right from scratch.

1. Use Right Hashtags: In order to make tweets, you need to find out the hashtags around which you will be creating content. The top priorities should be tweeting with trending hashtags that belong to your industry. This needs constant monitoring of trending hashtags and being creative in order to find a connection between the hashtags and your business. You can also go to the extent of using hashtags that do not belong to your field yet is a hot trending topic.

One more thing that you need to take care of is to make sure not to use more than 2 hashtags in a single tweet. Tweets with 2 or fewer hashtags get more than 20% engagement than the tweets with 3 or more hashtags. You can always make new tweets with fresh content with the other hashtags that you wished to use.

2. Create Engaging Content: We all know Content is the King, and the same applies to Twitter as well. A successful Twitter Marketing Strategy always prioritizes short, crisp, informative, and engaging content. Try to create content that revolves around your brand and the products/services you offer.

The maximum text limit of a tweet is 140 characters; however, it is always recommended to accommodate your content within 100-110 characters. Tweets falling in this category get higher engagement.

Also, try to include photos, videos, and links in your tweets for more engagement. You can even build a tweet around an image or video. You can use multimedia to provide more information to the audience than a tweet allows.

3. Build a Great Profile: Your startup’s profile plays an important role in getting new followers and building trust around your brand.

A great profile has an attractive profile picture, a cover picture with additional information about your startup, a crisp and straight forward bio, your website, and other useful information. You can even add your startup’s location on your profile.

You can also use your profile to pin an important tweet to the top which you would wish the visitors see.

A great profile always helps to build rapport among visitors and pushes them to follow your profile.

4. Engage with Audience and Influencers: Twitter is an engagement-driven community. The more you engage with people, the more you will be noticed. You can mention users in your tweets, reply to their tweets, and even retweet their content for engagement. With more engagement, you will be visible to more Twitter users from different user communities.

Along with your followers and other users, it is also important for you to engage with influencers in your field. These influencers may have many followers interested in your startup and you can gain new followings by regularly being visible with great content.

5. Use Twitter Analytics: Twitter Analytics is a very important tool that can help a startup with more followers and building your business. Analytics will provide engagement information for every tweet made by you. By using Twitter Analytics you will get information regarding which sort of tweet gets more engagement. This way, you can plan and create a Twitter Marketing Strategy with the kind of tweets that will get you more engagement.

Startups can really make use of Twitter to grow their business multiple folds. You can even go for paid promotions on Twitter to get more engagement. I hope these Twitter Marketing tips for startups were helpful. Feel free to contact us in case of any doubt.

Digital Branding Legal Branding Personal Branding

How Can SEO Online Marketing Bring About a Transformation in Your Business?

Steven on March 9, 2020

With the number of marketing strategies that are available for your business, it is probably one of the most difficult jobs to decipher the ones that are going to be the best fit for the organization. Before you decide to spend a bulk amount on any particular strategy, it is a must that you know about all the strategies that are available for your business, especially important ones, which include search engine optimization. Nobody in the business world can deny that SEO is necessary. However, most of them have a similar question, what SEO online marketing is and what is the working pattern? According to https://www.entrepreneur.com, not having a proper strategy for onsite content is not a good idea when it comes to SEO online marketing.

SEO online marketing

SEO is a popular marketing strategy and it is extremely effective as well. The results of search engine optimization can indeed take a little time to show up but it is going to be worth your wait. Search engine optimization helps in improving the online presence of your business, which helps in making sure that you are having a good ranking in the search engines.

When your website has a high rank in search engines, it is undoubtedly going to yield a lot more clicks from all the users. Based on the clicks that you are receiving, people are going to look at the website, and when they look at the website, they will come across services and products that are going to interest them.

Apart from that, when your site has a high rank, you are going to come across important revenue and conversions. Online SEO marketing is known to combine both off the page as well as on-page strategies, which work together to make sure that the job is done.

On-page SEO is the change that can be made physically to the website to make sure that the website has a high rank. This includes:

Targeting keywords and implementing them
Creation of content
Optimizing page speed

Off-page SEO refers to the different strategies, which do not take place on the website for increasing ranking. The examples include:

Link building
Email marketing
Marketing on social media

When you decide to hire professionals of online impact marketing, they are going to use both so that you get the ideal results.

Given below is a list of the reasons why online marketing can help in changing the business for good.

Thousands of people are searching in Google constantly

When you are implementing online SEO within the marketing strategy, you are marketing the business to numerous people, and the figure is almost 67000 people per second. When you are using SEO for marketing services and products, you are making the offerings of your company available to a huge user base, which will provide the chance of making sure that customers are interested in your business. This is going to result in better and higher conversions. Without SEO, there is hardly any chance that the target audience is going to stumble upon your website and purchase products.

People ignore paid advertisements

Few paid advertisements indeed provide an amazing way of advertising the business but according to statistics, 80% of the users do not pay attention to paid advertisements that appear within the search results. This means that you have a much better chance of target consumers clicking on the website if it is getting displayed organically within the search results. Organic ranking means that the website has to be there as a result right below the paid advertisements. You will not have to invest money if you are interested in ranking organically, however, one important requirement that you cannot avoid is a great SEO campaign.

Companies are constantly implementing SEO

If you are interested in staying many steps ahead of the competitors, search engine optimization is undoubtedly a must. 61% of organizations have stated that the biggest priority that they have is growing the campaigns. This is undoubtedly a high percentage and if you are not opting for SEO campaigns, your business is going to fall behind. It is going to be overshadowed by those companies, which focus on SEO strongly. This is why you need to make sure that you have a great campaign prepared.

SEO helps in boosting conversions

When compared with traditional marketing, the rate of conversion of search engine optimization is extremely high. With the help of any traditional marketing strategy, you are going to see a 1.7% conversion rate. However, when it comes to search engine optimization, you are going to observe the conversion rate of 14.6%. This is a huge difference and illustrates the reason why SEO is a great marketing strategy.

Local SEO is effective

If you are running your business locally, SEO has to be added to the marketing strategy without any second thoughts. After the users search for a local business, 88% are going to visit the business and make a decision within the next 24 hours. Therefore, to make this happen, you need to ensure that you are implementing a great SEO strategy.

Can SEO online marketing be done by the business?

You need to understand that there are several dynamic parts associated when we are discussing SEO. Most of the business owners have one question, which is whether SEO can be handled within the organization itself. It is important to know that a single person can handle the campaign but to make sure that the results are coming; enormous hard work has to be put in. SEO is not at all a strategy that you set and forget about, you have to take constant care and monitor the results. Since the business has different aspects to be taken care of, it is always suggested that a professional does the job. However, if you want to do it on your own, make sure that you are focusing on the changing tactics and strategies of SEO constantly.

Conclusion

Without ideal SEO strategies, your business will hardly get the limelight that you are interested in getting for it. Make sure that you understand all that has been mentioned above so that you can plan your strategies and implement them accordingly.

Legal Branding Personal Branding

8 Effective Strategy to Improve Your Business Growth

Steven on March 6, 2020

So you decided to grow your business. But the question is how?

There are a lot of probable growth strategies that are available, everything from exploring new markets, crafting new products, to making an acquisition. Most organizations make their own unique combination of strategies.

What’s important here is to select the best approach that is well-tailored for your overall strategic plan.

That’s because it is easy to lose sight of the big picture, especially if you have placed your focus on non-strategic growth opportunities.

In this post, we will explore eight effective strategies in improving your business growth:

1. Invest in systems

If you’re trying to do everything on your own, then chances are, you’ll be limiting yourself to the prospect of growth.

A business that’s powered by systems is one that could handle multi-layered demands of expansion. That’s why it’s crucial to have a solid CRM, as well as a powerful e-commerce software that helps you focus on the important aspects of business expansion and growth.

Check your current operations and see what elements are repetitive or monotonous. Also, make it your objective to outsource and automate as much as you can. That way you can focus on the growth of your business.

2. Improve your homepage

Apart from improving your SEO efforts, and making purchases and sign-ups easy, make sure that you have a perfect homepage as well.

A majority of visitors who land on your site aren’t ready to buy anything. It’s also likely that they’ll land on your homepage. If it looks cluttered and difficult to navigate, then they’ll move on to your competitors.

If your web copy is terrible and it doesn’t show your product’s value, then they won’t be won over. If this something that you can’t do alone, you can tap other agencies’ help by typing something like “outsource website design Philippines” on Google for example.

Sometimes, making a simple change, such as making improvements on your homepage, can boost your revenue tremendously.

3. Focus on analytics

Large companies and tech giants like Facebook and Amazon have realized the value of using data. You should, too.

As a business owner who owns a website and social media pages, you can use freemium tools to gather insights from your customers.

For instance, using Google Analytics helps you gather insights on page visits, average time on site, bounce rate, how an audience arrives on your website, and so on. That way, you’ll know where to focus your marketing efforts.

Another analytics tool that you can use is Unbounce, especially if you wanted to know how you can optimize your landing pages and boost your conversions.

4. Research the competition

If you’re figuring out what you can offer your target customers, then you have to research your competition.

You can use tools like AdBeat and Similar Web, to be able to gain x-ray lenses to your ad copy, all your landing pages, and other stages in the funnel.

It also lets you uncover the online strategy of advertisers. Search for ads that are running for the longest time, and try to emulate those. That’s one of the best ways to scale your business.

If it’s working for your competitors, then chances are, it will work for you as well.

5. Always have a backup plan

As your business grows over time and processes become more and more complex, making quick adjustments can be rather difficult.

Having a backup plan in place in case there are emergencies and unforeseeable circumstances could help you better deal with inevitable bumps along the road.

6. Build an email list

One of the effective ways in growing your business is by building an email list. It means that you need to have a lead magnet. And if you have a lead magnet, it means you need to create a sales funnel.

See companies like GetResponse, Aweber, ConstantContact, Drip, and ConvertKit to build and manage your list.

7. Form strategic partnerships

Forming strategic partnerships with the right companies can certainly make a difference. It allows you to reach a large customer base quickly and easily.

But identifying the key companies to partner with is often easier said than done.

Here’s a piece of advice: Look for companies that complement your own. Get in touch with them and propose to them opportunities on how you can work together.

8. Host a webinar

Webinars are an effective way to promote a product or a service. It can also help a business scale quickly.

Webinars also have an automated selling tool for taking any service or product in the market and reaching a large audience fast.

Overall, they’re a fantastic medium for captivating your audience to make a purchase.

Final Thoughts

Scaling your business is hard and needs considerable time and effort. You’ll be wearing many hats, and you’ll be interacting with customers regularly. Eventually, all of these would take a toll on you.

Fortunately, there are ways to grow your business.

There are hundreds of resources about business growth strategies available online. Picking the right ones and applying them to your business will take your business to the next level, as you grow over time.

Digital Branding

Visual Marketing: The Most Compelling Conversion Tool

Steven on February 18, 2020

Content marketing is an unusually compelling marketing tool for modern trades. However, a piece of written content that lacks visual appeal can be highly disengaging for your readers. So, what do you need to include in your content marketing strategy?

Evidently, you should include visuals to your content for increased audience engagement.

However, there are varying opinions on the type of visuals that one can pair with the written pieces of, often bland, content.

In this piece, you shall come across some of the most effective visual strategies, including which can enhance the overall returns on your investment.

But, before we get to the types of visuals that you can use, it is vital to learn a bit more about visual marketing.

Why Visual Marketing?

“Visual memories are the strongest memories!”

Various statistical data shed light on why visual content is more effective in improving the conversion rate. Some of them include:

The human brain can process ‘visuals’ 60,000 times faster than text-based content. This is because visuals can make the user feel like they are communicating with the author face to face.
Out of the total information that human brain processes throughout a day, 90% of them are visuals.
Although only humans can communicate verbally, still most of the communications are bland in the absence of tone. Visuals, on the other hand, are amazingly efficient in communicating a piece of information without using tone.

These facts might not make sense to you. But, if you consider the conventional marketing tactics, you can acknowledge the effectiveness of visuals in converting sales.

For instance, TV commercials are still the most effective tool when it comes to earning loyalty for brands. Simply because these short visuals can appeal to the viewers emotionally, as explained by https://c-istudios.com/video-film-production-services/, professional filmmakers. There’s no surprise to it that visual content is spreading across other platforms including Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube that have promising returns on investment, especially in the modern marketing mix.

By now, you might have decided to include visuals into your content marketing. But, knowing what type of visuals you can include can simplify the efforts for you. Thus, bringing in better returns for your investment.

The 6 Types Of Visuals That You Can Tap Into

Choosing the right type of visual can affect the overall effectiveness of your content on your audience. It all depends upon your target audience, their interests, and their expertise with the language. However, you should create your content that can easily tap into, at least, 80% of your audience.

Here are the types you are looking for.

1. Images are the easiest visuals

Some marketers opine that content with images receives 94% more views as compared to the one that lacks visual appeal. The key here is to break your content into short parts and fill the gaps with high-quality images.

More importantly, you’ll need to keep the images as relevant to the part as possible. Since a majority of online user taps into information using small screens (the mobile devices), the time a user pays heed to content is shorter than ever. Therefore, putting up long blocks of content can buzz off your actual reader that can potentially be converted into sales.

So, if your target audience is precisely mobile users, including images into your content can be highly fulfilling. Since these are the easiest form of visuals that you can tap into, you may not even require any expert mediation.

2. Videos can promote face-to-face interaction

If you intend to offer your audience with solutions to any problems that relate to your products, videos can come handy. For instance, you can search Youtube for common issues associated with your motorbike. And surprisingly, the solutions offered in these videos really work.

Usually, such videos are put up by individual bloggers and influencers. Imagine if you can tap into such schemes and offer your patrons with solutions to some common troubleshooting and that too under your brand name. Your brand is sure to earn the trust of your customers.

Moreover, such tactics can also help penetrate new markets. Since online users prefer content that can connect with them emotionally, and offer solutions to their problems, tapping into video content can improve returns for your marketing efforts, exponentially.

3. Infographics can help with minimalistic content

Although several marketers suggest creating highly informative content, and that too over 1000 words, often it can be difficult to curate such a lengthy piece of content. Mainly because of the shortage of information available in the relevant context.

In case, you are also struggling with the same problems, you can tap into infographics. These are incredibly effective in communicating maximum information without using many words. But, there’s a catch. It requires a lot of expertise and creativity to develop such images that can convey the information precisely, in the shortest forms.

However, once you are habitual to the basics of infographics, and the practices involved, you may steer through, effortlessly. As the name suggests, these visuals easily provide information through graphic illustrations. Thus, it is most suitable for the type of audience where time is of the essence. Short and precise information delivered in a minimalistic form.

4. Memes are great for entertaining your audience

Particularly, if you are leveraging your audience over social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, the entertainment aspect of your content is of prime importance. Since most of the social media users tap into the channels for getting rid of routine monotony, if your content is traditionally promotional, you can expect your audience to ignore your content.

This is where creating memes can be highly beneficial. Several leading bloggers and web marketers suggest that memes receive more impressions on social media as compared to any other form of content.

Therefore, if your audience is preferably engaging with entertaining content, you should include memes into your marketing plan.

5. Presentations for communicating Intricate Info

It is needless to say, statistical charts are highly effective in giving elaborate information in a short and easy-to-understand manner. However, such intricate information is usually sought by users that belong to a highly skilled and expert niche.

For instance, if your business is a supplier to retailers, then you should cater to your audience with highly accurate data. Especially, the kind of data that provides them insight into the modern trends of your trade.

This is where presentations can come handy. Ideally, your presentations should include bar charts, pie charts, and graphs with statistics related to your trade.

6. Screenshots to simplify the process

In case, you are planning to provide your audience with a step-by-step guide, you may need to explain the process in as much detail as possible. But, no matter how much detailed content you put up, it may still fail to provide the users with a clear idea of the process.

Including screenshots can simplify your content. The key is to break your content in simple steps and provide with as many screenshots as you possibly can retrieve. This would not just help your user understand the content, but also simplify the follow-up for them.

For instance, if you are creating a blog post to help your audience troubleshoot a software, you should include the steps, explaining where to click and after what steps, in chronological order.

In the end, it all boils down to the audience that you are trying to target. No matter, how detailed verbal content you put up before your audience, unless it intrigues their interest, they are very likely to bounce back from your content. So inevitably, including visual content to your marketing strategies is only beneficial for the effectiveness of your plan.

Digital Branding

Modern Email Marketing Tactics: Impact of Emails in 2020

Steven on January 13, 2020

At a time when everybody else is talking about memorable memes and quirky tweets, you must be wondering why on earth are you reading about email marketing? Well, let me tell you why:

Because it’s still working, that’s why!

People are so curious to buy Hotmail accounts on UseViral and other sources. Yes, you heard that right. Email marketing is still effective by all means!

With that said, it’s important to understand email marketing strategy has changed dramatically in recent years, and if you’re expecting the 2000s email marketing strategy to work in current times, you’re are highly mistaken. After all, a direct sales offer via email is nowadays led to the spam message folder and left unread until eternity – in fact, statistics tell us in March 2019, 56% of global email traffic was based on spam messages.

Just like the times we are living in, email marketing has come to utilize all modern ways available – if intelligently employed email marketing can successfully run appealing and informative campaigns and not just end up being categorized as Spam.

Had not to email marketing been modernized and kept upgraded through recent years, perhaps it would not have survived the current age, rather rendered too limited in its impact. If you want an email marketing strategy that brings fruitful results to the table, you need to be aware of certain tactics and trends as you make your way into 2020.

Don’t forget, times are calling upon you to

Blend with the Trend.

Days when notifications are badly ignored, emails still get a response. This is because emails are considered important. Almost everybody uses email and deems it significant enough to open immediately. Talk about boomers or Gen Z, politicians are to their modern lives.

With the following email marketing tactics, you can emphasize any preceding impact to boost up your business marketing in no time:

1. Start Connecting with Your Audience

If you’re old enough to drink, I bet you must have experienced receiving tons of emails asking you to become part of a veteran community. And the baffled look on your face must have shouted out loud that you knew nothing about it – not to forget how you must have wondered about the poor results of bad segmentation in email marketing.

Modern-day email marketing has urged marketers to understand their audience. And by understanding, we don’t mean collecting email addresses rather doing what you need to do in order to up your email marketing game i.e. knowledge about the interests and preferences of your target audience. Other than this, email segmentation can be conducted based on recipients’ gender, age, location, etc.

Such segmentation based on interest has proven to be extremely beneficial for email marketing campaigns; also with greater media relevance, open rates are far more than inscribed rates.

2. Talk to Your Audience

Do you know what keeps the audience interested? Content that speaks to them!

In older times, emails, even when sent to the right audience, ended up making the recipients disinterested in a product because of the utterly boring language employed in the email content. This brings us to one of the latest trends in email marketing i.e., customization.

After segmenting your targeted audience and gaining all the relevant information about what they like and dislike, it’s necessary to customize emails. Customization helps businesses relate to recipients at a personal level – and that in turn inculcates a sense of trust among the audience as people tend to feel more connected with the brand and by way of that with the business organization.

I understand making emails customized enough to appeal to each individual is A LOT of work. HARD WORK. However, what you can do is segregate recipients based on generation; for instance, the millennial generation tends to find precise and informative messages combined with a visual more appealing.

3. Be Direct and Give a Call-to-Action

In older times, one of the most annoying elements in emails was the lack of clarity of purpose.

Now that you’ve segmented your recipients, received the knowledge of their interests and preferences, and generated an email that has attracted attention, what next? Well, now it’s time for you to focus on the core purpose. The clarity of your purpose will reflect through an effective call-to-action included in your email.

Whether you want your readers to like your Facebook page, subscribe to newsletters or visit your website, you need to lead them towards that objective – and that can be done via a striking Call-to-Action.

It has been observed by replacing “find your solution” with “learn more” the click-through rate in emails rose by 77%.

4. Exercise Prudence with Email Blasts

As per the latest email statistics published by expanded ramblings, an average office employee receives almost 121 emails per day, which is A LOT. If you don’t want your email to end up in one of the spam folder piles, you need to exercise control over the number of emails you send out to your subscribers.

Take Away

The previous decade instructed us in many ways that we may benefit our businesses with – digital and social media marketing, high-speed internet with cox deals, etc. to say less. However, it did take some serious effort to upgrade email marketing enough for it to survive in contrast to many foregoing elements of online marketing. Modern-day email marketing tactics, some of which we have touched upon in today’s write up, tend to restore marketers’ faith in the impact of emails as a marketing medium.

Digital Branding

How HubSpot Inbound Marketing and its robust CRM helps to build Strong Customer Relations?

Steven on December 16, 2019

Building a strong relationship with your customers is an essential phase of business. If you can satisfy your customer’s demands, it can be said that you are near the closing phase to achieve success and generate revenue.

Organizations prefer to use different marketing tools to maintain strong customer relations. These tools help to organize business strategies and enhance the marketing approach by focusing on customers’ interests.

Every company looks for the tool to optimize their tasks, manage the information, track customers’ interests and be on top of this competitive world.

Mail Chimp, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Trello, KISS metrics, etc are the most used marketing tools. From all the above, HubSpot- all in one marketing tool commonly used for the purpose of sales, marketing, and customer services. More than 1500 companies are using HubSpot in approximately 90 countries. Because of its popularity, you can understand there are a lot of HubSpot alternatives as well.

Source: HubSpot

Are you a business person or a marketer? If yes! Then you might have heard about HubSpot inbound marketing tool and its robust features that attract the marketers most.

HubSpot Marketing is totally based upon the inbound strategy and it uses the inbound methodology for any marketing automation.

Let’s have a glimpse idea about an inbound marketing strategy.

Today, Inbound marketing is leading the business world as it is the best way to attract, delight, and engage clients. By using HubSpot inbound holistic strategy, you can easily build trust to enhance your business revenue and convert your potential customers into leads.

Are you currently using any marketing tool to nurture your customers and manage your business activities? Are you the one who wants to develop trusted relationships by engaging more with the customers?

HubSpot’s inbound marketing platform will definitely fulfill your desires as it is considered the hidden gem in developing a better relationship with customers.

HubSpot CRM termed (Customer relationship management) is a sales automation tool that helps in accelerating your company revenue by managing your organizational details.

In this target-based world, most organizations prefer to go for Free services to proliferate their ROI. Are you the one who gets attracted to FREE! FREE! FREE!

Close your eyes, migrate to HubSpot, and start learning its CRM functions.

Let’s evaluate more about HubSpot CRM.

There are robust features of HubSpot CRM that makes it identical to other management and customer relationship tool.

As per the survey conducted by TechNewsWorld, more than 500 organizations are using HubSpot CRM over other contact management tools to realize their goals and achieve business success.

Source: TechNewsWorld

HubSpot CRM Divergent Features

Let’s take a look at its identical features which grab the attention of marketers towards itself over other customer service tools.

SalesForce Automation

Automating the activities is an easy and quick way to complete your task. It will save your company time, drive growth and reduce your efforts.

WANNA! Automate your marketing services?

HubSpot CRM has an inbuilt automation feature which makes it different from other management tools.

This feature helps you to manage sales opportunities, sales pipeline of individuals, business tasks and activities. You can also assign the due dates directly from google calendars with just a click.

We all know that Emails are the most common way to communicate with customers. Instead of sending individual emails to customers, you can create contact-based workflows to generate automatic emails to notify your customers and interact on a daily basis.

HubSpot CRM is a centralized tool that helps to easily store, manage and view customers details from anywhere. You can also do the amendments and manage your customer’s contacts effectively.

Customer Support

The primary objective of the organization is to manage the customer’s information in such a way that they do not have to face any difficulty while maintaining content and get notified with updated information.

Do you wish the same?

HubSpot CRM will assist you to manage call script, track the customer’s issues and deliver a proper response to clients for clearing their doubts.

It is essential to optimize customer support as it will help you to become a good marketer. By using the Support analysis feature of HubSpot you can analyze various customer support activities such as customer experience, ways to deal with difficult situations, etc. to gain in-depth knowledge about customers’ interest.

Once, you are able to evaluate the customer’s interest, you can build deeper relationships with the client by providing informative and good quality content.

Reporting and Analytics

Tracking your sales revenue plays a significant role in generating business productivity.

Till now, I can’t visualize any tool which provides both reporting and analytics feature with other management tasks other than HubSpot.

However, HubSpot CRM will help you to evaluate your sales revenue projections via forecasting, reporting, and dashboard feature. By using this feature you can create ad-hoc reports to maintain your company’s informative data.

Dashboard feature of HubSpot CRM helps you to keep a glance at your website performance, its Likes, dislikes, etc.

Therefore, you can easily evaluate whether your customers are interested in availing of your services or not.

Integration

It is another feature of HubSpot which makes it dissimilar from other tools.

Currently, organizations that are unaware of this feature are still finding a way to get more traffic from social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram being on the marketing platform because there are near about 2.32 billion potential customers who are currently active on Facebook.

HubSpot is the best marketing tool that integrates itself with other social networking sites. Once you integrate social sites with HubSpot, you can directly import the client’s information from one platform to another in a structured form. It will further improve your system functionality.

Currently, using other sales marketing tools for building customers’ trust? Worried about how to migrate with HubSpot CRM?

Fear not.

HubSpot CRM provides the feature of integrating with other customer service and sales management tools such as Salesforce.

You just need to follow the steps to install the HubSpot- Salesforce integration or to connect your Facebook ads to HubSpot.

Templates, and scheduling

HubSpot also includes the characteristic feature of making email templates scheduling. This feature helps you to arrange your organizational activities such as meeting with your clients, lead and campaign management, etc. appropriately.

HubSpot CRM helps you in creating deals, tasks, and contact insights to build a better relationship with your customers without paying a single penny.

Till today I didn’t find a tool that can perform all such activities at one particular place. I believe that it is the best way to grow your business sales without making any compromise with time and cost.

Due to all these alarming features of HubSpot CRM, It gets the Top-1 CRM software product award and also the best CRM software in the 2018 award from finances online.

Source: finances online

All these divergent features of the HubSpot platform will help to provide relevant content to the customers at the right time appropriately.

How HubSpot CRM helps small business?

Now, let’s run down to the benefits that small businesses can reap by using HubSpot CRM.

Provides plenty of Free services
Social media integration to successful outreach to generate more traffic.
Website integration to notify your leads
Centralize and manage data at one place
Helps to track prospect activity
Keep track of communication, services, and products.
Helps to get real-time updates
Forecast your sales process
Organize the contact information of your clients, etc.

By availing all these benefits, you can upgrade your customer retention rate by offering better services to your potential customers.

Additional Information

Including all these features, HubSpot- Marketing tool provides some additional services which will help your team members in performing business tasks more accurately, effectively and efficiently.

Pay little and get more!

HubSpot is the only tool that provides a lot of services at such an affordable price.

Take a look at the HubSpot CRM Pricing plan.

HubSpot Plan	Cost
HubSpot CRM Free	Free
Starter	$50 per month
Professional	$400 per month
Enterprise	$1200 per month

Being a HubSpot user, I recommended you to avail HubSpot Sales Hub features for managing more specific elements of your campaign and improve the connection with your desired customers. Furthermore, it can be said that-

The more your Pay, the better you Get!

Final Remarks

Without any traces of doubt, one can say that HubSpot CRM is the precious gem of HubSpot Inbound Marketing and Sales automation tool.

To generate more clicks in the first go, Use HubSpot CRM because, in this dynamic world, it is the only tool by which business leaders and marketers can perform various tasks at one centralized place.

Therefore, to run in the race of the marketing world and reach on the curve, you need to predict the top 5 social media marketing tactics as it will help you to define and outreach your customer’s interest in 2019.

By looking at the trends and interests of persona- it can be said that execution, formation, management, and organization of content are essential as it helps you to understand, measure, monitor, identify, map and nurture your leads to enhance your marketing, sales, and services process in a collaborative form.

I hope all the defined facts and figures are sufficient to support how HubSpot, especially HubSpot CRM, helps marketers to build an acquaintance with their customers who are going to be their sales promoters in 2019.

About the author

Usman Raza is the co-founder of a Christian Social Media Agency and marketing strategist working with various brands online. Usman is the content marketing manager at SeedX Inc in Los Angeles, Best PSD to WordPress, and Nano Hearing Aids. He is devoted to helping small businesses bridge success gaps by providing in-depth, actionable advice on digital marketing, SEO, and small business growth. Follow him on Twitter @usmanintrotech.

Digital Branding

Why Social Media Marketers Should Rely Less on Facebook

Steven on December 4, 2019

Social media marketing is a must these days. No longer is social media a simple website or application on the Internet for connecting with people in different parts of the world, no matter the timezone. But rather, social media has taken over digital marketing these days. In fact, it’s one of the most effective ways on how to promote and sell a brand’s product or service. JSMM is a social media marketing agency that specializes in a lot of digital marketing tactics, so they can pretty much attest to how social media helps accelerate a brand’s interaction and engagement with users, as well as its online visibility.

One of the most popular social media platforms today is Facebook. Facebook is arguably the most powerful and most used social networking site ever to exist. With Facebook, you can connect with your family and friends, collaborate with colleagues, and meet new people. You may even buy Facebook likes and comments to achieve rapid success. That’s why a lot of companies globally use this platform as one of their primary channels to market, promote, and sell. More than that, it also helps in establishing a stronger online presence.

However, some experts may not agree with Facebook being an effective and efficient tool in social media marketing. In fact, social media marketers are even advised to rely less on Facebook. Curious? Here’s why:

Ads Are Getting Too Costly

Startup businesses that rely on social media marketing in today’s digital era can attest to this. Lately, Facebook ads are starting to get costly, with little to no improvement in their overall performance. While this is not an easy feat for small businesses, larger and established companies can better provide a budget for this. That is, of course, if you’re willing to splurge on Facebook ads. Might I suggest you do your research first and plan ahead so you can allocate finances and budget, and, be able to pay for this commitment in the long run.

Consumes So Much Time

While there are automated Facebook services available to do the job for you, these programs and software can’t do everything still. At the end of the day, you have to rely on yourself, your team, and your skills to be able to respond to most of your customer concerns, queries, and feedback. On top of that, you also have to check-in on your analytics, analyze reports, and such for you to be able to improve in delivering and optimizing your content.

In turn, if you fail to manage your reputation on Facebook, then your supposed social media marketing strategy could potentially hurt you in the end.

Insufficient Privacy

These past years, Facebook has had issues regarding privacy, and it is, in fact, one of the major concerns of most Facebook users – whether personal account holders or companies. Although Facebook has now simplified its privacy settings, it’s still safe that you stay out of this platform if you’re trying to build your brand’s name. One incident of getting hacked, and you permanently damage your business’ reputation. Now, you wouldn’t want that. So, since the stakes are high, you might as well opt for other social networking platforms where you can secure your brand like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

Slowly Losing A Hold On Its Marketing

Long gone are the days of Facebook skyrocketing in the field of social media marketing. Today, more and more marketers shift from Facebook to other social networking platforms simply because Facebook has lost its charm in marketing. Originally designed to be an interactive platform where people could share information, Facebook has gone downhill by losing control of who posts such circulating information and what exactly is included in these posts.

Of course, as a marketer, you intend to uphold and protect the image and reputation of your brand. However, today, it has become so easy for random users to post malicious content on your wall – a few of which may possibly come from competitors, and that’s the sad reality of it.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, a lot of social media platforms like Facebook are provided for marketers all over the world. However, before fully immersing your social media marketing strategies on these platforms, make sure you’ve done enough research so as to avoid spending on platforms that wouldn’t and couldn’t bring your business any good. Social media marketing plays an important role in your business, and, in fact, takes up a huge chunk of your budget and overall performance. The least you can do is integrate your company with tools and platforms that do not deliver as what they have promised.