Categories
Content Marketing Social Media Tips

4 Ways to Improve the Visual Aspects of Your Online Presence?

Maybe you haven’t thought about it before, but your online presence is predominantly composed of a series of visuals used in your digital marketing strategy. If you have a podcast or YouTube channel up and running, there also an audio aspect. Anyhow, I dare to say that at least 80 percent of customer and client experiences online start with an engaging visual.

It wasn’t a mere coincidence that content marketing has flourished over the past years. Content marketers have been building their entire strategy on the fact that 90 percent of the information that comes to the brain is visual. Let’s see what you can do to improve the visual aspects of your online presence to delight your customers, improve engagement and conversion rates, and in the end, extend your reach.

Homepage & other website pages

Your official website is a cornerstone of your digital marketing efforts and a point from which you can extend your online presence.

A home page is the first visual aspect of your online presence that your visitors will have face-to-face communication with. And it better be engaging, because in the next few seconds a visitor may as well leave it. So, if you want to make it more engaging, you should incorporate a relevant background image, logo, strong typefaces, short converting message and a call-to-action button.

Since the logo and background image are the most prominent visuals, let’s see how you can get improved versions of the ones you might be already using.

Background Image

The background image is the container of your homepage content. It has to be powerful, engaging and yet not intrusive. Since it adds to aesthetics, you have to use the best photo possible. You can get your hands on a photo taken or designed by a professional photographer or illustrator from the abundance of stock images online.

There are plenty of stock image websites online, so feel free to visit any of them. After you purchase the license, you are free to use it on your website. This method is way more affordable than hiring a professional designer or illustrator to do a custom job for you.

You will be surprised by the number of high-quality images and illustrations on sale. These can also be used to advertise your products, as well as on the other web pages on your website and, as you will see later, in your blog post.

Furthermore, high-quality images can help you to establish credibility among online content consumers. In fact, the quality of visuals is the number one criteria for assessing the credibility of the content and website. In one of the studies of the Stanford Web Credibility project, 46 percent of participants said exactly that.

Logo

The logo is a very important visual aspect, one that serves as a seed that your brand strategy will grow from. A place where visitors expect to see a company logo is in the upper left corner of your website, and that’s exactly where you will see it on most websites.

Now, if you run a small business, you might think that you don’t have the budget to finance a professional custom-tailored logo as they are pricey. But did you know that you can get a fantastic-looking and affordable logo created by a professional logo designer?

About Us

Before engaging in a relationship with a company, consumers like to get to know it. Actually, to be precise, 52% of visitors do. This is what the About Us page is for. To make it more appealing to the visitors and easier to relate to your business, including different forms of media. Why? Because if they have already bothered to visit it, you should reward them with attention-grabbing content.

 

Things worth considering:

 

Individual and team photos – these will help visitors to visualize your company. If you feel like adding some character to your brand, you can include photos of your team in action in-house, as well as shots of you having fun together outside the office.

Videos – a video on this page will help you to convey a powerful message in a matter of seconds for those that can’t be bothered to read.

Blog

Do you know that 38 percent of marketers say that blogging is the most important form of content for their business? Visual marketing comes in a close second with 37 percent, perhaps because articles with visual elements get 94 percent more views than the plain text ones. These facts lead to a simple conclusion: by incorporating visuals in your blog posts, you will increase its engagement potential.

The most common visuals used in the blog posts are photographs, illustrations, memes, and infographics. As I’ve already mentioned, a great source of images and illustrations for your blog are stock images. You should keep in mind that there are few rules to follow when it comes to incorporating these into your content strategy.

The rule of the thumb is consistency. The visuals should be consistent with your overall website design and theme. If you decide to go with illustrations, stick with your decision and try not to diverge from the plan by suddenly mixing them up with photographs. Using the right images from the same art category will help your visitors connect with your brand and this will boost your conversion rates.

The second rule restricts the amount of visual content found in a blog post. The cover image should be found in all of your blog posts. Besides a compelling headline, the cover image is the next thing that should compel the user to click and read the article. Additionally, the cover image should always be relevant to the article theme.

Generally, you should refrain from flooding your articles with images unless they complement the general purpose of your content. For instance, guide articles should contain screenshots or “how to” images, so that readers can visualize the solution and easily follow through.

When it comes to infographics, you should know that they are very powerful visual elements that you should leverage. They present a powerful synergy of data and images, and since people process images much faster than text, they can really engage visitors and make them want to stay until they are done “reading” an infographic.

YouTube Posts

YouTube has become the most popular platform for uploading and sharing video content. There are more than 1.3 billion YouTube users and 50 percent of those who are subscribed to channels would drop whatever they were doing to take a break and watch a new video on the channel they’ve subscribed to.

Becoming active on YouTube will definitely help you to extend your online presence, depending on how much time and money you put into it. Creating compelling videos is not an easy task. It is something that you will have to learn over time and get equipment if you want to appear professional to your audience.

YouTube is much more than sharing your business/product/service promotional video. Don’t forget about the social media aspect of it. Here are few tips on how to use YouTube for your business in order to increase engagement and conversion rates:

  • Start regularly uploading new video content – This is the best way to start boosting your business credibility and visibility. Don’t have any ideas? Post interviews with staff, create series of behind the scene videos, break webinars and webcasts down into episodes, etc.
  • Leverage the video description – Make sure to include your website link in the description below the video and ask viewers to go and check it out if they are interested. Things can start happening if you politely ask the audience to like, subscribe and click the links. The video description should be short (2-3 sentences) and informative. Make sure to stick a keyword or two when you are writing it.
  • Don’t neglect the comment section – This is where you can directly engage in the conversation with your audience. Stay tuned and make sure to use the momentum and respond to the questions. Refrain from posting generic responses. Instead, personalize your interaction.

 

If this sounds like too much, don’t worry, there is an alternative. You can identify the most popular YouTuber in your industry and ask him to make a review video on one of your products or services. This way you will tap into his audience and video producing skills and drive more traffic to your website.

Social Media

In the end, we come to social media marketing. Social media platforms have been used for business promotion for quite some time now. If you are not using visuals in your social media marketing strategy you should definitely start doing it, because competitors are already ahead of you. Actually, 74 percent of social media marketers use visuals in their SMM efforts.

If you are already doing it, don’t get too confident, there is always room for the improvement. Do you share blog post on your social media profile? Make sure to keep at least 20% of your blog posts shared through your official social media profile. It is better if you write a unique post message for each share. And, of course, include the cover image of the article. To spice up your visuals, you can add a portrait photo of the writer.

Infographics are also a viable content option for your posts on social media. They are engaging and can get a lot of shares, thus driving the attention exactly where you need it.

Since social media hits the sweet spot between community interaction and visual presentations, you should organize quizzes and giveaways every once in a while.

If you want to succeed in these efforts you absolutely have to look at visuals as an important asset to your digital marketing campaign. By carefully picking the right visuals to represent the information you want to convey, you will not only increase engagement and conversion but also overall user experience, thus keeping the visitors returning for more.

 

Author Bio:

 

Dereck Gligorijevic is a blogger who is always willing to assist you in making a beautiful online home for your next big adventure!

Categories
Etsy Marketing Marketing Small Business

How to get more traffic to your Etsy store?

How to get more traffic to your Etsy store?

A common question and a confusing one at that!

Getting traffic to an Etsy store is surprisingly tricky and is often unyielding. This is because it is difficult to gauge the customer sentiment and gain a sustainable traction at the beginning of the Etsy journey.

With that aspect in mind, we’ve prepared a little cocktail of certain steps and methods that a frustrated Etsy seller could follow to get some definitive traffic to their Etsy stores.

So, without further ado, let’s look at some of the best way(s) to get quality traffic to an Etsy store –

Cross channel promotions

Cross channel promotions involve advertisement, organic promotions and marketing on different channels. Feature your products on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and Youtube – creating a comprehensive outlook for your products.
Moreover, using a cross channel promotion strategy can help you gauge any interested users on the distinct platforms and make considerably higher sales.

Here are a few to-dos when working on Cross platform promotions –

  1. YouTube: Place your product in a conducive environment. Possibly one that complements the product and highlights its needs and working. For example – You could showcase a Blender in a kitchen. How it so easy to use it and how it’s so gorgeous and worth the customer’s time.
    Or, presenting a curtain in a posh house and how buying it would decorate the customer’s living room. Create a montage that’ll entice the audience. Tell a story if you feel it aligns with your product marketing.
  2. Pinterest: Pinning images of the products, with the prices. Create boards, join groups and pitch your product in a subtle manner. Do not make a hard sell.
  3. Instagram: Another image centric platform. Use it to display your images in a holistic manner. Adhering to the trends and the desires of the audience. Your image quality and personality matters the most. So, pick a customer persona and pitch them your product. You can also showcase a person using the product in their own habitat.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is basically getting hold of an Influencer (a person to whom people listen to, atleast when it comes to a service/product) and asking them to pitch your product to their followers.

It may be a little conceited but Influencer marketing helps your product gain a spotlight (for a short period of time). This can help boost customer confidence in your product and let you bask in the glory of increasing sales while you work on your store.

Oh and a radical, highly-followed influencer will cost more. So try and strike a balance between the expense and the expectations.

Etsy optimization: Keywords, Search, SEO

Kind of a No brainer. You need to pitch your customers (prospects really as they haven’t purchased your products yet). To pitch in a manner that isn’t blunt nor too vulgar, you must write the right copy, post the right clicks and target the right audience (can’t be targeting bikers for Hello Kitty aprons, unless you want to create a new market segment).

Etsy offers quite a lot of tools for Etsy sellers to increase their sales. Get a hang of these tools and create your own niche. Once you do that, you can expand your product line and pitch more products to your customers.

So, this aspect covers the Etsy quotient of pulling traffic. As a pre-cursor to Etsy marketing, store optimization also helps you to select your target audience, know your competition and mainly strategizing your approach to the market. Simple enough? Okay. Forward march!

Co-branding

An astonishingly under rated and grossly misused component of Marketing (on Etsy, on Social media or on the TV!). Co-branding offers logically limitless avenues of growth and sales to the market collaborators.

First – What is Co-branding?

It is the conjoined pitch of two products that complement each other. Think of Nike shoes going with a can of Redbull. Fascinating, right? Co-branding helps both the parties pitch each other’s customers and create a whole new marketing component.

Thus co-branding helps to exploit the market and any unreachable crevices in it. Mutually beneficial arrangement – like lichen!

[Tweet “Co-branding can help you find new markets, boost awareness and raise sales without greater efforts. “]

One more thing: The co-branded products mustn’t be competitors. This’ll blow up the entire premise of Co-branding.

Utility marketing

Pitch something useful. Please? Utility marketing moulds itself around the customer’s requirements and needs. Something really useful to your customers. That’s why it is essential to research your customer segment.

Unless of course if you are selling sweetened water. That’s a whole new field. (subtle jab!)

Utility marketing also convenes a rather simple message – Find an intersection between your customer’s personality, needs and desires. This won’t necessarily boost your Etsy sales instantaneously, but forge a strong foundation for your brand. Apart from this, Utility marketing also helps in –

  • Building brand loyalty: You do not come off as a frivolous brand with bad products. Using utility marketing you can drive the customer sentiment in your favor.
  • You do not make a direct sales pitch: You interact and inform your customers about the product line concerned. This shapes your brand as a reliable resource of information and a possible seller. Oh and it also helps you get discovered in the market.
  • Establishes your brand identity: Makes your brand name relatable to the product line in question.

There! We’ve presented you a small list of things you can do to boost traffic to your Etsy stores. This list is absolutely not exhaustive and will change from the insights gained from customer and market analysis. We will strongly recommend you to tinker with your Etsy marketing. Keep a few ideas consistent and experiment with your presentation and methodology. Once you do that, it’ll be fairly easier for you to understand your customers.

You’ll begin to be an expert in the subject and obviously reach your future sales goals at warp speed!

Categories
Pinterest Tips

How to Pin on Pinterest?

Branding on Pinterest always goes in hand-in-hand with the way you pin. You could create a niche board or just pin randomly on your Pinterest profile. Nevertheless, there are several direct implications to any pinning method that you employ.

pin on pinterest

Well, this is the basic steps to guide you on how to pin something by yourself on Pinterest, how to pin from a website and how to pin someone else’s pin.

1.   Pin Yourself

Log in to your Pinterest account and hit the ‘+’ icon on the left side of the page indicating add your pins.

upload a pin

Clicking on it will give you options such as upload a pin and pin from a website. To add images from your computer just click on upload a pin.

upload the pin prompt

You will be directed to choose the file from your computer to upload. As soon as you select the image, a thumbnail format of the same will reappear.

upload pin tab

Just select the board you want to choose the image or create a different board by clicking on ‘Create a board’. Add a description below the image thumbnail and click on save it. Your image will be pinned in few clicks!!!

2.   Pin from a website

I will prefer to my readers to install & use ‘Pin it’ or ‘Save it’ button on your bookmarks bar. After adding the save button, open the image on the website you want to pin.

Tool-Bar-Pin-It(2)

Just click on the ‘Pin it’ button on your bookmark page and all the available images will appear on your screen. From those, select the one you want to post. This will redirect you to the ‘pin boards’ drop down menu in a new window. Choose the relevant board, fill in the description and click on pin it button.

Also, Pinterest will link back the image to the original website automatically.

Although this is a bit direct way, Pinterest also provides you another way to Pin from another website.

Alternate Way

  • Open the image on website you want to pin
  • Copy the URL
  • Open Pinterest Page
  • Log in
  • Click on ‘+’ button and then click on ‘Pin from a website’
  • Paste the URL

pin from a website

After this a fresh new window will open, displaying a number of options for the link. Choose your image, select the board and click on save it. Your pin is posted right away!!

3.   How to Repin

This is the simplest one.

Just log in to your Pinterest Account and stay on the home page. Go through all the pictures available on the home page and select the one you wish to repin.

repin

Click on the save button on the left top corner and add the description.

You will also get an option to choose from your own boards.

Select the most relevant board for it.

You can simply add or edit the description as per your liking.

After this, just click on save and you are good to go!!!

Categories
Others Pinterest Tips

Why Pinterest for Indian Brands?

In an earlier time, people could not even think of an e-commerce as a platform for buying products and services. Whereas today, we’ve come to a whole new arrangement, where shoppers are just choosing what to buy on their mobile sitting in their living room.

This immense shift in shopping style has occurred almost everywhere on the globe. Even in India, 292 million people use smartphones and even more use E-commerce services on their laptop or desktop.

Pinterest for Indian Brands

As you may know, Pinterest is a visual platform, where images are pinned on boards and can be liked & repinned. Users extract images from different sources and pin it on Pinterest. Followers see this pin and can like or repin the post depending on their preference.

So essentially Pinterest acts as a catalog of images, in which each user has their own personal collection. This collection is intimate and can give a pretty great perspective into the lives and likes of the user.

A fun fact about Pinterest is that “number of people who see your pins is larger than number of people who follows you”. That’s Pinterest for you. Still need more reason? Ok, here they are.

As per a study, 88% of the users who pin a product on Pinterest, make a definite purchase. That’s a pretty solid percentage when you compare it to other social media networks where even ads are unable to pull these kind of numbers.

For example: 80% of the Pins on Pinterest receive a repin compared to 1.4 % retweets on Twitter. This gives us a basic view of Pinterest’s efficacy when it comes to business oriented aspects.

And if we look at the Pinterest ads; my God! Aren’t they beautiful?

Pinterest ads

You cannot ignore the fact that how exquisitely South African Airlines have given a beautiful impression along with the promotion of their airlines.

User loves what they see and that is why Pinterest can be seen as a galleria of several gorgeous images pinned on variegated boards.

Well, let’s see some listed reasons, why Indian brands should use Pinterest as their marketing platform.

Demographics and Stats

Out of 1.23 billion people, only 243 million uses the internet. It’s good because 243 million still uses the internet and we have 81% of prospects left.

As per predictions, total users may increment up to 500 million. What does it mean for marketers like you?

A totally new customer pool of 250 million users is under process. There will be millions of users to reach with such a simple and elegant platform, where you can simply promote your products by pinning images.

Talking about mobile integration with social media platforms, around 92+ million active users are there on mobile. Much to your amaze, this is only 41% of total mobile internet users, which means a huge chunk is still left to tap (which is already predicted to come to play in next 2 years).

Alongside, Digital media market in India is also increasing at a swift rate. With already 8.9 million active users in India, Pinterest is swiftly penetrating the Indian markets with ease.

As per the research, around 58% of the digital marketers are still focusing on customer acquisition, which means there is huge untapped customer-pool. It also, means 42% of total digital marketers have controlled the market.

 

Predictions

Many marketers are predicting that Pinterest’s buying user number will see an increase of 24% till 2019; i.e. reaching 60 million. In the month of November 2014, it was studied that this impeccable platform has doubled up the number of men signing up as compared to 2013.

Since times have changed now; Marketers are now assessing social media by not seeing the number of followers but by actual sales conversion done there.

You may say that Facebook has 66% bigger customer base than Pinterest. But have you accounted that people come on Facebook with a purpose to interact, do networking and see the news. Facebook too has not set its focus from being a social networking site to a marketing-focused platform.

This has opened a gate for Pinterest in India since India ranks 2nd in Facebook users across the Globe, U.S. being the first.

A Toddler now Maturing

Pinterest was started by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp as a closed beta in the year 2010. In the preceding years, Pinterest has matured a lot in terms of user engagement, UI and design parameters.

Many brands still talk of Pinterest as a ‘Toddler’ in the context of advertising but no one debates about its immense potential. The introduction of promotional pins has been an open declaration from Pinterest of their arrival in the field of advertisement.

Pinterest has always been a bit different and quite visionary when it comes to social networking mediums. Comparing to the existing social media platforms, one could say that Pinterest is ‘the best’ platform available for users to product sales. The same goes for the sellers; as a marketer you get ample space and audience to communicate the intended message effectively.

Compared to Indian user number of 2.1 million in 2014, now Pinterest has been able to tap 8 million users in 2016. That is just not a sign of toddler anymore. Showing an increase of around 400% is just another example of saying that Pinterest is going to be “The next big thing” on Internet very soon.

What Does Pinterest Offer?

A lot has been already said for the Indian market and users. We’ll discuss more about Pinterest and its offerings.

This image-based social platform is becoming more than what it was aimed to be. Owing to its elegant UI, large user base, and shopping-oriented design, Pinterest is becoming a major tool for shoppers of today.

Let us go through some of the basic terms related to Pinterest:

  1. Pins: It is simply the pins posted by you
  2. Boards: Collection of pins categorized as per your preference
  3. Followers: People following your profile, pins or boards
  4. Repin: If someone likes your pin, he/she can repin it.

Some more terms are there; go here for further clarity.

Since social media is considered as the best form to perform research on products/services, so how should you use it?

Just put an image of the product as a pin and ask the customers for their feedback.

Mentioned below are few offerings by Pinterest that can surely help you are a marketer to promote your brand and increase the sales:

Boards

A board is a collection of images or pins on your profile. Once you log in to your Pinterest account, just create a board by clicking on your account name on the top left side of the page.

Pinterest boards

The main advantage of having boards is that if your business is targeting a specific group of audience, you do not have to promote your product like a blind marketer. Instead, you can select what sort of boards covers your audience, make that category and cover a larger client pool.

Brands having niche marketing goals should take Pinterest as their mentor because a board simply solves all the bottlenecks that were previously available in all other social media platforms.

For example, if you are selling luxurious watches, just make a board naming it relevantly and selecting groups such as luxury, fashion, men’s watch, and watches. You will cover a larger segment of users who are following these categories and will be interested in purchasing the product.

So, Pinterest filters out a large group of people and lets you target users relevant to your brand or product.

Action Oriented

Do not get misinterpreted by the fact that Pinterest is a place, where users just give an impressive look to the images and move on. No. As said earlier, most of the shoppers get influenced by Pinterest to make a purchase. Also, most of the pins on

Pinterest pins are themselves action oriented.

Recipe pins aid users in figuring out what to cook, home décor pins helps people decorate their place as per their preference and fashion pins enable the user to decide what to buy.

Serving as a mechanism of discovery, Pinterest has users who tend to spend more money. Pinterest users are 10% more likely to make a purchase on e-commerce platforms than users who are referred from other social media platforms.

Another important feature of Pinterest is that users can save the pins they like for later; thus serving as a bookmark for products. For a bride, who is planning her marriage Pinterest can serve as a digital wedding planner, where she can save whatever she likes and can review the options later to make a purchase.

Advertising Platform

Pinterest has been taking a special interest in the promotion of brands. The introduction of promoted pins or Rich Pins has been a major step in advertising by Pinterest. Rich Pins are total of 6 kinds:

  • Recipe
  • Product
  • App
  • Movie
  • Article
  • Place

Each meant for the different purpose, these paid/promoted pins are utilized for getting a better & effective user engagement.  For example, app pins include an install button, which enables users to download the app without even leaving Pinterest.

For people who love traveling, Place pins tell them everything about a place such as providing a map and giving address & phone number.

Indian brands who wants their products to be showcased on Pinterest can use product pins, which makes it quite convenient for the buyers to reach and purchase your product.

Campaigns

It is quite hard to engage customers with your brand on social media platforms, especially when there are so many. Pinterest includes Campaigns, where you as a marketer can start a contest or campaign to bring more and more users at a single platform to discuss.

Pinterest indian brands campaigns

You can see here, two different kinds of campaigns are available; Engagement campaign and Traffic campaign.  Either you can choose to engage customers by boosting the interaction with your pins or you can direct a motivated audience towards your content.

Brands that are finding it difficult to start a conversation or do not know how to tap the client pool, can utilize this feature and benefit themselves by engaging with users at a macro-level.

Pinterest Analytics

It is every marketer’s dream to track even the minutest activity of their strategy to assess its performance accordingly. Pinterest has made this dream come true for marketing professionals. Although, many social media platforms have their own analytical tools, but none has such a huge shopping enthusiast users on their platform.

So a combination of millions of users (80% of them) who just want to shop and a tool, which can help brands to monitor their activities in order to promote the product in accordance with the consumer behavior, can be a deadly one.

Pinterest analytics

Not only analytics tells the performance of your Pinterest profile, but it also gives insights on small issues such as what kind of pins are performing best & worst, when are your target audience online most, what does your target audience like most (which boards and pins), and so on.

However, there are some third party tools also available for managing the business account of Pinterest to fill some uncovered issues. Viralwoot is an M&M (management & marketing) suite of Pinterest. Using a simple UI that users can handle, monitor and track, Viralwoot is able to tap around 70000 users and associate itself with 4000 brands across the globe. Some of the brands that are using Viralwoot are listed as following:

  • Industry:       Company
  • News:             Buzzfeed
  • Knowledge:   Wikipedia
  • Travel:            Trivago and Cleartrip
  • Clothing:        Wrangler and Lifestyle
  • Retail:             Infibeam
  • Jewelry:          Nakshatra
  • Movies:           Bookmyshow

This M&M suite Viralwoot has following main attributes:

  • Pinterest Scheduler
  • Promotion on Pinterest
  • Pinterest Analytics
  • Content Manager
  • Influencer Manager

Top 10 Indian Brands on Pinterest

I will now list the top 10 Indian brands that are using Pinterest as a platform to market and promote their products:

1.    WedMeGood

WedMeGood is a new wedding planner destination for all the to-be brides & to-be grooms. Incepted in 2014, this firm has been using Pinterest solely for the purpose of marketing their services and reaching a larger audience.

Wedmegood Pinterest Dashboard

This is one of the few companies in India, which is wise enough to utilize the potential of Pinterest in order to reach their sales target. With 35k followers, WedMeGood is quite popular on Pinterest and hence it remains active by continuous engagement with the customers.

2.    Myntra

Launched in 2007, Myntra is an e-commerce platform for branded apparels. Ranked as top four startups for India, Myntra is aggressively using Pinterest for increasing their visibility.

Myntra Pinterest

With 3000 followers, Myntra is surely using Pinterest as a booster to increment its sale and build a bigger customer base.

3.    Jabong.com

Incepted in the year 2012, Jabong.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites in India, has been able to mark its presence on Pinterest. Seeing the Jabong.com Pinterest account, you can simply figure out that it has been effectively using this exquisite image-based platform to ensure a proper customer engagement.

jabong Pinterest

Jabong has been using promoted or Rich pins continuously to showcase its product for the target audience.

4.    Times of India

Pinterest has been a wonderful place to start a discussion; i.e. interacting with customers on a large scale. Times of India, country’s leading print media player has been taking full advantage of Pinterest. With around 10k followers, TOI has been gaining a competitive edge as it started before everyone else.

TOI Pinterest Page

5.    ScoopWhoop

ScoopWhoop is a new-bee internet media and news company launched in the year 2013. Started as a viral content generating and sharing website, the company is now providing news on the portal and also acts as a medium for discussing & sharing social concern issues. Pinterest has been an active stage for ScoopWhoop altogether with approximately 1.4 thousand pins and 2.5 thousand followers.

scoopwhoop

6.    PepperFry

One of India’s most eminent names in online Furniture and Home & Living destination, PepperFry is making the difference at Pinterest. With around 6ooo pins, PepperFry is drawing the attention of customers quite smartly.

pepperfry Pinterest

7.    FabFurnish

Started in 2012, FabFurnish is making its name in the online furniture, furnishing, décor, and kitchenware. If you see its Pinterest page, you will know how FabFurnish is highly involved with the customers by pinning different pins.

Fabfurnish Pinterest

8.    Swayam India

Swayam India is an online store for home furnishing products, which is covering around 70 cities in India at 400 plus counters. This E-store has been promoting its product line effectively on Pinterest. Different boards of varied categories show the diverse products Swayam India can offer.

SwayamIndia Pinterest

9.    Utsav Fashion

Shipping to over 200+ countries, Utsav Fashion is a leading online name in Indian Ethnic Fashion. Utsav Fashion’s exclusive designs and appealing color combinations have been exquisitely exhibited on Pinterest, so much so that it has more than 30 thousand followers.

utsavfashion Pinterest

 

10.    Fabindia

Being an Indian chain store, which is involved in the retail of fabrics, garments, ethnic and furnishing products, Fabindia is truly a treat to watch on Pinterest. With its followers reaching two thousand, Fabindia is surely cashing the sales opportunity at the Pinterest platform.

Fabindia Pinterest

 Conclusion

A lot has been discussed about why Pinterest is important for Indian brands for various marketing purposes. The Indian market is still nascent in social media and marketers should leverage this opportunity to scale their businesses. Then only you can be termed as a smart marketing professional. So, Pinterest gives you an opportunity to engage large customer pools. You can sit back and use the traditional mediums or let Pinterest reel in the sales. Choose wisely!

Categories
Content Marketing Marketing Social Media Tips

Top 10 Ways to Promote Your Content

There is something very special about the content you write for your business, blog, website or any purpose. It introduces you and your business to the right audiences with a backdrop of the message you want to communicate with them.

In other words, your content presents you to the people who have never been exposed to you or your brand. Your audience reads your words, gauges your sentiments and tries to understand your ideology.

That’s precisely the reason why your content can be considered as a reflection of your brand and what it stands for.

Therefore it is really important to create and manage content that can draw user’s attention and maintain for an impressionable period.

promote your content

In this article we will try and look at some of crucial ways that can promote your content to the right audiences and help you gain some traction in your area of market influence.

1.   Find the Influencers

As a content professional,try and reach the right influencers for promoting your content. Tell these influencers about the topic of your content and request them to contribute to the topic.

Sites such as Buzzstream and Buzzsumo are few of the available tools that can help you find the right influencers. Type in the topic and you’ll have a list of available influencers in the concerned category.

In case you own a blog post, include the quote (written by the influencer) in the post and incorporate the link of influencer’s website and social media accounts.

This provides you with 2 very specific benefits:

  1. You and your brand get exposed to a totally new audience
  2. Your content gets validated on being shared by an Influencer.

2.   Use Visuals

According to a survey, Facebook posts with images generate more likes than the average posts. Same goes for tweets with images and posts with images on LinkedIn too. This is because images, videos and infographics are easily understood and do not require a lot of time to read through.

Even a simple featured image makes your content more visually appealing while providing a visual context. So, visuals are important for your content strategy. Try and use some images amidst your content.

This will help you get some more views and will hook your audience to your content.

3.   Embrace the Headlines

You content’s headline is the most important aspect of your content presentation. And it is not only because the headline is the first thing your audience sees.

Your headline can help you throw in some wit, some taste and some color to your content. It is a kind of a first impression your brand or blog or business has on the customers.

Smart marketers usually dabble with multiple titles so that they can test the efficacy of the head tag. See what words ring with you customers. Do they lean towards a wittier copy or do they want straight up no nonsense informational articles.

Also, for different social networks, different sort of headlines might work. As twitter only provides few words limit for a tweet. On Facebook, you can post a longer content. You might want to assess the audience and the limits on each platform to see what works best for you.

4.   Customize Everything

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” . Seeing the current trend in content marketing, many brands are customizing their content as per specific markets. The overwhelming trait of generalized content has been thrown out of the window to make way for different sects of content based marketing.

For this each platform needs to be tailored to the type of users on it. And that means curating the content, the images, the presentation and even the basic element of information. The context remains the same, but the presentation is wildly different.

This is important because each platform caters to different requirements of your users. Pitching the same content to different audiences will portray you as insincere in your marketing effort. And you don’t want that.

5.   Pay Way

By basic advertising many brands ensure the promotion of their content to a wide spread market. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram provide a particularly curated manner of advertisement to the right audiences on the basis of their clicks, likes and shares.

6.   Newsletter

All content marketers maintain an email list, to notify the subscribers about any new articles or an offer.

Newsletter subscription is one of the basic and most used ways to promote your content online. Create a thread of articles related to each other. Form a successive thread where the articles in a package can help solve a problem that your user faces (or might face). These threads will help you post some non performing content among the high performing ones.

Also a newsletter presents a collection of articles to your audience. You can even create little nuggets of information that present the crux of the articles. That’ll entice your users into reading the entire article.

Tips: Companies often rely on automated content, but it is proved that automated ones reduce the customer engagement. So, writing a personalized email is surely time-consuming, but it increases the likeability of customer engagement to the core.

7.   Use Google+

Google+ like other social media networks provides a cohesive network of influencers and professionals. Apart from that, Google+ is integrated into Google search and that helps your content to be easily read and shared. Also, there is a disproportionate number of content enthusiasts and marketing professionals active on Google+.

So that really provides an incentive for you to market your content on the platform. These kinds of promotional activity will increase the reach of your content to a wider audience base.

For including other people in the comment, type a plus (+) and their name. As soon as you start typing after the plus sign a dropdown box will appear with all the names of your connections.

8.   Make use of Communities

Get into a community. That is essential for the promotion of your content to select audiences. Think about it, in a community, your content will be read and shared by people who have similar interests and similar personas (that’s the reason why they’re in a community).

These kinds of communities also provide with an unexplored pool of customers who will probably associate with your brand. One more benefit of sharing content on these communities is that their members are usually really active. These people are essentially the ones you want to target. Once your idea/product resonates with them, they can act as your brand advocates to further organic advertising.

9.   It’s good to Ask

As a marketing professional, you must try something more than just to drop the links. You should always strive in to make sure that your targeted audience is in conversation with you on a constant basis.

Being a blogger or a business owner, always try to engage more and more customers with your content by requesting feedbacks and asking questions.

You can glean more information about your customer’s requirements by asking them directly. Also, it’ll make your customer feel more privileged and special. Assess your customer’s requirements by asking them in a clear and collected manner.

Since, we all know that social media is a platform meant for people and not for the business, so, every effort from your side should be to engage more and more people.

10.  Personalize Everything

Personalize your emails, comments, posts and any other content related activity. For this you’d need to ascertain your customer’s personas. Once you understand their persona, you’ll be able to appeal to their inner most instincts and needs.

Once you do that, it’ll be fairly easy to coax a purchase from them. But you need to be sincere and methodical in this approach. Do not come off as creepy or inaccurate. Don’t make your ‘guessing’ evident to your customers.

We’ve learnt that Content is a pivotal part of any brand’s marketing strategy. Your content is your words, your sentiments and your ideas. That’ll be visible to your customers after which they’d probably understand your product better. It is up to them to relate your brand with their requirements. Before they do that, ensure that your content is top-notch, relevant and personal to your customers.