Tag: Small business marketing

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Marketing Others Small Business Social Media Tips

Clever Blogging Tips All Small Business Owners Need to Know

Blogging is everywhere nowadays, and it seems like every business and individual under the sun is having a go. However, there is a method in the madness since blogging is one of the most effective ways to engage and interact with your users, attracting them to your small business to generate sales.

However, blogging can only be a beneficial as it is done right. Today, we’re going to explore several clever blogging tips for you to remember, allowing you to maximize the success of your blogs and take your online business to the next level.

Make it Relevant to Your Business

Firstly, perhaps the most important element of blogging you need to consider when writing is that the content you’re producing needs to be relevant to your small business.

While some topics may seem relevant, they need to ideally be directly related to the products or services that you’re offering, so the customer can make an easy connection. You have to show how they can benefit from buying and using your products and how it can resolve their problems.

Research Your Competitors

While you may feel bad about checking out your competitor’s content, after all, you wouldn’t want them doing it to you; it’s an essential part of business. How are you supposed to stay one step ahead if you don’t know where they are?

Not only can checking your competition give you ideas for content, but you can also check a tonne of elements, such as what their most popular posts are, how their users are interacting with their content and what sort of keywords they are using. Check it and make content better than your competitors with your ideas.

Focus on Your Target & Purpose

Every single blog post that you upload to your website needs to have a purpose. Without this purpose fresh in your mind for every post that you write, you won’t be able to lead customers in that direction, and the entire post will have been for nothing.

Some of the purposes you could think about include;

  • Inspiration
  • Product information
  • Motivational
  • Business story
  • Customer case study
  • Sign up for a mailing list
  • Follow on social media
  • Offer or promotional education

Your blog is one of the methods of conversation with your potential customers, so lead them to the buying process of your products or services.

Think About Formatting and Accuracy

When it comes to presenting your blog content, you need to make sure that you’re formatting your final piece in such a way that it’s as easy as possible for your reader to consume. As you can see from this article, imagine if there were no subheadings and no broken paragraphs, just one big block of text. Would you be happy to read it all?

One of the most important processes you need to undertake when you’re writing your blogs before you upload them is to check them to ensure they are free from errors and mistakes. If you’ve got spelling errors, misplaced punctuation and bad grammar, this will seriously harm the credibility and reputation of your blogs and people won’t want to read them.

According to study, 59% of people stated that they wouldn’t buy any product or service from the company who has grammar mistakes and errors on their website. Check and proofread your content using tools like Grammarix to be sure your content is perfect to go.

Make sure that you break up your content in small, digestible chunks for easy reading, especially when you consider a vast majority of your readers will be coming to your website through their mobile devices. You can also use tools like Cite It In to add any references, citations and quotes in a professional manner.

How Often Are You Going to Post?

The knack for running a successful blog is being able to post consistently. Ideally, you’ll want to be uploading a post about twice a week, but you can do once a week or even daily, depending on the nature of your small business.

However, any less than once a week and your customers will read a post and then forget about your business. You want to be posting consistently, so your customers always have you in their minds, but not too much that it annoys them by seeing you pop up on their feeds all the time.

Consider the Length of Your Content

It’s easy to want to talk on and on about the subject that you and your small business is interested in. Depending on your blogging platform, writing long-form content may be ideal and what your customers are interested in.

However, if you’re marketing to ‘everyday people’, this can cause problems since the typical person wants easily digestible content that only takes several minutes to read through maximum before they get bored and take their attention elsewhere.

Using tools like Easy Word Count, you can make sure the majority of your content reaches around 800 words, an ideal reading time of five minutes or so.

Always Check for Plagiarism

Plagiarism is one of blogging biggest taboo subjects, and you need to make sure that you’re avoiding it at all costs. While you might not be proactively going out onto the internet to copy other people’s work, it’s possible that you do it accidentally without even realizing which is why it’s so important you check each post.

Having plagiarised content on your blog will mean that Google indexes your page and then removes them from their search engine results pages, and they won’t even notify you. Fortunately, there are many online tools, like Copyscape and Academized that you can use to check your content to ensure it’s 100% original.

Consider Outsourcing

Since you’re trying to run and manage your small business, there may not always be time to write new blogs to the quality that you’re expecting. However, you still need to post. With this in mind, it’s worth remembering that there are many services out there that can help to generate content when you need it.

Sites like Upwork and Paper Fellows are full of writers that you can use to produce content on your behalf, whenever you need them too. Alternatively, if you want to write them yourself, you can use writing guide databases like State of Writing and Via Writing to help you create quick and properly formatted content.

Conclusion
As you can see, blogging is beneficial for your business and can help your potential customers to understand your product or service better. Be sure to use these main tips and you’ll lead your customers to buy from you and use your products to take your small business to the next level.

 

Author Bio:

Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years of experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. Consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs at Oxessays. She believes that constant learning is the only way to success. You can visit her personal blog at Letsgoandlearn.com

 

Categories
Content Marketing Marketing Social Media Tips

Top 10 Ways to Promote Your Content

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.

 

Categories
Marketing Others Pinterest Tips Social Media Tips

How to use Visual Marketing to grow your Business?

Visual Marketing

Marketing remains a diverse field consisting and connected to different business activities such as sales, advertising, promotion, and distribution. And while you juggle with conventional forms of marketing, you must look forward to and implement modern marketing methodologies.

One of those methodology is Visual Marketing. Visual marketing is the channeling of images, videos, gif’s and infographics to market a product. It’s that simple! So why have we created an entire post dedicated to this field? 

It’s because most visual marketing still clings to the old-school methods of implementation and measurement. As a whole new field, visual marketing has its own quirks and tricks. Getting better at it requires a know how of its basics and its ramifications in the marketing arena. (and you need to get better at it, seriously!)

In this post, we will talk about Visual marketing basics and ideas to leverage it for your business.

Visual Marketing for your Business

Visual Marketing – Infancy

The introduction of internet revolutionized the prevailing marketing schemas and provided a whole new array of opportunities. Marketing was no longer limited to Television, Billboards and Radio. This also brought a change in visual perception and customer demands.

And now Social media sites have emerged as a pillar on which online market rests and progresses into the the recesses of customer requirements. People just love to be on social networking sites. In this era of multi-tasking, where everyone handles more than activity at once, brands keep a close watch on the users on these high potential platforms.

With the emergence of image-based social platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram, people love visual marketing platforms. Ability to choose by seeing in the virtual universe of internet, in an astonishing platform of images is a gift every shopper dreams of.

Typically marketing is a strategy to engage customers with brands. On the other hand, visual marketing is a term to encourage promotional displays in order to ensure customer engagement and an increase in sales.

Why Visual Marketing?

The key to marketing is creativity. As a brand owner, your efforts should be directed towards innovation and experiment. Customers can get bored due to the traditional way of promotion, which often stands to be the plain old text.

Entertaining the target audience with appealing images can increase your brand reach and can aid you in building a vast customer pool. For the people doubting the potential of this fabulous platform, visuals (images) are processed 60k times faster than an ordinary text message inside human brain!

In addition to this, most of the information transmitted from the brain is through visual perception. Seeing other stats such as what is preferred more by the customers; visuals or content, marketing professionals can simply make out the importance of visual marketing platform in virtual space of the internet.

Visual marketing can be seen as a unique way to communicate with your target audience. Gone are the days of overused text content ways to perceive the consumers. With the age of technology rising to its peak, visual marketing is slowly sweeping the textual market share to its own plate.

There is always a bottleneck in the process of engaging customers; that is the misinterpretation of intended message communicated. Essentially it boils down to the idea that you convey to your customers. This will shape their perception and their notions about your brand.

But seeing the humans love for image and how our brain reacts to visuals as compared to content, many social media sites have started investing in image-based marketing. It’s high time for all you marketers struggling to make their name in Online marketing industry; get on the horse and start riding now!

How to use Visual marketing?

It might happen to you that you might be able to understand the real value of visual marketing, yet you do not know how to utilize its potential. I will take you step by step via each social media platform and tell how to utilize their space and caliber appropriately.

Facebook

Facebook presents a great opportunity for marketers to showcase their product line. With over a Billion users, Facebook offers you the chance to explore all sorts of audiences and assess the different responses that you get.

Always remember that if you want to upload a video, Facebook accepts the entire available formats but recommends MP4. Similarly, if you want the videos to be presentable to FB audience, then make sure to keep the resolution under 1080 pixels.

Uploading GIFs and Memes are also an attractive way to pull up  a large chunk of customers.

Facebook can take large video files up to 1.75 GB and if you consider quality as the main parameter to draw out customers, it is advisable to upload high definition videos. Creating engaging videos and incorporating call to action can increase your brand’s visibility and hike the reach of your business.

starbucks india Facebook

Starbucks, a strong player in the coffee world has been creating an impression in the minds of customers by creating eye catchy images such as above. On the occasion of Father’s Day, Starbucks adopted visual marketing as its tool on Facebook to reach out the maximum users’ altogether.

Similarly, with around 90 million likes on Facebook, Coca-Cola is been doing all the right moves with visual marketing.

Coca Cola Facebook

See how intelligently Coca-Cola did not talk about its brand or product; rather it just gave a perfect romantic situation with the brand embedded in it. That is called wise visual marketing strategy.

Apart from this, few other tips to implement visual marketing on Facebook are listed below:

  • Quotes: Quotes plays a vital role while drawing the attention of users. Because of their versatility, quotes are considered to reach all sorts of demographics. Like if you are sharing some inspirational quotes, it can reach millions of audience crossing the barrier of race, religion, caste, region, gender, and language.
  • Special Occasions: Like the example I gave in Starbucks pic, utilizing the potential of several occasions should be the strategy of smart marketers. There are several occasions coming and going. Brands should keep a close watch on what sort of occasion is approaching and how can you cater to the users on a festive day.
  • Cartoons: Brands thinking that cartoons only cover the young audience i.e. kids are totally wrong. Cartoons are likable by so many users despite their age, color, gender, and religion. As most of the users log in to Facebook after a long & tiring day at work, so seeing a glimpse of cartoons may prove as an optimistic move.

Cartoon Visual Marketing Facebook

  • Mascots: Just like the cartoons, Mascots are another important source of visual promotion available on Facebook. Owing to its special flair and its own personality, Mascot is a popular way by which customer engagement is done with ease.
  • Humor: Making people laugh is considered as the hardest task in the world. So, making your Facebook visuals more humorous gains you a competitive edge over others. Customers love the posts that make them laugh or smile, so it is an impeccable way to attract more attention to your brand accordingly.
  • Mini-Infographics: These are the visuals that inform or teach something to its readers. It can vary from simple facts to step-by-step images of teaching users how to make tea. Brands mainly utilize this kind of visual to flaunt their expertise in their respective industries.

Twitter

For twitter, you can create loads of visual content and keep on tweeting it on a regular basis. Additionally, you can also hire a designer and increase your budget by incorporating other creative employees in the workforce.

Or you can be wise and do the visual marketing on twitter in a much effective manner.

Adding Call to Action

For engaging customers on twitter and increasing your brand reach, one of the most creative platforms is twitter. Understanding what makes the user take action may increase the chance of bringing both the audience and brand on the same platform.

Be it clicking, retweet, signing up or commenting, as a marketer you should not leave any action to chance. Unlike the traditional marketing, you have to make sure that your twitter followers know exactly how they are supposed to go hand-in-hand with your business.

You can ask your customers to download your product’s new version or ask them to retweet and incorporate a call to action in the subsequent message.

cadbury-call-to-action-twitter

As a brand owner, you may never want your user to call you a spammer website. So, provide your audience something of substantial value and then back through with relevant content on the other side of the link.

Tell your brand Story

Share your story with the customers and make it kind of unique to draw maximum attention. As I said earlier that anything which inspires people seeks no barrier and gets through all demographics. So, tell your target audience about how you started this company and what inspired you.

In addition, you can flaunt your competitive advantage by incorporating it in tweet graphics. Make sure to express your business personality via a lot of informative, entertaining and relevant tweets.

Oreo tweet

See this image above, showing the strength of twitter and its customer base. During the Super Bowl 2013, Oreo managed to infuse fun swiftly and effectively at the power outage, which stopped the game for 35 minutes. This shows how you can relate your brand by any latest happenings and make a story.

Add videos in Tweets

Because visual marketing is growing at an outstanding rate, so users love to see videos in the tweets. As a business owner, you must put your efforts to capture a huge customer pool by incorporating creative videos in your tweets. Informative and educational videos that make customers learn about something is becoming very popular on twitter.

The marketing manager should make use of eye-catching thumbnails and should keep it topical.

Your Business Your Brand

Seeing the facts that users love the visuals, it is the responsibility of each brand to market their message in much imagery based way. Brands utilize this extremely versatile stage to ensure they are promoting their brand in a streamlined manner.

Some businesses make sure to include the creativity in one graphic message only. Pulling your target audience towards your brand is directly proportional to the innovation you are putting in your efforts.

Moz Blog twitter

You can have a look at the above graphic message and can make out what I am trying to say. Moz blog ensures to use text overlays on the graphic yet informative image used to pull more writers to their websites.

Pinterest

If we are talking about visual marketing and not referring one of the few most alluring websites that have been able to increase their user base to a climbing 200% in just 5 years, it will be a big loss to you as a marketer.

We are talking about Pinterest, a visual platform, which comprises of millions of stupendous images. This interest based websites, where people post images that inspire them and also they can repin these posts if they like.

Pinterest is like a virtual podium where you can see billions of images posted by millions of users. These images are are part of a collection of millions of users around the world. Imagine the potential prospects are available on Pinterest today.

Listed below are the few steps that are necessary for a brand to increase their visual marketing effectiveness.

Make Visually Attractive Images

For any brand, which is trying to make a long lasting impression on their target audience, innovation is the key recipe. To ensure customers like what you are pinning, tell your graphic designers to include appealing images in order to increase their customer reach.

Wall Street Pinterest

The ideal example for this is given by Wall Street Journal, which has ensured to keep the quotes of great personalities and named the board as quote wall.

Make customized Images

Making images tall make Pinterest love your pin. Adding simple but clear text overlays on the pins also provide you a fair chance to pull more audience to your website.

Pinterest creative pins

If you want to see an ideal example of how an image on Pinterest should ideally look like; give a glance at the image above and you can note that the image is tall, the message is clear, text overlaying is creative and brand is connecting with the people. The brand Pixel8Ltd has also ensured to utilize the colors and settings that are conveying their own brand.

Images that too tall are not advisable to pin. Marketers and professionals should keep a tight balance between making the pins too long or relatively much shorter.

Some brands make a collage out of a pin, which is often creative. Adding more than 5 separate images in a pin is not advisable as it often causes confusion among the users.

Make use of Rich Pins

It is very important for brands to know about the promoted pins introduced by Pinterest this year only. The 6 rich pins (movie, article, product, place, recipe and app) available for marketers direct the users to their specific domain related sites.

If you are using movie pin, it should lead you to a movie review, trailer or other similar pages. In case you are using a product pin, it should lead you to a place where you can check the stock of product, see the price and can make the purchase decision accordingly.

Brands should have a clear mind set up while using these pins for the promotional purpose.

Instagram

Based on the concept of visual perception, Instagram has created an interactive visual platform for users to post and share images.

The elegance with which Instagram has been engaging customers is completely outstanding. You do not need to set up a visual marketing campaign necessarily to reach success in this industry. Jotted down are few points that give you an idea of what to do on Instagram to make a difference and bring more customers to your brand.

Quality is evergreen, Quantity is overrated

Marketers often come up with great taglines. Merely using a collection of images of different landscapes does not start a visual marketing campaign.

Thinking like a consumer can provide you different set of ideas and thoughts that could add innovation to the visual campaigns by which you want to create a brand presence on Instagram.

Andrew Knapp

Andrew Knapp, an interface designer, and photographer has created an innovative and addictive way to interact more people on Instagram. Instead of putting images that can draw users, he has started #findmomo campaign. Users have to find his dog momo in every image.

Know your viewers

Simply putting an image for marketing purposes is not always enough for the effective marketing. Professionals focusing on customer interaction should post an image which can make users think for a second because of its depth and conceptuality.

If you can make your audience pause and look at the image you posted, you can ensure a purchase or even a mild interest in your brand. Triggering an emotional bridge with the target audience should be your major objective.

Also, posting the perfect image is not enough; you should try to see if the image matches up with your message.

Getting likes is not enough

A common misconception in the market is a mass-liked image is always relevant to all contexts. It’s a misconception because ‘likes‘ are not necessarily the correct metric to get any feedback for an image. In fact you should look at any discussion or comments for your image. The consequential ‘Shares‘ can also give you a better feedback.

You might be a great artist, who wants to bring out his inner Picasso and make a difference; but guess what Instagram is not an art training school. You have to care about your target audience the same way you do about your creativity. A customer comes first always when it comes to Business!

Visual marketing is the future of digital marketing for sure. Marketers can deny it now, but in the very near future, visuals will dominate over another forms of marketing.

Marketing managers can take some wise decisions now to promote their product line in a much comparative and difference-making manner.