Top Online Marketing Tips for Strategic Marketing

The Internet has caused fundamental changes in the ways people do business around the world. These changes have greatly manifested in our social interactions, cooking and eating habits, living habits, traveling habits, dressing habits, fashion sense and lots more. Strategic marketing readily takes advantage of these changes to market online. This involves, product promos, audience targeting, customer interaction, shopping and brand marketing. Here are tips that come handy in strategic marketing.

Strategic Social Media Marketing

Nearly everyone is now on social media. Online marketers have quickly taken note of this development and they are taking advantage of it to do good business. With almost 70% of the internet users now spending over 2 hours on social sites daily, marketers now know where to take their marketing pitches for better results. On popular social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, it has become very easy to engage a vast number of the audience at once to receive your marketing messages. With in-house analytics peculiar to these sites, you can accurately measure your progress as you market along. Compared to any other form of content, creating social content is relatively easy and propagation can go viral in no time. This strategy greatly helps your marketing efforts no matter how modest.

Leveraging PPC Ads

Irrespective of whatever products you are marketing, using pay-per-click, PPC ads for advanced targeting can be a critical strategy for your marketing efforts. You can smartly morph PPC ads as a good strategy to target specific customers. Even though PPC ads may be a bit more expensive than other display ads, they tend to yield higher returns on investment when compared to display ads. This is one more strategy that yields good results.

Strategic Video Content Marketing

Compared to other content marketing efforts, video content marketing yields very good results if strategically used. Video content can easily go viral and are one of the most shared and hugely consumed forms of content over the Internet and social media sites. When strategically used on social media sites, videos tend to have more shares than text and images based posts combined. These results are achievable only when the videos are shot with an enticing and captivating intro, eye-catching title and a cute CTA to aid the video watchers take some beneficial actions to your business.

Strategic Problem Solving Campaigns

For marketing strategies to be effective, they must focus directly on how best to solve pressing problems for your customers. The best strategy is to use communication and marketing channels that can effectively reach your audience to deliver your marketing messages. Taking your marketing messages directly to where your audience is tends to get the best results.

Methodical and Consistent Campaigns

Making sure you are methodical and consistent in your marketing campaigns is what quickly helps to build trust. That is one good strategy for your marketing success. By focusing on things that are unique to your business and methodically pushing your marketing narrative along those lines, you can easily have a lasting impression on your customers. Yet another strategy that gets results.

Strategic use of Mobile Devices in Campaigns

From Google reports, about 60% of people now access the Internet from their mobile devices. This is because most search engines and apps now work perfectly on mobile-friendly interfaces. With Google recently announcing that it will focus on mobile versions of sites to rank and index them, marketers can now strategically use mobile devices successfully in their campaigns.  When marketers design their campaigns with mobile devices as central focus, it helps them to stay ahead the competition in most cases.

Strategic use of Reviews/Feedback

Marketing reviews are just like word of mouth in today’s digital marketing world. Some online research reports indicate that about 80% of internet users trust online reviews similar to personal recommendations. Such reviews greatly influence their buying decisions. In addition, user-generated content, be it reviews, social posts, or feedback, plays a very vital role in getting referrals. For strategic marketing, even if a review is negative, responding quickly and politely to it is good for business. If you are quick and polite to address issues of concern from reviews, you can win back the confidence of skeptics and set a very good example to impress other visitors. This is good for business.

10 Tips to Nurture your Business’s Digital Marketing Authority

The virtual internet world is a very wide world where digital marketers do their thing. It is very difficult to succeed out there unless you can maintain your digital marketing authority. To enhance that, it is crucial to understand how to nurture and optimize your digital marketing authority. These here, 10 marketing tips can be of help in that quest.  

1. Regularly Update Your Website

Updating your website regularly is to keep up with the changes that may inevitable occur in the course of running a business. Because consumers are always looking for authentic information on how to do business with you, be sure your website is current and up-to-date at all times. Changes in hours of business, products on offer, ongoing promos, sales promos, and new discounts and coupons on offer, must always be fully updated to reflect what is current on your website. Doing so makes it easy for your customers to get any relevant information they are looking for.

2. Measure Your Progress with Google Analytics Tools

Without analytics, it is difficult to gauge how well your business is doing in the digital space. If you have a credible and reliable way of finding out how you are doing, it helps you to better utilize and optimize the time you spend on your digital marketing efforts. Google Analytics free online tools are very good to use for these measurements. If your business is on social media (i don’t see why it shouldn’t be there), you also have access to their free tools as well. You can access such free tools on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others that give easy Insights about the progress of your business.  These tools help you to accurately measure the digital marketing progress of your business on social media and they are free to use. 

3. Work Your Marketing Plan

In digital marketing, it helps to have a marketing plan and to work this plan. Make sure your marketing plan is always up-to-date and workable as well. Your marketing plan is a good plan if it reflects your target market, the mission and vision of your business. If your online and offline marketing efforts fit well into your plan, you can better connect with your current and new customers by endeavoring to work the plan diligently. A good marketing plan helps provide a reliable guide to ensure you use your valuable time wisely and profitably.

4. Focus on Your Customers

Customers are the main reason you are in business. Your business focus must always be on them and for them. If you have some good insights into what their needs are and what they are searching for online, you can better channel your marketing efforts to those areas. If you want to have a better understanding of your audience, and what their needs are, you can use free online analytics and data tools. The most popular of these free tools are Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Insights. For the success of your digital marketing efforts, the more and better you understand your customers, the more the likelihood of your success in marketing to them. Information from your key customers’ feedback if well utilized can also help your digital marketing efforts.

5. Market with Engaging Content 

In digital marketing, content is king. It must be informative, educating and even entertaining to be useful. For this reason, you must take adequate care and time to create visual content that easily captures your consumers’ attention. Good content must adequately highlight a combination of the vision and mission of your business with the products/services you are promoting, promos, business updates, CTAs and such like business building/promoting activities. A healthy mix of good aesthetics, graphics, photos and video content help make an appealing and engaging content.

6. Optimize Your Website

Your website is your online business window. It serves that purpose better if it is visible to search engines. It is only visible to search engines if it is optimized for that purpose. Search Engine Optimization, SEO helps your customers to find your business easily online. Website optimization is an extremely vital element in determining the relevance and authority of your website on the web. If you claim and regularly update your “Google My Business” business profile, it helps your online presence and authority. By optimizing each page on your website with unique meta-tag descriptions and keywords, it is easy for your customers and even potential customers to find your business. Your business online authority is also better enhanced if you can link the site to other websites, social media pages, blogs, etc. Alt titles and descriptions to each image/video on your website further reinforce the authority of the site.

7. Take Advantage of Your Social Media Presence 

Your social media presence is a very credible way to connect easily with customers. You must take full advantage of that. Your social media efforts should reflect your goals as part of your marketing plan. Taking your business on social media is an effective way of marketing to your customers where they are. By optimizing your presence on social media and properly tailoring your messages to suit each platform and effectively using good content with graphics and videos, you can easily catch customers’ attention. A direct consequence of that is more business exposure and customer engagement. Ultimately, your online presence and authority is better enhanced and in no small measure.

8. Stay Connected with Reviews/Feedback

It is smart business to always ask your customers for feedback. That helps you to stay connected with them. The feedback and testimonials from your customers most times is the easiest and most effective way to gauge how valuable your products/services are to them. Responding professionally and encouraging them to keep sending feedback helps in no small measure to nurture your online authority and to grow your business.   

9. Engage Customers with Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing methods to stay in touch with your customers and to nurture your online authority. If you choose to use the services of MailChimp or Constant Contact to assist you, you can automatically send frequent emails to your customers as a very effective way of keeping them fully informed on what your business is up to at any point in time. Your online authority is better enhanced as a result.  

10. Use Paid Advertising as Needed

Most small businesses are always on shoestring budget for advertising. The reason they depend more on free online advertising. If however you want to market to many more people and free advertising is not helpful enough, you can decide to supplement that with some paid advertising as needed within the limits of your ads budget. In paid advertising, the higher your budget, the higher your reach. If however your ads budget is severely restrictive, you can in addition use social media advertising. Characteristically, social media advertising offers a fairly inexpensive way to reach more potential customers and customers. Social media makes it possible for you to target easily, different locations, audiences, interests and behavior patterns around the globe 24/7.

How to Market your Professional Services Online

If you are in any of the popular professions like law, accounting, medicine, entertainment, real estate, plumbing, haulage etc and you want to market your services online, always be clear who you really want to market to. What most people simply want to know about you is, who you are, what you know and how much what you know can be of help to them. It is as simple as that. As a professional, to market your services successfully online, you must explore every way to get your info in front of the right people at the right time and even in the right forum. That strategy tends to get the best results. With the right marketing strategy, professionals can attract and convert prospects with ease. It is also possible to re-engage existing clients and turn them into regular sources of referrals. First, you must take the right steps that can help you to stand out and be easily recognized in the vast digital world of the internet. These tips can be of help if you diligently try them out.

Personalize and Command your Presence Online

Make sure your biography is fully established on your website. That allows you and your website to make online presence together as a good step to personalizing them for the benefit of your target audience. That way, the traffic your website attracts, directly benefits your professionalized profile. With time, many searchers may indeed be hitting your website mostly because of the info laid out on your biography. You can use free online tools to help personalize your online presence and to command more respect and demand for your professional services. If used correctly, you can indeed witness some appreciable increase in prospects reaching out to you through the “contact us” form on your website. The email address, social media handles and even the telephone numbers you have on site can be very good personalization tools that enable your audience to make easy contact with you and your business. 

Embrace Technology

These days, embracing technology to enhance your professional services is a given. Anyone who genuinely wants to do good professional business online must embrace the right and suitable technology to enhance the business. Smart professionals are increasingly turning to smart tools that easily combine their personal touch with cutting-edge technology to do business online. You now have specially adapted software that computers can use to ease things up a bit for any professional service. Everyone wants to save time and get a good job done professionally and the right technology usually helps a great deal in that quest. Zoom meetings, virtual seminars/learning, online graphic tools are a few of the technologies professionals now depend on to get things done faster, safer and better.

Optimize your Website for Searches

Your website is your online business window in the virtual world. If you already have one, it is just not enough to design and host your website well. It must be optimized to make it visible to search engines. Doing so allows it to benefit from organic traffic which search engines are well positioned to send its way. If your website is not optimized, it benefits only from generic traffic. A generic traffic website tends to speak only to an undefined target audience, the reason it generates only mediocre results in terms of inbound prospect traffic. Optimization positions the site for prospect searchers to reach it from their own search results on their own time and place. With the availability of personalization tools on the site, prospects can easily get in touch with you by way of any of the contact info you’ve provided therein.

Be Consistent

Information consistency helps to build trust and authority. Make sure that any info you provide online is accurate and not contradictory to what you’ve already supplied someplace else. Inconsistency is unprofessional and may indeed hurt your business if you are not careful. Professionally, irrespective of whatsoever marketing tactics you may choose to use online, the important thing is to be sure you are consistent. Consistency helps to build credibility for your business. That in turn helps to increase trust and confidence with your prospects, a development that is very good for business.

Match-Make Other Professionals

This two-way traffic service serves most professionals very well. In medicine, they call it referrals. Medical practitioners always send some of their patients to other specialists for medical intervention depending on their specialized fields. Such Doctors too also benefit from such referrals in their own areas of specialization. Naturally, no matter how good you are in your profession, it is not possible to be everything to everyone. You cannot be an expert in all fields. The real reason it is good to match one professional somewhere with a business prospect where your own expertise is limited. You also benefit from other professionals who benefit from you in similar matchmaking. This is good for business no doubt.

Avoid Generalized Messaging

As a professional, you must have realized that you can’t be everything to everyone. Yes, you do have your own limits as a human being no matter how intelligent and professionally qualified you are. As a professional, you must know your audience well enough to be able to market to them directly at all times. To avoid confusing your audience, desist from sending generalized messages to your specialized audience. Addressing your audience with strange professional jargons is also not helpful at all. As much as possible, your content marketing campaigns must be specific and directed to your target audience even if by way of multi-channels approach on social media, emails, blogs, podcasts or even videos. This is because of the relative ease of leveraging specialized marketing messages across multiple platforms.
 
Be Credible

Factual consistency helps to build credibility for your business. If you are a professional, credibility is one of the most important characteristics on which to build your business. You get a lot of business mileage if you are able to get your marketing messages and thoughts out to your audience solely on the strength of the business credibility you’ve strenuously built up online over time. Your business credibility can earn you a quotation as an expert in the news or having your business featured in large/reputable name media publications. These publications do act as your third-party endorsements. More of such endorsements easily give credibility to your business by way of helping to build trust for it and allaying the fears of clients at having to do business with you.

Be an Expert Author

If you are a professional, your authority is asserted better if you manage to get your name on a good book as an author. A good book helps to highlight your expertise and to educate your clients on your areas of specialty. Writing a good book may be time and other resources consuming but it is something that can truly set you apart from your competition. That no doubt is a very good testimony to your expert professional standing. You can autograph books and give them away as gifts at seminars and other professional gatherings. You can also use eBooks online for similar purposes.

Periodically Appreciate your Clients

Most humans naturally crave recognition and appreciation. To enhance your professional standing and to appreciate your clients better, you can occasionally send them token gifts and even ebooks online highlighting current breakthroughs in your profession. These token gestures can go a long way to get your clients to remember to do business with you when they need to. Gifts are very good as public relations tokens as well.

Write a Professional Newsletter

Unlike writing a book, writing a newsletter can be less strenuous for a professional. You can use newsletters to regularly update your clients on the latest developments in your profession and how these developments affect their businesses. A good newsletter also helps to keep your business name in the minds of your clients even if you send it via email or given out physically.

Embrace Smart Work as Against Hard Work

This is where smart technology is very important. Your professional job is better enhanced with the right technology. That is working smarter. Zoom meetings, virtual seminars, emails, blogs and social media marketing all enable a smarter working environment and better results delivery for your professional business. You can leverage these smart working technologies to relate easily with a bigger audience and to enhance your business effectiveness as a professional. With the effective use of emails, newsletters and social media marketing, you can maintain contact with your clients easily. That is working smarter as against working harder.

Use the Right Metrics to Measure your Efforts

Smart professionals working online always drive their marketing plans based on concrete goals and driven by accurate metrics which you can with the use of Google Analytics, a free online tool. It helps your planning efforts to be able to measure accurately your website traffic, click rates, leads and sales rates. To grow your professional business online, these metrics are very important. They help you to plan how to better attract and convert new prospects to clients. They help to save you the efforts of dissipating your valuable time and resources in the wrong directions.

How to Use Your Content as a Creative Marketing Strategy

In online marketing, content is king. If you can create high quality content that is informative, educating and entertaining, you attract readers with ease. These readers become the bulk of the traffic to your website. They transform to leads and eventual customers. If you want to succeed as an online marketer therefore, it is extremely important and a good marketing strategy to always create content that people want to engage with. Note carefully that a good content is far more than just blog posts and press releases. It must be well crafted and creative enough to fit into your overall marketing strategy.

These here are great ways to use your content as a creative marketing strategy.

Emulate Industry Leaders: In any business you are in, look out for the industry leaders and endeavor to follow them keenly in whatever they’re doing in their business. Pay particular attention to what the leaders in your industry are doing by way of marketing themselves and their business. Doing so gives you the opportunity to discover certain things you can take away from what they do and how you can adapt such things to your own strategy. Think more of emulation and not outright copying to get results for your own business.




Use Industry Related eBooks: If you blog for business, well, nearly everyone does these days, you must already have a huge trove of content on your website. You can re-purpose this content to create a guide or industry related eBook. With that, you can then use the eBook to attract visitors through an invite form on the landing-page of your website. That helps to capture leads from among visitors who are interested in downloading your eBook.

Online Polls: Conducting online polls is one great way to get visitors interested in your website. By working through poll-maker sites online, you can specifically ask a target group of people some probing questions. Since these questions are industry-related, you will get some attention from people who are in the same industry if you report the findings on your blog or in a case study. Sharing such findings widely on social media helps to get traffic back to your website.

Use Fun Memes: Having fun is one great way to relieve tension. Good Memes do help your website visitors with some humor and to have fun. They help to give them a break from mundane business activities while showcasing the lighter mood of your business. That’s why many people love Memes and they are always attracted to good ones. Your website traffic gets boosted as a result.

Industry Trends Infographics: This is one great way to process data graphically for easy comprehension and digestion by your readers. Infographics help you to merge the statistics you get from your research efforts into an easy-to-understand visual presentation. If they are well-designed and well-presented, they attract the attention of online visitors.

Use SlideShares: SlideShares represent some form of online presentation strategy. They involve re-purposing your PowerPoint presentation in a more engaging way to attract visitors seeking preferred visual info. B2B persons mostly on LinkedIn social media platform tend to prefer the use of SlideShares as online marketing tools.

Use Comparison Guides: If you are marketing a product similar to that of your competition, you can create a comparison guide for it. Such guide helps in a strategic way to show your audience how you are different and what you do differently that warrants giving your product a try. Stating the naked facts about your product in a fair and objective way is an ethical way to go about it. Customers easily take note of that from among the several choices they have, and they reward you with patronage.

Offer Product Test Trials: It is one great and effective marketing strategy to offer money-back guarantees for returned goods and offering free trials as well. Allowing buyers to test your product risk-free is a great way to get them in. It demonstrates to buyers that you have implicit trust on the product you have in the market. For most buyers, if your product meets their needs during the trial period, they get converted as customers.

Teach with Webinars: Teaching with webinars is one impactful way to teach and to give more insight on any industry topic of choice. You can also use webinars to give a more detailed inside look at any product you are marketing. Webinar lessons can be delivered with synchronized timing at the same time around the world. They are very effective online marketing efforts which help to generate good sales and leads.

New Industry Intro Guides: Yeah, there are always new entrants into any industry on daily basis. People who are in a relatively new industry or branching into a relatively unknown part of any industry do need guidance and pathways. For this reason, beginners guides are a great piece of content that typically have very high engagement rates because such content has a way of making readers feel like industry insiders.

Use Pop-Up Opt-In CTA: Strategically using pop-up opt-ins as call-to-action just when visitors are trying to exit your website works very well to convert. That way, the bounce rate on your website gets lowered. For marketers, pop-up opt-ins on a website do serve as last ditch efforts to give visitors one last chance to engage with your website.

Use Interactive Quizzes: Online quizzes are very easy to create using free online tools. Many people love doing online quizzes mostly for entertainment and for solving imaginary business problems or answering imaginary questions. When such quizzes are good and challenging, they tend to attract visitors to the website.



Write an Online Magazine: Producing your own virtual magazine is a great form of content marketing. If your content is of high quality, you can quickly build up followers and subscriptions. That helps to get leads, customers and sales.

Produce Your Own Podcasts: To produce your own podcasts, be sure you really understand what your audience actually wants to hear and learn about. That’s the only way to produce podcasts that will benefit your audience. Make sure your podcasts are unique and outstanding not just run-off the mill podcasts everyone else is producing. If well produced, they can serve as strategic traffic earners for your website.

Make Online Comics: You can create good online comics using free web tools. They serve well as visual content marketing materials. Online comics are very popular with web visitors thereby helping to get traffic for a website. As marketing tools, online comics that relate to the surreal aspects of any business niche tend to be better liked.

Market with Videos: Videos are very effective visual content marketing tools. They tend to arrest viewer’s attention much faster than text content. Web visitors who view product videos are more likely to convert to customers because videos always present a more convincing visual message to potential customers. You do not have to be a professional to be able to shoot marketing videos. With the amazing cameras now available via smart phones, creating videos has become much easier than ever. Once created and shared on YouTube, they get the required exposure from one of the most searched Social sites in the world, which YouTube presently is. That exposure is good for traffic.

Cover Industry Events: Every business person likes to get quality information about the industry they operate in. The reason many like to attend industry events. For the benefit of people who are unable to regularly attend such events for one reason or another, they benefit by getting information from reliable sources that cover such events. So, by creating a guide, overview of an industry event, or even doing real-time industry updates on Facebook or Twitter, you can quickly build an audience of eager followers hungry for information.

 

How to Use Social Media as a Creative Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing is gradually increasing in popularity in tandem with the increasing popularity of social media platforms. Social media now provides a veritable avenue for online marketers to market to billions of people around the world 24/7. Now, that is one very huge market no doubt. To take full advantage of this huge market, you’ve got to be sufficiently creative in your marketing efforts. First, you must build a formidable following on social media platforms and with some creativity, you can harness it for the benefit of your business.

You can try these here creative strategies for effects and expect amazing results.

Share Industry Related Content: Online, marketers and consumers are always looking for information to help solve problems for them. This is why it is imperative to always choose content that adds value to your audience. Such content must be related to the industry niche your business in known for. You can share links to relevant content published in authoritative and credible sources like trade journals, business publications, research journals and newsletters in the fields of interest to your audience. This is one creative way to build audience and traffic.



Reward Customers Who Share Your Content: Content sharing is very easy on social media even though not everyone does it. A vigorously shared content tends to go viral fairly quickly and that is good for business visibility and traffic. Since not everyone likes to share content, you can design ways to appreciate and reward customers who take a bit of time and effort to share your content. Simply thanking them for what they are doing for your business may be OK with some. Some others may be rewarded with token gift items like free coupons, discounts and suchlike incentives to make what they are doing for you really worth their while. That’s a creative way to encourage them to continue sharing your content.

Create a New LinkedIn Group: LinkedIn is a very popular social media platform that helps to bring together business persons with similar interests. So, if you can’t find any group in your industry that has similar needs as yours, you can simply create one. That’s very easy to do after which you can take deliberate actions to promote it to people you are connected with. You can attract them with compelling content and discussion questions then invite them to join up.

Join LinkedIn Groups: These are places business persons with similar interests have unlimited opportunities for interaction. So, if you are a business owner, you need to join LinkedIn groups if you’re yet to do so. Joining groups on LinkedIn is one easy way to building connections and getting involved in business conversations with like-minded people. The more active and useful you are in these groups, the greater the returns your business gets.

Connect with Local Businesses on Social Media: One great way to build community and cross-market your business is to connect with other local businesses on social media. You can actively interact with these businesses, positively engage with their content and build good relationships as a result. Doing so can help open doors for your business to get referrals and even mutually beneficial partnerships.

Push Your Social Media Handles: Do you often see “Follow me on Twitter?” That’s one creative way to push your Twitter handle. You can do similar things in many social media platforms. If for example you are writing an article for publication or you are speaking at an industry event, conference or seminar, you can easily drop your social media handles for your audience to link up with you at a later time of their convenience. When people love what they hear you say or read what you write, many will be keen to keep up interacting with you. Dropping your social media handles helps to facilitate that process.

Use Hashtags: The internet loves hashtags usually denoted with the symbol “#” before the hashtag word or phrase. Many internet users usually search for information using hashtags. When you use hashtags, it allows people searching for content, using such tags, to find your content fairly easily.

Join in on Popular Hashtags: You can search Google for hashtags related to your business niche. If found, you can join and use the popular hashtags in your industry by getting involved in the larger conversation. Search results will be turning up your business as well if it is involved with popular hashtags.

TikTok Social Service: TickTok is useful for creating quick, short-form videos. It takes just a bit of work and efforts to create the videos. If such videos are some fun creative content, you can quickly grow a network and following on TikTok. Get started now if you’ve not already done so before everyone else in your industry beats you to it. If your content is good, the traffic it gets is good too.

Images on Pinterest: Pinterest is more an image and inforgraphic social media platform now becoming very popular with marketers. If you create some great images for your blog or make an infographic, you can Pin them on Pinterest. You can leverage Pinterest for your business by sharing other related content along with your Pins. That way, your business gets seen as someone who Pins great content even if you didn’t produce the content. This helps to build trust with your audience and positions you as informed and helpful in your niche.

Follow Your Competition: Some marketers like to call this spying on your competition. It is good for business if you can keep a keen eye on what your competition is doing. Use creative and effective ways to keep watch on and to keenly follow your competition. In some social media platforms like Facebook for example, you can use its “Page to Watch” feature to follow other accounts easily. Following your competition and keeping tabs on what they are doing enables you to see what works for them and if you can learn anything from the strategy they are using.

Be Your Biggest Promoter: Having a good content on your website is not enough. You must reach out and promote it. If you sit back and hope it will work just like that, it won’t. You cannot be wrong by promoting your own thing. If you’re unwilling or unable to share your own content, who will? If you have a good content, experts advise that you should reach out, engage, interact and be bold enough to ask for, follow, like or connection. That is one great way to get noticed.




Use Instagram Photo Contest: Instagram is one social media platform that is image driven. The reason it is a celebrity platform of choice. Posting good photos regularly helps to build a very formidable following in good time. On Instagram, you can use a photo contest to build brand awareness. If some good prizes are involved in such photo contents, you easily attract followers who in turn help to share your business with their followers. That helps to grow brand awareness real quick.

Use a Social Media Management Tool: Social media management tools come handy to help manage many social media accounts and saving time. Many of the tools come with great features which you can use to run the connected accounts from one location. You can even get to use some of their analytics features to better understand what is working for your campaigns and what is not. A proper use of social media management tools helps to save time and energy and with good results to boot.

Connect with Leaders in Your Niche: Finding and connecting with influential leaders in your niche has two major advantages. Firstly, if you connect with them via social media, you have unlimited access to their awesome content which you can learn from and share with your own audience. Secondly, you can get them to also help share your own content to their huge followers who look up to them as industry leaders. Both ways help your brand awareness and visibility immensely.

Use Zoom Web Conferencing: Zoom is one new technology now becoming popular with marketers. It is a great, free way to do video conferencing. With Zoom, you can market directly to customers and engage them as if you are doing word–of-mouth advertising. By video conferencing, you see them and they see you. Talking to each other is seamless while facial expressions and gestures can also help to send powerful messages. Many business owners now use Zoom to connect more intimately with their following or to record their screen and produce screencast videos to share on social media.

Blogging as a Creative Online Marketing Strategy

Blogging is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your business online. Your blog is a great place for you to share your expertise with your target audience and to market your business. The only notable cost element of blogging is your time and if you blog creatively, the time expense is always well worth it.

If you use the creative strategies below, you can maximize the effectiveness of your blogging efforts.

Write Quality Content: With blogging, content is king. The more impactful the content, the better for your blogging efforts! You must be careful to create only content that is worth reading and sharing. Major search engines particularly Google don’t like poor quality content. So, if you as the writer wouldn’t read it, better don’t create it at all.

Make Sharing Easy: A written piece can easily go viral if it is shared easily. Make use of the sharing button on each post generously to ensure your post reaches a very wide audience online. That is the surest way to quickly get real exposure for your blog pieces.



Write only for Your Audience: Write only what you’ll love to read yourself if you were a shopper. By visualizing what your audience will like to read, it is possible to write what they’ll actually read. One essential element to successful online marketing is by understanding who you are writing for very well. You get some traction and impact better when you write solely for your audience.

Create Statistic Lists: Statistics can be very impactful and tell good stories. You can create a list of eye-popping statistics to wow your audience. You get their attention better by creating posts to explain the statistics and how they impact the audience.

Create High Visual Blog Posts: Visuals are very impactful on readers because human brains generally process images much faster than texts. For high visual blog posts, you can use Memes, Videos, SlideShares or Infographics to share a message.

Use Graphs/Charts: Graphs/charts also have high visual impact on your audience. Thus, when you use Graphs/Charts on your blog posts, they make it easier for your audience to digest and understand the message at a quick glance.

Create “Ask the Expert” Pieces: Experts do command a lot of respect in online marketing business. Expert opinion usually plays a great role in buyer decisions. By reaching out to leaders in your industry and interviewing them on burning topics and industry issues, you can get a treasure trove of information to write about. Publishing your findings on your blog makes a great deal of impact on your audience.

Ask Experts to Share: Many industry experts always have a huge following on social media. By following them and helping to share their pieces, you can in turn request them to help share yours. That’s one social media etiquette that is highly impactful on blogging. If industry experts help you to share, you get extra visibility from their huge audience.

Top 10 Lists: This is one blogging strategy made popular by expert blogger David Letterman. He insists that readers always love top 10 posts. Getting quality posts in that range from your blog is good for traffic.

Optimize Your Titles: Doing so helps to attract a crawl from search engines. It also impacts the rating of your content in their SERPs. Because Your Blog Title is the first thing your audience interacts with, it must be impactful at a quick glance. If it is not impactful enough, it risks a frequent pass by from your reading audience since they have many other competing titles on their feed. For more and better impact, it is advisable you spend just as much time crafting your title as you do creating your content, if not more.

Pace Your Posts: Blogging for quality is much better than blogging for numbers. Before you write each post, take some time to think through it before you start writing. Rushing your blog posts just to meet self-imposed deadlines leads to poor quality posts. If you are quite realistic about the amount of time you need for any piece you are writing, you can take the time to do it right. If you can’t do it right, please don’t do it at all.

Be Flexible: It is good to have a content schedule for your blog to avoid overwhelming yourself. However, just take content schedules as mere guidelines that do not require stressing up about. Leave enough room for flexibility to take on more timely events even if not in the earlier schedule. Always remember you are writing for an audience. It is what your audience likes and wants to read that dictates what you should write about most of the time. That demands a bit of flexibility despite content schedules.



Guest Posting: Be sure to do it the right way. You can reach out to blogs in your niche industry and offer guest post content. Some may not accept but some may say yes but with some conditions. If the conditions are acceptable to you, just go ahead with your guest posts. Guest posting on a popular industry blog is good for traffic.

Buy Content if necessary: At times you may not really have sufficient time or hands to meet your content schedule. If that is the case, you can then consider buying quality content. Since content development takes time which you don’t really have, it is OK to hire good content writers for some reasonable fees. Content writing professionals may just require you to provide them a few details about your business. Once you pay their fees, they get the job done.

Write “How to” Blogs: People read blogs to get information or find solutions to pressing problems. Writing “how to” blogs helps to meet that need. You can develop a simple step-by-step post that helps your audience find solution to a problem they are experiencing. By making it concise, simple and enjoyable to read, it easily attracts readers. If for example you run a confectionery business, a good “how-to post” like “How to bake tasteful cupcakes” is a good idea.

Create List Posts: Blog readers tend to like list posts because they are always helpful and straight to the point. You get your info point by point instead of reading a whole lot of stuff before you can decipher a few points from the whole lot you’ve read. If you run out of ideas to write about, you can use Google to help find great blog topics relevant to your niche.

Why Get to Know Your Online Customers

The current coronavirus pandemic ravaging the world has no doubt fundamentally affected consumer behaviour and shopping trends in very many ways. Naturally, consumer behaviour habitually shifts most of the time. However, current events like forced lockdowns have on their own dramatically impacted consumer behaviour and how people generally shop. If you are an online marketer, you cannot afford to ignore this trend in your marketing plans and strategies. You’ve got to be ready and willing to adapt your marketing efforts to all of the changes if you want to remain in business. Knowing your online customers and their behaviours very well is key in such efforts.

If you have some measure of experience in online marketing, you’ll realize that at times, consumer behaviour can be quite predictable. A lot of shopping behaviours are most times determined by seasonality as well as peak times when every good marketer knows that a lot more people are going to be shopping online. Seasonal marketing spikes like Black Friday or Boxing Day are always in the calendars of serious marketers. For some others, depending on the industry, they know that January is historically the most popular month for booking summer holidays. Marketers particularly travel companies who know this always like to take full advantage of the month of January to make the most of travel bookings.



Many marketers also know from their various experiences of consumer behaviours that some products characteristically have higher demands within certain months of the year. For example, winter clothing and summer clothing sell better within winter and summer seasons. It is always expected then that consumers will demand more of these products depending on the season of the year. Because of the current pandemic, many marketers are more concerned about the safety of warehouse staff and the logistics of receiving deliveries during this crisis. For this reason, a lot of consumers are mostly shopping for bare essentials to carry on with their lives as best they could. In normal times outside pandemic seasons, many changes in consumer behaviour can arise for a host of reasons. Smart marketers who know this can always take advantage to make good sales. What they need do is to be ready to quickly change their marketing strategies one way or another as the need arises.

Even if seasonality and peak times affect your chosen industry in a similar way, it’s also important that you understand your typical customers’ shopping behaviours more specifically. For this, you need to gather diligently as much copious information as you can get on your online customers. This is because, the more information you are able to collect about them, the better it is for you to accurately predict their shopping behaviours. Such vital information will easily put at your disposal, exactly who visits your website 24/7 and where they visited from. You can also determine how long it takes your website visitors to convert once they’ve clicked through to the website. Knowing where your website visitors are coming from is of paramount importance for traffic analysis purposes. Traffic from influencers’ Instagram stories, Twitter and Facebook blogs, voucher sites and or more traditional online media, needs to be well identified because it can help provide vital information which the marketer greatly needs to target potential customers through the various seasons all year round.

 

10 Vital Lessons on Ecommerce Marketing

If you run an ecommerce site, just pay attention to these lessons. They are mostly customer based and the persistent search for ways to improve on how to serve them better. For very huge ecommerce marketing platforms like Amazon, what drives their marketing efforts is their deep understanding of the customer and their relentless search for self-improvement. If you run an ecommerce site and you want to compete with giants like Amazon, study these lessons very carefully.

These here 10 lessons if faithfully applied can help any ecommerce site better serve its customers.

1. Seamless and Pain-free Transactions
 
Because of habitual constraints in online transactions, ecommerce by nature may engender a lot of customer constraints and pains. Shipping costs, damaged or missing products and return of unsatisfactory products are usually areas of concerns. You can mitigate some of these constraints by way of free shipping, free return-shipping of damaged and unsatisfactory products, money-back guarantees and convenience to drop-off returns at designated/convenient collection centres.


 
2. Know Your Customers Closely
 
To be able to deliver personalized service which many customers really like, you can get to know them deep enough by way of their behavioral data from your ecommerce site. This data is not too complicated to collect. With it, you can help to ease a customer’s shopping experience by way of suggestions and tips to help them make a buying decision seamlessly. That way, it is easy for you to position yourself to the customer as a sympathetic partner in his otherwise complicated shopping forays.

3. Leverage Your Customers to Get More Customers
 
“Word-of-mouth” remains a very powerful customer referral effort in aid of marketers. It usually comes from satisfied customers who are easily believed by other people. On your ecommerce platform, if you manage to make customer experiences unique and positive, such customers willingly and happily tell others. Before too long, the word gets around that you are the best there is in the business and many other people will be looking out to do business with you. The force multiplier from the “word-of-mouth” of your satisfied customers can do amazing things for your ecommerce business.

4. Allow Buyers a Wish-List Store

Habitually, many online shoppers do spend a lot of time researching products before making the decision to buy. By allowing them an onsite wish-list store, buyers can store in a list items they like, but are not yet ready to buy. That list simply means they have a deep interest in such items which maybe for lack of sufficient money or time not yet due to buy them, they are earmarked for purchase at a later date. Such list usually gives them the impetus to return to your site to do business at some later dates of their choosing instead of going elsewhere to shop.

5. Have a Membership Rewards Program in Place

Membership rewards have many variants such as paid subscription for prime membership, free and priority shipping or access to special discounted products. It is a good way to retain loyal customers. Rewards programs may cost the ecommerce site some money which is recoverable from the increased patronage from Prime members. It has been established that Prime members on average usually spend much more shopping than non-Prime members. That is a win-win situation for all parties.


 
6. Make Testing and Innovation a Priority

Out there on the internet, the competition is always very fierce for ecommerce marketers. The reason you must be really proactive if you want to remain relevant in ecommerce business. You must always think ahead, innovate and stay at least one step ahead your competitors. That is proactive competition which is a credible survival strategy in ecommerce business.

7. Use Mixed Personalized Recommendations

Every customer likes to feel important. Nothing boosts that feeling more than the ecommerce platform taking personalized interest in serving its customers. With customer behavioral and purchases data at the disposal of the ecommerce site, it is easy to make targeted recommendations to customers to help their buying decisions. You can make personalized recommendations not only based on recent purchases, but also for your next buy including a variety. This variety usually derives from your wish list, past browsing sessions, or recent buys encapsulated in your behavioral data. The ecommerce site can also entice you by showing you other products that could go with your past purchases or some new pieces in the same range you like to buy. That way, a customer may end up at times buying more than she earlier intended.

8. Simplify Regular Repeat Buys for Customers

If you want to retain customer delight and loyalty you must find ways to simplify repeat buys. Because of the many easily exhaustible household items needed month after month, you can encourage customers to have “standing orders” for some purchases. This gives these customers the advantage of buying these products at discounted prices and having them automatically delivered up at given times of the month without them having to make any fresh orders. That way, such customers don’t necessarily have to remember to stock up on such regular items. That is one great value-added service to customers and guaranteed purchases from the ecommerce marketer. 


 
9. Give Customers Wider Products’ Insights

Characteristically, one of the major drawbacks of buying online is that we cannot touch, feel, turn, or hold products. We can only see virtual images of such products. This limitation tends to slow down buying decisions. Many ecommerce sites are now providing for better and more detailed examination of products by using near 3-D images, image guidelines to sellers on close-ups and image insets by way of more robust literature and brochures which are very vivid in virtual space. All these tend to make online buying more distrust-free.

10. Deploy User Reviews Very Generously

There is research evidence that about 85% of online customers trust online reviews of peers. This is the reason why many people usually rely on the opinions of their peers and even social media influencers before making their buying decisions. Many marketers now regard customer testimonials as hugely important for any online marketing business. For effects, these testimonials are usually genuine and truthful and are neither coerced nor induced. The reason they’re easily believable. When these testimonials are made available right below each product on display for sale, they help to make customer buying decisions faster.

 

9 Tested Business Ideas to Earn Money Online

Yes, you too can earn money online just like anyone else if you are sufficiently determined to. All you need to earn money online is a good business idea and some requisite skills. Once you have an open mind to learn, with a bit of hard work and some skills, you can start to earn money with some business ideas even within hours of starting out. The more knowledgeable and skillful you become, your earnings increase in similar proportions.

These here are some business options available to everyone who wants to earn money online at no extra expense.

#1.Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn money online. What it entails is to simply elect to help product merchants promote and sell their products then you earn a commission for your efforts. It is as simple as that. The more products you help promote and sell, the more money you earn as an affiliate marketer. Just sign up with any affiliate marketing networks of your choice particularly SFI and boom you are in business.

#2.Freelance Writing

To be able to earn money as a freelance writer, you must be good at writing. That is a given and there are no two ways about it. Most freelance writing jobs online are hugely profitable and free to join. If you write well and want to earn money as a freelance writer, you can showcase your skills at many opportunities online. If you have writing skills, freelancing is one of the easiest and simplest jobs you can do online and you start to earn money from your computer even at home. It is also one of the best business options available for you to start earning money online even without spending any money. Depending on what your inclinations are, you can write articles, website content, blog posts, translation, research & summary, sales copy, press releases, transcripts, legal writing, email copy, business slogans, book and eBook writing, product description, speech writing, proofreading, and editing, resume and cover letters, etc. If you are keen on earning money as a freelance writer, websites like Fiverr, Freelancer.com, PeoplePerHour, and Upwork are credible platforms for freelancers to work from.


 
#3.Web Designer

Web designing requires some technical knowledge and skills which if you don’t have, you cannot earn with it. If you know how to use a computer and how to code with it, you can train to be a web designer. As the internet deepens and many businesses go online, the demand for web designers continues to increase. Web designing is one online job that pays very well, if you have the requisite knowledge and the skills to design websites on demand.

#4.Online Marketing

If you have a website and you have a product/service to sell, you are in online marketing. In addition to your own products, there are thousands of companies out there looking for some freelance marketers to help them do their online marketing jobs. You can sell physical products and e-products off your website to make money. You also earn commissions from products you help other product merchants to sell. You can work from anywhere as much as you want and even earn money online passively even without any monetary investment at the outset. Online marketing opportunities are many and varied. If you have the skills, you can work in social media marketing, video marketing, email marketing, surveys, web analytics, influencer marketing, mobile advertisement, etc, etc.

#5.Business Assistant
 
As a Business Assistant or Virtual Assistant, you can work for companies and even individual clients who need to outsource some of their routine services. You can easily become a Virtual Business Assistant working for companies in areas of data gathering, collation and entry, email management, social media management, market research, business plans, branding services, legal consulting, financial consulting, business tips, presentations etc. etc. Business Assistant is one great handy job to do online and the hourly pay is good but you need to get out there online to be found. So, to easily get hired as a Business Assistant, you must be able to create a convincing portfolio out there then start approaching clients for patronage. You can start little to acquire jobs online no matter how small. The more the jobs you’ve done in the past, the better your chances of getting more and bigger ones.

#6.Music Manager

Do you have a musical talent? Are you good in any kind of music activity. If you do, the good news is, you can sell your services online to earn money. The areas a talented person can intervene in the music industry are many and varied. For example, you can compose music, mixing & mastering, singing or song writing, record podcasts or spoken-word editing, jingles & drops, sound effects, voice over recording, etc, etc. Even if you can’t sing yourself, it takes some talent to simply record a voice over to earn money online.

#7.Online Mentorship

In these days of increasing individualism and privacy, the demand for virtual mentors is going up. If you are well grounded and knowledgeable in any subject matter and you are able to impart knowledge convincingly, you can mentor others and earn money. A good mentor is basically a problem-solving person who helps other people with their problems, be it business or personal life problems. Online mentorship basically involves the job of teaching others what to do and how to get things done. People get paid readily and handsomely for good mentorship services these days. The job is now so popular and sophisticated that people now provide mentorship services in many areas of human endeavours. Mentors are now in great demand for relationship advice, health advice, nutrition & fitness related advice, astrology & readings, spiritual & healings, family & genealogy, gaming mentor, etc, etc.


 
#8.Graphic Designing

Graphic designing simply involves the creation, editing and the manipulation of images for various purposes. It requires quite some talent to be successful in graphic designing even though some computer software are now available to help make up for human deficiencies and limitations at working on images. As a graphic designer, you have many options to work with images and easily make cool money online. You can try your hands on logo design, illustrations, books and album covers, web and mobile design, social media covers, banner ads, photoshop editing, Infographic design, presentation design, etc, etc. You can make money by selling your graphic designing services handsomely provided you can create beautiful and attractive images with the use of different software like Canva or Picsart. For a more professional touch, you can use Adobe Photoshop to make original and very attractive images which earn good prices on sale.

#9.Video Editor

Video editing is one unique and attractive business idea particularly for younger persons who crave unlimited entertainment. As an online business, there are many options for anyone who can edit and design videos using unique effects because many people habitually create beautiful videos and upload them on social media networks just for fun. With the use of video editing software like Filmora, you can help create and edit videos for business owners to promote their businesses and you get paid for your efforts. Video editing is one great way to make money online with no extra cost implications.