Effective Social Media Video Strategies That Help Your Visibility

Social media currently plays a very crucial role in digital marketing because of its innate peculiarities. This role is further enhanced by social media video strategies that are directly responsible for the eye-catching content peculiar to social media platforms. So, when digital marketers think of more reach and engagement, they turn to social media. Here are some effective social media strategies anyone can leverage to craft video content that resonates and connects with the right audience for effective digital marketing.

 

Understand Your Audience

Perhaps the most important social media video strategy is to fully understand the audience that is the target of your marketing. It is by understanding your audience you can effectively craft video content that resonates with it. It takes quite some creativity though to get it done. This creativity requires a strategic approach hinged on a thorough audience analysis that will enable you create the right video content that manages to not only capture audience attention but also forges a meaningful connection with the audience. If you know the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of your target audience, you gain valuable insights that can directly influence your content creation process. A good knowledge of the social media platforms where your audience can be found enables you to optimize your content for maximum impact. You can leverage the in-house analytics tools of these platforms to refine your content strategies in real-time to enable you make necessary adjustments that will  ensure your content remains relevant and continues to meet the evolving and dynamic expectations of your audience.

Platform-Specific Video Content

All social media platforms have their own unique peculiarities and nuances. This is why it is a good strategy to craft video content that is platform-specific. Such videos are usually more effective for marketing purposes than the one-size-fits-all types. If you want to craft video content to maximize impact on social media, you must factor in the unique characteristics of each platform, particularly the very popular platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and the likes. You can also craft videos that are adapted to the formats and expectations of each platform, kind of speaking the local language of each platform. This enables your message to be heard and understood as it is more likely to resonate well with the format and expectations of the audience. 

Compelling Storytelling Videos

Crafting compelling video narratives is the secret super power that helps to transform ordinary videos into memorable experiences. You must be sufficiently creative to craft resonant narratives that can impact your audience. To do this effectively, you must know your audience, keep your videos brief and concise, be sure your videos invoke emotion, can create tension and even anxiety and with abundant visual appeal. These are the kind of videos that can easily impact your audience positively. Social media videos, with their constrained time frames, demand concise yet impactful storytelling. Their narrative power lies not just in the story itself but in how it’s told. You must bear this in mind and pay special attention to the tone, the pacing, and the emotional resonance of your narratives. Such videos easily resonate with and impact your audience positively.

Showcasing Effective Storytelling in Brands

If you can showcase success stories in videos, they can be impactful. You can look for success stories of brands that have harnessed the power of storytelling to elevate their social media presence. You can copiously showcase these stories in your videos to impact your audience. If well utilized, storytelling may not just be an ordinary tool, it can be a veritable strategy that helps to build brand identity, foster connection, and transcends the transactional nature of digital marketing.

Effective Audience Engagement

Your video narratives can be impactful if they effectively engage your audience. They manage to unlock a very crucial two-way communication between marketers and their audience. This is akin to unlocking a two-way street where creators and viewers coalesce into a vibrant community. To benefit from this vibrant community, you must explore all ways to generate more audience interaction with your videos. This you can do through clear and concise Call-to-Actions (CTAs) that guide your viewers on what action to take next, creating more interactive content, fostering real-time interaction by hosting live Q&A sessions, encouraging User-Generated Content (UGC), promptly acknowledging and responding to your audience comments.
 
Leveraging Comments, Likes, and Shares for Visibility

Engagement metrics like comments, likes, and shares are not just vanity metrics. They act as the building blocks of visibility for your content in the crowded landscape of social media. Here is how it works. When comments are lively, it is a sign of an engaged audience. You can therefore actively encourage discussions with your audience on social media by asking open-ended questions and responding to comments to keep your conversations flowing. On social media, any “like” on your content is a vote of approval. So, if you consistently craft content that resonates with your audience, and consistently delivering value, it will naturally lead to increased likes. “Shares” on the other hand are the ultimate endorsements. So, you can consistently create shareable content by evoking emotions, providing valuable insights, or presenting information in a unique and entertaining way. All these help to build the much desired visibility for your content.

Summing Up

You must not just tell compelling stories with your videos, for marketing purposes; you must also explore ways to make the videos extraordinary. The foregoing strategies come in handy in that quest. Once your videos sufficiently impact your audience, you get the desired marketing results. For best results however, you must continuously experiment, innovate, and tailor these strategies to resonate with your own unique brand and content. Doing so will greatly help to enhance your social media visibility.

Effective Strategies for Social Media Link-Building

You can effectively build backlinks to your webpage by leveraging the huge popularity of social media. With that, social media can become a very effective strategy to improve your website’s search engine rankings and increase traffic to the site. Here are systematic steps you’ll need to take to make that happen:

Consistently Create Shareable Content

Content is what makes social media tick. So, if you consistently create high-quality, engaging, and valuable content that resonates with your target audience, it generates backlinks. For effectiveness, you can package your content in form of blog posts, infographics, videos, eBooks, and much more, to make it easily shareable. The more shareable your content is, the more it is able to attract backlinks.

Engage with Influencers

Most influencers are usually people with high social media presence who are thought leaders in their niche. You must carefully identify and select them. You can directly engage with their content by sharing, commenting, and mentioning them in your posts. This helps to build valuable relationships with them. Building relationships with influencers encourages them to widely share your content and link to your website.

Share User-Generated Content, UGC

It helps your backlinks building by encouraging your followers to create and share content related to your brand or industry. This has to do with valuable UGC which your followers generate themselves. You can widely share such UGC but due credit must be given to the creators of the UGC. Doing so not only helps to create an interactive community, it also helps to create backlinks as users share their contributions.

Engage Actively with your Followers

It helps backlinks building by regularly engaging with your followers. This you do by responding to their comments, starting conversations and becoming an active participant in discussions. This process can help you to build relationships that may lead to backlink opportunities.

Generously Use Visual Content

Visual content is usually very effective on social media. This is more so when the content is packaged in form of infographics, videos, and images that tend to perform very well on the platforms. If these formats are widely shared on social media, they help to increase the chances of your content reaching and generating backlinks.

Leverage Relevant Hashtags

If you generously use relevant and trending hashtags, it helps to increase the visibility of your content, thereby making it easier for users or topics to find and share your content.

Use Linkable Quotes and Statistics

Habitually sharing valuable quotes/statistics from your content on social media helps to build backlinks because when others find your information valuable, they are usually attracted to link back to the source.

Promote Guest Posts

You can write guest posts for other blogs and even in Articles Directories and promote these articles on your social media platforms. By doing this, you not only show your niche/industry expertise, you also increase the popularity by sharing your posts/articles, with a backlink to your site.

Participate in Relevant Groups/Communities

You can join, participate and engage with popular and relevant social groups and communities on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit. On these platforms, you can easily share your expertise, answer questions, and provide value. This can help to increase your level of authority and consequently lead to organic backlinks.

Utilize Visual Platforms

Significantly and for effective marketing purposes, social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok are highly visual. If you deliberately create content that aligns with these platforms, it can be visually appealing enough for others to link back to your website. Deploying the right CTAs in your captions or video descriptions helps to make them especially effective.

Widely Share Research and Data

Valuable research data when widely shared on social media can help generate backlinks. In this quest, well-packaged original research, case studies, and data-driven content can be highly shareable. You can thus endeavor to create visual content and update reference websites linked to your research to build backlinks.

Collaborate with Influencers

You can partner with influencers on campaigns or collaborations that create content that links back to your website. With their strong social media presence, influencers can always introduce your content to a larger audience and potentially lead to new backlinks.

Run Contests and Giveaways

You can periodically organize social media contests that encourage participants to engage with your content and share it with their followers. This can create a buzz and attract more visibility, potentially leading to backlinks.

Last Line

If you want to build effective backlinks to your content, you need patience and dedication because social media link-building is a gradual process that requires consistency and genuine engagement. By utilizing the foregoing strategies, you must focus on building valuable relationships, providing value, and creating shareable content to maximize the benefits of your efforts.

8 Ways Social Media Contributes to Link-Building Strategies

Leveraging its huge popularity, social media now plays a very significant role in modern link-building strategies. Most digital marketers now take a highly beneficial advantage of this to build links across many online platforms. They explore the fact that link-building is a very important element of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In this quest, the ultimate goal of marketers is to get high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to improve the search engine rankings and overall online visibility of their own websites. The following 8 ways are proven ways marketers can take advantage of social media to build backlinks to their websites.

1. Networking and Relationship Building: Because of its huge popularity, social media allows you to connect with other industry professionals, business owners, bloggers, influencers and website owners. If you consistently engage with their content and creating genuine relationships, you can directly increase the backlinks to your content.

2. Content Promotion: Technically, when you share valuable and relevant content on social media, it generates interest and engagement. If the content is compelling, it may be widely shared by others in your industry. A widely shared content can result in more visibility and potential backlinks.

3. Content Distribution: Significantly, most social media platforms allow you to share your website’s content easily. That is if the content is packaged in form of blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, and suchlike content formats. If the content is widely shared and liked by your followers and their connections, it will be able to attract more attention particularly from other websites, bloggers, and content creators. This leads to valuable organic backlinks.

4. User-Generated Content, UGC: You can encourage user-generated content (UGC) to get backlinks. This you can do through social media contests, challenges and campaigns. UGC can help you with increased visibility and potential backlinks from participants who share their contributions on their own platforms.

5. Community Engagement: The more active you are on social media, the higher your chances of getting valuable backlinks. Being active on social media allows you to engage with your audience directly. If your activities include doing comments, responding to comments and messages, it can directly help to increase your content and links to it from other websites.

6. Social Signals: Activities like “likes”, “shares” and “comments” are the main signals on social media. If you get more of these activities, it is a direct indication that your profile is very strong. A strong profile leads to strong social engagement and social engagement is indirectly connected to search engine rankings. Therefore, if your content has higher social engagement, it can with time attract more organic backlinks.

7. Social Bookmarking: Social media platforms like Reddit, Pinterest, and others that allow users to submit and share interesting content are great places for social bookmarking. If your content is valuable and impactful, it can easily gain wide attention on these platforms. If it does, it will be directly responsible for getting high traffic and potential backlinks.

8. Influencer Outreach: On social media, Influencers and Thought Leaders always have a strong social media presence. You can directly create beneficial relationships with these Influencers and Thought Leaders by way of collaborations. Through this arrangement, they can widely share your content or link to your website from their platforms. This helps to boost your link profile immensely.

How to Leverage TikTok Advertising Techniques for Brand Success

Significantly, most digital marketers have found a way to leverage the power of social media to push for the success of their brands. The relative new kid on social media block TikTok now provides an excellent opportunity for marketers to take advantage of its advertising capabilities to promote their brands. Because of these capabilities, TikTok has practically become a real advertising powerhouse in the social media space. With currently over 800 million users worldwide, the platform is especially popular with younger generations. This makes TikTok an excellent social media space for brands to reach younger generations as target audiences. Significantly, TikTok has many advertising capabilities and it offers a range of robust data and analytics tools marketers can effectively use to track and measure the performance of their marketing campaigns.

These here tips and best practices are quite essential for leveraging TikTok’s advertising capabilities to its fullest potential.

Consistently Craft Engaging Content

As an advertiser, creating content that resonates with a target audience and encourages engagement is essential. This is especially true when it comes to advertising on TikTok. Advertisers can take advantage of the platform’s creative tools to create content that stands out from the competition. Such content must be relevant to the brand, informative, entertaining and resonates with the target audience. Advertisers can do this by utilizing trending topics, creating visuals that draw attention, and incorporating as much humor as decently possible. Once the content resonates with the target audience, it drives engagement.

Leverage User-Generated Content

User-Generated Content (UGC) is one of the most potent strategies for driving brand success on TikTok. Technically, UGC is content that is created and shared by TikTok users that is related to your brand. Marketers can take advantage of UGC to reach out to a larger audience and build relationships with customers. If well utilized, UGC that can help to get enormous TikTok likes. This is because if the UGC you are using is relevant, it can help to prove to potential customers that your brand is authentic and trustworthy. UGC is an excellent way to build brand awareness and customer loyalty on TikTok. If you use UGC, it is ethical to always make sure to credit the original owners of the content.

Discovering Trends

Discovering trends is essential in TikTok marketing since trends are constantly changing. That makes staying on top of them hugely essential. If you diligently analyze the trends on TikTok, it will help you identify the types of content that will resonate with your target audience and ensure a marketing success. For instance, content from influencers usually trends. So, when influencers create content related to your brand, it gets a very wide exposure because of their large dedicated followings. This exposure is highly valuable to your brand exposure.

If you carefully analyze your current metrics on TikTok it can help you determine what content is trending that resonates with your audience. You can then understand the types of content that are popular on TikTok. This vital info helps you to craft more powerful and effective ad campaigns. It also helps your campaigns to carefully analyze your competition on TikTok. This way, you’ll get to know what your competitors are doing, what content they are posting and what engagement their posts are getting. This can help you identify what’s working and what’s not. You can then use this vital info to craft your content for more effective campaigns.

Tactically Utilize Targeted Ads

On TikTok, targeted ads are an effective way of reaching a relevant audience. If brands target specific users based on age, location, and interests, they can optimize their ad campaigns to maximize their brand reach. This is more so when these ads are packaged in creative, entertaining, and informative videos. Significantly, video ads are the most popular form of advertising on TikTok because they allow brands to create engaging content that users can see in their newsfeeds. For this reason, marketers who want to create a successful video ad campaign should focus on telling exciting and relatable stories to their target audience using videos that are creative, entertaining, and informative. For more effective marketing, marketers should consider optimizing their videos with the relevant keywords to their brand.
Diligently tracking the performance of your video ads and carefully analyzing the data you receive from your ads campaigns will help you to identify which ads are performing well and which are not. This vital info will help you to determine exactly which ads to tweak for better results.

Live Streaming

Live streaming on TikTok is a very effective way to engage with your audience and build relationships with potential customers. It lets you connect with your followers in real time, allowing for more direct communication and customer feedback. Through livestreams, you can directly interact with your viewers real-time, ask them questions, answer their queries, and encourage direct dialogue with them. Doing this helps to make your livestreams more engaging and give your viewers a sense of connection with you and your brand. Livestreams allow you to showcase your products in action and give behind-the-scenes looks into what goes into creating and producing your brand. Hugely effective for marketing purposes no doubt.

Creating Effective Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

You can create and optimize CTAs to maximize your brand reach. For effectiveness, CTAs should be created and tailored to your ads’ intended audience. They should be designed to attract as much attention as possible even at first glance. To maximize reach, CTAs must be concise and communicate the brand’s unique value proposition. Incorporating an actionable element in your CTAs makes them really effective for marketing purposes. For instance, you can through your CTAs ask users to like, comment, or share your post. Additionally, if you use targeted hashtags on your CTAs, it can also be an effective way to broaden the reach of your ads. When marketers use the right combination of creativity and data-driven insights, they can ensure their CTAs reach the right audience and spark engagement.

Using Hashtags Strategically

In digital marketing, hashtags allow users to find relevant content quickly and easily. Therefore, by utilizing the right hashtag strategy, marketers can create a powerful presence on the platform for their brands. This can significantly increase the reach of the brand. For effectiveness, hashtags should be explicitly tailored to the unique needs of each brand. Brands that really want to stand out and get noticed quickly can create customized hashtags unique to their product/service. Hashtags are directly responsible for helping brands to stand out from the vast array of other content on TikTok. That can be really great for brand engagement. When brands monitor their hashtags regularly, it can help them to quickly identify what content resonates with users and the type of content that does not. In addition, diligently monitoring hashtags can help marketers to identify any negative sentiment that needs to be quickly addressed.

Wrapping Up

No doubt TikTok offers a variety of unique tools marketers can take advantage of to push for the success of their brands. The foregoing techniques on how to use TikTok for advertising are really handy to help marketers reach their target audience and push for the success of their brands. If you take up the challenge now, you too can promote your brand on TikTok with the right strategies and attract tremendous success for your brand.

7 Top Spot Internet Marketing Strategies Every Ambitious Marketer Needs

Presently, internet marketing has become a hugely popular method of brand building and products/services promotions among digital marketers. Marketers easily settle for internet marketing because they can depend on it for increased efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. If you already own a business or you are considering starting one, your primary concern should be how best to promote your products/services to get the best results. Internet marketing readily comes to mind to get these results. Marketing successfully on the internet requires effective strategies.

Following are some top spot and effective internet marketing strategies every ambitious marketer needs to aggressively grow their business.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant content with a view to attracting and retaining customers. Content marketers technically use content to persuade their audience of a brand’s authenticity. Relevant content makes marketers feel understood and can naturally lead to a sales pitch. Such content is usually packaged in form of blogs, articles, videos, infographics, case studies, eBooks, and User-Generated Content, UGC. Content marketing as a strategy is really effective if the content is of high quality, impactful, informative and even entertaining. If content is created with a specific target audience in mind and published through the right channels, it tends to be more effective as well.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple performance-based business model where affiliates help promote a merchant’s products/services to consumers and earn commissions for their efforts. Affiliates usually promote these products/services on social media, web blogs, video content and podcasts. Affiliate marketing as a marketing strategy can work for anyone who understands how it works and uses it correctly. Through this strategy, marketers can directly increase leads, sales and even their customer base. For best results in affiliate marketing, it is advisable to join reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI. This way, you can have the advantage of choosing and working with the right affiliates, optimize your marketing platforms and explore all ways to collaborate with influencers to enable you take a marketing advantage of their large following/audience.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be “old school” and has been around for quite a while but it is still a very effective marketing strategy. To get the best results from email marketing, you must diligent build a responsive email list. This list is hugely important for your email marketing to be effective. If you have this list in place, with just the pressing of a computer button, you can send marketing messages to hundreds of thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds. Email marketing is thus a very effective marketing strategy for getting leads, increasing sales and your customer base.

4. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a technique you can use on your website content to enable it rank high in the SERPs of search engines. The technique involves the effective use of keywords, mata tags and backlinks to attract the attention of search engines. It involves both on-page and off-page factors to comply with the requirements of search engine bots.  SEO is an important technique of reaching out to your target audience and increasing traffic to your website. This traffic is organic traffic which search engines send to your website in response to searches related to the keywords you have optimized your content with. SEO technique requires you to from time to time tinker with specific elements of your website in order to comply with search engine’s particularly Google’s requirements and provide the best user experience possible. Technically, SEO is simply deliberate website activities of getting your website/blog to rank at the top of the SERPs of search engines. If properly done, it helps your website to receive better organic traffic, more leads, good conversions and sales.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencers are usually prominent people who have a large number of followers particularly on social media. Marketers can collaborate with influencers to promote their products/services. They can effectively take advantage of the huge audiences of influencers to reach a large number of people with marketing messages. Influencers can even help by endorsing products/services to their huge flowing in return for commissions. Working with influencers to promote your brand’s messages, products/services is known as influencer marketing. It is a hugely effective marketing strategy to increase sales.

6. Conversion Rate Optimization, CRO

Technically, CRO is the practice of maximizing the number of conversions on your website or app. This is calculated by the percentage of site visitors that successfully complete a targeted activity. Any user that goes through this process successfully is referred to as a conversion. The more conversions you have on your website, the more sales you make and the more your business grows. User-conversion is a way of extracting more value from the traffic of users on your website. So, conversion rate optimization is quite handy to help marketers reduce their customer acquisition expenditures. A real cost-effective way to acquire more customers no doubt! Ultimately, if you manage to increase your conversion rate, you can attract more customers, boost your sales and expand your business.

7. Pay-Per-Click, PPC

PPC is an effective internet marketing technique to widely expose your business and product/services to customers. It is a very important component of an inbound marketing plan. So how does PPC work? As an effective marketing technique, it enables advertisers to place bids on specific keywords on the internet. When users enter these keywords into search engines, the search engines will present to them the ads connected to such keywords. A click on these ads takes the searcher to visit the advertiser’s website. The advertiser consequently pays for each click delivered to his website through that process. PPC ads are always well targeted to segmented recipients and thus very effective as marketing techniques.

Summing Up

On the internet, there are some foolproof strategies every ambitious marketer should use to market their products/services, increase brand awareness and grow their business. The foregoing strategies are top spots among these strategies. If you diligently implement them, no doubt they will help increase brand awareness for your business. Consequently, your business will get more leads, acquire more customers, make more sales and boost your revenue.

Top Ecommerce Marketing Tips to Grow Your Brand

One thing is settled in online marketing. It is virtually impossible to avoid stiff competition no matter the type of products/services you are selling. This is practically what every e-commerce brand has to contend with. Irrespective of whether your marketing goal is to attract new customers or retain the customers you already have, you have to fiercely compete with millions of others having the same goals. If you are unable to compete effectively, it will be very difficult for you to satisfactorily grow your brand. These here tips can help you to overcome this challenge and effectively grow your e-commerce brand.

 

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Presently, more and more people are taking to shopping online. That increases the patronage of e-commerce websites. A vast majority of these purchases are done through mobile devices particularly smartphones. So, it becomes smart digital marketing to optimize your website for mobile devices if you want to effectively share in this huge mobile traffic. It is therefore very essential that your website pages look good and function properly on the proportionately small screens of mobile devices. You can either DIY or engage the services of professional webmasters to make sure your website works well on small phone screens. Such professionals will be quite willing to help revamp your website with a responsive UX design.
 
Invest in Email Marketing

First you must build a responsive email list if you want to market with email. The people who subscribe to your emails are the people that like your brand enough to want to stay engaged with the brand. With a good combination of your content marketing strategy and a good email marketing strategy, you can turn existing subscribers into loyal followers. This is achievable if you can effectively use your emails to share discount/promo codes, announce new product launches, and share relevant content they’ll want to view or read. Once your email frequency does not present like spam, emails can be very effective at growing your brand.
 
Improve Your Website Loading Speed

Website loading speed is a major component of the requirements for your website SEO. The faster it takes your website to load, the more user-friendly it is and the more traffic and sales you can get from it. Internet users are notoriously in a great hurry. No user really wants to sit idly waiting for a page to load. If your web page is slow to load, many users will simply skip your page and move elsewhere with their business. If you want your website to be effective at growing your brand, its loading speed must be fast enough as not to discourage visitors to your web pages.

Increase Sales with Affiliate Marketing

By joining FREE reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI, you can increase sales and build your brand. Affiliates are independent business persons with their own audience and marketing channels. Anyone can be an affiliate who is willing and able to promote products/services for products/services merchants and earn commissions in exchange. This can be done even if the audience/followers are not in the millions. If however your followers are in the millions, you can become an influencer affiliate and earn commissions too. Influencers can help endorse products and brands to their large followers thereby helping to build and grow your brand. As a business owner, affiliate marketing actually costs you nothing unless the affiliate actually gets you a sale. Even the commissions you pay affiliates come from the sales they generate. The little reward affiliates get in form of commissions appears insignificant when weighed against the efforts they put in to promote your products/services.

Have a Strong Content Marketing Strategy

It is smart marketing to have a strong content marketing strategy for your e-commerce store. With it, you can effectively drive more traffic to your website, increase conversions, and position yourself as a leader in your niche. If you don’t have a strong content marketing strategy, you’re pretty much-handing valuable sales over to your competitors. For your content marketing strategy to be good and effective, it should include a routine analysis of your competition. You must also have a good idea of what types of content you should focus on. You must regularly review how the strategy is performing with a view to determining if and when it becomes necessary to rejig it or refocus it to effectively grow your brand.

   
Offer International Shipping

If practicable, free shipping is always better to grow your brand than paid shipping. If you can offer international shipping, so much the better! Most e-commerce business owners usually face huge unpredictable shipping challenges with customs, duty, tariffs, and liability risks. These are usually some of the reasons many e-commerce business owners choose not to ship overseas. Significantly, any e-commerce business owner who is willing to open up his e-commerce store to overseas customers directly increases his chances of doing more business with customers overseas. It may be daunting and tough going at the outset, but if you’re willing to take on the challenge, you can significantly increase your customer base overseas. Such international customers can help you to grow your brand/business significantly.
 
Market more on Social Media

With presently over 4.55 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market place out there on the Internet. If you are creating valuable content to promote your e-commerce store, making your social media strategy as an integral part of your content marketing strategy is great for growing your brand and making sales. On social media, your marketing messages can easily go viral to the benefit of your brand and sales. If you have a large following on the very popular social media platforms, your social media followers can help you to widely share your content, photos and even endorse your products. That significantly helps to grow your brand and increase your sales. In addition, your brand can directly benefit from User-Generated-Content (UGC) on social media. Such content created by real customers can act as social proof to promote your brand. That is one very inexpensive way to promote your brand. It is much more authentic, much cheaper and can even more effective than paid ads.
 
Summing Up

If you want to build an e-commerce brand, you need time, dedication, and patience. The foregoing tips come in very handy in that quest. They are great to help build brand awareness, draw more traffic to your website thereby significantly increasing conversions for your e-commerce business. Even if deployed singly or in a combination of two, three or more, these tips can be helpful. They can significantly help you to increase sales in your e-commerce store and become a more recognized brand in your niche. You’ll find out only if you try them out.

5 Robust Social Media Marketing Strategies That Get Results

Social media is daily increasing in popularity and digital marketers are taking real advantage of this popularity. They are devising strategies to increase their reach, get more traffic, leads, customers and sales by improving their social media marketing tactics. Right now, social media appears to be working for everyone but in various shades. These here five social media marketing strategies have been variously tested and have robustly proved to be useful to get desired online marketing results.

1. Skillfully Use Engagement Contests for Branding

For marketers who know how to use them, social media contests provide real opportunities for brands to grow their business. Most human beings usually like contests particularly when the rewards are great. So, if you can organize engagement contests, you can get the contestants involved and engaged with your brand for as long as the contest lasts. By using the right software, you can automate the process of collecting data about contestants in social networks using special programs. That way, you can actually collect the email addresses, phone numbers and more personal marketing data from all contestants. This data becomes useful down the road for branding, getting leads and customers and ultimately making more sales all because of the contests you are running. For best results, always make sure the prizes you offer match your target audience. If these prizes are good, they significantly help your business to increase brand awareness and generate more leads.

2. Reply Promptly to Facebook Messages

Brands are increasingly taking real advantage of promptly acting on messages via messenger or direct on Facebook. This is because most of the messages from subscribers involve asking a question, placing an order or leaving a review. These usually require very prompt and timely response from brands. Facebook for instance has pretty strict rules for sending messages between brands and customers. When a user contacts a brand via messenger, they only have 24 hours to respond to that message. If the brand responds promptly, a chat conversation can be established to quickly resolve a business problem. AI and Autoresponders come in very handy for brands to deal with business messages on social media. These can buy a bit of time for the business owner to personally respond to messages that may be too sophisticated for Autoresponders to handle. These are messages outside the FAQs which the responders are usually programmed to deal with. The bottom line is to always keep the customer positively engaged in conversation to see if a sale can be made through such efforts.

3. Promote High Organic Engagement Posts

Promoting high organic engagement posts is a great strategy marketers use to increase brand awareness and attract new users to their social media pages. Doing so is a very effective tactic to get new followers, clicks, and more of their website’s landing page visitors. It is for this reason Facebook has a “Promote Post” option among its in-house marketing tools. The feature encourages and allows brands to promote existing posts to new audiences. These are posts that have shown promise through analytics data relating to audience engagement. Such analytics data directly shows which posts are best performing in terms of likes, clicks, comments, and shares. Comments and re-posts are especially very valuable since they directly reveal the quality of a post and its relevance to the target audience. It is such posts that should be promoted more. Brands can thus effectively use such posts to promote ads and other valuable posts that are attractive to their target audience. Promoting existing high-performing posts on Facebook and Instagram has a distinct advantage for marketers. Such posts are great to preserve the social proof. All the likes and comments a valuable post manages to earn are usually visible to new users. Very likely therefore that more people will pay attention to content that is already appreciated by many other people. The direct effect of social proof at work!

4. Tag Relevant Brands and Influencers

It is an effective social media marketing strategy to tag other brands and influencers in your content. However, because of the spam rules in most social media platforms, you must make sure the tag action does not look like spam and does not annoy people. You can avoid this by making sure you do it only with relevant content that such people can relate with, that is, content that connects directly with them in some positive way. If other brands and influencers who have an audience-match with you accept to partner with you, the partnership directly benefits all parties. If you can help share their content by tagging them, chances are, they’ll be happy and willing to reciprocate. That makes a win-win situation for both parties.

5. Market with User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is no doubt a very powerful social media marketing tool. But, before you share UGC on social media, always be sure you get permission to do so. Photos and testimonials created and shared by customers can help your brand with social proof if shared with permission. You can greatly increase your business reach if you manage to turn UGC into social proof. If your target audience is made to see the reviews of other customers, it is more likely to help them make a vital purchase decision. For this reason, it is hugely important to pay attention to campaigns that encourage the creation and dissemination of UGC on social media. 

To encourage social media users to share content with reviews or tags from your brand, you can do the following:

-    Use UGC in your stories or feed, and always tag the author.
-    Widely share with permission content from users frequently and enthusiastically.
-    Create your own content and tag other brands and influencers.
-    Add UGC asking you to share your favorite products from your brand.
-    Use a branded hashtag in the content they share.
-    Place a CTA in your bio on platforms like Twitter or Instagram, asking users to tag your brand.
-    If you quote others, mention their product or brand in your post.
-    If you quote an affiliate program or sponsored content, mention the product involved.

Last Line

Best way to get real marketing benefits from social media is to use robust social media marketing strategies that can help you to get results. The foregoing strategies are quite handy in that quest. Just give them a try, will you?

Benefits of User-Generated Content for Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is extremely valuable for driving traffic, building trust, and generating leads for marketers. Affiliate marketing is a simple business model where affiliates help product merchants to market their products and the affiliates earn commissions from the sales they generate. It is all about building relationships and networking to earn money online. Many affiliates prefer to build a relationship with the businesses they work with, while others focus on building a relationship with their audience. Affiliates take advantage of UGC to build these much-cherished relationships.  UGC is a content created by users rather than professional marketers or publishers. It comes in such forms as comments/feedback, photos/graphics, videos, reviews and even blog posts. Many marketers hugely rely on UGC to promote their products and drive traffic to their websites. UGC helps affiliate marketing to work better and deliver more beneficial results. Here is how:

More Traffic

Even if the UGC is in the form of funny meme, adorable video or a heartfelt post about a personal user experience, if it is widely shared, it translates to valuable inbound traffic. Affiliate marketers cherish good traffic. This is because good traffic in quite helpful to their business. The challenge however is always how affiliate marketers can make their UGC more appealing and, therefore more shareable. To this end, marketers must strive to make their UGC more relatable than traditional marketing content. They can make it feel less like an advertisement and more like a conversation between friends, family or business partners. That way, UGC manages to provide a sense of authenticity that can be lacking in other forms of marketing. When shoppers see that other real people are using and enjoying a product, they can relate better and are more likely to try the product themselves.

Enhanced Trust

One huge challenge of affiliate marketing is always how to earn the trust of consumers. This is because many consumers don’t quite trust bloggers or websites promoting products. UGC usually comes handy to plug that trust deficit hole because it comes with a built-in level of trust. Consumers see UGC as coming from a real person rather than a faceless entity. The reason they relate well and better with such content. That helps to build trust. So, affiliate marketers can better enhance this relationship by rewarding their customers with deserved recognition through widely sharing their posts and even mentioning them by name. Great for trust building no doubt!

Higher Engagement

UGC is more likely to be engaged with than traditional marketing materials. You know why? It is because it is more authentic and relatable in the eyes of consumers. Smart marketers can use UGC to address poignant issues as well as disclosing more about their personalities and values. Most human beings crave recognition and always want to be seen to matter. This is why people are more likely to share content that’s relatable and not superficial. That translates to higher engagement.

More Leads

Typically, UGC can generate more leads because it can help marketers to reach a wider audience. The more people your marketing messages reach, the more leads you’re likely to generate. The more leads you generate, the more sales you are likely to make. UGC is highly effective to generate leads because it is more authentic than other forms of marketing. That helps to make it more trustworthy and persuasive in the eyes of consumers. Naturally, UGC often usually comes from people who are already customers or fans of a product/service.

Credible Ways to Get UGC for Your Affiliate Marketing Program

For your affiliate marketing business to take advantage of the foregoing benefits, you must first explore all credible ways to get UGC for the business. One of such credible ways to encourage UGC is to offer incentives, such as discounts, free giveaways or exclusive content. With these incentives, users will be more likely to share your content and help you promote your products/services as widely as possible. You can also encourage shoppers to share their own photos and videos or create contests and giveaways. The more fun and engaging your content is, the more likely people are to share it. You may also use influencers and reputable content creators, but adequate care must be taken to make sure the end result looks more like UGC and less like a paid ad. Many consumers do not take paid ads as seriously as they take UGC.

Conclusion

Even though UGC looks like and sounds like users are doing the entire job, it is not really the case. Deft and calculated marketing efforts from the business owner usually help to get the right UGC. Affiliate marketers must be sure they do their research well, make good plans and budgets, gauge strategies, and employ the best analytics tools to measure results. That is about the best way they can hope to get the real benefits of UGC for their affiliate marketing programs.

5 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

In this age and time, even though email marketing has been around for quite a while, it still remains one of the best online marketing strategies small business owners can use to grow their businesses. It is not just cost-effective to use, it still gets some of the best results when compared to other means of digital communications online. It characteristically gives very good returns on investment for small businesses. This is why many small business owners never fail to leverage on emails for their marketing campaigns.

Here are five effective email marketing strategies any small business owner who wants to quickly grow their small business needs to adopt.

1. Personalize Your Email Messages

For maximum effectiveness, it is advisable to personalize emails. That however does not mean sending a specific message to everyone on the email list of your subscriber base. Not at all! What it means is to creatively use customer data to create and send a personalized message to your customers. Such messages resonate better with customers and they tend to get the best results. Email personalization simply aims at creating an excellent customer experience by allowing customers to build good relationships and trust with your business.   When emails are personalized with customers’ names, subject lines, customer needs and location, they are usually very effective at conveying marketing messages. Consequently, such emails do help to enhance some increase in the email open rates, conversions and increase in sales.

2. Optimize Your Email Messages for Mobile

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of online traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s a very huge chunk of traffic. A very large chunk of marketing emails are now opened via mobile devices particularly smartphones. So, sending emails to subscribers who regularly use their phones to access messages is just not enough. You need to optimize these massages for mobile devices. When your messages are optimized for mobile, it helps to minimize the chances of trashing, unsubscribing or deleting such messages. Sending mobile-friendly messages that are optimized for the mobile devices can lead to increased conversions and sales. One great way to optimize your emails for mobile devices is by using a responsive email template. Such responsive templates are usually created to automatically work on users’ screens for ease of viewing. These templates will allow you the sender to have a preview of your messages exactly how they’ll appear to your recipients. You’ll see in advance how your emails will appear when viewed on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. As more and more people now do business out of mobile devices, optimizing your emails for mobile has become a very good email marketing strategy.

3. Segment Your Subscriber Base

If you segment your subscriber database, it helps to make your email marketing campaigns more targeted to your audience. Better targeting means better effectiveness of your emails. You can therefore use segmentation as a personalization approach to deliver relevant email messages to your subscribers. With segmentation, your messages will get to them according to their interests, buying history, geographic location, gender, age, and so on. With segmentation, a marketer can effectively address the specific needs of the subscribers and facilitate customer satisfaction. For this reason, it is not advisable for all your subscribers to receive the same email content. What works best is that by segmentation, they should receive only messages that are relevant to them and their needs. Doing otherwise helps to increase the chances of many of your emails ending up in trash bins.

For maximum effectiveness, below are some of the best ways to segment your email list:

Content-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation based on data gathered regarding specific contacts. Such data may relate to the pages customers visited, the content they downloaded, tools used to download content, and so on.

Behavior-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation relating to audience behavior on your website. Here you craft emails by taking into account how long the audience takes on a web page, the pages viewed, and the frequency of their visits.

B2B Email Segmentation: This is segmentation based on B2B integrated relationship. Most businesses typically are different entities and have their own unique requirements and expectations. For this reason, you must deliberately craft emails for each business category. Such emails should target, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, IT specialists, Administrative Assistants, and so on.

Localized Segmentation: Yes, most small businesses are local. The reason there is an imperative for local segmentation. This type of segmentation is fairly common among many small businesses because it allows them to target and directly market to the local market around their base of operation. If for instance as a small business owner you are organizing a seminar or doing sales promos, sending emails to people within your locality and its environs helps to increase your reach a great deal.

4. Routinely Test Your Emails

Email testing helps to provide the requisite data to guide you in making practical decisions to improve your email marketing campaigns. For practical purposes, it is best to routinely test your email templates, the home page and landing pages to see how they pan out with the right elements of email marketing campaigns. The elements you need to test in your emails are subject lines, call-to-action CTA, messaging, personalization, design, sender name, and the target audience. These are the elements that are instrumental as to whether or not your subscribers will even bother to open your emails or the mails end up in the trash bin. Routinely testing emails can help to better promote your brand image and create an exceptional subscriber experience for your business.
 
You can rely on automated tools to do your email testing. These tools allow you to easily check the appearance of your email for both desktop and mobile users. Automated tools are also handy to check for grammatical and spelling errors that could put off some recipients. Emails also need to be checked for the proper display of images, font sizes and graphics displays that may need adjustments.

5. Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC

Usually, online reviews are like product recommendations from friends and can influence the customers’ buying behaviors. One of the most effective ways of encouraging engagement in email marketing campaigns is asking for customer reviews. Reviews are a great user-generated content, UGC. You get quality UGC when you allow your customers unfettered interaction with your brand. It is one very effective way to influence prospects to buy from you. You can better use UGC to convince customers to buy than other forms of inducement such as the brand/products photos/graphics.

Positive reviews and testimonials are a valuable means of social proof in digital marketing.  Customer reviews can also help to greatly enhance your UGC email marketing campaigns since many customers tend to trust the reviews they access online more. This is why reviews can also be helpful to generate more leads. Some reviews may however not be positive. That’s ok. Even negative reviews and testimonials are also helpful UGC. Experienced marketers can use negative reviews positively by responding to them to demonstrate their commitment to meeting customer needs as needed. 

Wrapping Up

It is proof positive that email marketing can be a very effective way to generate leads and build customer loyalty. With the right strategies in your business as outlined above, you can increase your customer base and do better business. The effectiveness of these strategies is not in doubt even though marketing trends keep changing rapidly. A way around that is to continuously test the relevance of these email marketing strategies with a view to identifying the very best and most suitable for your business. The strategies that work best for your type of business should be used more.

4 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Benefit Your SEO Strategy

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies available to digital marketers. This is because it characteristically delivers such good results that you can hardly get from any other marketing strategies. If you have a direct marketing strategy of increasing your search engine ranking, influencer marketing is one of the easiest and most effective marketing methods to get the best results. A high SEO ranking can directly help to differentiate your business from its competition. The higher your business ranks in SERPs, the better your brand grows. However, you can hardly get these results if the influencer(s) you choose to work with aren’t right for your type of business. Therefore, before you start any influencer marketing campaigns, you must make sure the influencer(s) you settle for are right. Make sure the strategies you deploy to reach your influencer marketing goals are ethical at all times because there are strict penalties set by Google and other major search engines for websites that try to be overtly manipulative in their strategies. Allow that to guide your activities as you market along. Here are some of the best ways influencer marketing can benefit your SEO strategy.

1. Create Unique and High Quality Content
 
For most marketers, content creation can be hugely challenging. It has to be done all the same because you need to create good content to attract organic traffic to your website. If the content you create is good enough, it will help your website to rank well on the SERPs of search engines. To be good enough your content must fit into what major search engines like Google consider in content such as readability, keyword usage, and overall content quality. In addition, the number of its social media shares and audience engagement are also very significant ranking factors for websites that search engines consider. So, to regularly create content that your readers love, it won’t only be just high-quality; it must be unique to boot. Influencers can play a massive role in creating your website content that is widely shared to their large audiences. Some influencers can directly help to create sponsored content and share it widely for you. In some cases, influencers can ask their followers to create content suited for your brand and add your business’s branded hashtag to it. Such content is called User-Generated Content, UGC. The more of such contents that are produced for your brand the higher the awareness that your brand benefits from the efforts.

2. Increased Brand Visibility
 
Every digital marketer must always factor in stiff competition in its marketing strategies. That is the nature of online marketing. Marketers must always find ways to overcome such daunting challenges to have successful marketing campaigns. Traffic and engagement on a website are some of the critical factors used by major search engine particularly Google for SEO ranking. For this reason, if you are unable to bring traffic to your website and ensure that there’s enough engagement on it, your ranking would be affected. This is where influencer marketing becomes hugely imperative. It greatly helps your brand visibility. Much more than any other digital marketing strategy, influencer marketing can bring massive traffic and engagement to your website. That is why influencers are called influencers as a result of their ability to influence their huge followers/audiences to take desired actions. By working with influencers therefore, you give your content more spread and credibility. Thus, with a broad content reach, you inevitably attract more visitors to your website. That is good traffic. The more traffic you get, the higher your SEO ranking. The more visibility you get, the more the engagement you get as well.  More engagement also means more website traffic and that helps to boost your SEO ranking.

3. Build Brand Authority and Credibility

Even though there are no reliable metrics to determine brand authority and credibility, you can closely observe a few factors that makeup brand authority. These factors relate to how people perceive your brand to determine if they can trust you or if your information is accurate and verifiable. People can make informed decisions on these factors from your website traffic, engagement rates, reviews, on-site activity, purchase rates and such related factors. It is best to maintain real credibility across this various range of factors. When your website commands some brand authority, it helps its SEO ranking. Influencers have great potentials to improve your credibility when their own influence rubs off on your brand. They can use their credibility and influence to give real positivity about your brand through their large audiences. It is hugely important to make full disclosure to your readers when your content is sponsored through influencers. That helps to enhance your sincerity and credibility. By marketing with credible influencers therefore, you greatly enhance your business ranking and reputation.

4. Build High-Quality Backlinks

As most digital marketers very well now, link building is a very effective SEO strategy, despite the huge challenges involved in getting credible links. Influencer marketing comes in very handy to tackle these challenges. One major factor that can influence your ranking on search engines is the quality of your links, be they internal links or backlinks. The authority of websites that link to you is a major factor search engines take into account to rank your website. To rank high enough therefore, you need to get high authority websites to link to your website. Doing so does not come easy though. Again, you can rely on influencers to help generate good backlinks to your website as a way of boosting your website rating.

By working with credible influencers, you stand a very good chance of having access to several high-authority websites. Now that’s a huge plus for your back linking activities.  Influencers can create content on these websites and link the post to your website. That becomes one good backlink. In addition, influencers can deliberately share your links as a way of helping to build your link profile. If they do this, chances are very high that many in their huge audiences will do same. Increased sharing of these links means increased popularity for your brand. With the help of search engines the probability becomes greatly enhanced that your website will fall into high authority domain websites’ hands. If these websites like your content and attach some premium to it, they may choose to add the link to some content on their own websites where it is relevant. The good traffic these high-authority websites receive will thereafter rub off on your website through such backlinks.

Email Marketing Tips for Current Trends in Communication

Digital marketers are increasingly relying on emails to do business. Because more and more people are taking to shopping online, marketers are also increasing the volumes of emails they are sending. This is partly to be able to reach out and accommodate consumers' constantly changing needs and to reach more people restricted by covid-19 pandemic. This trend is likely to continue even when the restrictions begin to ease off.

To sustain the current email marketing trends, these here tips can become very useful to email marketers going forward.

Using AI to Optimize Email Strategy

Email marketers can benefit from more effective emails if they skillfully deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, to optimize their email strategy.  With AI, marketers can easily and accurately analyze consumers’ behaviors and streamline their email marketing efforts for better results. Marketers can for instance utilize smart online tools to analyze consumer’s purchase habits and interests. By optimizing the email sending time with these tools, marketers can identify a more suitable angle for their emails’ subject line and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.

AI can help out to make your emails more captivating and readable thereby reducing the numbers that end up in trash bins. They help to accurately identify your customers’ needs thereby providing the much needed Intel to shoot them the right emails. CRM systems come very handy to make these processes much easier and time saving.

Personalizing Emails

Marketers can leverage automation and AI to create personalized emails that resonate well with consumers, making them feel connected with your brand. You can use online smart tools to accurately gather customers’ data. From this data, you can analyze their interests and preferences so as to design, craft and deliver more personalized emails that directly speak to their wants and needs. With that personalization, the emails tend to be more effective. These days, many more people are craving personal connection. Many consumers want to feel valued so they respond better to direct and personal touch from marketers. Therefore if you strive to personalize your emails, they help demonstrate your personality and care. That way, more customers can read your emails and really feel connected with you. It helps them to build trust in you as well as your brand.

Using More Interactive Emails

You can engage your customers better if your emails are interactive. The interactive elements in an email don’t have to be too complicated. They can be presented in form of clear and clickable CTA buttons, polls/surveys and quick quizzes to showcase products and or services. The idea is to remove boredom and to give customers the room to help lead the process. This way, customers may really feel that they’re being given options to take their own decisions. Whereas what smart marketers do is to make use of their customers’ choices to tailor-make the user journey that fits the customer preferences most. Such specially customized customer journey tends to convert more sales for the marketer.

Respecting the Privacy of Email Recipients

Customer awareness is now helping to place more emphasis on their privacy. Marketers must beware of this and respect it particularly on how customer data is being used. Trending now and going forward, focusing on customer-data privacy is hugely essential for any digital marketing business. Data privacy regulations may vary from one country to another and all require the right observances, respect and compliance. For this reason, marketers must constantly review extant legislation regarding data privacy with a view to ensuring their email campaigns are in full compliance at all times. If there are any changes in these regulations, as it happens from time to time, marketers must inform their customers of these changes and letting them know how their information will be protected. Doing so helps to increase customers’ trust in your business.

Incorporating User-Generated Content, UGC, in Emails

In digital marketing, UGC is any form of content created by the users of goods and services. The primary source of this content is user feedback. Incorporating UGC into your emails is one great way to increase consumer’s trust in your product/brand. UGC is free and unforced content making it highly convincing and believable. So, if you include customers’ reviews, polls results and photos of customers using your product/service in your emails, your emails resonate better with your recipients. Customers’ feedback is so impactful that it is said to influence over 90% of consumers to make their buy decisions. To get more UGC, you can cross promote your products/services on social media. That is one great way to gather more user reviews or photos. Many social media users are always happy and tend to appreciate your brand more when they too see their own reviews shared publicly by your brand.