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?

Tips to Step Up Your Social Media and Content Marketing Efforts

Digital marketing strategy is as unique to digital marketers just as it gets results for them in their own unique ways. Therefore, no digital marketing strategy can be wrong really for as long as it gets good results for the marketer. It is all a matter of results. To get these results, marketers do depend on many platforms and tools that are most relevant to their needs. To step up your social media and content marketing efforts, you can learn from your own mistakes and experiences as well as those of other small business owners. That helps you to get started and you build from there. These here are useful tips from the experiences of members of the online small business community.

Be a More Productive Content Marketer

To step up your content marketing efforts, you must painstakingly write good quality content in the form of blog posts and even social media content for the benefit of your readers. Doing this diligently and consistently takes quality time and efforts, even though it helps to enhance your productivity. You get more productive in your content marketing efforts if you hone your skills and create an intentional schedule to help you get more done within manageable time frame.
 
Blog to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Blogging is the most popular form of content marketing. Good bloggers can indeed use blogs to profitably boost their affiliate marketing activities. The more good content you create as a blogger, the more traffic you attract and the better for your affiliate marketing business. If your blogging is good, you can leverage several marketing strategies to help you earn more affiliate income.

Promote Your Brand with Tweets

Getting your business on Twitter is good for your affiliate marketing. Once you grow an active twitter community, you can always find out which tweets have been most impactful in your marketing activities. You get to know this through some of your most liked tweets. That info provides you some insights into how to grow your brand and community on Twitter.

Leverage Your Social Media Skills

As the internet is deepening and technologies are advancing, social media continues to evolve. For your social media marketing to be effective for a long period of time, it is best to focus more on your social media skills instead of specific social media strategies. That is what gets the best results particularly if you are marketing content through blogging. It is more advisable then to leverage these skills adequately.

Increase Engagement with Social Media Polls

If you want good traffic, it is always better to explore all ways to increase your engagement. It a way to deliberately get people involved in what you are marketing. Social media polls are a way to go in that quest. Polls are a great way to get more people involved with your social media accounts. By doing so, they get to interact better with what you are marketing through the accounts.
 
Market with High Converting but Low Cost Ads

Most marketers are always operating very tight marketing budgets. Stretching what you have to get the most benefits is one great marketing skill on this issue. That is why you need to invest more in low cost but high converting ads. If you already have a mastery of the skills of organic content and social marketing, you can then go for paid ads. To get the best returns from your marketing investment, it is best to create high converting but low cost ads.

Get Expert Help

Expert help is always welcome in business decisions. In this case, if you want to better propagate your brand, it is best to consider working with a branding and communications agency. Agency help is useful because most small businesses don’t always have the resources to hire full time staff for their branding and marketing activities. By paying moderate agency fees, professional agencies can be hired to step up and fill that gap. You can work with some agencies to outsource some of your important branding and marketing tasks.

Leverage LinkedIn for Branding

Popular social media platform LinkedIn is quite suitable for serious business minded people to interact and network for business. Like minded business persons get to interact on the platform for mutual benefits. They do offer paid jobs, business partnerships and collaborations. Through these relationships, users can effectively leverage LinkedIn for small business branding and marketing.

Avoid SEO Mistakes

If you want organic traffic to your business, optimize your website for search engines. That is SEO which is an essential component of any blogging or content marketing strategy. It comes about by the deft use of keywords on your content. However, excessive use of these keywords is keywords stuffing which search engines do penalize. It is an SEO mistake to stuff your content with keywords. Such common mistakes can make your content marketing efforts less impactful. In extreme cases, search engines may even penalize your website by dropping it from their SERPs completely.

Take Advantage of Instagram Hashtags

Hashtags are unarguably very popular marketing tools for small businesses on social media, Instagram in particular. Through hashtags, businesses can directly popularize their brands on the internet. They help Instagram users to grow their following on the platform. If you want to grow your following on social media therefore, you can take advantage of Instagram hashtags to do so.

Tips to Grow Your Online Business with a Blog

Most online business owners now rely on blogs to grow their businesses and blogs are really proving very useful in growing many of these businesses. Intermediate parties may not be able to promote your products as much as you would prefer, so blogs come in very handy to fill that gap. No matter how competitive the internet appears to be for business owners, a good blog can help make a real difference. Blogs can help to effectively popularize your products on the internet even in today’s highly competitive market. This is why business owners rely on blogs as superb resources for branding and for creating general awareness for their products on the internet. Blogs are a great resource for letting people online know how excellent the products you’re offering are that they would love to use. Below are some great tips on how to use your blog to grow your online business.

 
 
Post Only High Quality Content

In online marketing, content is king. A good blog is all about crafting and posting quality blogs regularly to attract readers. Therefore, to attract more visitors to your blog, you need to post quality and compelling content regularly that people find interesting, engaging, and relevant to their needs. The reason they’ll keep coming back to your website for more blog information. If your blog content is well optimized with relevant keywords, it can help you with the digital marketing processes necessary to promote your blog and get it on top of Google SERPs. This is why the better the content you post, the higher your chances of attracting leads/buyers that could transmute to customers if well nurtured.

Build Email List

A credible email list is an excellent digital marketing asset for marketers. It however takes quality time and efforts to build one. Here is what expert marketers recommend to build a good email list. Make sure your blog has a contact form you use to capture the names, location, and email IDs of persons that comment on your blog through this contact form or comments section. To get your website visitors to part with such vital personal information about themselves, you must try to offer something of value to them in exchange for the information. You can for instance offer free newsletter, research information, eBooks, prize winning quizzes as well as promos. Offering such values is quite effective even though many visitors will freely part with their personal information if your content is attractive, has quality, useful, and relevant to their needs. Over time, the list will grow and become a very valuable asset for your email marketing activities. You can segment your email list for effective marketing and also use it to nurture leads to become customers.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

If you have accounts on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others, you can easily share information about your new blog posts to your followers. Your followers could in turn share this information to their own followers if they find the information useful. That way, your blog post can easily go viral thereby attracting many more people to share your posts if they find them interesting enough. On social media, you can seize the excellent opportunities the platforms provide to easily interact with potential buyers or others who may be interested in products. From these interactions, you can acquire some leads, prospective customers and even customers provided you are able to handle their queries and suggestions or comments correctly. If you do, your chances of converting some of them to buyers of your products are greatly enhanced.

Optimize for Digital Marketing

Every marketer wants his business to be visible online. Getting your business well ranked on search engines like Google is a great way to go about it. That calls for SEO, Search Engine Optimization techniques on your blog content and even your website. If you know how to, you can deftly use keywords relevant to your products on your content to make it visible to search engines. Because SEO is hugely technical, you may choose to hire the services of a good digital marketer to do various digital marketing processes on your blog. If well done, SEO can help your blog to rank in the topmost searches of Google SERPs. That is how your blog can get to attract more attention online and benefit from quality organic traffic.

Blog About Your Industry

Blogging about your industry or business niche is one great way to show expertise which in turn attracts readers. You can through your blog provide news, breakthroughs, research findings, trending issues and views about the latest happenings about your industry. That somehow helps to keep readers and other stakeholders in the industry interested in your blog. This is also one great way to increase your business blog following. Such readers will relate to you as a dependable authority in your industry and that could enhance their loyalty to your brand.
 
Provide Affiliate Links

Many buyers trust blogs more than online ads when buying products online that matters to them. Bloggers always latch on to that opportunity by providing affiliate links to the products they are selling in the content of their blogs. A click on these links takes buyers directly to where they can find the products. A great blog about your industry with the right affiliate links to your products is always a great idea. Providing affiliate links to your products is like an invitation to your website users to take a look and possibly buy from you. If links provide the real opportunities for you to make sales online, they help your business to grow.

Wrapping Up

A blog is a vital resource marketers rely on to make sales online and to grow their businesses. If your blog is of high quality, informative and educational enough, it serves this purpose very well. If you run a business online and you are not blogging for business yet, the time to start is now. The foregoing tips are very handy. When it comes to marketing online, you will never regret doing so with a good blog.

Why Email Marketing is Important to Your Small Business

 

To some digital marketers, email marketing now appears “old school” but it still gets some great results. Email marketing is not only convenient, it is also cost-effective particularly for small business owners who are characteristically low on marketing budget most for the time. Crafting effective email campaigns requires some knowledge and skills. Once you get it right, the results are amazing. That is why email marketing is so important to small business owners who operate on low marketing budgets.

 

No doubt other messaging channels are also very important to business owners depending on their types of businesses. Notwithstanding that, email remains the main channel of communication for small businesses. Business owners effectively use email messages to lead consumers through the whole sales and marketing funnel, converting them to customers in the process. They rely on emails to assist their website visitors to interact with their apps, engage them more, and consequently increase their brand loyalty. Without a doubt, email marketing is one of the most efficient channels for customer retention. Ambitious marketers never lose sight of that fact. There is some credible research report indicating that “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit” Profit motive is what largely drives most small business owners and anything they do that helps them to increase profits, gets done more and better. That is the lot of email marketing.

To create effective email campaigns, marketers must pay special attention to two big areas of crafting email templates and handling email recipients. Experienced marketers can manually build email templates fairly easily. However, to save time and to guarantee efficiency and effectiveness, delegating your database management and sending logic to a dedicated and reputable email marketing service can also be considered.

If you resolve to follow DIY route, please pay attention to the following tips. Before you start creating your email campaigns, decide firmly on the following:
Your objectives/motives
The goals you want to achieve
Your recipient audience
Your type of marketing messages
The role great content will play
How to segment your audience

This information will help you to make the all-important decision on the type of email campaigns your business needs. Your emails even if largely technical must be transactional in messaging to be effective. For as long as they have marketing, branding, and even sales purposes, they’re great to form part of your marketing and product strategies. Meaning? For your emails to be effective for proper branding and sales, they must have well-crafted templates and carefully worded and optimized messages with great aesthetics appeal to boot.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help With Advertising to Attract Local People

Recent Google reports indicate that over 90% of its users regularly search for local businesses. Now that is quite awesome and a very huge volume of search information.  Smart digital marketers cannot afford to ignore that vital information. The reason is simple. With the growth of the internet coupled with changes in consumer behavior, most consumers now habitually search for products online to find out where nearest to them they can find such products. Digital marketers quickly latch in on that to refocus their advertising to local consumers. They tend to do better business when they deliberately target local people, who are geographically around them. Deliberately targeting ads at such people becomes hugely rewarding business-wise.

Here are three ways small businesses can target local consumers with advertising.

01. Take Active Part in Community Events

Every local business inevitably draws patronage from local consumers. So, anything they do with and in the community usually benefits the businesses in the short and long term. Local businesses need to support their communities because they are part of the communities.  Being active in community service is good for business, as most small businesses very well know. Helping and giving back to your community usually secures very valuable ads mileage for many businesses. You can sponsor community service events for your community and your business benefits even if you did not expect to sell anything from the sponsorship. The community naturally gives back to you by patronizing your business.

02. Advertise with Local Targeting

People now search online for businesses near them first before they look elsewhere. Optimizing your website for local searches helps to target local consumers. However, if you rely only on organic engagement, it is difficult to reach a large number of people at the same time. That is why it is imperative to combine direct advertising with local online marketing for best results. For this reason, you must endeavor to be active in both social media and search engine advertising to promote your business locally. That is better enhanced if you focus on and target the community you are known and the language the community speaks to help create familiarity and ease of doing business.

03. Build a Loyalty Program

As experienced digital marketers very well know, digital advertising is not only to gain new customers. It is much more. You can do better business with returning customers than new ones. So, it is smart for business to always explore viable ways to retain current customers. That is where customer loyalty programs become very handy. When you remember customers, they in turn remember you. If you are loyal to them, they reciprocate by being loyal to you. Discount coupons, promos, outright gifts, buy-two-and-get-one-free rewards to returning customers help to cement customer loyalty.  A loyal customer is not only good for further repeat purchases; he is also a reliable brand ambassador and a most dependable word-of-mouth advertiser for your business.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Grow Your Small Business on Social Media

It now appears that nearly everyone around the world where there is internet access is now on social media. Digital marketers have quickly taken advantage of that development in their digital marketing activities. Granted, many people may be on social media for many different reasons, smart marketers have found a very easy and reliable avenue to market directly to various strata of audiences based on known and very dependable demographics peculiar to many social media platforms. Visibility is hugely important to digital marketers and social media is a very ready source to easily acquire some appreciable visibility for your brand. The reason social media has become very important for digital marketers to grow their businesses. 

Here are three practical ways digital marketing can help grow your business on social media.

01. Makes Reaching Out Easy

Yes indeed! For ease of use and immense popularity, social media is it. Social media makes reaching out to a wide audience easy. Some social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for example provide some in-house analytics digital marketers can depend on to market their businesses. Nearly all of them provide accurate numbers of “Friends” and “Following” audiences, info that is very useful for marketing purposes. Social media platforms like WhatsApp and Messenger are not just for talking and interacting with friends only. They also make it easy for small businesses to communicate with target audiences. For instance, you can use WhatsApp Business App to “create a catalog to showcase your products and services and use its special in-house tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages.” Now, that gives a great advantage to digital marketers. Many social media apps can be downloaded into smartphones and mobile devices making them available to do business on the go. Inbox messages and messenger/communication apps go with many of the platforms, making it easy for a two-way communication with customers and potential customers. All these make reaching out to audiences something that is easy and even pleasurable to do through social media.

02. Creates Strong Bonds with Your Audience

Bonding helps to build business confidence. To quickly establish very valuable bonds with your audiences, social media becomes an indispensable part of digital marketing efforts.  Social media platforms provide very good business opportunities to become friends with your target audience and customers and to build long-term mutually beneficial relationships with them. The ultimate aim is to create strong and reliable bonds with your social media audiences and a great business relationship takes root from there.

03. Makes Your Target Audience Feel Important

You can make your target audience feel important if the social media content they read from you is mainly about helping them to solve their problems. By doing so, you can become a known problem-solver for your audience and they take you more seriously as a result. As most digital marketers very well know, social media is not an avenue to simply put yourself forward in an obvious manner. It serves well as a good opportunity for helping your audience and making life better for them. It somehow helps to make your audience feel hugely important for you to bother helping them instead of yourself only. To cement that impression, do not bombard your social media audience with products advertising. Take buying/selling out of the primary focus of your social media interactions. Offering a benefit to them first to show how your product will change their experience is what you need. Build trust and encourage your audience to relate freely with you. That tends to convince them to open up to you somehow what their needs really are. Buying becomes a logical consequence thereafter particularly if they sufficiently appreciate the efforts you are making to make their needs of paramount importance in your efforts.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Grow Your Business with Local SEO

As most digital marketers very well know, every business now appears local. That is why small business digital marketing activities that tend to ignore local peculiarities hardly become successful. Google now reports that over 90% of its users regularly search for local businesses. The reason is simple. With the growth of the internet coupled with changes in consumer behavior, most consumers now habitually search for products online to find out where nearest to them they can find such products. Now, that is one very vital information no serious marketer can afford to ignore. That is why smart digital marketers deliberately target local people, who are geographically around them. Local SEO tends to help such marketers out in that quest. Here are three ways local SEO can help grow your business.

                

01. Create a Google-My-Business, GMB Account

If you want to create visibility for your business in your local geographical environment, get   your business on Google-My-Business, GMB. Visibility is the first target before creating engagement in local SEO. If you have your business account on GMB that will help it to be visible on Google searches. Google-My-Business account enables your target audience to see your business when they search with keywords like “business near me, local barber shop, local grocery, local plumber, local lawn mower, and so on” on Google. Once your information on GMB is accurate and up to date, clicks and visits to your website by searchers leads them on to your business. With that, your local online marketing efforts tend to show results quickly. That is good for business.

02. Create Content Based on Local Events

Every digital marketer creates content for the singular purpose of attracting audience attention. When that content derives from local events, it tends to attract more of local audience attention. You can list all the local festivals, sporting events and social gatherings in the region you are active in and create your content from them. Many locals will identify with you and your brand simply because they see you as a “local boy” of their own. That’s one very good opportunity to create some love and patronage for your brand.

03. Encourage Reviews

Local audiences habitually like to associate with local businesses. Many like to show their concerns by sending some encouraging feedback to the business. When it comes to a local business, many people care and pay good attention to other users’ experiences before they decide to buy or pay for any product/service. Most potential customers care too. It is good for business if a marketer pointedly requests customers to leave feedback and review about any product/service. If positive and helpful and Search Engines such as Google get to pick such reviews up, they become extremely beneficial not only to your online reputation, but also for local SEO. That is because Search Engines consider reviews as useful content. The reason reviews show up in their search results. Because of this, if your local business reviews are positive ones, they help to increase the visibility of your brand on Google search results. Now, that tends to do overall good for your business in a very positive way.

 

Effective Ways to Blend Creativity and Technology for Digital Marketing

If you market online, you must have noticed the increasing dependence on technology in digital marketing mechanisms/strategies. Daily, more and more digital marketing techniques are emerging, all engendered by changes in technology. To survive in a fiercely competitive digital space, marketers must rely on blending technology and creativity to make a difference. That requires some ingenuity to accomplish. You may rely on professional experts for assistance provided such experts have all the necessary tools to formulate an effective marketing strategy by blending creativity and technology. The ultimate is for marketers to use technology and creativity in dynamic ways to reach out to new customers and convert them to loyal customers in a profitable and cost-effective way. That is why digital marketers depend on technology to collect data, run ads campaigns, promote products, brand their businesses and do general marketing activities. They tend to get the best results from their marketing activities if they manage to utilize dynamic technology in creative ways particularly in the following activities among others.

Website Designing

Your business website is the marketing window to your business in cyberspace. It acts as your front office as well as back store out there. That makes its design hugely important as a suitable place to do business in cyberspace. For your website to serve this purpose well, it requires a blend of creativity and technology in its design and development. That blending enables it to be seamlessly interactive and for effective content creation, displaying advertising banners, sending/receiving messages, promoting products, selling products, developing applications, inviting new customers, servicing old customers as well as many other business activities required of a business office.
 
Branding

Every business is always proud of its brand. That is what gives it positive identity. You need a very good blend of technology and creativity to brand your business to be strong enough to face competition. Digital marketers effectively combine technology and creativity to create a new brand or to re-model an existing brand for better performance in the market place. When marketers effectively combine innovative marketing strategies with technology, a good brand emerges. A brand is good if it helps marketers to convert potential buyers to loyal customers.

Graphic Designing

This is about aesthetics and attraction. It involves the deft use of colors, design and a combination of factors to produce outstanding content and marketing messages to attract more customers. In a hugely competitive digital marketing space, businesses need compelling and attractive content to engage potential customers and convert them into loyal customers. That requires creativity and an ingenious use of technology. Most marketers rely on their graphic designers’ imagination and their smart use of technology to produce captivating content and messages. They offer creative and imaginative designs aided by technology to suit the marketing techniques for building a strong brand and increasing sales.

Content Marketing
 
In digital marketing, content is king. It must not only be informative, educational and even entertaining, it must be attractive and captivating enough to attract customers. Producing such content regularly requires a lot of creativity backed by technology for best results. The ultimate aim of any content is to engage and retain customers. The better it does so, the better it is for the business. Marketers need creativity aided with technology to design and deploy audio messages, video content, graphics/photos, webinars, email marketing, chat bots, pop up messages etc. etc. to meaningfully engage and interact with customers and potential customers 24/7.

How To Brand Your Business With Digital Marketing

According to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.” It is that important. Every business depends heavily on its brand to attain any measure of success in our hugely competitive markets whether through traditional marketing or digital marketing. Digital marketing means promoting your products/services on the internet by way of Google Ads, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, etc. Whereas Traditional marketing means promoting such products/services by way of banner ads, flyers, brochures, templates, Radio and TV, etc, These are all in a marketing effort to build trust among customers because no brand ever gets any measure of success without first building trust and relationship with customers. In the entire branding process, you must take into account three elements of customer trust which are, promise, competence, and integrity.

Here are some tested and proven ways to build your brand through digital marketing:

Content Marketing

This involves both visual and written content posted regularly on your website/blog. It means marketing your products/services through content updates which must be related to your business particularly the products/services you have on offer. That is what helps to put out there what your business should be known for which becomes the brand known to your customers. 

Search Engine Optimization, SEO Marketing
 
If you want your business to be noticed widely online, search engines must first find and rank it. Top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing not only find your business but help it to rank at the top of their search results page if your content and website is well liked by customers. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, works best for long term marketing results by continually sending traffic to your website if the site is ranked high enough for such benefits. It is one great way to brand your business online.

Social Media Marketing 
 
These days, nearly everyone is on social media. You build your brand easily by getting it out there where nearly everyone is. That means promoting your products/services through different social media platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. Because of ease of use, sharing of content and popularity of social media, it makes branding fairly straight forward and easy. This you do through regular posting of pictures, images, videos and infographics to attract customers and build your brand.

Google Ads

You can use Google Ads for both branding and selling of products/services because they entail display ads, search ads, YouTube ads and shopping ads which all have different goals. Display ads help in the branding of a business, products/services while Search ads help in getting sales. YouTube ads help in engagement and awareness of your brand while Shopping ads help in promoting e-commerce businesses. 

 

Tips to Create a Good Brand

 To create a successful brand, you must take a bit of background information/ guideposts into consideration in the process. The first thing you do is to make an honest examination of your product/service with a view to clearly identifying the qualities that should appeal to your target market. You then take steps to emphasize them in your brand, making sure to leave out the qualities that might appeal to others, but not necessarily appealing to your target market. If we accept the American Marketing Association’s definition of a brand as a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers", you will discover that your brand must as of necessity be completely woven around your product/service for it to make any business impact. That is why your "Brand" must identify your product/service adequately and set it distinctly apart from others. Because, your brand is the first opportunity you have to tell others particularly your potential customers who you really are and what you are offering, adequate care must be taken to see that it performs that function effectively. If not, it is useless.

The next consideration is expectation. Your brand must tell everyone at a glance what to expect from you. What exactly can you do for them in terms of value and how you go about doing it is very important in branding. Can your brand deliver quick and excellent service efficiently and in good time? A good brand must push out and identify with all the qualities that give your product/service value. You may consider higher quality and higher cost or lower but acceptable quality at fairly lower costs. These are some of the things customers want to know about and your brand must help them to know about them. The real reason, your brand is one great way to offer information about yourself or your business in some kind of a short-hand way. Therefore, in designing your brand, you must think and reflect deeply on the kind of questions that people may have about you and your product/service. These questions you must try to address by the way you brand yourself and your business. That is one of things that distinctly set you apart from others. One of the great functions of a good brand!

A good brand not only identifies you, but it identifies the product/service you have to offer. For that reason, it must as of necessity provide the answers to such questions as: What are the strong qualities of your product/service? What sets it apart from others? What makes it appealing? What makes it unique? Why must a buyer go for it? etc, etc. You must note very carefully that, if your brand does not clearly set you apart from the others, it will not be an effective brand. Having an ineffective brand is as good as not having a brand at all.