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Effective Criteria for Selecting Viable Affiliate Programs

If you are a digital marketer and you want to venture into the realm of affiliate marketing, it is of absolute importance to have a clear se...

Showing posts with label brands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brands. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Effective Marketing Tips to Maximize Your Brand’s Exposure on Instagram

Instagram on smart phone.
With over 1 billion active users worldwide and a high engagement rate, Instagram is presently a very powerful platform for businesses to maximize their brand’s exposure. Marketers no matter the sizes of their businesses are taking advantage of this to establish a strong online presence for their brands on Instagram. These here tips are quite handy to help smart marketers maximize their brands’ exposure on Instagram.


 
Setting up Your Instagram Account

To have a strong presence on Instagram, it is crucial for businesses to carefully set up their Instagram accounts properly. An effective Instagram account must include a strong bio and profile picture that accurately represents your brand among other requirements. You can utilize relevant hashtags in the bio and content to help your visibility by reaching your desired audience. If you can in addition switch the account to a business account, you can take full advantage of the valuable insights it offers and the added ability to promote posts. These steps may look small but they are sufficiently impactful to ensure a successful Instagram marketing strategy.

Consistently Creating Engaging Content

You need to consistently create engaging and visually appealing content that resonates with your audience if you want to stand out on Instagram. Such content usually starts with high-quality visuals and consistent branding that must reflect your brand’s identity. It helps to use the power of storytelling to connect with your audience and make your content more relatable. If feasible, you must try to incorporate user-generated content and collaborations. This helps in building trust and authenticity with your followers. Limiting yourself to static posts is not helpful for your content. Instead, it is advisable to use more of Instagram Stories. Doing so is a great way to keep your audience engaged and this directly helps to increase your visibility. For more audience engagement, you can use features like polls, Q&A, and countdowns to interact with your audience and to keep them coming back for more. If you want to maintain a strong brand presence, it is hugely important to regularly post on Stories.

Create a Consistent Brand Aesthetic

If you consistently create brand aesthetic on Instagram, it is great for creating a strong and recognizable brand identity. This simply requires that you use consistent colors, fonts, and themes in your posts, stories and profiles while making sure it is cohesive. This is because a cohesive brand aesthetic creates a visually appealing feed which helps your audience associate your brand with a specific style and message. You must clearly understand your brand’s values, tone, and target audience if you want to create brand aesthetic. You can then use high-quality visuals and custom graphics to maintain a consistent look and feel. You can easily get this done by using Instagram’s in-house built-in filters and editing tools to achieve a cohesive aesthetic.

Effectively Utilizing Instagram Stories

Because of their huge popularity, (over 500 million active daily users), Instagram Stories have become really essential for marketers looking to increase their brand’s exposure. As a marketer, if you use Instagram Stories well, it can significantly increase your visibility and engagement with your audience. These Stories have various effective features for engagement, such as polls, Q&A, and countdowns. These features help marketers to connect with their audience in a fun and interactive way, thereby helping to make their brands more relatable and memorable. If you want to maintain a consistent brand presence, you must regularly post on Stories. You can add links, hashtags, and location on your posts. This helps, to drive traffic and increase reach for your brand. By re-posting user-generated content and interacting with their posts, you can directly engage with your audience’s Stories. Doing so helps to make your audience feel valued, thereby helping to create a sense of interactive community around your brand.



Directly Engaging with Your Audience

Building a strong relationship with your audience is one of the critical factors in successful Instagram marketing. This relationship involves engaging with your followers positively. Doing so not only helps to foster a loyal community, but it also helps to increase your brand’s visibility on the platform. Now what to do to foster a loyal community? Make sure to respond promptly to comments and messages from your audience. This shows your audience that you value their input and actively listen to them. It can also lead to meaningful conversations and feedback that can help to improve patronage for your brand’s products/services. So, if you actively engage with your audience on Instagram, it can lead to increased brand loyalty, higher reach, and, ultimately, a boost in your brand’s exposure.

Cross-Promoting on Other Platforms

Actively promoting your Instagram content on other social media platforms is a great way to increase your brand’s exposure and to reach a wider audience. If you cross-promote your content, it can help you to drive traffic to your Instagram page and potentially gain new followers. You can use your other social media accounts to widely share your Instagram posts, stories, or promotions to increase your brand visibility. You can also add your Instagram handle to your website, email signature, and business cards to encourage people to follow you on the platform. For more effective exposure, be sure you include a link to your Instagram page in your social media bios, use relevant hashtags and tags when sharing your Instagram posts on other social media platforms. You can in addition share your Instagram stories on very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, X, Facebook and others. This helps to increase brand visibility.

Utilizing Instagram Ads

Instagram Ads are a powerful tool for businesses to significantly increase their brand exposure. Businesses that use paid advertising can reach a wider audience and target specific demographics that align with their target market. On Instagram marketing, marketers can take advantage of various formats to get their messages out. These include photo, video, carousel, and story ads. These formats each come with their own unique marketing benefits. For effectiveness, it is important to carefully select the right ad format for your brand and audience.

Leveraging the Power of Hashtags

Technically, hashtags play a crucial role in increasing your brand’s reach on Instagram. This is because hashtags are simple but powerful tools that help categorize your content, making it more discoverable for your target audience. To leverage hashtags effectively, do some diligent research to help you create branded hashtags specific to your business. Doing this does not only help to make it easier for your audience to find and engage with your content, but it also helps to build brand identity. If in addition you take steps to incorporate popular and niche hashtags relevant to your industry in your content, it can help expand your reach and attract new followers. So, if you utilize hashtags effectively, it can significantly help to maximize your brand’s exposure on Instagram.

Leveraging Influencers and Partnerships

Influencer marketing can no longer be ignored in today’s digital landscape. When marketers partner with influencers, particularly those with a large and engaged following, they easily tap into new audiences that significantly increase their brand exposure on Instagram. For this reason, it is particularly important to consider their relevance to your brand and the authenticity of their following when choosing influencers. You can leverage influencers and partnerships by way of collaborations to expand your reach on Instagram. What is most important however is to maintain genuine and authentic partnerships to ensure long-term success and credibility. If you are able to utilize influencers and partnerships this way, it is possible for you to maximize your brand’s exposure on Instagram. Smart marketers never fail to make this a key component of their marketing strategies.

Diligently Monitor and Analyze Performance

The success of your Instagram marketing strategy ultimately depends on how well it performs. This you cannot determine unless you are able to diligently monitor and analyze your performance on the platform. It is therefore crucial to regularly monitor and analyze your Instagram performance to ensure that you are on the right track. Utilizing Instagram Insights and third-party analytics tools can provide valuable data and insights on your content, audience, and engagement. It is hugely important also to track key metrics such as post reach, engagement rate, and follower growth to understand what is resonating with your audience and what isn’t. The insights from such data can help you to make informed decisions on adjusting your content and strategy for better performance. It helps to keep an eye on industry trends and adjust your strategy accordingly to stay relevant and competitive. Consistently and diligently monitoring and analyzing your Instagram performance is key to maximizing your brand’s exposure and success on the platform.

Wrapping Up

If you follow the foregoing tips diligently, it can help you to maximize your brand’s exposure and visibility. What is most important however is to continuously monitor and analyze your performance on Instagram platform. The insights from such analysis can help you to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly, all with a view to staying up-to-date with the latest Instagram trends. It is essential to have a strong presence on Instagram and continuously evolve your marketing strategy to stay ahead of your competition. That’s about the best way to safeguard your success on Instagram marketing.

Sunday, April 23, 2023

5 Factors That Help Determine a Good Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing over a computer keyboard and wads of currency.
Globally, affiliate marketing remains a profitable avenue for earning income online particularly for content creators. The business continues to grow because of the massive adoption of the marketing concept by top brands and content creators. Depending on the program, affiliate marketers get paid a commission when they generate a sale, lead, or click. Affiliate marketers get this done by promoting unique affiliate links/codes in the content they create. This is how they effectively drive traffic and sales through blog posts, coupon sites, emails, mass media sites, and paid search microsites. However, joining reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI, tends to make affiliate marketing easier and more profitable. But, how do you determine if an affiliate program is right for you? These here 5 factors can help you out in making that vital decision.


 
1. Product Quality and Reputation

In affiliate marketing business just like any other business, reputation matters a lot. That reputation can quickly deep or gets battered if you are reckless enough to promote poor quality products. As an affiliate, you always have a unique niche, an audience and a reputation to protect. This is why, when choosing an affiliate program, you must ensure the program is reputable and well known for offering high-quality products through good business ethics. Aside from making sure the products fit your niche, they must be top-notch products that are on demand and sell well. Marketing substandard products from untrustworthy affiliate programs can quickly ruin your business reputation and stunt the growth of the business. Partnering with Strong Future International, SFI can help avert such unpleasant development.
 
2. Affiliate Marketing Tools/Resources

Reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI offer the right tools/resources which affiliate marketers need to effectively promote products/services on the platforms. In addition, they offer free quality training to help and support affiliates to use these tools more effectively to optimize their marketing campaigns. SFI also has reliable analytics tools to help affiliates track the performance of their marketing campaigns. They offer free marketing tools like banners, text ads and unique affiliate links/codes to help affiliates in their marketing activities. A good affiliate marketing program like SFI has a caring and reliable customer support team and the resources to handle its customer service effectively and efficiently.

3. Flexible and Convenient Payment Options

Many affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI usually offer free sign-up for affiliates from all parts of the world, practically from anywhere in the world where there is internet. This brings a lot of challenges in tow in terms payments for all transactions and even commissions payouts. At SFI, they’ve found a way around this by working with globally-accepted payment methods and online gateways. Thus, payments via PayPal, Payoneer Cards, Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and Satoshi), TCurrency, Virtual gift cards, Bank wire transfers, and Checks are acceptable on the platform. It is best therefore to always ensure you partner with affiliate programs like SFI that support the payment options/methods acceptable in your country and jurisdiction.



4. Competitive Commission Rates

This is exactly where the money you earn as an affiliate usually comes from. You therefore cannot be too careful to select and work with only affiliate programs that offer competitive commission rates. That’s the only way your marketing efforts can be profitable. In the business, commission rates usually depend on the service/product and the industry bearing in mind that conversion rates and the average order value (AOV) affect the commission rates. It is advisable to choose only programs with conversion rates and AOV that balance well with the commission. Some of the best-paid programs offer rates up to 50%. At Strong Future International, SFI, the rate usually ranges from 10-50% CV and commission payment is monthly calculated and paid out not later than the 10th of the following month.

5. Cookie Timing/Duration

Technically, cookie duration is the period between when someone clicks on your affiliate link/code and when they order and pay for a product. This is the active period of the cookie associated with your affiliate link/code. Cookie duration can range from a few hours to days or even weeks. Since cooking duration is the period allowed affiliates to persuade a consumer to make a purchase, it is vital to your affiliate earnings. If for instance your cookie duration is 24 hours, it means you only have 24 hours to persuade a customer to make a purchase. If they do so after the cookie’s expiry, you don’t qualify for a commission. Only the product merchant benefits by making a sale. The implication of this is that it is best to choose affiliate programs that use Cookies with longer cookie durations. So, if for instance you choose a program with cookie duration of 30 days, it means you’ll only earn a commission if a customer completes a purchase within 30 days.
 
Wrapping Up

Anyone can become an affiliate marketer and make money out of it. This however depends largely on the affiliate marketing program they choose to work with. This is why you must carefully choose the affiliate program you’ll want to work with taking into consideration the foregoing factors. The bottom line is to earn good commissions from your affiliate marketing efforts and this must affect the choices you make. You’ll do great if you manage to avoid affiliate programs that have poor reputations, meager commission rates, short cookie duration, and substandard products. Good luck!

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Top 5 Tips to Monetize your Instagram Account

$1 dollar bills held out in a fan shape.
If you already have an Instagram account, there’s no better time to start making money from the account than now. If you don’t have an account, there’s no better time to have one than now if you want to make money on Instagram. With more and more people taking their businesses online daily and many more people looking for alternative sources to earn income, monetizing your Instagram account is quite an attractive and profitable way to earn income on Instagram. This has directly opened the way for influencer marketing. Presently, on social media, and particularly on Instagram, influencers help businesses of all sizes to reach their target customer audience. They help showcase the most recent products, test numerous marketing hypotheses, and boost sales and loyalty for businesses. Instagram is one of the most popular social platforms out there ranking fourth behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It boasts of over 1.5 billion visitors monthly. Now, that’s one huge market out there on Instagram and a great place to earn money by creative content creators and influencers. However, before you decide to embark on content creation and marketing on Instagram, please pay close attention to Instagram monetization requirements and community guidelines so as to avoid penalties and even outright ban if you fall foul of the rules.


 
Here are top five tips on how to monetize your Instagram account and earn money on it.

Live-Streaming Broadcasting

One great place to make money on Instagram is the live-streaming market. Instagram live streaming broadcasting allows content creators to talk to and be seen by their audience in real time. You can help product merchants advertise their products/services on your live streams. If the content you are broadcasting has a large number of listeners, you earn good money from products merchants if you run ads for them. This is one viable monetization technique on Instagram you can earn good money from.

Collaborating with Brands

One other way to earn on Instagram is by collaborating with various brands to promote their products/services. Even if a brand wants to conduct a fresh product launch or re-animate an existing one, you can help the brand to highlight the product’s features by providing an honest review. The brand may choose to pay you commissions or even gift you a sample of the product to enable you try it out yourself. Through your Instagram account, you can in addition help brands to engage in brand awareness, promotional and educational campaigns and so on. These are all aimed to spread the word about the brand’s great products and its mission. Among the other vast areas you can collaborate with brands and earn income are writing posts tagging the brand’s official account in your feed, creating a Story with a clickable CTA (call-to-action) button, shooting a short Reel video depicting a product’s peculiarities, or by simply putting a link with all the details in your Instagram bio and so on.

Instagram Reels Ads

You can also earn money on Instagram Reels. Reels are highly-engaging, short-form video clips which allow users to explore concise visual content based on their AI-derived interests in an endless loop. You can monetize your Instagram videos if you are granted an invitation to enroll in the Reels Play Bonus program. This program rewards you if your reel performs consistently well, the volume of reels you upload is considerable and if you accept a prompt to create a special reel dedicated to a certain special event. Doing these, you stand to benefit a great deal from income shared periodically from ads shown on creators’ reels.



Instagram Subscriptions
 
You can earn income from Instagram Subscriptions services too. In this service, for a predetermined monthly fee, subscribers get faster availability of new content, access to exclusive content, and some other perks and benefits. This special service is what attracts the fees subscribers pay. In addition, users can also contribute to their favorite blogger’s earnings and they get a chance to receive a shout-out for doing so. This allows content creators to not only monetize their Instagram posts, but to also set up a stable recurring income flow.

Instagram Affiliate Marketing

Another way to earn income on Instagram is through its in-house e-commerce shop. Instagram e-commerce shop provides sellers with a built-in funnel. This funnel now removes the need for customers to leave the app to continue shopping. This development has made it really convenient for about 50% of Instagram users who now shop directly on the platform. For content creators therefore, this shop translates to yet another earning opportunity by way of affiliate marketing. When content creators through the content they create manage to attract shoppers to this shop, they earn a commission on each unit the shop sells with their help. Usually, the commission payout takes place within one to three months after a sale is sealed.

Wrapping Up

Instagram is quite a young and rapidly developing social media platform and its popularity is phenomenal as well. Therefore, aside the foregoing ways to earn income on the platform, many more ways could be coming on stream going forward. There are already in-house signals to this effect.

Friday, July 08, 2022

How to Enable Monetization of your Facebook Page, Tricks and Tips

A smartphone showing facebook symbol, a computer and a shopping cart.
Worldwide, millions of people are on Facebook for fun and to connect with friends. Many others are there to do business and to earn some extra income online. Many business owners and brands are deliberately taking their businesses to Facebook for maximum exposure. Facebook business pages and marketing tools are great business assets that can help marketers to make a bit of money on the side and online. If you want to earn some money on Facebook you too can deliberately enable monetization activities on your Facebook page.



Most digital marketers are very much aware that through your Facebook pages, you can build strong brand recognition. Even when you do not have your own products to sell, it does not stop you from enabling and monetizing your Facebook page. Following are a few things you can do to enable monetization on your Facebook page.

Sell Products Directly from Your Facebook Page

On Facebook, if you have something to offer to your audience, say a great product for instance, you can directly sell it on your Facebook page. Facebook in-house marketing tools can assist you to make sales on the platform smoothly. If you are selling on Facebook directly for instance you can use the different Hootsuite features for direct product sales to analyze your customers’ behaviors and requirements. Better still, if you have your own products to sell. If you do, Facebook will not just be a social media site of fun but a veritable platform for good business.

Optimize Your Facebook Page

For effective marketing out of your Facebook page, it must be optimized. So, if you want to monetize your Facebook page, the best technique available is to optimize your Facebook business pages. Making your website mobile-friendly is one of the most essential techniques in the monetization process. Since a very large percentage of business owners now access data from their mobile devices, it is imperative to make your website mobile-friendly if you do not want to miss out in this huge chunk of mobile data. From these handheld devices, searching is usually easy among internet users. So, if your Facebook page and website in tandem are not mobile optimized, you are going to lose a good number of customers and potential leads. That is for sure.

Create and Sell Digital Content

Facebook is a very effective platform to sell digital content. Digital content distributions and selling are easy ways to monetize your Facebook platforms. If you do not have actual products to sell, digital contents are easily saleable products. On Facebook, you can sell eBooks and other e-products/documents to make money. If you work with reputable affiliate platforms like Strong Future International, SFI and Amazon eBooks, you can get good products to sell as digital products. 



Use Facebook Page for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing sites are an excellent place to start your business from your Facebook business pages. Affiliate marketing is a perfect way to monetize your Facebook pages. You can create the content from the Facebook pages and send the traffic to the affiliate marketing sites through an affiliate link. You earn commissions when consumers purchase products through your affiliate links.

Promote Local Events and Campaigns

On Facebook, you have excellent opportunities to create good and attractive pages for your products/brands. If you want to promote local events from your Facebook page, the page must be optimized for local business. The reason is because local events always need local promotional work for good results. Anytime you are doing local event promotions, your Facebook pages are really handy because every business is local. These local events promotion are especially helpful to make your product/brand names hugely popular around the local communities. From your local events endorsements, you earn local popularity. Through this popularity, more local people begin to notice your brand, more of them start to visit the brand and your Facebook view rates increase as well.
 
Sell Third Party Products/Services

If you plan to monetize your Facebook page, third-party products/services are a good way to start. Even when you do not have your own products, you can still make money by selling third party products/services. Sometimes, these third-party products/services can be very quick and easy ways to make money on Facebook. All you need do is to simply promote these third party products links on your Facebook page and when sales are made through these links, you earn commissions from the sales.

Summary

Through monetization on your Facebook page, you directly popularize your brand and earn incomes as well. Brand endorsement begins from there. Through brand endorsement, you can grow your audience and get more loyal followers on Facebook. The best step towards monetization therefore is to make your Facebook page hugely popular among your followers. That translates to good traffic without which you cannot expect any worthwhile income from your Facebook page. The bottom-line is to make money from your Facebook page through monetization. Any of the foregoing strategies that do not directly help that process is not worth the while.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Effective Co-Marketing Techniques for Small Business

Co-Marketing team at work with computers, notebooks, notepads, calculators, smartphones pens and pencils, and spreadsheets on the table.
For small businesses to thrive, they cannot afford to ignore marketing. Getting busy and doing business in today’s reality practically means running a small business. Most people are presently involved in running small businesses and they are striving hard daily to grow these businesses. That is why they do all they can to reach more customers, serve more people and make more money as a result. Most of these small business owners promote their businesses better by working together and involving their customers in their marketing efforts. It takes co-marketing techniques to do so properly, and the results are usually very good.



Following are some tested ways you can partner with other businesses and consumers to co-market your small business.

Affiliate Marketing

Through affiliate marketing, you can turn other businesses into resellers for your own business. Affiliate marketing allows websites, influencers, blogs, and other third-party domains to sell your products for a percentage of the sales. The percentage payment is called commission which must be earned before being paid. Bloggers and content marketers can use their own websites to recommend third party products/services to their own followers/ audience using unique affiliate links supplied by the product/service merchants. If anyone clicks any of these links and makes a purchase, the blogger/content marketer gets a portion of the sale as commission. By this arrangement, your customer gets a great product/service, you make a sale, and the blogger/content marketer gets a commission. That is how affiliate marketing works and it is usually a win-win situation for all the parties involved.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing

This is about the oldest and most effective marketing technique. Smart marketers can always encourage their customers to talk about their business thereby helping to market it. Business owners can create great a product that naturally compels buyers to tell all their family, friends and acquaintances about it. If you have a great product in the market which people cannot help talking about, these people help to market the product extensively through word-of-mouth info.



Brand Partnerships

These days, Brands do work together to share customers by cooperation and collaboration. This arrangement mutually benefits all the brands involved. A perfect example is the business relationship between beverage-serving bars and food-serving food trucks. Such separate businesses can work together to sell more without encroaching on each other’s business territory. If you can find a company that sells some complementary products/services to yours, you can partner with them to better market your products/services and sell more.

Referral Marketing

Through referral marketing, you can empower your customers to market your products/services in exchange for discounts, rewards, or cash back guarantees. Many businesses are running very successful referral marketing program worth emulating. Some businesses always promise to and do reward subscribers with points which they can redeem later, gift cards and more when they get their friends, family and other persons to subscribe. Such reward system usually helps in no small measure to push products in the market.

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Effective Small Business Public Relations (PR) and Traditional Marketing Methods

Advertise sign on scrabble board tiles.
No doubt Public Relations (PR) still has a huge role to play in modern small business marketing even though it has been around for quite a while. Marketers still have confidence in it to get their marketing messages out here. This is in addition to the fact that consumers trust earned media more than brands, social media posts, or even influencers. If PR is handled by trained professionals, it manages to help build consumer trust fairly quickly. Below are the commonest methods these professionals use to get the best results.



Tested Public Relations (PR) Marketing Methods

What gets the best results is what marketers need in their marketing strategy. If you want to score your business with some positive earned media coverage, get cracking with:
 
PR Stunts

If you are a marketer, and you have no publicity budget restrictions, you can always pull off a PR stunt. It is one great way to organize a spectacular fun fare that attracts a lot of people from the local communities. If the event is well staged and massively attended, it helps to build brand awareness by generating free press.

Press Releases

Well timed press releases are also great marketing methods. The essence of press releases is to get a good story/message out through an appropriate medium to get wide readership. You can get messages out from your social media handles or by giving a good story to a journalist who can quickly and easily turn it into a career-building piece of content for both of you. You can always get good press releases if you focus on pitching only the most important stories that will attract good readership. If you do this consistently, you can build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your readers and even news outlets.

Community and Industry Events

It is fantastic PR marketing if you can get your business involved in events in your local community. Same goes for your niche industry. You can consider sponsoring local a derby involving Soccer or basketball or baseball games. Sponsoring other sports meets particularly for children and young adults is also a great idea. Contributing employees’ hours to volunteer work in sanitation and cleaning, health and fitness walk in your community are great PR for your business. These volunteer service and sponsorship events do not only make your community a better place to live in, they also help to build your brand and expose your business to new customers.

Tested Traditional Marketing Methods

Traditional marketing may sound old school when compared to digital marketing, but it is still a very effective marketing strategy particularly in certain industries and geographical locations. Marketers do get appreciable returns in traditional marketing even though it is quite difficult to really track the ROI accurately. That is not to say it is ineffective though.

Below are marketers’ favorite traditional marketing methods that can be of use to you in your small business marketing.



Direct Mail

If you are a smart marketer, you can use direct mail to stand out even in this digital age. You can mail brochures, promos, how-to messages and other forms of messages through direct mail to consumers in their homes. If your messages are great and well timed, you can be lucky to break through the clutter and catch the attention of the consumers.

Billboard Ads

Yeah, everyone still finds billboards on the highways as they drive along. The attention catching giant constructions work to catch the attention of everyone passing by. Billboards may be quite expensive to erect over a wide area but you can cut your budget and concentrate on the ones you can afford only in a selected local community, making sure you have the right permits though. For effectiveness, you need to be very strategic in erecting billboards. It is hugely impactful if you erect a billboard at the main entrance to your business premises particularly if you are into factory work or manufacturing.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing can be a very effective marketing strategy if done right. Getting the correct telephone numbers and knowing when to make that all important call is crucial if you don’t want to suffer excessive rejections. If not done right, telemarking can make you to waste time and money making annoying calls and even to unlikely buyers. If done right, it can be quite effective to turn many prospective buyers into customers.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing can be quite effective to get new customers. Unlike telemarketing, SMS marketing does not rudely intrude into the privacy of prospective buyers. Recipients can always open their SMS messages at their own convenience. This is why SMS messages have open rates as high as 98%.

Radio and TV Ads

Radio and TV are still effective marketing channels for ads. For most marketers, the problem is not that of effectiveness but excessive costs to advertise on Radio and TV. Many homesteads do afford to have Radios and TVs and people habitually rely on them for their main sources of information. Depending on the products you are marketing and your target market, Radio and TV can easily and quickly get your message out if you can afford the cost. You can however cut down on costs and still get good results if you purchase ads on other audio platforms, such as podcasts or Spotify.

Newspaper Ads

Newspaper ads are an effective marketing strategy particularly in a society with high literacy rate. That is where you have the type of audience that regularly picks up a physical newspaper. Inside newspapers, an insert, digital ad, or classified ad are great ways to send out a marketing message that gets results. However, you must always endeavor to choose your outlets carefully, negotiate rates, and spend time creating engaging content if you want the best results. Settling for mediocre visual design or lackluster copy won’t get you impressive results in newspaper advertising.

Saturday, March 05, 2022

How to Profitably Engage Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

A tablet and a computer in affiliate marketing work station.
Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy many business owners rely on to sell their products/services. It is an effective and low-risk method of building audience for your business by partnering with like-minded individuals and brands. This partnership is hinged on mutual benefits for product merchants as well as affiliates. Affiliates work on commission-based formats which the products merchants put in place. All the affiliate does is to promote unique affiliate links to products through their content/blog. Any time a purchase is made through this unique link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. This process is easily adaptable and beneficial for most types of business models. Here are some proven ways you can profitably engage affiliate marketing for your business and be glad you did.



Establish a Clear Brand Identity

Affiliate marketing is most effective when you already have a clear brand identity. Therefore, before launching a wide-scale affiliate program, it is advisable to first build a solid brand identity. Since most affiliates will promote your products across multiple online platforms, your brand identity ensures uniformity and continuity across these platforms. This is why you must clearly establish a viable brand manual that denotes clear brand colors, fonts, and voice. That makes it possible for all your affiliates to properly present your brand identity to avoid confusing and or inaccurate promotion messages.
 
Collaborate With Complimentary Brands

Affiliate marketing is a versatile concept that is suitable for promoting most brands. It works with collaboration with other brands as well. This collaboration is a type of partnership that allows for cross-recruiting and premised on a wider audience base. It is mutually beneficial for brands when one brand promotes for the benefit of another brand in some kind of cross-selling. By this arrangement, both brands can benefit from the promotional activities as well as earn commissions both ways from referrals and purchases.

Launch an Affiliate Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still very effective in online marketing activities. More so when such emails are specially designed for affiliates. If you launch an affiliate email campaign, it serves as a form of internal communication for your existing affiliate network. This method allows for clear and concise brand collaboration. You can thus set up an email campaign to update affiliates about upcoming promotions and sales as well as provide up-to-date marketing materials to make their marketing activities more result oriented.

Work to Improve Conversion Rates

Without good conversions, it is pretty difficult for marketers to make sales. You can therefore make optimizing conversion rates the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you do the right things, affiliate marketing has a high chance of success when it comes to improving conversion rates on your website. For effectiveness, you can handpick and choose your affiliates to ensure brand compatibility. Take a step further by offering enticing promotions such as incentive bonuses, free products, and enticing commissions to keep potential partners interested. If the affiliate team you have selected is well trained and works in efficient collaboration, it can create the right synergy to improve your conversions rates.



Partner With Podcast Hosts

It is difficult for marketers to ignore Podcasts these days because they are widely consumed by the population. Aside from being easily absorbed, Podcasts are effortlessly entertaining modems and therefore great as effective affiliate marketing tools. Online, Podcast hosts typically come with a loyal and trusting audience. What that means is that Podcast followers take brand partnerships seriously. So, if you partner with podcast hosts to entice them to plug your brand into their episodes, the results are great. For this reason, you can grant Podcast hosts an exclusive discount code for their listeners, as well as a set percentage of profits. Your business benefits a great deal from such arrangements.

Target Slow Selling Products

It is smart marketing for marketers to deliberately use less popular products to motivate higher commissions. Some products may be slow selling but once a sale is made, the commission volume can be huge. If you deliberately target such products, affiliate marketing may just be a great way to get your slow selling and less popular inventory off the shelves. At times what such products really need to sell is a little extra promotional attention and incentive. That means deliberate and specially targeted marketing efforts for such products. So, any which way you can use to push your slower-moving products unto the spotlight through affiliate marketing can be really great for your business.

Run Influencer Campaigns

If product merchants can effectively partner with Influencers, the results can be astounding. Marketers can thus use influencer campaigns as very effective form of affiliate marketing. By running a well-coordinated seasonal or long-term influencer campaigns, such collaboration allows your brand to utilize affiliate links as the right incentives. You can therefore start a profitable and mutually beneficial affiliate marketing campaign by simply partnering with one or more influencers to promote your products/services.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

How to Create Sponsored Content that Engages Consumers

A lone marketer working on a computer on top of a brown table with a notepad and pen, smartphone, a mug of coffee and a glass of water on the table.
In digital marketing, content that does not attract engagement is not a valuable content. This is more so with sponsored content which many consumers usually avoid because they tend to see most sponsored content as ads. The main issue with sponsored posts particularly on social media and other digital platforms is really about the manner in which sponsored posts are displayed and not about the messages. That is what most consumers resent and it tends to put many off the messages all together. However, in terms of engagement, sponsored content whether as social post, a blog or a video can be as engaging as a non-sponsored content when done the right away. Both can be effective digital marketing strategies when properly deployed. These here are very effective tips to help boost your sponsored content to get the right engagement.



Avoid Text on Photos

As a digital marketer, it is inevitable that you do have to market with texts and photos. How these texts and photos are used in what determines their effectiveness particularly in matters of user engagement. You must therefore ensure always that your content looks very natural to your consumers. Avoid as much as possible text overlays on photos. In the eyes and perception of consumers, text overlays make your content to look like an ad or a meme. For this reason, you must always keep your text limited to your caption, but even at that, you must avoid going overboard there either. In addition, if you habitually utilize too many hashtags, it makes your sponsored post look spammy and that ultimately results in decreased engagement which you can least afford. When your sponsored content is of poor quality and just feels like an ad, consumers are less likely to engage with it. But, when the content is properly placed, doesn’t include too many tags, utilizes sharp photography, and feels organic and very natural, it turns out to be the right content that can effectively generate very good results for your brand.

Avoid Poor Photographs

Sharp and very high quality photographs are a must in digital marketing. Poor quality photographs are about the most common mistakes most brands and influencers usually make within sponsored content. No matter where the photographs are used, whether on social media or other digital platforms, blurry or poorly cropped photos are always a put off for most consumers. Such poor quality photos therefore usually help to decrease engagement a great deal. Expert marketers advise that as much as practicable, digital marketers should utilize an HD camera to ensure the best visual quality for their marketing photos.

 

Avoid Unnatural Product Displays

If marketing pics appear unnatural on content they reduce engagement. Consumers are people and they relate better with any visual content they see as natural and not outrageous or garish. That helps engagement. What most consumers really want to see influencers doing is to see them use a product in a vividly demonstrable form. Seeing things like that simply tells the story in a very succinct and captivating manner. If for instance you are promoting a sponsored content about a clothing item, the influencer must wear the item to clearly show to consumers how it fits. The idea is to make it feel less like an ad and more like an item that just happened to be captured in the influencer’s photo. That looks more natural and tells the marketing story much better even without appearing to be doing so. Engagement is better as a result instead of prominently featuring the product in such an unnatural manner that may even be disgusting to consumers.

Saturday, January 15, 2022

8 Cool Ways to Make Money on Pinterest

Dollar bills being counted by a woman in black clothing and scarlet paited nails.
For most digital marketers, making money on social media has become routine. Many use Pinterest to indirectly promote their products/services and their businesses are better for it. The reason is, Pinterest isn’t just another social media platform like all others. It is much more than that since it serves as some kind of search engine too. The reason it provides ample opportunities for marketers to make cool money directly on the platform. Pinterest works by allowing users to create pins, which are usually images or videos with links to outside sites. By leveraging these links, you can learn how to make money on Pinterest. But first, you must have a good plan how to go about making money on Pinterest. Next is to sign up for a Pinterest business account. After that, you must factor in how you’ll direct other pinners to your website or another destination website where you can earn an income and boom you are in business.



If you have interest in social media marketing and you are desirous to make some money out of it, find below some tested and credible ways to make money on Pinterest.

1. Partner with Brands

Why not? It is brands that must pay commissions for your marketing services, the reason you must partner with them. If you have a business account on Pinterest, you can directly partner with brands to promote their products/services for shoppable idea pins. The strategy works well if you already have a lot of followers and traffic on your pins. To monetize Pinterest in this way, you must create rates you’ll charge brands for single pins and other content. That is where the earnings come from.

2. Sell Pinterest Templates

Millions of Pinterest users rely on the site to bring traffic to their online content or products. The platform is designed in such a way that only certain types of images and design elements are more likely to perform well on the platform. Very typical and commonly used examples are eye-catching pins that include an image with text over it. If you have templates that include the basic format of these images, it is easy for your customers to simply insert their own images and headlines and you earn money from selling these templates.

3. Offer Pinterest Consulting Services

Consultants make money by selling their knowledge to others. So, if you have the knowledge and experience for creating your own successful Pinterest strategy, you can offer it to brands as Pinterest consulting services and you earn money from it. However, for this work, you must first explore creative ways to demonstrate your ability to promote your own website using the visual search engine of the platform. You can then market to other Pinterest users looking to make money with their Pinterest strategies.

4. Teach Pinterest Marketing Online

Not every marketer knows how to take full advantage of Pinterest to earn money. If you have this knowledge, you can teach your strategies to other online business owners in exchange for a fee. This is a bit similar to consulting services in some ways. To attract patronage, you can launch your own site and create an online course with various modules to serve various needs. You may in addition decide to even include it with content about other social media platforms or marketing strategies depending on how wide the audience you are targeting is.

5. Drive Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store

If you own an e-commerce store and you sell physical products, Pinterest can be a perfect way to bring in more sales. What you need do is to create pins that include photos and links to the products you are selling. These pins can help to raise brand awareness and consequently bring more interested buyers to your website.

6. Become a Pinterest Virtual Assistant

Busy executives always need the services of Virtual Assistants and they pay handsomely for the services. On Pinterest, virtual assistants can run accounts for and on behalf of other users. As a Virtual Assistant, you can help create pins, promote them, and schedule content for brands. To earn money as a Pinterest Virtual Assistant, you need to create your own account to showcase your abilities. You can then market your services on your website or make contacts with your favorite brands to offer them your services and you make money from rendering the services.



7. Include Affiliate Links in Pins

Including affiliate links in pins is a proven and effective digital marketing strategy. On Pinterest affiliate marketing, this simply involves creating pins that include a direct affiliate link to relevant products/services you are selling. If and when other users click the links from your pin, they’ll be directed to a site where they can make purchases. When that happens, you earn a commission from each sale. But first, you must take steps to sign up as an affiliate with your favorite brands. Next is to embed and sprinkle in your content the right affiliate links to the products/services you are selling. You should be more particular about this on the content you consider extremely valuable to your audience. That is what helps to get more leads and conversions.

8. Drive Traffic to Your Blog

If you are a good content writer or blogger, you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog website. Increased traffic directly helps to increase blogging income particularly if you are using sponsored posts or affiliate links to monetize your site. The more traffic your blog gets through Pinterest, the higher your chances of running a successful and profitable blog.

Monday, September 27, 2021

Popular Social Media Platforms You Can Make Money On

A folded wad of Dollar notes under a padlock.
A huge number of people worldwide are active on social media but very few really get to make money on it. Many of these people merely use social media to socialize and make fun but without any thoughts whatsoever to make money. Aside from not having the right business ideas to do so, what each social media platform offers and how that can help in the process of making money is usually lost on many. Well, here is the good news. If you have the right business ideas and you are able to take advantage of what each social media platform offers, there is a lot of money to be made on social media. To make money on social media, you must first ensure you have many followers you can easily influence through your content. Next is to monetize your social media accounts in various platforms to make money. Here is how the numbers stack up to enhance that effort in some of the most popular platforms.


 
On Instagram, you need a minimum of 5,000 Instagram followers and some 300 plus sponsored posts a year to generate good income.

On Facebook, you need to have at least 10,000 followers and 30,000 +1 minute views.

On YouTube, you will need at least 1,000 subscribers and some 4,000 watch hours in a year to start earning.

On Twitter, you need at least 10,000 followers and 10,000 re-tweets to earn good income.

Now let’s look at what the individual platforms have to offer to help users make money. You can take good advantage of the in-house marketing tools of most of the under listed social media platforms to help you make money on the platforms.

Facebook: You can make money by promoting other brands, affiliate marketing, selling your products and posting sponsored content.

Twitter: You can make money by tweeting as a ghost writer, do affiliate marketing, sell your own products, or work as an influencer.

Pinterest: You can make money by promoting a brand, promoting affiliate products and selling your products.

LinkedIn: You can make money by placing ads for brands using affiliate links and selling your products and or services.

Instagram: You can make money by partnering with a brand, pushing affiliate links and getting revenue from ads played on their IGTV videos.

YouTube: You can use this platform to market your video content, do affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and collaborate with brands to market their products.

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Top 12 Ways to Make Money on Social Media

Some American dollars notes and Nigeria Naira notes in spreadout display.
Yeah, billions of people worldwide are active on social media but not many people really get to make money on social media. Even though millions of people merely use social media to socialize and make fun, if you have the right business ideas, there is a lot of money to be made on social media. Out there on social media, many people are making money even without having to directly sell any product/service. That is possible because social media users who have a large following can use their profiles to get paid by brands, sell their knowledge, offer consultations, and much more. Below are some tested, tried and proven ways you too can use to make money on social media if you wish.



1. Promote Your Own Products/Services

If you are a small business owner, you can promote your own products/services to make money on social media. With social media accounts you can easily interact with others by sharing and creating content through communities. Promoting your own products/services through social media platforms is cost-effective. At little or no costs at all, you can effectively promote and drive traffic to your online store, get leads and make sales to augment your sales volume. Social media is quite an ideal place for small business owners to effectively promote their brand and business. Therein, it is easy to tell customers about your products and services; find out what they think of your business; attract new customers, and build stronger relationships with existing customers.

2. Promote Affiliate Products

You can join credible and reputable affiliate networks, promote affiliate products and earn commissions for your efforts. By joining these networks you can expand your reach to potential customers and make money through affiliate marketing in an easy and straightforward manner. Thus, you can earn money by just adding tracked affiliate links into the text of your social media content. Any sale made by way of a click-through in any of these links entitles you to a commission from such sale.

3. Sell Digital Products

You can create and sell digital products through your social media channels. Quite unlike business websites, social media platforms have in-house capabilities to help you sell digital products real time. On social media, it is easy to reproduce and recreate digital products that can be easily shared very widely and save costs associated with inventory, warehousing and shipping. Some of such digital products marketers like to share on social media, are eBooks, software, templates, photography, music and how-to lessons. These are typical e-products you can create and sell in an unlimited number of times and numbers with little additional efforts to make money.

4. Collaborate with Brands

In digital marketing, it now appears more and more consumers trust influencers more than paid advertisements. They tend to obtain better social proof from these influencers to help them make buy decisions. For this reason, if you are a blogger and your blog has huge following, you can directly influence this audience to look towards a product/service. Characteristically, from posting product reviews, hosting video tutorials, bloggers have the power to influence large segments of consumers in favour of a product/service. So, if you blog in a unique niche related to a brand and your blog has huge following, you can collaborate with the brands in that niche to market their products to your audience. Brands will benefit from these efforts by getting more customers and you will benefit by earning more commissions and endorsement fees from such brands.

5. Sell Your Music

If you have a good musical talent and you are creative you can make money on social media. If for instance you are able to create very good music which appeals to people, you can sell the music through SoundCloud. If you sign up on the platform’s SoundCloud Pro or Pro Unlimited subscriptions, it is possible for you to sell the original music and make money. Through this platform, you can get unlimited upload time; get paid for your plays, access to advanced audience insights, and much more.

6. Get Paid for Sponsored Posts

Many brands are always looking for social proof to market their goods and services. Bloggers and influencers always come in handy to help provide this social proof. As a small business owner, you can earn money by helping these brands to produce sponsored content. This you can do by way of product reviews, promotions and backlinks to a sponsor’s website. However, if you are blogger, it is an ethical requirement to let your audience know that you are offering them paid content. The amount of money you earn from sponsored posts depends on several factors, some of which include your reach, your niche, and whether or not your posts include images, graphics, videos, and audio.

7. Become an Influencer

In digital marketing terminology, an influencer is a person who has the skillset to influence people’s purchasing decisions through his or her authority, knowledge, or relationship with his or her audience. Social media influencers are people who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic and offer regular posts on that topic on social media and in the process build a huge following. If you become an influencer, many brands will readily pay you to help them create trends and encourage your followers to buy their products.



8. Do Coaching Services

Yeah you can earn money online by selling coaching services. If you have a unique set of skills or are passionate about something, you can choose to offer coaching services on that unique skill/knowledge. Many people are out there looking for self-development or learning new skills in singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, learning a foreign language etc. etc. The demand can be really huge. You can make money by latching on to this demand if you have the knowledge and skills in a specific niche that is of value to other people. You are at liberty to set your fees and rates and you earn accordingly.

9. Earn with YouTube Partner Program, YPP

Many social media users don’t really see YouTube as a social media platform but it is. If you are a good blogger, you can unlock YouTube channel’s earning potential and make money. For instance, if you join YouTube Partner Program (YPP) you not only get a strong platform but also access very valuable YouTube’s in-house resources and features. These resources and features allow you to get access to ads being served on your content and you earn money as a publisher. However, to get worthwhile benefits from this, you will need to get lots of views and clicks on your YouTube content.

10. Sell Rights to Photographs/Images

If you are a good photographer, you can sell Rights to the Images on your social media accounts. If you have some great creations in terms of pictures or digital artwork that people are interested in purchasing then you can use your social media account to connect with the people and sell to them. You earn money from this effort as well.

11. Run a Facebook Group

Facebook has many valuable in-house tools that help marketers to make money. In addition, the platform offers marketers a huge reach complements to its over 2 billion active users worldwide. If you can create a Facebook Group to tally with your niche/interest, it can really be an inexpensive but hugely effective way to reach your target audience. With it, you can easily build a great community around common interests/goals with hundreds of thousands of like-minded people. Now that’s one huge audience out there that can help drive good traffic to your website/blog.

12. Join Influencer Networks

Sponsored posts remain one great way bloggers can earn an income on social media. It takes a great influencer blogger to earn good money from their blogs. Many brands are always looking for influencers to market their products to their followers in a genuine and authentic way. If however you are a blogger who does not command much influence yet, you can latch on to influencer networks which are third-party agencies that are designed to do the hard work for you. So, Influencer networks can be a great way to start in sponsored posts and paid social sharing opportunities that less influential bloggers can take good advantage of to make money. These networks will help connect you to brands and act as middle men. That way, you don’t have to be in direct contact with brands yourself. If you sign up with influencer networks like CreatorIQ, Upfluence and AspireIQ, they’ll provide you the valuable intro and give you the much needed sponsored post experience that you can include in your blogger resume. However, only brands who sign up to work with a particular network have access to analytics regarding campaigns run within that single network of influencers. By way of some restrictions, some networks may require you to only work with them exclusively. You can make your choices depending on what you want. The bottom line is how you can make money from sponsored posts.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

6 Ways Social Media can Benefit your Small Business

Social Media marketing sign on an IPAD with a white mug of coffee, a camera and a white pen on a brown table top.
For most small business owners, social media clearly presents countless opportunities for potential and existing customers to engage with their businesses. It is a veritable environment for these customers to read blog and marketing content, ask questions, make suggestions, share content of their own and much more. In fact, some surveys suggest that over 70% of small businesses greatly depend on social media as part of their overall marketing strategy. If your small business is presently not on social media, you are missing a lot. Take quick steps to invest in social media marketing if you want to reach more customers and boost online authority for your small business.



These here are 6 ways your small business can greatly benefit from social media marketing.

1. Build Brand Authority

When your business has brand authority, it enhances its online visibility. That translates to good traffic, more leads, customers and sales. If you market your business on social media, you can quickly establish thought leadership through showcasing your expertise, sharing valuable content, and constantly engaging and interacting with your followers. Doing so effectively helps to stand your business out among its peers. It confers the business with brand leadership and authority which help it to win the trust of potential customers and customers alike.

2. Attract New Customers

For many small businesses more customers simply means more business. If you market your business on social media, it greatly increases your chances of acquiring new customers. When your social media marketing strategy is right and effective, the business easily attracts new customers organically and/or through paid efforts. That translates to more customers, more business, more sales and more revenues.

3. Boost Brand Awareness

If you are desirous to quickly build brand awareness for your business, just get it on social media. These days, nearly everyone is on social media doing one thing or another. That is what makes social media one great place to boost your brand awareness. Social media presents an array of business opportunities and tools business owners can take advantage of to reach a wider audience and build brand awareness. Many social media platforms help businesses to get in front of a wide array of potential customers through brand awareness.



4. Regularly Engage Your Followers

With social media, businesses can easily engage their new and existing followers for marketing purposes. Through these regular engagements, businesses can build brand loyalty and grow their referral networks exponentially. These engagements are also great to attract new customers and grow your business. You can further boost these engagements by answering business questions directly and regularly providing valuable content to your followers on social media.

5. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Some online marketing studies indicate that there is a significant correlation between improved social media signals and increased search engine rankings. Every business owner wants traffic to their business websites right? A good SEO helps to enhance that, particularly the highly valuable organic traffic. If you implement a good SEO in your social media marketing, it impacts your marketing activities particularly in terms of improving your Search Engine rankings and organic traffic.

6. Retain Existing Customers

Smart business owners do not just seek new customers only. They also take deliberate steps to retain existing customers. With deliberate efforts at regularly engaging your existing customers on social media, it enhances their continued loyalty to your brand. Enhanced customer loyalty usually translates to better business and more sales. It also helps to grow your referral networks for the benefit of the business. Your existing customers must have had some good reasons for becoming your customers in the first instance. You can continue to nurture these reasons with more engagements through direct answers to their business inquiries and concerns, providing them valuable marketing content and much more on social media.

Friday, June 11, 2021

Hot Tips to Build Your Brand Through Social Media Networks

A lone worker on brand building through Social Media Networks working from a computer, smartphone with a mug of coffee on the table.
Small business owners can no longer afford to ignore social media networks in their marketing activities. This is not just because of the huge popularity of many social networks but also because of the relative ease of marketing on the networks. Many small business owners have a preference for hugely popular micro-blogging sites such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. For this reason, social media is fast becoming the dominant advertising platform online. It is greatly cost-effective when compared to traditional formats of advertising such as TV, newspapers, magazines and radio among others. As preferred ads media, social networks enable small businesses to easily reach their target audiences more effectively through a variety of channels. This is why small business owners can depend on them to build their brands fairly quickly online.



Here are some hot tips/techniques to get the best marketing results from social media networks.

Social Media Management, SMM: SMM requires an integrated approach that takes into account various aspects of strategic internet marketing. This includes planning, measurement, and strategy implementation. If you accurately measure your marketing results quantitatively, you have a great opportunity to understand exactly where you are in your efforts to reach your target audience. This measurement data must include everything from the number of people who have visited your blog, to the number who are now your friends/followers on your social media handles. You can also measure and obtain metrics data on the time spent on each social media platform by your target audience. Next is to measure the actual engagement on the platforms. From the engagement data, you get to know the number of people who actually click on your ads, respond to your promotional messages, and share your content. This information is very valuable for marketing purposes as most marketers very well know. Smart small business owners rely on this data to formulate marketing plans, develop marketing strategies and launch marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO Strategy: For effective marketing purposes, SEO is not expected to be a one-time process. It is usually a continuous and an ongoing effort with the sole aim of achieving higher rankings on major search engines. Higher ranking on SERPs of search engines translates to higher organic traffic, leads, customers and sales. A good SEO strategy involves using the right keywords in your content, creating backlinks to your website, and generating high amount of traffic to the site. When your SEO is good enough, it helps your business to maintain a positive brand image while greatly increasing its brand awareness on the internet.

Strategic Internet Marketing: This focuses on SEO, paid Search Engine Optimization, PPC, pay-per-click, networking, viral, and other creative strategies. You can strategically integrate them all to get good results. A good SEO helps your business with organic exposure and you can easily incorporate it into your social network marketing plan/strategy. That way, you can easily use social networks to build your brand by directly engaging your target audience.



Combine SMM and Traditional Advertising Methods: Many small businesses successfully combine traditional media marketing with SMM in their efforts to quickly build their brands and grow their businesses. Both are complimentary to each other. It is not smart to rest one for the other if your marketing budget can accommodate both. If the budget cannot, it is advisable to put more of your scarce resources on SMM that is hugely cost-effective. This is a good survival strategy in the hugely suffocating ads marketing space.

Get Reliable Metrics/Analytics Data: To do this effectively it is recommended you use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. There are free easy-to-use Google Analytics tools available online and paid ones as well if you are desirous to have a more comprehensive report. Business owners rely on analytics data to have insights into how users are interacting with the content on their websites, search and user behaviors, and demographics. This helps them to have a clear understanding of their audience and the activities they engage in and general audience behavior. Armed with such vital information, they can plan better and create more effective social media marketing campaigns for their businesses.

User tip: For best results from Google Analytics, just import the data, use the filters and options available, and generate a custom dashboard with detailed reports. That way, you can easily return to it and get updated info from it as often as you want.