How to Leverage TikTok Advertising Techniques for Brand Success

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

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

Consistently Craft Engaging Content

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

Leverage User-Generated Content

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

Discovering Trends

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

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

Tactically Utilize Targeted Ads

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

Live Streaming

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

Creating Effective Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

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

Using Hashtags Strategically

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

Wrapping Up

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

How to Make Your Business Stand Out on Instagram

Instagram which started as a simple photo app has gradually become one of the most popular social media platforms on the internet. Presently, it has more than one billion active users and it is still growing by the day. Digital marketers have found Instagram to be among the most effective marketing channels online. The platform manages to help marketers to have a strong digital marketing strategy and a highly valuable online presence, without which these businesses cannot hope to succeed online. Even though Instagram users use it primarily for fun and socializing, the platform has proved over time to be a very precious online tool for business. For this reason, Instagram comes very handy for marketers who want to build their brand reputation, source new leads, understand their ideal customers better, grow their revenue and increase their profits.

It is however near impossible for marketers to achieve these lofty goals if their Instagram accounts cannot stand out and compete successfully with global competitors. If as a business owner you like to market on Instagram, be sure you are marketing with a strategy that can make your business stand out on the platform. If you are already on the platform, here is what to do if you want to start seeing improvements in no time at all.

Create and Post High-Quality Content Consistently

Human beings are visual in nature the reason video content is really impactful with them. In online marketing, video content proves to be a very effective marketing tool. It is highly effective to attract the attention of prospects and for creating a lasting impression in their minds. Marketers can effectively use Instagram to create brand visibility for their brands if they are able to create and post high-quality content on the platform consistently. Most Instagram followers always go for content, high quality content that is. That is the type of content that gives them what they want and induces them to stay connected. So, if marketers habitually create content on Instagram that reflects their brands and show off the quality of their products, such content usually helps anyone wanting to purchase from them to make their buy decisions. For best results therefore, you should not only create quality content, you must also endeavor to post it consistently making sure it is well timed for maximum impact on your followers. It is such impactful content that usually generates positive reactions from your audience and also helps to inspire user-generated content from them.

 

Use Instagram’s In-House Tools Correctly

Most marketers know that Instagram as a versatile social media platform is a powerhouse of marketing tools. Marketers who use these tools correctly find it much easier to create brand visibility for their brands, raise brand awareness, and gain more leads and customers. Ultimately, they make more sales with the help of these tools. These tools are particularly available to you when you take simple steps to create a business account on Instagram. You can use the tools to know the trends, track your marketing metrics, and for better audience targeting. This way, you can do more and better marketing on Instagram as an effective social media platform.

Leverage the Most Popular Instagram Features

If you have a business account on Instagram, there are in-house features you can leverage on to do business better. With these features, your business account can easily meet some of the most important conditions it needs to succeed on Instagram. First condition is to consistently create quality valuable content, while the second condition is to find additional creative ways to inspire followers to interact with your content. For these reasons, any marketer with a business account on Instagram must know how to effectively use some of the most popular in-house features like Stories, Reels, Live Streaming, Hashtags and so on. Depending on your type of business and the products you are marketing, you can experiment with these features to find out what’s most suitable and works best for your business. Some of these features have an effective way of reaching and matching your content with users that are already actively searching for similar content. Such users being already active are more likely to positively engage. That helps to get more leads and conversions.

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.

How to Find the Best Products to Sell Online

E-commerce business is often thrilling, exciting and can be profitable if you are selling the right products. Even though there are many product options available to sell online, how to find such products can be hugely tasking particularly if you are not too experienced in e-commerce business. The good news is that technology has made this task fairly easy to perform if you know what you are doing. Following are some of the most efficient practices anyone can rely on to determine what products are best to sell online.

Personal Insights from Experience

Personal insights derive from what you know and have even experienced. That is about the best place to start. Just take a good look around you and your neighbors. Talk to people in your family and your neighborhood to know what products they are really using or consuming at any material time. Look around your home, office or work space. Can you identify any specific products that make your life easier or that your life hugely depends on? The identities of such products can help you decide what products to sell online.

Feedback from Customer Reviews

You can analyze feedback and gain valuable insights about products that are selling well from large and very popular e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and Amazon for instance. Gaining insights about products directly from the large customer base of these and similar platforms is quite helpful to business owners even though many rely also on some other methods to gain such insight. One of such common methods is reading customer reviews/feedback on products.

Diligent Competitor Analysis

You can research and study your competitors with a view to identifying what products they are selling and how well they are selling the products. The reasoning behind that is, if your competitors can do it, so can you. By studying your competitors well enough, you can forge a way to avoid any saturated market segment and refrain from choosing too many niche products. All you really want is to sell more products and take less risk in doing so.
 
Various Online Resources

Various online resources can actually serve as a treasure trove for valuable information. Most popular among these online resources you can rely on and utilize are Shopify’s Trending Product List, Google Trends, Amazon Suggest, The Facebook Ad Library, Kickstarter.com, Wish.com, Pinterest Suggest, Exploding Topics, amongst others. For an e-commerce store owner, it helps to also check out as many e-commerce web forums you can access to get information. Through these forums, it is possible to find new and exciting ideas/insights about products that customers are looking for which you too can sell online.

Social Media

With presently over 4.5 billion people active on Social media, it is one huge market where you can identify products that are selling well. You can always check hashtags and trending videos to know what people follow more or watch more. Trending products normally have high views on their videos. Pay particular attention to products related to fitness, foods, fashion, beauty, hospitality and sports as they trend on social media and you can decide on which of the products to sell online.

From Keyword Data Analysis

Analyzing data generated by online tools can also give good insights into products that are in demand online. You can rely on online tools that provide information/data on search volume, competition, and cost-per-click among your target audience. Keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planners, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Trends, or Keywords Everywhere can be very useful and handy to generate information/reports about products that people are looking for online. For consumers searching for products through search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a useful tool that can be used to assess their product demand online.

How to Create Sponsored Content that Engages Consumers

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.

How to Get More Social Media Followers and Drive Sales

With now an estimated 4.2 billion active users on social media worldwide, the quest for followers can be quite challenging since it depends on many factors. The benefits are enormous as well if you can have a large number of followers on any of the social media platforms. Even though it can be pretty difficult to gather a huge following, the techniques and tactics you deploy in your social media activities play a very significant role in that quest. If for instance you are an active blogger, it is only when you have a huge following that you can profitably monetize your blog. Same thing applies if you want to become a social media influencer and join the league of good money-makers on social media. If you are able to deploy the right techniques and tactics you can easily generate a good following, build a great reputation from a loyal audience and drive sales for your business. Find below some tested and reliable techniques you can use to get more social media followers and drive sales for your business.

Have a Social Media Strategy

It is true that haphazard marketing on social media hardly ever yields good results. Therefore, you need to have a strategy that works well to help get the best results. This strategy must be such that can effectively help to drive more traffic to your website or blog. If your social media strategy is right and effective, a huge bulk of your readers can come from social media networks. You must therefore endeavor to formulate a social media strategy that helps boost traffic to your business website or blog.

Create Valuable Content

In social media marketing, content is king. Good content is what helps to attract readers to your page. The reason readers come to your page is because you are offering them something that they need. Therefore, you must endeavor to create content that is of value to your readers. One very easy and effective way to get that done is to think from your readers’ perspective and create content along that perspective.

Offer Free Stuff

Yeah, everyone likes free stuff. Nothing attracts people more than free stuff. You can offer up promotional coupons, eBooks, free templates, how-to guides, and other useful stuff to ingratiate yourself with your audience. They respond accordingly and that helps to attract traffic to your website/blog.

Choose a Specific Niche

A specific niche allows you to target a specific audience interested in that niche. The success of your blog depends on you finding your passion and your ability to create compelling content. Expert marketers advise that your niche should not have too much competition as your blog will need to compete against highly rated sites. If it does, the content can easily be stifled out and unnoticed by readers. That scenario cannot help your traffic. Be sure to choose a subject matter that you are very knowledgeable about and one that people can take insights from and with a demand that will impact your potential following. That means you will also need to get an accurate picture of your target audience in terms of age, level of knowledge of the subject matter, and other factors to make a meaningful impact on the audience.

Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms

It is quite impactful to focus your content on a few or even a single social media channel. If you don’t, you risk not capturing the right amount of followers to make your blog worth looking into. Carefully identify your target readers’ demographics and then identify the social networks that they prefer. If for instance your blog post is geared more towards professionals and businesses you might want to consider using LinkedIn. If however your target followers are younger and more visual, you may tilt towards Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest for best results.

Build Trust Diligently

In any human endeavor, trust building takes time and efforts. This is even more delicate when you factor in that you are dealing with all kinds of people with various backgrounds on social media. For most readers, it could take some very little things to get them to trust you or distrust you. All of it depends on the content they read from you and expect from you. If you manage to build a track record of creating useful content that serves them well, and you are diligent, consistent and reliable about it, it helps you to build trust.

Create Quality Content Regularly

This helps to establish and build your social media presence. If your content does not attract readers, it is not worth the while. Therefore, you must regularly churn out quality content that readers need. To sustain the interest of your readers, it helps to set out a calendar for your content creation and posting. Doing so helps to guarantee regularity and consistency in your quality content production.

Increase Engagement Rates

How people engage your content is directly related to the relevance and quality of the content. Therefore, one credible way to increase your fan base is to get more engaged followers. You can only get more engaged followers if your content is important enough or interesting enough that people share, link to, like, and even make comments on. To sustain this engagement, make sure to reply to comments as well as collaborate with other content creators for mutual benefits.

Use Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Social media analytics is all about feedback data. You can rely on this data to better understand your audience. Social media analytics data allows you to get the right insights about who your followers are. With that vital information, you can regularly tweak your content to align with their needs. If your content aligns well with their needs, it is better engaging and good for traffic. If you back that up with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can maximize your audience and income with ad sales.

Use the Right Hashtags

Many social media users tend to ignore hashtags. Hashtags are hugely important to help direct more followers to your website/blog. This is because posts with hashtags have higher rates of engagement than posts without hashtags. To take advantage of this, you must make sure that the hashtags you use are relevant, funny, interesting, easily recalled, and in good taste. It is such hashtags that are really great for engagement.

Social Media Marketing Tips for Newbies

If you are new in digital marketing and you haven’t joined social media yet, you are missing a lot. You are missing the power of social media platforms you can effectively leverage to market your business. Social media provides excellent opportunities for marketers to build a strong online presence, build a strong brand, nurture leads/customers, share quality content, do promos as well as effectively engaging and retaining customers. What else do marketers really need online they cannot get on social media? If you are new in social media marketing, here are tested ways you can start out and get real benefits from marketing on social media particularly when you open accounts on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

 
 
Always Create Unique and Compelling Content

Content matters a great deal on social media. If your content is unique, educational, informative and of high quality, it helps to establish a distinct personality for your account. That is what makes your business distinctively different from your competitors and your customers notice. It evolves into some unique social identity for your business. You can nurture this identity with your own unique style of posts, unique content, visuals, graphics, logos, comments, interactions and unique hashtags. Doing these things regularly and consistently helps to build a great audience of followers for your business. You can validate and amplify your USP by posting links to blogs and articles that are talking about your business, highlighting its accomplishments or promoting its news. That helps your business a great deal because third party validation is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media marketing strategy.

Make Yourself Valuable

Social media users are always online to look for value. Without providing real value, you cannot hope to build a good following fast enough. Your first major challenge should therefore be to go about building a community of followers that are organic, relevant and engaging. Expert marketers recommend that you can go about this by introducing yourself to the social media community and getting them to notice you. Follow other accounts, engage and interact with these accounts by way of intelligent, relevant and unique comments. You can deliberately comment on popular influencer accounts and offer genuine input, feedback or expertise, helping your followers find what they’re looking for online, answering their questions and meaningfully engaging with them online. If you can do these things consistently, genuinely and intelligently, more people will start to pay attention to you. That helps to build your own audience of followers pretty quickly.

Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

Every social media platform has its own unique tools to assist marketers. You can take advantage of these tools to market effectively, promote your brand, grow your online authority, schedule your posts, share your posts, and interact with like-minded marketers by joining groups and suchlike marketing activities. You can save good time to create more content if you use tools like HootSuite to link all of your social media accounts together and schedule posts to appear at per-determined times across multiple social media platforms. With the help of these scheduling tools, you can develop a calendar of the best times to post based on the audience you would like to interact with and let the scheduling tool do the rest. Doing this allows your content to be automatically posted for you without having to manually do it yourself multiple times a day thereby enabling you to have audiences in different time zones and servicing them all adequately and simultaneously.

Network with Your Connections

Even when new in social media marketing, you can leverage the power of your connections when it starts growing. You can effectively market on social media and generate sales if you are able to use the media as a great tool to create a wide global network you can dependably leverage on to market your business. It allows you to get to meet a lot of people in your industry you can relate with and do business with. To enhance this, you can purposefully create relationships with thought-leaders and people of influence that have a wide group of followers in their own right. That helps to expand your network exponentially. You can identify influencers in your business niche, reach out and collaborate with them and they will in turn reciprocate by helping to promote your brand. On Twitter, a single re-tweet from the right influencer can help your brand/content to get in front of a whole new lot of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers.

Be Genuine and Authentic with your Followers

Reputation matters a lot in social media marketing. The reason you must endeavor to be authentic and genuine at all times in the content you post. Why people respond to authentic content positively is because they always want to interact with real people and not computer bots. That way, they tend to take appreciations and acknowledgments more personal if they know it is from real people. To enhance this, never fail to acknowledge and thank members of your audience/followers for complementing, posting and sharing your content. If you endeavor to return these little favors whenever you can, it will help grow your community/followers. Your audience engagement will grow in tandem as well.

Adhere to Community Rules of Each Platform

This is hugely important. Many social media platforms take their community rules very seriously. If you breach any of these rules, you get sanctioned. Such sanctioning may include but not limited to cautioning, taking out your content, temporary suspension or outright ban. You are visited with these sanctions when for instance you use the wrong or abusive language, bullying or when you promote any prohibited merchandise like drugs and firearms. Most social media platforms can greatly enhance your business if you stick with their community rules. Opening an account on social media platforms is free of cost. All they demand from you is to strictly comply with their community rules and regulations. That in all fairness is not too much to ask when weighed against the huge benefits you derive from being on the platforms.

Social Media Content Optimization Best Practices

Is your business on social media? If it is not, you are missing a lot from the benefits of social media marketing. You’ve got to optimize your content for social media if you want to remain relevant in online business. If you want to supercharge your online engagement, content is key. By taking deliberate steps to adorn your content with the right keywords, tags, titles, links and images, it can help you target the right customers, get leads and even sales. An effectively distributed and optimized content helps create a direct line to customers who are actively searching for products/services using the keywords the content is optimized with. When your content is optimized for social media, it helps to drive engagement and meaningful interactions. After all, social media optimization is all about making everything we post on our social platforms as engaging and as fruitful as possible with conversions as the end result.
These here are some of the best practices your business needs to optimize your social platforms for better results.

Streamline Your Strategy

To market successfully on social media, the strategy you adopt is vital. This strategy must be streamlined well enough to enable you establish a clear, regular and consistent posting schedule. Meaning, as far as your audience is concerned, they can be rest assured that you’ll always be there for them. This translates to reliability and dependability which somehow helps to build trust and guarantees engagement. So, if your posting schedule drives engagement satisfactorily, it is best to stick with it so as not to disappointment your audience who keeps coming back for more of your content.

Optimize Your Accounts

This is a given. Optimized social media accounts leave no one in doubt even with a very brief interaction what your business is all about. For this reason, you must be sure that all your social media accounts/profiles align with your business message, brand image goals and ethos. You can always guarantee and maintain this posture through regular and consistent content audits. When you habitually use consistent visuals, logos, tones of voice and marketing messaging in your social media accounts, your engagement is better enhanced.

Make Your Content Searchable

Unsearchable content cannot be engaging. Because search is a major feature of most social media platforms, making your content searchable helps engagement. Diligent optimization helps that process. Most prospects search on the social platforms themselves and they find products through the right keywords. Even from major search engines like Google, prospects can search for and find social pages themselves. Marketers do take advantage of that by embedding appropriate search-friendly keywords and hashtags (but with utmost caution), in their published social media content. If keywords are excessively used, you could be guilty of keywords stuffing and search engines’ algorithms can penalize your content for that.

Last Line

To compete favorably online, businesses should focus on content optimization. Content is king in online marketing. For this reason, marketers must not just post content for posting sake. Any content worth posting must be high in quality, informative and educating enough to attract engagement. Marketers must therefore ensure they consistently write content in such a way that it engages their target personas. Of course, to engage your target personas, your content has to first reach them. An optimized content serves that purpose better. 

5 Cost-Effective Ways to Harness the Power of Social Media

No question about it, social media has made tremendous impact on digital marketing. Aside the huge popularity of social media, sharing marketing messages on the platforms is relatively very easy and effective. Even though the competition in digital marketing is tough and hugely challenging, social media helps to ease things up a bit for many marketers. With over 4 billion active users on social media at the moment with most logging into at least one of the platforms daily, digital marketers cannot ask for a more fertile marketing environment. The icing on the cake is that marketing therein is hugely cost-effective. If you visualize social media as some kind of Public Square where everyone interacts freely, you don’t really need to spend any money for this interaction since it is an open space for everyone. However, standing out and getting noticed in such free space for everyone has its own challenges. Marketers can always weave their ways around these challenges if they have the right marketing strategies and are consistent enough to make a real difference out there. That too is not at a great expense.

 

Here are 5 cost-effective ways to market on social media without stressing yourself financially.

1. Go Live on Videos: Marketing videos are very easy to make and easy to deploy on social media. You make more impact as a marketer when your audience hears directly from the “horse’s mouth.” This impact is more when you endeavor to go live on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Marketing with live videos on these platforms is a great way for your audience to meet you live. That is hugely impacting and it is a free social media feature to boot.

2. Pay Genuine Attention to Your Audience: Make a habit of talking to and listening to your audience. By doing so, they feel cared for and do reciprocate as well. There is no question about it. Everyone likes attention particularly when that attention looks genuine. If and when your social media followers feel like you are giving them genuine attention, they will key into your content and support you. You can practically demonstrate this attention by devoting quality time to read comments/inquiries on your posts and respond to them all. By doing so, you are showing real concern and attention to what bugs your audience. They reciprocate and respond to your marketing messages as if it is person to person real time. That can be hugely impactful.

3. Be Consistent: There is no better way to show consistency than to show up every day. If you do, your audience will like and appreciate you better. Consistency helps you to build a connection with your target audience and imprint your brand in their minds. It makes you easily recognizable as a brand allowing others to find and notice you online with relative ease. Aside making regular and qualitative social media posts, you can ensure consistency in your social media profiles if you set them up using the same avatars, logos, descriptions and tone to make for easy recognition.

4. Make your Posts Creative and Interactive: Out there on social media, everyone is making a post every minute of the day. That is really a very huge trove of posts. For your posts to stand out from the crowd, you must endeavor to be creative in crafting your posts and making them interactive. No question about it, lots of people love the creativity offered by social media stories and marketing pitches. Always have that at the back of your mind when designing your posts particularly when such posts involve product launches, discounts, price adjustments, promos, and special announcements. If you are so inclined, you can post special snippets of your day-to-day life at work to give your audience some behind-the-scenes ideas about what you do and how you do it in your business. You can create quizzes, a poll, host a Q&A session and even make jokes to attract and engage the attention of your audience. These are all free but very effective marketing tools on social media.

5. Incorporate Hashtags Generously: Marketers use hashtags as little communities of content online. They do so by pairing their content with the right and appropriate hashtags. When they do this, the content automatically becomes part of these specific communities. That helps the content with very cheap online visibility. When your content is appropriately tagged, hashtags have the power and authority to help multiply your engagement provided they are correctly used. Many online searchers rely on hashtags to locate posts online that are relevant to their interests. That makes the use of hashtags some fantastic, cost-effective and incredible way to get your business noticed online. As a marketer, you can either create your own unique hashtags, or you latch on to any hashtags relevant to your business and content. Whichever you use, be sure it makes sense and relevant enough to help online searchers locate your business and your content.

Wrapping Up

Social media is now very deep and still developing. The reason digital marketers cannot afford to overlook social media in their marketing activities. If you are a creative marketer wanting to cut back on marketing costs, there is a lot you can do to leverage social media. The foregoing tips are very handy in that quest. Even if these tips will help you to save on some marketing money, to get good results, you must invest some more of your time and efforts. In the long term, it is worth the while for you to put some more efforts into finding the right tools, resources, and platforms that will help you build a sustainable online marketing strategy at minimal financial costs.

Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Do you have a social media marketing strategy for your small business? If not, why not? The right time to start is today. You are no doubt aware that at the moment, social media clearly presents countless opportunities for potential and existing customers to engage with your business. It is a veritable environment for these customers to read blogs and marketing content, ask questions, make suggestions, share content of their own and much more. If your small business is presently not on social media, you are missing out of the many social media benefits that can help your business to grow. If you want to reach more customers and boost online authority for your small business, just get it on social media. Social media has become a very powerful tool for helping small businesses reach more customers and do more business online. What matters most in social media marketing is to post the right content for the right audience at the right time to nurture engagement, drive clicks, and attract customers.

Find below a few strategies that have proved effective for many small businesses marketing across some of the most popular social platforms.

Publish Only Relevant Content

In online marketing, content is king. It is more so on social media. While engaging with others’ content on social media, it is advisable that you should also be posting your own content on a regular basis. This content should be packaged into standard posts, images, videos, graphics and blogs. Your content will be effective if you ensure it covers such topics that are relevant to your audience and at the same time respond promptly to all questions/comments in the Comments section of the social media platform.

Diversify Your Content

In content marketing, diversity breeds more curiosity. On social media, questions, images, graphics and videos appear to be more engaging than other types of content. Mixing these content types and determining which works best on your type of audience is the way to go. In some popular platforms like Facebook, you have an added advantage of the valuable insights the platform provides. It has tools that help its users with some insights on how often other users are interacting with which content. With the benefit of these insights, marketers can take deliberate steps to craft and post more of the content people appear to be interested in.

Use Videos to Increase Organic Reach

High quality videos as content types on social media help to increase organic reach. Google reports indicate that video content represents over 74% of all online traffic. On Facebook in particular, it is one of the leading drivers of organic reach. If the videos are short, sharp, and concise and quickly answer questions and help solve users’ problems, they attract good organic traffic to your business website.

Market with Facebook Live Videos

Marketers can rely on Facebook Live videos to increase organic reach and boost engagement for their businesses. This is because Facebook users spend more time, in fact about three times as much time watching FB Live videos compared to other types of videos. These videos give marketers the all-important opportunity to directly interact with their followers in real time, answer questions, and make product recommendations to them.

Utilize LinkedIn Search Function

If tactically engaged, LinkedIn is a great platform for sharing valuable content, interacting with customers and potential customers and winning over new customers. LinkedIn’s search function works just like a real search engine. When users are searching on the platform for any particular type of business, LinkedIn helps to direct such searchers to the page that profiles the most relevant information and has the closest degree of connections to what they are searching for. Smart marketers can thus effectively use LinkedIn SEO to optimize their pages for search and to attract more Connections to their businesses.

Take Advantage of Instagram Marketing

Instagram appears to be the most popular social media platform with Millennials, that is persons now 35 and below. For smart marketers, that is a very vital demographic info. This group of people are now the largest generation presently in the workforce and they make up the majority of users on social media. Depending on the type of products you are marketing, you can deliberately target this group with marketing messages directly to where they can be found on social media.
 
Use Hashtags Tactically

Smart marketers particularly on Instagram can tactically use hashtags to maximize organic reach for their businesses on the platform. Once the hashtags are related to the brands and products, they do nicely. This is more so when you can effectively take advantage of the hashtags your direct competitors are using.

Use Instagram Stories Wisely

On most social media platforms, the main goal is to get users to interact more with your content. This is with the ultimate aim of getting them to reach out and do business with you. One great feature called Instagram Stories comes in very handy here. Instagram Stories allow you to post polls, questions, gifs, and much more to get people to engage and respond to your content. Instagram Stories are also great to give you more insights into what your audience is interested in and what questions they are asking. You can take advantage of these insights, to better market to them.

Market with Only High Quality Photos

What this means is that you must avoid stock photos at all cost particularly on Instagram. What is very important on social media is to be sure you can effectively engage your followers visually. To be able to do this, you need eye-catching photos/imagery that speaks directly to your target audience. If you can avoid common stock images, you’ll do nicely by using high quality professional photos and/or custom graphics that give your audience vivid images of your brand/products. That helps to get the brand/products noticed even amidst stiff competition.

Engage in YouTube Marketing

YouTube may not be a true social media platform in the real sense of it, but it does very nicely in video marketing which is its main specialty. In addition, YouTube has an organic search function that allows users to find videos on topics/products they are interested in. It is also very easy to simply publish your marketing video content on YouTube and then share it widely on the most popular social media channels. 

Market with Your Personal Stories

Getting personal on social media is a good marketing strategy. It is futile to regularly bore your audience with common stories which many of them may have heard before anyway. Getting personal with your own stories usually gives the best touch. You can do this by deliberating sharing personal stories, milestones, favorite anecdotes, quotations, updates, insights, achievements, interviews, and much more. That helps to build trust with your audience better. Trust is hugely important because most people are more likely to do business with people they trust. For this reason, if others perceive you as personable and authentic, they will do more business with you.

Use Paid Social Media Advertising, PPC

For marketers who have the budget for it, Pay-per-Click, PPC is one great option to generate better quality traffic and more marketing results faster. Marketers who are smart enough to supplement their organic traffic efforts with paid advertising; it helps them to establish a more holistic marketing strategy for their business. With PPC, you can effectively run paid ads on social media to attract clicks and leads to your business. 

Take Advantage of Facebook Ads

If your marketing budget can accommodate it, you can take advantage of Facebook ads to promote your business. Facebook ads are data-driven and it takes quite some marketing skills to get good results. These skills require that you have a working knowledge and understanding of who your audience is and what they are interested in. That knowledge and understanding enables you to set your ads targeting to reach the right audience with the right type of content. That helps to enhance the effectiveness of the ads. If you take advantage of Facebook insights and analytics, you can better segment your marketing activities for best results.

How to Increase your Small Business Online Presence with Social Media

Small business owners deliberately take advantage of social media to increase online presence for their businesses. The vast user bases and sharing capabilities peculiar to social media platforms make them ideal amplification tools to help increase online presence for your business. This is in addition to the fact that a vast majority of consumers rely on social media for product recommendations and actually make purchases based on these recommendations.

Here are five things you can do to increase social media presence for your small business.

1. Be Active on Social Media

This is a given. The more active you are on social media, the easier it is for you to get noticed. To make social media a part of your online presence therefore, the first thing you need to do is to have an active account. That done, you can start publishing high quality posts regularly as well as making well-informed responses to likes and comments on those posts. At the same time, you can reciprocate with liking and commenting on your followers’ posts, answering direct questions/messages, sharing content from other sources, and much more. If you do this consistently, your online presence will increase proportionately.

2. Think more of Audience not just Followers

On social media, your online presence hardly improves with more followers. Rather, it is your following that improves with a stronger online presence. When you think more of your following as a great audience you can market to, you can work to cultivate niche audience of individuals who are interested in what you are offering. That translates into more likes and comments on your posts and more user-generated content to boot. As most marketers very well know, marketing campaigns with user-generated content result in higher conversions rates than campaigns without it. Meaning, user-generated content helps to build your online presence better on social media.

3. Limit the Number of Social Media Platforms you Use

Expert social media marketers always advise marketers to limit the number of social media platforms to only the numbers they can conveniently handle. This is because online presence is all about quality and not quantity. You can settle for the platforms your preferred audience is using, then limit the number you choose based on your bandwidth. If you have just one, two or three accounts with solid engagement, it is much better than having several accounts with weak activity. For most small business owners, the preference is always among the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest depending on what products/services they are marketing.

4. Make Posts with Emotion for Shareability

If you want to generate engagement on social media, you must make quality posts regularly. Posts that generate engagement are hugely important if you want social media algorithms to locate and display more of your posts in users’ feeds. In addition, quality posts compel your followers to consume your content more and to share it with others widely. To craft quality posts, you can use emotional words and phrases in your captions, use compelling stats, evocative images/photos/graphics and even add emojis for effects. If the posts are easily relatable and link-free such that your followers can consume quickly, it increases their shareability. The more your posts are shared, the better for your online presence.

5. Have Social Media SEO in Place

Some social media sites are some kind of mini search engines in their own rights while relying on keywords in some cases. For this reason, just like the SEO on your business website, you can also have SEO in your social media posts by including your preferred and popular keywords in your profiles and posts on the platforms. You can use many of the same keywords as you do on your business website. But, you may choose to have a preference towards some idea-oriented and lighter-hearted queries because social media platforms are more of the browsing and interactive type of socializing. It is recommended that both hashtags and keywords be used sparingly in your posts to improve your social media presence. If you use them sparingly and focus more on location-based and niche terms, you can manage to increase your visibility to the right audience in their right locations.

Top Social Media Marketing Tips for Aggressive Marketers

Social media marketing is increasing in popularity among digital marketers because of the ease-of-use and huge popularity of social media platforms. It now appears that nearly everyone around the world is on social media. Marketers have quickly latched on to this huge popularity to promote their brands and products. For marketers who have challenges with technology and other forms of digital marketing, social media marketing is easy for them to handle. Aggressive marketers will find these social media marketing tips top range preferences to grow their businesses. 

Create Accounts on Different Social Media Platforms

Yes, there are many social media marketing platforms out there. They all come with peculiar characteristics and advantages. Depending on your type of business and the products you are marketing, it is best to have accounts on more than one social media platform. For some marketers, the more the number, the better for their promotional efforts. For aggressive marketing, you must therefore endeavor to create a number of different social media accounts since each social media network comes with its own peculiar advantages and disadvantages. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like are great social media networks where marketers can easily market content, share videos, photos and even do promos to a very wide and diverse audience. Some of these social media networks do have their own in-house analytics that are very useful for aggressive marketing.

Stimulate Engagement

If you need reminding, social media is all about being social. As an aggressive marketer, you must have great and outstanding people skills. These, are the skills you can take good advantage of to stimulate engagement on social media. If you open an account on any social media platform, it is just not enough to occasionally make a post and forget about it. You must take additional steps to interact more with your audience by way of inviting comments and responding to such comments. That is what stimulates interaction and more engagement. Most social media users always want to know the real personalities behind the contents they are consuming on social media. That further helps to stimulate more interactions and engagements that can lead to beneficial business relationships down the road.

Generously Share Videos

Many social media users tend to be more interested in videos than in graphics and images. The reason videos have become great marketing content on social media. For aggressive marketing, it is better to share more videos than any other type of visual content on social media. For effective social media marketing therefore, marketers must endeavor to generously share, very good and captivating videos of what they are marketing. That is what gets the best results.
 
Post Attractive Visuals

Millions of people are active on social media posting whatsoever catches their fancy. With millions of new social media posts each day from everywhere around the world, what easily catches attention in such scenario must be very unique and outstanding. That is why aggressive marketers must deliberately focus on particularly very attractive visuals. That is what helps to grab the attention of potential leads as they scroll through their news feeds on the networks. Social media marketing depends heavily on very beautiful photos/graphics to get leads and customers.

Post Local Content

Even in this age of the internet, many businesses remain local. Google tends to give good attention to “near me” searches in its search results. If you post marketing content that clearly shows your business as a neighborhood business, you will attract more local patronage. Many people make their buy decisions based on interrelated considerations. Nearness to the business location is one of those considerations. If you post local content on social media, you stimulate local audience and you get local patronage.

Schedule Posts Regularly

To establish a solid presence on social media, aggressive marketers must endeavor to share good content on a regular basis. Social media is interactive and millions of people are out there at any point in time posting stuff. Regular and reliable postings help to build trust through expectations. With that, marketers can build huge following, leads and even sales. If as a social media marketer you worry about the time you need to spend on social media making posts, there is a solution. You have access to a myriad of online social media management tools that can help you schedule your posts. A good social media scheduler helps you to reliably schedule, your daily, weekly or even monthly social media posts at once. By doing so, you can free up your valuable time for some other important marketing activities.

Use Hashtags Correctly

On some social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, hashtags when used correctly help your posts to get to the right audience. Even though hashtags are hugely important on all social media platforms, they are an absolute must on Twitter and Instagram. On these platforms, hashtags are very reliable to help social media users find your posts. Many users rely solely on them to search for and find products/services. Hashtags help your tweets or posts reach out to the target audience to generate leads and even sales.

7 Ways to Get the Best from Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers always worry about how effective their digital marketing strategies are. They worry about how these strategies help their businesses to grow. If at any point in time they discover that the strategies they are using are not working for them as expected, they take steps to rejig them for better results. In your own business, whenever you observe that your marketing campaign is not working well to your satisfaction, it is a very clear sign that your business is in a vulnerable position. That is when something just has to be done and done fast too. A good look at your digital marketing strategy is the first logical step in that wise. Smart digital marketing demands it as a basic step, since most businesses rely heavily on effective marketing for their survival and steady growths. To get the best from your digital marketing strategy, don’t ignore the following. 

 
1. Have a Formal Digital Marketing Strategy

You must first be sure to have a marketing strategy and it works for your business. Not having one is always a very grave marketing error that stunts business growth. If you have a digital marketing plan in your overall marketing strategy, your business benefits immensely. By putting all the elements together in an effective way, doing all you should do at the right and proper time, your strategy becomes effective as a result. Of course, you can only know how well you are doing, if you have the right tools in place to track your results and monitor your progress.

2. Use Your Marketing Budget Prudently

Smart marketers always have a very keen eye on marketing costs. This is with a view to better organizing their marketing budgets and in delivering higher Returns on Investments, ROIs. For this reason, budget analysis/management in digital marketing becomes hugely important. By relying more on the most cost-effective techniques in your digital marketing strategy, you can better manage your marketing budget more prudently.

3. Target the Right Audience

You dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily if you habitually “shoot at everything that flies” in your marketing activities. Effective targeting is what gets the best results. If you fully identify and understand the ideal audience for your products, you can market to them directly for good results. For this reason, if you know your audience well enough, you can effectively tailor your digital marketing activities to fit them. These activities entail the right content, the right type of marketing medium/channel and the right message you are conveying. It is always very important therefore, to have a plan for targeting customers and potential customers who share a lot in common in a specific and effective way. Targeting the right audience in your marketing efforts, is not only a cost-effective thing to do, it gets the best results.

4. Pay Attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A good search engine optimization, SEO technique on your website helps to get it noticed by search engines. It requires a careful and tactical use of keywords and alt tags in your content and headlines. When correctly used, they have a large amount of influence on your SEO. They help search engines particularly Google to rank your website well in its SERPs. That is what easily becomes available to searchers first when in need of information. Your website directly benefits by way of good organic traffic from such search results. Because search engines tend to change their algorithms from time to time, be sure to keep an eye on these changes and to update your SEO techniques in tandem to avoid penalties from search engines. Such penalties may have adverse effects your business online.

5. Connect with Influencers

It remains a good marketing strategy to develop good relations with influencers and to depend on their large following to grow your business. Because of their effectiveness, making some investments in connecting with influencers is a good marketing strategy. Making this investment is usually worth the while because it tends to engender higher ROI for the marketer. This is why marketing with influencers is always worth it and a large percentage of marketers think so as well. Many see it as a very effective marketing strategy because of the good results it gives. For best results, it is advisable to make some deliberate efforts to source the right influencer to work with and who suits and promotes your brand better. That kind of influencer can easily help to create a huge awareness for your brand and help to boost sales/revenue for your business.

6. Use Paid Social Media Ads

Social media platforms have become very popular with digital marketers because of their immense popularity and ease of sharing information. They now serve as very important platforms for marketers to build and grow their audiences very quickly. With their customized in-house analytics, marketers benefit by building greater insights into their marketing efforts free of cost. These benefits can be boosted with additional paid ads that are cost-effective too. Promoting your brand on social media without any paid advertising is usually time consuming and may not even guarantee any appreciable increase in your audience. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is good to invest in paid ads on social media. Doing so will not only help you to better target your audience, but also, it will help transform your page into a very popular page and a top leads generator as a result.

7. Market with all the Platforms

Expert marketers like to advise marketers not to ignore any marketing channel/platform in their digital marketing strategy. All channels have their own advantages and peculiarities and the results they deliver vary as well. Content marketing, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, inforgraphics, video marketing etc. must be part of your marketing strategy for better effectiveness. What matters is to be very active when using most of these channels. If you regularly post fresh and informative content related to your brand/product on daily basis, it will help your page to get more traffic and to build a larger audience. For better and direct audience targeting particularly on social media, it is very important to understand how their algorithms work. You can rely on hashtags to post information according to your audience’s online stats to get insights and a brief of your audience. Doing so will enable you to have a better use of hashtags and keywords to target your audience based on such hugely important marketing demographics like age, education, employment, profession, gender, marital/parental status, and interests. You get better results as well.