Top 6 Social Media Marketing Tips for Ambitious Marketers

As most marketers already know, our digital marketing landscape is always rapidly and constantly evolving. The real reason marketers must always have in place an effective and relevant social media strategy for their marketing activities. Ambitious marketers are increasingly taking advantage of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to get their marketing messages massively out online. If not properly used, social media may constitute a huge drain on your time and resources. However, because of its effectiveness, a good social media marketing strategy is necessary for any ambitious marketer who is willing to follow the rules.

Here are some of my top tips that can help any ambitious marketer to hold their own in the hugely competitive social media-marketing world.

1. Carefully Choose your Social Media Platforms

Yes, because social media platforms have their own peculiar differences. The reason you must carefully choose which of them suits your business and marketing efforts among the thousands of social media platforms on the digital marketing world. Since it is practically impossible to create effective content across too many platforms, it is best to always focus more on a few very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. On these platforms, you can make quality content posts that resonate with your audience consistently.  That is what gives the best results for your marketing efforts.

2. Focus more on what is Trending

Social media essentially thrive on trends. Because audiences on social media are essentially yearning for human connection/interaction, you can latch on issues enhancing these connections. These are always the trending issues hugely important to marketers. If you set up an RSS feed in a place like Feedly, you can have a steady supply of topics to enable you find out what is trending by closely monitoring key hashtags. That allows you to create and focus your marketing messages more effectively.

3. Set Realistic Social Media Goals

Serious marketers don’t normally get on social media to simply fool around entertainments. You must define your social media goals and how you’ll go about attaining them. Most importantly, on social media, it is essential to first build an audience of loyal followers. The bigger the audience, the better for your marketing activities. Because it takes quality time to build an audience organically, you have to set clear goals with timelines how you intend to go about it. When the audience builds up over time, you can use the metrics of the social media platforms to find out what they care about and what interests them. Many social media platforms do have some fantastic analytics tools that can help you work out the effectiveness and rate of engagement on your content. This info helps you to effectively create marketing messages that get good results.  

4. Work with Your Social Media Content Calendar
 
In order not to unduly dissipate your efforts unnecessarily, you can decide to work with a social media calendar as an effective guide for your quality content posting efforts. Posting across multiple social media platforms is one very huge time-consuming process. Social media content management systems like Hootsuite allow you to schedule your content to coincide with when your audience is online. It helps to take the hassle out of posting across multiple platforms, which essentially saves quality time and efforts and very effective too.

5. Encourage and Embrace Feedback Engagements  

If you encourage and embrace feedback from your audience, it gives you a very good opportunity to engage with your audience meaningfully. The feedback helps you to quickly make corrections and to refocus your marketing message where necessary. Better results always come out from such efforts.

6. Regularly A/B Test Your Content for Effectiveness

In digital marketing, A/B testing essentially involves creating multiple headlines for the same piece of content and working out which generates a higher rate of engagement and reach. To measure the effectiveness of your marketing messages, there is need for you to always take advantage of A/B testing to gauge the effectiveness of the quality content you are posting. It helps to provide you some very useful insights on how people react to the content you are posting. You also get good insights to the effectiveness of the Call-To-Action, CTA phrase you’ve deployed on your site.

Effective Tips for Making Money on Pinterest

You need some techniques to be able to make money on any social media platform particularly Pinterest. Aside from the frequent changes on the platform which can be problematic for many marketers, Pinterest still offers good opportunities for marketers to earn a bit of money on the side. The good news for marketers is that the platform offers a huge reach, some say over 300 million users and it continues to grow. That is really one huge market out there on Pinterest.

Granted you already know how to use Pinterest, here are some techniques/tips to help you make money on the platform.



Create a Business Account

This is the first thing you must do if you want to make money on Pinterest. You’ve got to have it before you reach out to others to do business on the platform. By the time you open a business account, you can then reach out to any brands for cooperation, affiliation, partnerships, affiliate links, and such like virtual space business engagements. The good news is that on Pinterest, business accounts are free. Not only that, they give you free access to on-site analytics and some other necessary assistance to help your business.

Create Eye-Catching Pins

The marketing power of Pinterest depends hugely on its visuals.  It is practically a visual marketing tool. Therefore, for the pins you create to be useful as powerful marketing tools, they definitely need to stand out, be eye-catching and to look really professional. If you do not have the requisite skills to create digital images yourself, you can use an online free tool to create high-quality images for your pins. One of such free tools that readily come to mind is Canva which I recommend for you because it is also useful for creating flyers, invites, business cards, etc. etc. Canva is one free tool that is super-easy to use. On Canva, there are lots of free designs which you can edit with your own texts and images and you come out with beautiful eye-catching images for your pins.

Use Tailwind to Schedule Your Pins

Tailwind is a marketing app you can use to schedule your pins on Pinterest. It was created specially to be adapted for use on Pinterest and Instagram. It is however not a free app to use. With a small monthly rental fee of less than $10, Tailwind can help you with analytics and to promote your pins. It does really well at helping you to create a pinning schedule for your pins.

Relate with and Interact with Other Pinners



You can interact and relate well with other pinners if you routinely pin other people’s pins, click their follow links, etc. This is because Pinterest is not just a social media platform, it is also a very powerful Search Engine. Relating with other pinners in reciprocal manner is an overall best practice on Pinterest and it gives the best results. Depending on what your interests are and what you are looking for, you are always at liberty just as in some other social media platforms to “unfollow” any persons you are following if you are not comfortable with the stuff they post that shows up in your feed. That is a clear exercise of your right of freedom of association/interaction which social media guarantees.

Install a Press/Media Kit

Having a press/media kit on your account on Pinterest is one of the easiest and smartest ways to tell other people what you can offer their business. Media kits have an uncanny and very attractive way of telling potential partners key facts and statistics about your blog, business, or Pinterest following. If you choose to use Canva to create your Press/Media kit, be sure it gives out at a glance, a short bio about you and your business, a list of the services you are rendering, number of impressions and/or following on your account and some summary information about your audience. That is what makes the kit a very powerful marketing tool.

Optimize Your Pins to make them Searchable

Like Google, Pinterest is also a very powerful search engine. So, to make your pins easily searchable, you must optimize them with specific keywords relevant to your business niche. It is advisable to always start by looking at the pins that pop up in the top of your feed. They help you to easily get what you want when they start popping up as soon as you start typing in the keywords for a search. What pops up shows you what people are currently searching for on the search engine same way you use other search engines like Google. It easily gives you the information you really want.

Be Transparent and Honest About Your Partnerships



Just like in any other business arrangement, transparency and honesty are very helpful when doing virtual business. On Pinterest, if you are using affiliate links or partnering with brands in any capacity, you have to let your audience know. That is transparency. The platform itself is very finicky when it comes to regulating the activities of its platform users. Read and understand the rules of engagement well to avoid being penalized regularly or even outright ban.

Pay Attention to Regular Changes on the Platform

Pinterest habitually makes changes very often maybe because it is still developing. It has changed a lot since it was launched sometime in year 2010. It is advisable to always pay attention to and to act in accordance with these regular changes particularly as they affect your ability to earn money on the platform.

Strictly Follow Pinterest’s Guidelines/Best Practices

This is a given. If you want to be a good partner to Pinterest, you must play according the rules. Respect the platform by following their Community Guidelines as prescribed and revisable from time to time. Good luck!

 

Best Digital Marketing Platforms your Business Needs

Every digital marketer must know exactly from which platforms they need to launch their marketing campaigns online. Depending on your type of business, most of the platforms have something unique to them which can aid digital marketing campaigns for good results. That is where some experience counts to know exactly where to be to get your business in front of your target audience.

Here are some of the platforms many experienced digital marketers recommend.


 
Facebook

With around 1.5 billion active users, facebook commands such a huge audience around the world which digital marketers cannot afford to ignore. It is sociable, easy to use, easy for sharing and hugely popular. A good content out on facebook can easily go viral to the benefit of any campaigns. You can easily post written content, photos/graphics and videos. Get your business a facebook page and see what difference that can make in your digital marketing campaigns.

Twitter

Twitter is a short blog platform which is becoming increasingly popular to pass short promotional messages to a huge audience which you have built up over time. It parades diverse demographics where social and witty writers are very much at home turning out large numbers of short messages 24/7. Information can go viral on Twitter pretty quickly and targeted campaigns can rely on hashtags on the platform. Many Twitter users can share your content easily if it is sufficiently informative, witty, entertaining and or intriguing.

Instagram

Instagram is popularly known as an images/photos/videos marketing platform. Celebrities and popular sports personalities can help products promotion by using their pages on the platform for endorsements. The platform has varied and diverse demographics making it easy to target customers and potential customers with relatively good results. Digital marketing opportunities on Instagram are very huge and marketers who know how are using it to get very good results from their promotional efforts. Instagram is one great place to market businesses related to clothing/fashion brands.

TikTok

TikTok now appears to be a new kid on the block of social media. It is not yet as popular as facebook or Twitter when it comes to social media preferences but it is holding its own and growing fast. Content posted on the platform always stands a very good chance of going viral as well. If you are able to churn out good content on the platform regularly and consistently, you have a very good chance of attracting very valuable attention to your brand/business. For marketers involved in a clothing brand or real estate, TikTok is a great place to market your business. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is seen as a platform for serious business persons and professionals. It allows every account holder on the platform to interact and behave as they would ordinarily do in a formal office environment. People sign on to the platform primarily to further their careers or their businesses. On the platform, you can promote any business to like minds and to persons who are looking to do business within the same niche as yours. LinkedIn is one great place to market any businesses related to real estate.

Snapchat

As for demographics, Snapchat appeals more to younger persons because it leans more towards entertainment and gist. If you are targeting young people, you can push out very entertaining content daily to promote your brand image. If properly handled, Snapchat can become a veritable social media platform your brand/business needs to reinforce its brand excitement and create lifetime value for itself.

3 Trending Social Media Tactics for Effective Ads

Online, marketers are literally at war trying to get customers’ attention. Everyone gets to use one tactic or the other particularly on social media to outdo others. We now generally know that social media has become one of the most fascinating developments of our time. Apart from ease of use and accessibility, social media is also cost effective and very efficient at getting ads across to millions of users within a very short space of time. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram need specialized and different ways of use to get good results. That is where tactics come into the picture. Here now are the 3 currently very popular and trending.

01. Consistent posting. No doubt the most important ingredient in establishing a strong brand persona on social media is consistency. Once you have built up a good base of content, you can create an automated posting schedule most likely to garner high-engagement rates. That is because consistent posting leads to stronger brand recall, increased engagement and more opportunities to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

02. Tracking and analyzing results. If you want to keep conversations on your social pages going, you must be able to track your results and analyze them correctly. That is where tools like Google analytics come in very handy. You can use analytics to look at brand mentions and engagement to learn what is working for you, what isn’t and what needs to be improved upon. You can get details on certain factors like what demographics your posts appeal to most or what countries are most engaged with your brand messaging. With this information, you can target your ads correctly for better results.

03. Latching on to trends. Taking the message to customers where they can be found is one great advantage of social media ads. You can use tools like Buzzsumo and Feedly to enable you to learn about the content that is buzzing within your industry, around your brand or about your competitors. That information allows you to target your ads to trends correctly for better results.

 

5 Wasteful Small Business Marketing Strategies to Avoid

 For any small business, time and money are way too valuable for any wastage to be tolerated. Granted everyone in business always wants to do what most others are doing to promote their products/services in the market place. It gets real difficult most times. That is because marketing is no easy task. It is where some business owners at times get to overdo certain things thereby occasioning some avoidable wastage. When developing your own marketing strategy, you must take care to avoid wasting your time and money unnecessarily. Here is what to look out for and try to avoid.



01. Casting your marketing net too wide. Almost always, you get better returns on your investments and your marketing efforts work better if you target your audience effectively. Experience has shown that if you cast your marketing nets too wide, you end up wasting valuable time and money marketing to the wrong people in the wrong places. That clearly is a waste which is avoidable.

02. Untargeted video marketing. If you rightly assume that your customers are watching videos online, you must find out where. First you must try to know on what platforms your videos would be viewed on before you even create one. That is because creating videos for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for instance requires different approaches and strategies for the simple reason that videos are consumed differently on both platforms. Doing otherwise leads to avoidable wastage creating videos which are not well targeted.

03. Using too many social media channels. The more the merrier is hardly relevant when it comes to marketing on social media. If you are one of those marketers who still believe you need to be everywhere on social media, you are simply wasting your very valuable time, effort and money. When you decide to market on social media platforms, what is most important is to target your customers exactly where they are already spending their time. Just take your business to them in the social media where they already are. That saves you time and money.

04. Creating irrelevant content. We hear marketing experts say “content is king” when it comes to blogging for business. And that you need regular and fresh content all the time. Great! But that’s not all. What is important is that your content must be relevant to be useful. That is what helps your customers who want to build a relationship with your business. They appreciate your business more when you regularly give them valuable, relevant and fresh content which helps them. Irrelevant content is clearly a waste of time and money in that wise.



05. Wrong use of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is good for your business if the influencer is in the right industry. To get good value from the advice of influencers, they must be right for your business and they must also have some visible and identifiable reputation. If however you’re in an obscure industry or you create products for a small niche market, influencers are probably not going to be of much help to you. Using influencers for such business will clearly be a waste of time, effort and money. Therefore, you can do well to avoid wasting your time and money on some low impact influencer or one in the wrong industry.