Featured post

10 Small Business Ideas You Can Profit From Working Remotely

Changing human habits have made more people to start working remotely in recent years. These days, remote and hybrid work have become part o...

Thursday, July 09, 2020

How to Use Social Media as a Creative Marketing Strategy

Creative Marketing Strategy with a mobile phone and red flowers.
Social media marketing is gradually increasing in popularity in tandem with the increasing popularity of social media platforms. Social media now provides a veritable avenue for online marketers to market to billions of people around the world 24/7. Now, that is one very huge market no doubt. To take full advantage of this huge market, you’ve got to be sufficiently creative in your marketing efforts. First, you must build a formidable following on social media platforms and with some creativity, you can harness it for the benefit of your business.

You can try these here creative strategies for effects and expect amazing results.

Share Industry Related Content: Online, marketers and consumers are always looking for information to help solve problems for them. This is why it is imperative to always choose content that adds value to your audience. Such content must be related to the industry niche your business in known for. You can share links to relevant content published in authoritative and credible sources like trade journals, business publications, research journals and newsletters in the fields of interest to your audience. This is one creative way to build audience and traffic.



Reward Customers Who Share Your Content: Content sharing is very easy on social media even though not everyone does it. A vigorously shared content tends to go viral fairly quickly and that is good for business visibility and traffic. Since not everyone likes to share content, you can design ways to appreciate and reward customers who take a bit of time and effort to share your content. Simply thanking them for what they are doing for your business may be OK with some. Some others may be rewarded with token gift items like free coupons, discounts and suchlike incentives to make what they are doing for you really worth their while. That’s a creative way to encourage them to continue sharing your content.

Create a New LinkedIn Group: LinkedIn is a very popular social media platform that helps to bring together business persons with similar interests. So, if you can’t find any group in your industry that has similar needs as yours, you can simply create one. That’s very easy to do after which you can take deliberate actions to promote it to people you are connected with. You can attract them with compelling content and discussion questions then invite them to join up.

Join LinkedIn Groups: These are places business persons with similar interests have unlimited opportunities for interaction. So, if you are a business owner, you need to join LinkedIn groups if you’re yet to do so. Joining groups on LinkedIn is one easy way to building connections and getting involved in business conversations with like-minded people. The more active and useful you are in these groups, the greater the returns your business gets.

Connect with Local Businesses on Social Media: One great way to build community and cross-market your business is to connect with other local businesses on social media. You can actively interact with these businesses, positively engage with their content and build good relationships as a result. Doing so can help open doors for your business to get referrals and even mutually beneficial partnerships.

Push Your Social Media Handles: Do you often see “Follow me on Twitter?” That’s one creative way to push your Twitter handle. You can do similar things in many social media platforms. If for example you are writing an article for publication or you are speaking at an industry event, conference or seminar, you can easily drop your social media handles for your audience to link up with you at a later time of their convenience. When people love what they hear you say or read what you write, many will be keen to keep up interacting with you. Dropping your social media handles helps to facilitate that process.

Use Hashtags: The internet loves hashtags usually denoted with the symbol “#” before the hashtag word or phrase. Many internet users usually search for information using hashtags. When you use hashtags, it allows people searching for content, using such tags, to find your content fairly easily.

Join in on Popular Hashtags: You can search Google for hashtags related to your business niche. If found, you can join and use the popular hashtags in your industry by getting involved in the larger conversation. Search results will be turning up your business as well if it is involved with popular hashtags.

TikTok Social Service: TickTok is useful for creating quick, short-form videos. It takes just a bit of work and efforts to create the videos. If such videos are some fun creative content, you can quickly grow a network and following on TikTok. Get started now if you’ve not already done so before everyone else in your industry beats you to it. If your content is good, the traffic it gets is good too.

Images on Pinterest: Pinterest is more an image and inforgraphic social media platform now becoming very popular with marketers. If you create some great images for your blog or make an infographic, you can Pin them on Pinterest. You can leverage Pinterest for your business by sharing other related content along with your Pins. That way, your business gets seen as someone who Pins great content even if you didn’t produce the content. This helps to build trust with your audience and positions you as informed and helpful in your niche.

Follow Your Competition: Some marketers like to call this spying on your competition. It is good for business if you can keep a keen eye on what your competition is doing. Use creative and effective ways to keep watch on and to keenly follow your competition. In some social media platforms like Facebook for example, you can use its “Page to Watch” feature to follow other accounts easily. Following your competition and keeping tabs on what they are doing enables you to see what works for them and if you can learn anything from the strategy they are using.

Be Your Biggest Promoter: Having a good content on your website is not enough. You must reach out and promote it. If you sit back and hope it will work just like that, it won’t. You cannot be wrong by promoting your own thing. If you’re unwilling or unable to share your own content, who will? If you have a good content, experts advise that you should reach out, engage, interact and be bold enough to ask for, follow, like or connection. That is one great way to get noticed.




Use Instagram Photo Contest: Instagram is one social media platform that is image driven. The reason it is a celebrity platform of choice. Posting good photos regularly helps to build a very formidable following in good time. On Instagram, you can use a photo contest to build brand awareness. If some good prizes are involved in such photo contents, you easily attract followers who in turn help to share your business with their followers. That helps to grow brand awareness real quick.

Use a Social Media Management Tool: Social media management tools come handy to help manage many social media accounts and saving time. Many of the tools come with great features which you can use to run the connected accounts from one location. You can even get to use some of their analytics features to better understand what is working for your campaigns and what is not. A proper use of social media management tools helps to save time and energy and with good results to boot.

Connect with Leaders in Your Niche: Finding and connecting with influential leaders in your niche has two major advantages. Firstly, if you connect with them via social media, you have unlimited access to their awesome content which you can learn from and share with your own audience. Secondly, you can get them to also help share your own content to their huge followers who look up to them as industry leaders. Both ways help your brand awareness and visibility immensely.

Use Zoom Web Conferencing: Zoom is one new technology now becoming popular with marketers. It is a great, free way to do video conferencing. With Zoom, you can market directly to customers and engage them as if you are doing word–of-mouth advertising. By video conferencing, you see them and they see you. Talking to each other is seamless while facial expressions and gestures can also help to send powerful messages. Many business owners now use Zoom to connect more intimately with their following or to record their screen and produce screencast videos to share on social media.


Tuesday, July 07, 2020

Blogging as a Creative Online Marketing Strategy

Black blogging sign projected over a computer keyboard.
Blogging is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your business online. Your blog is a great place for you to share your expertise with your target audience and to market your business. The only notable cost element of blogging is your time and if you blog creatively, the time expense is always well worth it.

If you use the creative strategies below, you can maximize the effectiveness of your blogging efforts.

Write Quality Content: With blogging, content is king. The more impactful the content, the better for your blogging efforts! You must be careful to create only content that is worth reading and sharing. Major search engines particularly Google don’t like poor quality content. So, if you as the writer wouldn’t read it, better don’t create it at all.

Make Sharing Easy: A written piece can easily go viral if it is shared easily. Make use of the sharing button on each post generously to ensure your post reaches a very wide audience online. That is the surest way to quickly get real exposure for your blog pieces.



Write only for Your Audience: Write only what you’ll love to read yourself if you were a shopper. By visualizing what your audience will like to read, it is possible to write what they’ll actually read. One essential element to successful online marketing is by understanding who you are writing for very well. You get some traction and impact better when you write solely for your audience.

Create Statistic Lists: Statistics can be very impactful and tell good stories. You can create a list of eye-popping statistics to wow your audience. You get their attention better by creating posts to explain the statistics and how they impact the audience.

Create High Visual Blog Posts: Visuals are very impactful on readers because human brains generally process images much faster than texts. For high visual blog posts, you can use Memes, Videos, SlideShares or Infographics to share a message.

Use Graphs/Charts: Graphs/charts also have high visual impact on your audience. Thus, when you use Graphs/Charts on your blog posts, they make it easier for your audience to digest and understand the message at a quick glance.

Create “Ask the Expert” Pieces: Experts do command a lot of respect in online marketing business. Expert opinion usually plays a great role in buyer decisions. By reaching out to leaders in your industry and interviewing them on burning topics and industry issues, you can get a treasure trove of information to write about. Publishing your findings on your blog makes a great deal of impact on your audience.

Ask Experts to Share: Many industry experts always have a huge following on social media. By following them and helping to share their pieces, you can in turn request them to help share yours. That’s one social media etiquette that is highly impactful on blogging. If industry experts help you to share, you get extra visibility from their huge audience.

Top 10 Lists: This is one blogging strategy made popular by expert blogger David Letterman. He insists that readers always love top 10 posts. Getting quality posts in that range from your blog is good for traffic.

Optimize Your Titles: Doing so helps to attract a crawl from search engines. It also impacts the rating of your content in their SERPs. Because Your Blog Title is the first thing your audience interacts with, it must be impactful at a quick glance. If it is not impactful enough, it risks a frequent pass by from your reading audience since they have many other competing titles on their feed. For more and better impact, it is advisable you spend just as much time crafting your title as you do creating your content, if not more.

Pace Your Posts: Blogging for quality is much better than blogging for numbers. Before you write each post, take some time to think through it before you start writing. Rushing your blog posts just to meet self-imposed deadlines leads to poor quality posts. If you are quite realistic about the amount of time you need for any piece you are writing, you can take the time to do it right. If you can’t do it right, please don’t do it at all.

Be Flexible: It is good to have a content schedule for your blog to avoid overwhelming yourself. However, just take content schedules as mere guidelines that do not require stressing up about. Leave enough room for flexibility to take on more timely events even if not in the earlier schedule. Always remember you are writing for an audience. It is what your audience likes and wants to read that dictates what you should write about most of the time. That demands a bit of flexibility despite content schedules.



Guest Posting: Be sure to do it the right way. You can reach out to blogs in your niche industry and offer guest post content. Some may not accept but some may say yes but with some conditions. If the conditions are acceptable to you, just go ahead with your guest posts. Guest posting on a popular industry blog is good for traffic.

Buy Content if necessary: At times you may not really have sufficient time or hands to meet your content schedule. If that is the case, you can then consider buying quality content. Since content development takes time which you don’t really have, it is OK to hire good content writers for some reasonable fees. Content writing professionals may just require you to provide them a few details about your business. Once you pay their fees, they get the job done.

Write “How to” Blogs: People read blogs to get information or find solutions to pressing problems. Writing “how to” blogs helps to meet that need. You can develop a simple step-by-step post that helps your audience find solution to a problem they are experiencing. By making it concise, simple and enjoyable to read, it easily attracts readers. If for example you run a confectionery business, a good “how-to post” like “How to bake tasteful cupcakes” is a good idea.

Create List Posts: Blog readers tend to like list posts because they are always helpful and straight to the point. You get your info point by point instead of reading a whole lot of stuff before you can decipher a few points from the whole lot you’ve read. If you run out of ideas to write about, you can use Google to help find great blog topics relevant to your niche.