A pronounced pivot toward e-commerce and video has seen global ad spend bottom out quicker than expected, with forecast falls now expected hit the floor with a 7.5% contraction to $587bn in 2020 – as opposed to a 9.1% fall as initially feared.According to Zenith’s Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, the advertising sector is proving to be more resilient than expected and is now expected to bounce back by 5.6% next year to reach $620bn.No mere dead cat bounce the rise is given credence by a surge in connected TV advertising as well as the delayed Summer Olympics and UEFA tournament.
How is global ad spend holding up?
Zenith’s metrics show that 2021 growth of 5.6% will be fractionally behind the 5.8% uptick it forecast back in July, falling short of the $634bn spent in 2019.
A recovery to pre-crisis spending is not expected until 2022, when a further 5.2% growth will see spending total $652bn.
All these forecasts are couched under the proviso that there will be no further black swan events to snuff out the tentative recovery.
What factors lie behind the improving outlook?
A universal shift in advertising budgets towards digital channels is providing a much-needed source of growth, with global digital ad spend expected to rise 1.4% in 2020, equivalent to a 52% share of total ad spend.
An explosion in e-commerce growth is not expected to tail off either, with Zenith confidently predicting that digital will account for 58% of all spend by 2023.
Another bright spot lies in connected TV’s as people flock to streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) providers such as Netflix and Disney+, whose reach has expanded by 5% in the US as people switch off from the world outside.
While advertisers are locked out of SVOD, ad-funded video on demand has enjoyed the strongest growth of all, jumping 9% to reach 5.5m US households.
Commenting on the findings Christian Lee, global managing director at Zenith, said: “Now that it offers mass reach in key markets, it’s the right time for brands to invest in connected TV.
”Brands should use connected TV for both branding and performance, exploiting its high ad recall and full targeting and tracking capabilities to drive awareness and sales conversions at the same time.”
How is e-commerce shaking up ad spend?
A revolution in retail is feeding through to unprecedented demand for retailer media which promote products at the point of purchase, akin to in-store displays of old.
Crucially retailer media is allocated from commercial rather than marketing budgets, thus expanding ad expenditure as a whole. In all, Zenith anticipates the sector will jump from $35bn spend in 2019 to $51bn in 2020.
Ali Nehme, global chief commerce officer at Publicis Groupe, said: “Retail platforms are powering their growth by putting pressure on brand margins. Their focus on bottom out price wars, and enhanced consumer experiences, benefit consumers while brands bear the cost.
“In this scenario, brands must flex their power, by selecting retailer partners who offer demonstrable value through transparent data and measurement, as well as the ability to deliver the consumers who will drive much-needed category growth.”
The global picture in the report masks significant regional variations with Asia Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe expected to lead the way in terms of growth, attaining 2019 levels of ad spend as early as 2021.
Zenith expects ad spend in both regions to shrink by 6% in 2020 and grow by 7% in 2021.
Elsewhere North America is expected to prove more resilient than most, declining by just 5.3% in 2020 courtesy of a spending boost driven by the presidential election.
Feature Image Credit: A pivot toward e-commerce and video has seen global ad spend swiftly fall, according to new forecasts
“I haven’t spent a dollar on marketing or advertising,” says Bridesmaid for Hire’s Jen Glantz.
Over six years ago, when I started my first business, Bridesmaid for Hire, everyone wished me good luck. But that statement always came with a caveat. People told me that if I wanted to have any chance at being successful, I needed to pour as much cash as I could into my business.
Their reasoning? The only way to get clients would be to buy their attention through social media ads, paid search, and other marketing efforts, like influencer marketing or doing sponsored posts with well-known publications, that I couldn’t afford.
I had just been laid off from my full-time job and I was using my savings account to help keep me afloat. I didn’t have the capital to invest in my business and knew that I needed to find other ways to get new clients and people’s continued attention on my business.
That’s when I decided that I’d set out to prove people wrong. What if I didn’t put a dollar into marketing and advertising but could get a steady stream of clients and website traffic anyway?
Today, I’m still following that game plan. I haven’t spent a dollar on marketing or advertising. Here are the free tactics I used to turn my side hustle into a six-figure full-time business.
I focused on building relationships
Rather than viewing Bridesmaid for Hire’s social media presence as a promotional driver that would push people to make purchases, I saw my social media accounts as a relationship building tool.
So when I made my social plan, I created three content categories.
Educational and engaging behind-the-scenes content
Press and testimonials from clients who have used the service, which allowed us to take a break from talking about ourselves and pulls in a variety of other voices
Promotions (“buy this package, grab this deal” — only 10% of our posts)
Doing this allowed people to gain value from our social media channel feed. It allowed us to build brand loyalty and awareness, and that often turned into people heading to our website to learn more and work with us.
I also tapped into free tools like Canva and Headliner.app to help me create professional looking content.
Doing my social media strategy on my own and using free tools saved me thousands of dollars that could have been spent hiring an agency or a designer. I used a fraction of that money, instead, to invest in video and photography assets for the business.
I got good at pitching my story
One big thing I realized about myself as a consumer was that I didn’t start caring about a brand or business from their ads or marketing messages. I did, however, seem to give them a second look when I encountered them in an article or a TV segment, or on a podcast interview.
That’s when I realized that getting constant PR around my business and even around myself could be a valuable way to get new clients.
I made a list of publications I knew my audience cared about, from bridal magazines to podcasts, and sent pitch emails around the purpose of my business, uniqueness of my services, and even some unusual stories of what it’s like to work this job.
Over time, I had success getting the media’s attention, especially once I learned how to pitch stories around their editorial calendar and current trends. I have been able to be featured in over a hundred different stories and segments over the past six years.
I realized that getting constant PR around my business and even around myself could be a valuable way to get new clients.
I also used two free services, Help a Reporter Out and Qwoted, which brought press opportunities to my inbox. These websites share alerts when reporters or publications are looking for specific kinds of people as sources for articles. If you reply, you have a chance of being featured. This helped me secure various media placements.
Getting press helped us stay top-of-mind status in potential customers’ minds and allowed the news of our business to be shareable. It also allowed us to show up in the prime real estate locations our audience was already going to for news and updates without having to spend money advertising there. While I can’t measure an exact number of clients I received from this, it helped with brand exposure, brand awareness, and remaining top-of-mind status with my audience.
Dedicating a few hours each week to pitching the media in lieu of working with a PR agency has saved me thousands of dollars over the years.
I collaborated with peers in my space
A few months into launching my business, I created a master list of other companies and brands in my industry, who didn’t provide the same service I did, but still attracted my audience. I brainstormed ways to work with each of these companies that would be beneficial to both of us and reached out to ask if they’d be open to collaborating.
Some said yes to things like joint social media content through Instagram story takeovers, guest blog posts on each other’s websites, giveaways, and more. All of these collaborations were free, meaning I didn’t pay to work with these companies. To get them to say yes, even though I was new to the game, I provided a list of what I’d bring to the table: content creation, strategy, multiple promotional posts, and more.
This gave me exposure to their audience while giving them exposure to the small audience I was quickly building. It was a win-win situation. I’ve done over 20 brand collaborations over the past six years. While in some instances you can pay brands to do these partnerships with you, I didn’t go that route. Instead, I approached brands with a detailed strategy of how we’d add value to each other’s business.
For social media content, I was able to get traction in terms of building followers and getting website traffic. For giveaways and blog posts, I was able to help build up my email list, which allowed me to keep in contact with my audience and share news or offerings.
I developed a customer referral program
After working with my first 10 clients, I decided that it would be a good idea to have a referral program. I decided, since I didn’t want to offer a money reward, that I’d offer a product instead. I sent an email to my clients and offered them a free book, or phone session with me, if they sent over a referral.
This referral system worked and currently accounts for 15% to 20% of my new business yearly and it doesn’t cost any capital. Sure, I am giving away something for free, which costs the business a small amount of profit, around $50 to $200 a person. But it ends up being worthwhile since the amount of money a new client will spend is way more than the cost of the freebie I give existing clients when they send over a referral.
5:45
How Amobi Okugo turned a side hustle into a full-time business
Video by Courtney Stith
I provided free content
A good lesson I learned early on from my business mentors was to always offer a lot of free content for your audience to consume. I created high-value content, such as blog posts with practical tips to podcast episodes with popular guests, as a way of getting people to come back to my website and care about my brand, without asking them to buy something.
Doing this was a powerful way of creating constant brand awareness and a great strategy for getting people to come visit my website and stay for a while.
It’s hard to track which new clients or sales came from this method but either way, it’s a necessary thing to do as part of your overall strategy. Without free content, people might not pull out their wallet and buy from you, especially if they’ve never heard of the brand before, regardless of how big your ad budget is.
I led with my expertise
A final free thing I did to scale my business was to get in front of my audience whenever I could. I made lists of conferences and events I knew my audience would be at and pitched myself to the organizers to be a guest speaker.
Showing up at these events and hosting a workshop allowed me to get in front of people who were my direct target audience. It often led to immediate sales or even an increase in people knowing about the business and referring friends in the future.
You can find trade shows or events, even virtual ones, where you have to pay to present or display your product.
Working with no budget made me think outside the box and offer up my advice and knowledge as a thought leader instead. This added to the event’s programming and allowed me to meet hundreds or thousands of prospective clients, without paying to be there.
I view all of these strategies as puzzle pieces. Each have an importance and together they lead to business growth and a constant influx of new clients. Not having a big budget, or any budget, to spend on marketing or advertising won’t set you back if you find opportunities to enter the space of your audience and engage them in unique ways.
Feature Image Credit: Jen Glantz is the founder of Bridesmaid for Hire. Photo by Chris Ziegler
Use these 5 powerful digital marketing hacks to not only bring in quality leads, but also effectively convert leads into sales
Digital marketing is the most effective way to reach your target audience, drive targeted traffic to your website, generate quality leads, and ultimately, close sales. To create a digital marketing strategy that will foster business growth, it is key to understand the following:
How much money should be spent on digital marketing?
Which tactics will provide the best return on investment (ROI)?
Which channels will help funnel in high-quality leads?
What can be done to foster the entire buyer experience?
How can success truly be measured?
No matter how small or large your business is, having a deep understanding of what happens when you implement your digital marketing strategy is critical to making better decisions that will yield positive results. As such, having the right tools, processes, and people in place will only help elevate your efforts to meet your other business objectives.
Here are 5 powerful digital marketing hacks that will help you increase sales now:
1. Create stellar content for digital marketing
The key to making content work for you in terms of gaining the awareness, leads, and sales you want is to make sure that you’re adding tremendous value. This means that the topics you write about and tips you put forth are actionable and consumed by your target audience.
One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is that they develop content and hope that it will attract attention right away. Know that your content strategy needs to be focused on both short- and long-term goals. You’re really running a marathon, not a sprint.
There is a multitude of content types you can consider, so let’s look at a few and also understand the benefits of each:
Blogging — research topics that are actually being searched for, including hashtags that are being used by your target audience. Find a way to be a part of those conversations by writing thoughtful blog posts.
Infographics — visual content is easy to consume, so develop infographics as a way to drive engagement on your website, extend the time-on-site, and input a CTA (call-to-action) for people to inquire more about what you have to offer.
Guides and eBooks — whether you choose to gate your content or not, what’s more important is that they are being leveraged successfully as lead magnets. You can do this without gating the content because inputting CTAs throughout the content pieces will still help you understand what drives engagement and what doesn’t.
2. Run social ads
Advertising on social media networks is a no-brainer. Let’s say you’re in charge of generating leads for a B2B SaaS product and need to figure out how you can drive sales-qualified leads that will turn into opportunities — which social networks would you want to consider?
For starters, look at these three: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
You’ll be able to narrow down specific personas, test multiple creatives and messages, and collect data to see what works best. Like any advertising strategy, make sure that you tie your social ads to their own landing pages and that the copy from the ad to the landing page matches up. Additionally, consider the following:
Leverage your content assets to funnel in leads and inquiries.
Make sure your messaging presents a clear problem and solution.
Create multiple creative assets to avoid ad fatigue.
Fine-tune and tweak as you go. In other words, focus on progress over perfection.
3. Develop robust email marketing
Once you have lead information collected from your website, the logical next step is to develop automated workflows that will nurture your leads. The key to making effective workflows is to map out the buyer journey and align your email strategy with that.
Here are some key tips to keep in mind as you develop yours:
Position the content around the lifecycle stages of your leads.
Enable lead scoring so you can keep track of what drives engagement and movement from one lifecycle stage to the next.
Segment and personalize.
Test out multiple subject lines and copy.
4. Host webinars
Get creative with your webinars by inviting guest speakers to help co-host and even do interviews with happy customers who are using your product/services. According to Xant, 73% of sales and marketing leaders say that webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. In fact, a single webinar could get you over 1,000 leads.
In order to make sure that your webinars are successful, do the following:
Research and choose the right topic. Just as you would with your blog topics, do the same with your webinar topics — it’s about the searcher intent and target audience needs, i.e. the problem you solve.
Decide on a promotion strategy for your webinar. Unlike your other ads that are pushed to promote a guide or direct inquiry, webinars need at least 1-2 weeks of a promotional period.
Create a series of promotional emails as well as reminders.
Run social ads and even search engine ads.
Get out of the PowerPoint or Google Slides only presentation. Be interactive with your webinars.
Make sure the webinar is available on-demand and then have a series of follow-up emails and advertising to still drive engagement that then turns into opportunities.
5. Push a growth hacking approach
Growth hacking takes on the approach of testing nearly everything you can during the entire buyer journey so that you gain clarity around what triggers a lead to be interested and then progress into a sale. The great thing about growth hacking is that you can apply it to every single digital marketing tactic.
Here are some actionable examples you can use:
A/B testing headlines and CTAs for targeted landing pages that are tied in with ads and your homepage.
Personalize your emails per segment and even personas.
Develop multiple content clusters with your blog posts to see which one drives the best quality of leads that turn into actual sales opportunities.
Good digital marketing vs. great digital marketing
What separates good digital marketing from great digital marketing isn’t just your ability to spend a ton of money, but to use that money to show the actual problem you solve. In other words, you’re selling the solution for a clear problem and can show how you are able to do that.
More specifically, people buy from people, not companies. Therefore, being authentic with your approach and steering clear from just making a transactional sale will only help you in the long-term.
Finally, continue to integrate both your intuition and the data you collect to help excel your business forward. Don’t look at digital marketing as just a 1:1 — money in and money out — solution. Rather, use the power of digital marketing to create awareness that will expand beyond just one single piece of creative or content. Changing your perspective to this approach will help you keep the needs of your target customers top of mind, and in turn, support your growth initiatives.
You might think I’m crazy to say that traffic is not your problem, but I’m going to prove that to you in the following paragraphs. I’m also going to show you how to profitably grow and scale your e-commerce business using the traffic that is already coming to your store.
I’m the chief marketing officer of Build Grow Scale, an e-commerce education company, and have been working in e-commerce for almost 10 years now, alongside my partner Tanner Larsson, who has been doing it for over 19. When we partnered up on our first e-commerce store five years ago, I was really good at Facebook Ads, and he was really good with private-labelling products, so we were a perfect match. We started off well, but we weren’t very profitable, no matter what ad strategy I used — and I knew how good my ads were based on my previous ad success.
There had to be something else that we weren’t seeing. If it wasn’t the ads, it had to be the store. The only way to figure out what was happening on our store was to look at our Google Analytics data.
I started diving into the data and even paid someone to teach me how to better interpret that data. Immediately, we started detecting leaks on the store left and right. Very soon I realized that the more we worked on the store, the easier Facebook Ads got.
My biggest “aha” moment happened when I found that our site’s load time was 13 seconds and our site’s bounce rate was 90%. I realized that we were struggling to be profitable because we were paying to get people to the site, but 90% of them were bouncing because the site was so slow. Only 10% were actually seeing the website.
I did the math and realized that if I could reduce our 90% bounce rate by just 10%, I would be getting twice as many eyes for the same amount of money, effectively cutting my traffic cost in half and instantly becoming profitable.
Think about this: Let’s say I spent $500 to bring 1,000 visitors to our site. That means that our cost per visitor is 50 cents, right? Wrong. Here’s my epiphany. Our site’s bounce rate was 90%, meaning that out of those 1,000 visitors, only 100 actually saw our offer.
So, in practical terms, we were paying $500 to get only 100 people to our site, making the true cost $5 per visitor. That is 10 times more expensive than we’d thought. It’s no wonder we weren’t profitable.
Now, let’s say we cut that bounce rate to 80%. That means that out of 1,000 visitors, 200 people would see our offer, which means that our traffic will cost $2.50 per visitor. A minuscule reduction in the percentage of people who bounce could cut our actual traffic cost in half.
Realizing this, I immediately hired a developer, and we went to work. We did a 15-hour marathon during which we reduced our site’s load time from 13 seconds to 1.87 seconds, and instantly, our bounce rate went down, and our conversions more than doubled.
From there, I started asking myself, “What else can I do? What other 10% improvements can I make that will double my results?” After doing that a few more times, our store performed much better, and we started selling thousands of units per day.
At this point, I hired a Google Analytics expert. We realized that we’d been looking at very surface-level data. That’s why we began using Google Tag Manager (GTM) in conjunction with Google Analytics and started getting granular. GTM allowed us to track everything that was happening on the website and unlocked a whole new level of data that we could use to optimize our store.
The more I learned about collecting and reading that data, the better I became at optimization. The more I focused on optimizing our store, the better our ads performed, and the easier they were to run. It was a powerful upward spiral. To make sure that this wasn’t just good luck, I decided to volunteer and do the same for two of my good friends, who both saw excellent results.
The way you profitably grow and scale your business is by focusing on optimizing your store first before burning money on running more and more traffic to a broken store. You cannot control the traffic, but you can control your store.
Before optimizing, ensure that Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are set up properly and report accurately. You can only improve what you measure, and Google Analytics is how you’re going to track the changes in your metrics that result from your optimizations. This will also give you an idea of what you should optimize first.
I recommend you optimize your store backward, beginning with the checkout, then the cart page, the product page, the category page and, finally, the homepage. Start with the checkout because it’s closest to the money, so any fix there will mean a much bigger lift than a fix on your homepage, for example, which is many steps away from the purchase.
Finally, I recommend that you run A/B/n tests for any more significant changes you want to implement on your site. Make sure you test changes that alter user behavior rather than insignificant changes like new button colors. Run your tests for a minimum of two weeks and no more than one month. If you have a hard time finding leaks on your website, do 10 to 15 user tests using any of the tools out there, and you’ll likely discover issues that you can fix.
Why would you bet on something that you can’t control over something that you can? In fact, you are probably already better at traffic than you need to be. Focus on your store instead. Optimize before you maximize.
You might love the product that you sell but it’s your customer who needs to love it too in order to become a success. And from the perspective of your customers, your product may look different.
But here’s the good thing – if you know what your customer thinks about your product, you may use the feedback to improve the things you lack in.
But how to collect your customer feedback?
While there are many platforms that you can use to collect feedback, Instagram should be your choice.
You may wonder why Instagram should be your go-to platform for collecting customer feedback, here are some statistics for you:
62% of people say they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in stories.
Now that you know why Instagram is a great platform for feedback, it’s time to discuss how you can use Instagram for collecting feedback.
#1. Instagram story stickers
If you know about Instagram, you must know about Instagram stories. Instagram stories are a very effective and interactive way of communicating with your audience. And the best part is that you can use stories for collecting your customers’ feedback as well. Want to know how?
Here are five stickers that you can use in your stories:
Question Sticker
As the name suggests, the question sticker is a sticker that is used to ask a question of your audience. You can ask any question and your audience will be provided with a box where they can enter their inputs and you’ll be notified whenever someone drops an answer in the box. In this way, you can easily ask a question about your product and let customers provide feedback.
Poll Sticker
Do you like this one or that one? This is the kind of question that you can ask your audience using the poll sticker. With the poll sticker, you need to mention a question and provide them with two options to choose from. Once the poll is over you can check which option your audience liked the most.
Quiz Sticker
With the Quiz sticker, you can ask your customers multiple-choice questions right through your Instagram stories. So you can ask anything that lets your customers choose from various options.
Slider Sticker
A slider sticker is a fun sticker where your audience can rate you on an emoji sliding scale. You’ll be provided with an overall average of all responses.
DM Me Sticker
Ask your audience a question that sparks a conversation and helps you explore what your customers think about your products and services through the DM me sticker on Instagram.
#2. Questions in your captions
Nothing works better than a direct question in your captions. If you’re using Instagram for your business, you must also be posting regularly on the platform. And with every image or video you post, you should add a caption to define the image or video. That’s exactly where you should be asking questions about your product.
Create a compelling post about your product and ask a question about the product in the caption. This will encourage your users to post their answers in the comments. This will just not help you gather the feedback but will also help your post to get more reach as the engagement will be high.
However, it has its downside too. Everything posted will be public and negative comments can affect your online reputation. Nevertheless, you can still turn the situation into a positive one by smartly handling negative comments. Just make sure you reply to each and every comment and let your customers know that you’re always there to listen to their problems.
#3. Encourage user-generated content (UGC)
Most marketers see UGC as a way of increasing their followers on Instagram and improving their engagement rate. What they don’t know is they can use UGC to collect feedback as well.
Here’s how you can encourage your customers to create and share content for your brand:
Start a hashtag trend
Creativity is all that you need here. Start a campaign like a competition or a giveaway and use a unique hashtag that your customers can use while sharing their insights about your products. Every time your customer creates a post for your brand, they can use that hashtag.
Ask a question
You can simply ask a question in your post regarding your product. And if your customers have anything to say or suggest about your product, they can simply post about it and mention you. And in exchange, you can give them a shout-out. This one works best for brands who have a good follower base on Instagram.
Offer a discount
Encourage your customers to post about your brand with their feedback for a discount offer. Discount or BOGO offers work amazing because everyone loves discounts and free stuff.
#4. Create engaging video content
IGTV videos and Reels are the current trending features of Instagram that can provide you with amazing reach and are also helpful for collecting feedback. All you need to do is create engaging videos that encourage customers to share their feedback with you.
To start with, think about an interesting topic and then ask your customers questions about what they think about your products. The more engaging the video is the more people will share their feedback with you.
#5. Collaborate with influencers
Influencer marketing is rising with every passing day and it can be a great way to encourage your customers to provide feedback.
Influencers already have a huge follower base on social media platforms like Instagram. However, if you want to leverage the power of influencers, you need to find the right ones based on your niche.
Once you find some influencers ask them to create content that can help you gather feedback. Influencers are influencers for a reason. They know what their audience likes or dislikes – so give them a creative license with the content.
They may share something about how your product helped them and ask their audience about their experience with your product. Or, simply show a demo of your product and ask your customers for some other ways of using it. In this way, you don’t just get feedback but also promote your products in an effective manner.
To conclude
These are some ways you can collect feedback from your customers on Instagram. No matter what feedback you get, whether positive or negative, it’s your job to listen to every customer and understand their perspective.
Also, it’s not just about collecting the feedback but also about using it to improve your products or services. After all, there’s no sense in collecting feedback if you don’t use it for your own good.
Bhavik Soni is a Creative Writer at Auto Monkey. We provide an original analysis of the latest happenings in the social media industry. Connect with Latest Social Media Trends and News plus tips on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools on the web.
Twitter is rolling back its threaded conversation layout launched earlier this year. The company announced the roll back of the threaded conversations feature via its Twitter Support account. Stating, “Your feedback shapes Twitter,” the microblogging site wrote, “We asked and you let us know this reply layout wasn’t it, as it was harder to read and join conversations. So we’ve turned off this format to work on other ways to improve conversations on Twitter.”
Twitter started testing the new layout for threaded conversations for iOS and web users earlier this year with the aim of making the conversations on the microblogging site more organised. Twitter wanted to make it easier to read and follow dialogues on the social media platform through the feature. Reports added that Twitter was testing the features for over a year in its prototype app, Twttr. In fact, Twitter is also shutting down its Twttr prototype app that it had launched last year. “We appreciate the feedback you gave us through this run of our prototype app Twttr,” Twitter wrote before adding that for now, they are turning off the Twttr prototype so that they can concentrate on new tests to improve the conversation experience on Twitter. The microblogging site further added that if someone is using Twttr, then they should switch to the main Twitter app to keep up with what’s happening.
Feature Image Credit: Reports added that Twitter was testing the features for over a year in its prototype app, Twttr.
An Instagram business profile can help you engage your audience with high-quality visual content.
Your business may already have a Facebook business page, and because Facebook owns Instagram, the two social platforms integrate nicely. Instagram is also very popular: According to Statista, Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly active users spanning a wide range of demographics.
But before you get started on Instagram, you’ll want to make sure this platform is right for your business. This guide will help you determine if it’s a good fit and, if so, help you get started with this popular social media network.
Is Instagram right for your business?
Instagram is appropriate for many, but not all, businesses. If you’re deciding whether this social media platform is right for your company, ask yourself the following questions:
Who is my target audience?
Is my target audience largely on Instagram?
Do I have the type of business that can be visual?
Do I have the budget and time to maintain an Instagram business page?
Answering these questions can help you determine whether Instagram will help get your brand, products and services in front of prospects. Certain demographics use Instagram more than others, so a different marketing channel may be a better fit for your business depending on its target audience.
Benefits of Instagram for businesses
If you determine that Instagram is a good fit, there are many ways it can benefit your business. Here are some of the advantages:
Creates brand awareness
Helps you engage with customers and prospects
Shows your human side
Allows you to partner with influencers
Drives leads and sales
Differences between a personal and business Instagram account
Instagram personal profiles (also known simply as Instagram profiles) are designed for consumer use, while Instagram business profiles are intended for business use. Later on, we will dive into the key features of Instagram business pages.
If your business intends to promote your products and services on Instagram, you should have a business account. However, you can have both types of accounts.
As an example, life coach Lily Sais has both a personal account and a business account. On her private personal account, she posts personal content about her life and her children for her close family and friends to see. On her business page, Peace from Within, a business that also requires her to get personal with her followers and be vulnerable, she does not post about her daily whereabouts. Instead, on her business page, Sais talks more about anxiety – an issue that her program helps people overcome – and also discusses her coaching program.
Both types of accounts are free to use, but if you want to run ads on Instagram business, you’ll need to pay.
Should I switch my personal profile to an Instagram business page?
If you already have an Instagram personal profile and are wondering if you should switch your account to a business profile, ask yourself these questions:
Would you like to keep your personal account to share personal or private content with your inner circle? If so, keep your current personal page and start a separate business page.
Do you plan on posting promotional content about your business? If so, you should have a business page, but you can also keep your personal page if you’d like.
Just because you have a personal page does not mean you need to post on it often, especially if you end up getting too busy working on your business page. But people who typically already have a personal page with more than a few posts find that they prefer to keep their personal page and start a new page for their business.
Key features of an Instagram business account
Instagram personal accounts offer fewer features than Instagram business profiles. As a business owner, it can be helpful to have access to data that’s available only through business pages and Instagram Insights. Here are some of the additional features you get from an Instagram business account:
Instagram Insights
Instagram Insights gives you access to data on content, activity and audience. Use this analytics tool to discover weekly information about the following metrics:
Posts: the number of posts and stories added to your page.
Engagement: the number of accounts that your account has reached, including the posts that led to impressions, interactions, profile visits and website clicks.
Audience insights, growth: the number of people who followed your page, the number of people who unfollowed your page, the average times your followers were on Instagram in a typical day and the days of the week your followers were most active.
Audience insights, demographics: data on users’ locations, age ranges and gender.
At this time, Instagram Insights is not accessible via desktop. Through the app, Insights is updated weekly.
Instagram advertising and promoted posts
Instagram advertising and promoted posts are available only through business accounts. These tools are a key way to promote your Instagram business account to get more followers and increase engagement. To run Instagram ads, you need a Facebook business account with Facebook ads manager.
Product tags for easy shopping
Every e-commerce business can benefit from Instagram’s product tags, which help encourage followers to make a purchase on your page. However, Instagram does not approve this feature for every account. To gain access to product tags, you must meet Instagram’s shopping availability rules. Your page must meet the following commerce eligibility requirements:
Comply with Instagram’s policies.
Represent your business and your domain
Be located in a supported market
Demonstrate trustworthiness
Provide accurate information, and follow best practices
How to use product tagging on your Instagram posts:
Once Instagram approves your account, it’s easy to get started with product tagging. Per Instagram’s instructions, follow these five steps to tag products on your Instagram posts:
Select a photo or video, and add a caption, effects and filters.
Tap the products in the photo that you want to tag. For videos, you’ll see a tray where you can select up to five products to tag.
Enter the names of the products you want to tag, and select them as they appear in the search box.
Tap Done.
Tap Share.
Quick-reply direct messages
Consumers expect fast responses from businesses on social media, especially when they are inquiring about a product they would like to purchase right away. Not all businesses have the resources for around-the-clock social media monitoring. With Instagram’s quick-reply feature, you can send prospects an automated response, which is better than no response at all.
How to set up an Instagram business profile
Setting up an Instagram business profile is easy and can be completed in a few simple steps. Here are two ways to set up your Instagram business profile:
Switching from a personal page to a business page
If you already have a personal profile and you’d like to switch it to a business page, follow these steps:
Log in to your Instagram account.
Select Edit Profile.
Select Switch to Professional Account.
Choose the type of account you’d like to set up based on what describes you best: creator account (ideal for business influencers and any other type of influencer) or business account.
If you’ve decided to start a new business page, follow these steps:
Download the Instagram app onto your smartphone.
Create an account, ideally with your business email.
Choose a username.
Start building your following by finding friends and contacts.
Upload a profile photo.
Add your website.
Craft a company bio.
Create your first post.
Instagram business page setup best practices
To get your page set up for success, be sure to keep these best practices in mind:
Choose a relevant username.
The username you choose should be the name of your business so that prospects and customers can find your page easily.
Select an engaging profile photo.
Some businesses use their company logo as their profile photo. Depending on what your logo looks like, you might choose to go this route. Alternatively, you can do something more creative that still fits your brand. Experiment with different profile photos of people, such as your staff. Your profile photo needs to be 110 by 110 pixels.
Create a profile bio.
You get 150 characters in the bio section to make an impression. Using a few branded hashtags (no more than three, so it doesn’t make your bio hard to read) can help give your page exposure. Your bio should tell a short story about what your business offers. For example, New Jersey-based payment processing company Priority Payments Local uses lists and emojis to draw attention to the bio and make it easier to read.
The most obvious way to use the URL is to add the link to your company’s homepage. This makes the most sense for a lot of businesses, especially e-commerce businesses. But if your company has multiple pages you’d like to connect, consider adding a Linktree, which gives you the flexibility to add multiple links and thus help take users through a sales funnel.
For example, a Linktree for an e-commerce clothing business may have links to the following:
Newest clothing arrivals
Bestsellers
Sale products
A law firm may have links to these pages:
A blog post on what to do if you were just in a car accident (for personal injury prospects)
A free e-book on how to choose a mediator for a divorce
A landing page that highlights the firm’s accreditations
If your business sells both products and services, having mixed links makes even more sense. Here’s how Priority Payments designed its Linktree to feature different types of content:
It’s helpful to have a posting strategy to drive traffic to your page and, ultimately, generate sales from Instagram. Your posting strategy should work hand in hand with your overall marketing strategy and may include the following elements:
Goals. Include both your short-term and long-term objectives.
Target audience. Define the demographics and characteristics of your ideal customer.
Post frequency. Establish how many times a week you will post and how many of those posts will be on page posts versus Story posts. Find a good balance; posting regularly will help you stay top of mind with your followers, but posting too often may turn them off.
Assigned staff. Determine who will manage your Instagram page.
Hashtags. Select relevant hashtags to be included in your posts. Make sure to check out what’s trending so you can gain more traction if those trends are relevant to your business.
Content design. Figure out what your posts will look like. Will you have a special template for certain posts? For example, you might have a special design for sales posts to help with brand recognition.
Voice. Determine how you want to represent yourself to your audience. For example, will your posts be serious or funny? If your audience includes mostly professionals in your field, you might include industry-specific terminology, but if you’re targeting the average consumer, you’ll want to avoid this kind of jargon. The voice of your social media messages also ties back to your overall brand messaging.
Customer service strategy. If your business is new to social media, you’ve probably never had to respond to comments from prospects and customers on social media, so you’ll need a strategy for how to handle these interactions. Your responses should be guided by an established protocol. For example, what should you do if you receive a negative comment? All responses need to be crafted with care.
Once all of these pieces are in place, you’re ready to post on Instagram. Revisit your posting strategy periodically to determine what is working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly. Pay attention to your audience’s behaviour and needs to craft truly engaging content that resonates with your audience.
Marisa Sanfilippo is an award-winning marketing professional who has more than six years experience developing and executing marketing campaigns for small and medium sized businesses with a focus on digital marketing. After graduating Stockton University with a B.A. in Communications and minor in writing, Marisa worked as a freelance journalist for numerous publications, ultimately earning a position as an e-marketing specialist for a credit union. While in that position, she earned HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification and helped build the organization’s digital marketing strategy from the ground up. Her efforts helped lead the credit union to success on and offline including: a 200%+ organic increase in Facebook followers, a sales generating blog, and much more. Later on, she worked on a social media campaign that gained recognition by The Huffington Post.
Think quality over quantity when it comes to content.
Digital marketing is essential for any business these days. Seventy-six percent of people think marketing has evolved more in the past two years than it did over the previous 50 years. To scale your business, you need quality content more than you need quantity of content. But, with so many channels to cover, and a limited budget and time, how do you fully leverage your business’s digital marketing potential?
Copysmith is an innovative tool that helps businesses generate high-performing copy for all of your marketing needs without spending a bundle. It uses the power of artificial intelligence to write copy, word by word, keeping it completely original and sounding natural. You can use Copysmith on ads for Google, Facebook, or Instagram, for product descriptions and taglines, or even to write complete blogs. The qualitative assessment is as good as human-written copy, but there’s no brainstorming or editing rounds involved. In just the click of a button, you can generate a dozen ads, edit the copy to make sure it’s perfect, and launch them immediately.
Copysmith makes it easy to manage all of your campaigns across all of your platforms in a single hub, and even integrates with Shopify, WordPress, and Gmail. You can export generations of copy via CSV and share copy with teammates to get feedback before launch.
Copysmith is so easy to use, it’s earned #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. Normally, a lifetime subscription to Copysmith’s Starter Plan would be $228, but right now, you can get one for just $59.99.
Digital marketing is advancing each and every day. Every business will progress (or decline) depending on current trends and specific marketing strategies they set forth. The trends and strategies that are seen in digital marketing boil down to one crucial aspect: content creation. Content creation is crucial in digital marketing because it attracts and engages consumers, which leads to an increase in business.
Content can be as simple as making a statement. Anything from professional, financial, legal or technical advice to posting an entertaining GIF can all be considered some form of content. It is imperative to identify your target audiences because they are the ones who consume your content and essentially bring your business to life. Every business should know their target audiences, area(s) of focus and the type of content necessary to produce. Identifying these will effectively promote and improve the online presence of your business.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Convert your target audience to loyal customers by creating winning and distinctive content. The content you create will help you connect with your target customers’ needs and personas. Research and strong analytical data is required to secure all information needed to increase the traffic to your business. Gaining access to your target audience’s personal information (name, age, gender, geographic location and job title), along with answering questions and identifying their challenges, will help you improve the content you make and fine-tune your business agenda.
To adequately cater to new and current customers, research tactics such as interviewing past customers, conducting surveys and analysing the traffic you receive is vital. Use Google Analytics to view your site traffic and to analyse your audience by looking at the insights displayed. Having a very specific agenda that bookkeeps information such as key demographics, key psychographics (attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria of a person), challenges and preferred communication will help you create outstanding content that is unique and authentic. After identifying your target audience, the overall goal is to provide value to each consumer with the type of content you create.
Types Of Content
Content is used to entertain, educate and persuade. Businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on the content they create, increasing their exposure and attracting new leads. Every type of content produced should resonate with each consumer and provide them with a great deal of resources. High levels of engagement depend on the type of content generated.
• Blogs: Blogs are a great way to provide content and optimize search engines. Boost organic traffic by attracting potential customers who are looking for answers and other information that your business specializes in. With any blog, it is a great idea to create link pages within them so other people can share your post. Writing blogs is one way to have more interaction and develop strong customer relationships.
• Memes: Memes are videos or images that include correlating captions. Memes have become extremely popular this generation and are always going viral throughout social media. People create memes by embedding specific text into edited clips from videos, television and movies. Memes can easily create traffic because they are a fun way to engage people on social media.
• Live video/webinars: Online streaming is an effective way to increase traffic for any digital marketing strategy. Live videos and webinars allow businesses to inform their audiences, connect with them virtually and answer any questions or concerns they may have. Businesses can easily broadcast a live video or webinar to an online audience on multiple platforms.
Content Drives SEO
Content creation is to SEO as peanut butter is to jelly. Content increases traffic to your business and helps you become more visible online. Including valuable content on a business page gives owners the opportunity to reach more clientele. Content is created to be posted throughout the internet to build brand awareness and generate a larger audience. Every search engine has a variety of ways to index and provide information that determines your business exposure. These algorithms will decide the ranking of your business depending on a person’s search query.
Content creation benefits SEO because the words produced in the specified content highlights keywords that consumers search. These keywords are relevant to your business because it may create a higher ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). More keywords will result in a higher click-through rate (CTR) that will increase traffic and potentially bring new clients to your business. It is important for your content to be strong enough to appear in relevant search queries.
Keyword placement, backlinks and website visitors are all extremely crucial in the world of SEO. Lacking content will result in no keywords being found, no page for your future customers to view and no improvement in your SEO. Giving customers the best content possible is needed to eventually help lead your business page to one of the top search engine results.
Social media campaigns are an integral part of brand marketing strategies. A good post can elevate awareness and reaffirm the coolness of a brand, but what happens when you go viral for all the wrong reasons?
When it comes to PR disasters and brand blunders, it can be easy to forget there’s a person behind the post. Brands and social media managers alike will inevitably make mistakes.
From poorly timed tweets, to questionable GIFs and insensitive comments – these mishaps come in many different forms, in any type of industry and in companies of any size.
In today’s ‘cancel culture’ climate it can be difficult to weather the storm of a social media disaster. So, we asked our Twitter community for some practical advice on how to handle it in style.
Feature Image Credit: The Drum’s Twitter audience share tips on managing a social media crisis
