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Why People Love Ikea Enough To Queue. And Queue. And Queue.

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By Rachel Moss.

Wonder why you’d bother with waits as long as this? “I get excited over the fake plants,” says one Ikea super fan.

With it’s intoxicating mix of flat-pack furniture, Swedish meatballs and adorable little pencils, there is no store on Earth quite like Ikea. Oh, how we’ve missed it.

Monday marked the first day of Ikea’s opening since the UK lockdown began, and fans wasted no time flocking to the superstores. Photos soon emerged online of zig-zagging car park queues, as shoppers waited in the June heat to get inside.

Plenty of naysayers on social media have asked why you’d bother. So HuffPost UK asked dedicated Ikea disciples why they wanted to tread the one-way track at the first opportunity.

Jamal Greaves and his friend Bradly Hunt, both 27, went to Ikea in Wednesbury, West Midlands, on opening day to stock up on homeware.

“We got there around 12.10pm and got into the store about 1.25pm,” Greaves says. “The wait wasn’t as long as everybody anticipated.”

Jamal Greaves and Bradly Hunt.
Jamal Greaves and Bradly Hunt.

His main goal once inside was hunting down some new storage for his quarantine purchases. “I’ve spent a fortune during lockdown on clothes and trainers and needed some more storage space!” he says. “I love the fact Ikea do 50p hot dogs and cheap drawer sets. It’s so convenient.”

Jennifer Creed, 18, visited the Croydon branch on opening day mainly because her dad wanted to go. “We’ve been talking about how we needed to get a new wardrobe for my bedroom, I went and I took loads of pics for inspiration for my bedroom,” she says. “I like how everything is so nicely put together, the displays and showrooms, and it’s just so convenient.”

Daniel, 45, went to the Wembley branch with his family, but after a lengthy wait to get inside was left a little disappointed.

“We wanted to get sun loungers as they don’t deliver [that product] and wanted to get the remaining three left. They’d gone before I got to them,” he says.

“Got some food for the family, so no wasted journey.”

First in the queue at Ikea’s Exeter superstore was Steven John, 36, whose family moved just before lockdown, so he’s been eagerly awaiting the opening to buy some furniture.

“We kept checking the Ikea app and saw a lovely bookcase but it wasn’t available online as it would have required a two person delivery,” he explains.

“When Ikea announced they were reopening I checked and the app said low stock of the bookcase. I thought if I turned up early we might be able to get it.”

Photo taken by Steven John
Photo taken by Steven John

He didn’t expect to be first in the queue at 7.30am but is glad he made the early start. “They had very good social distancing in the queue and in the shop and we managed to get what we needed,” he says. “I was out within 30 minutes with a new bookcase. Mission accomplished!”

If you love Ikea for the play areas, be warned that they’re currently closed, as are the customer restaurants in all stores.

The Swedish Food Market is however open, offering a takeaway service, so you’ll be able to get your precious meatballs at most stores – or you can make your own at home since Ikea released their famous recipe.

To enable social distancing, Ikea has introduced a staggered entry system and restricted car parking. Only one adult and one child per household is permitted in-store at any time, so if you’re willing to brave it, be prepared to queue.

By Rachel Moss

Sourced from HUFFPOST

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How To Pivot Your 2021 Marketing Strategy For A Post-COVID World

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By Rodney Laws.

It’s hard to imagine a post-COVID world right now. No one can be sure when we’ll get back to normal and what normal will look like. Trying to plan for the future feels fruitless, and yet it will feel like everything is happening at once, so you need to be prepared.

For business owners and marketing departments, this presents the challenge of how to approach advertising in a post-COVID world. Have the fundamentals changed, and what is a safe promotional route to go down? Here’s how you can pivot your strategy ready for a new world.

Be content cautious

As the reality of coronavirus and lockdown measures started to set in, a new type of marketing content cropped up on our televisions and social media feeds.

Suddenly sentimental, coronavirus-themed content was in every other ad you saw. This uplifting content generally focused on people’s sacrifices throughout the crisis, how we’re all in this together, and what businesses are doing for you in your time of need. For many, this content provides assurance and shows companies understand what people need most.

The question for marketers once this crisis is over, or at least starting to wind down, is how do you move on from this content, and will coronavirus-tinged content still be appropriate? As people assess the full impact of the virus is it right to use their situation to push them towards purchases, if it ever was?

To pivot your content direction post-COVID you need to be aware of the genuine concerns people will have in regards to making coronavirus your focus. You need to balance the fine line of being aware of the current circumstances without appearing to take advantage of them.

Creating media that captures the public mood and shows appreciation for their feelings can really grab attention and cut through the mass of competition of social media channels. People don’t mind being advertised to if they think the brand genuinely has their best interests at heart. That involves offering something back, even if it’s just a message of support.

You should also look to create content that is genuinely informative. Try and educate people within your specialism on the common coronavirus issues. Slipping in a bit of promotional while doing so is fine, as you’re providing a service. People will want to set up good social distancing measures at work, so suggest creative ways to do so. It may not directly result in conversions, but it’ll build up goodwill with your brand.

The most successful post-COVID content will likely look a lot like the best campaigns we’ve seen throughout the campaign. Let shareable content filmed through Zoom calls inspire you and make sure not to misjudge people’s emotions.

Consider your finances

It’s safe to say most people are expecting things to get a little bit tighter financially after coronavirus.

As if the toil of the virus alone isn’t bad enough, it has also led to significant economic turmoil across the world. With many businesses operating on a much stricter budget — if any budget at all — the money is unlikely to be there for extravagant marketing campaigns. Just like you can’t act like your audience has money to burn, you need to operate securely yourself.

It’s important your marketing starts slowly and tries to avoid as many costly mistakes as possible. Ideally, you can look to follow the example set by small businesses. You don’t need to start from scratch, but approaching your marketing expenses in the way a startup or entrepreneur would will help you make low-investment risks when it comes to pivoting your strategy. These businesses rarely operate with a high-risk, high-reward mentality, which can be a great guide through this tricky period.

Your first campaign after the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t need to be an all-time-great homerun in advertising, but it can’t be something you bet the immediate future of the company on. Businesses are going to be judged not just by how they responded to the outbreak, but how they continue to respond throughout the recovery.

Think small scale with your marketing. Extravagant short films about the bravery of people throughout the crisis may be great, uplifting content, but they can be costly to produce. Whereas taking a more subtle, low-key approach within the budget constraints of a smaller business can help you show support, while accomplishing the long-term promotion and converting goals of your marketing.

Focus on localization

All future marketing strategies in a post-COVID world need to take into consideration the rate at which recovery is happening not just across the world, but in individual countries.

Universal advertising will be irrelevant in the days immediately after the virus. Different messages will mean different things to unique audience. You cannot make content that looks to celebrate defeating the virus available to a region that is still suffering significantly. It is insensitive and will tarnish the respectability and perceived competency of your brand.

Either try and keep your content more general or be hyper-specific in your location. If you want to run an after-COVID paid social campaign, for example, make sure you’re only targeting areas where recovery has been successful and you’re ready to pause it should the worst happen.

While celebrating national success may sound like a great opportunity to balance showing appreciation with brand exposure, this can, especially online, backfire pretty dramatically if you’re not hyper-specific in your execution.

Stick with online services

Despite it feeling like we’re all scratching at the walls looking for an escape from lockdown, it won’t be as simple as everyone rushing back into normal life once it’s lifted.

Not only will there be significant social distancing measures in place, but people’s attitudes and outlook will have changed. People have not just considered what they value, but there will be a residual fear of the virus.

Online services, be it video chat allowing you to talk to your family or an ecommerce store that can keep you stock up throughout lockdown, have shown their worth throughout this pandemic. With people reluctant to dive into normality once again, there will still be a need for these businesses.

All of this is to say you shouldn’t abandon any online services you’ve developed just yet. It’ll be wise to continue promoting these products and services even after coronavirus. Forced exposure to them has only increased interest from the average consumer and business.

Take Zoom as an example. People may be sick of video chats by the time this is all over, but businesses will still find practical uses in it as we return to normality, now aware of a tool that allows them to better connect with business partners abroad and open people up to new types of remote working options.

Likewise, many businesses may stick with remote working for the foreseeable future. This allows you to tweak your marketing, rather than fully pivot it, to just reflect the usefulness of your products and services, rather than play into the whole lockdown and remote working narrative. You don’t need to fully re-think your strategy straight away.

Consider scheduling changes

With efforts to return to normality likely to be slow, you need to consider how you’re going to schedule your content and try and capture attention online.

Before COVID, you were able to research when people were most likely online to try and capture their attention in the most effective way. Numerous studies had been conducted across all the major social platforms, showing when someone was most likely be susceptible to a Facebook video, Twitter Poll or Instagram influencer story.

A lot of these results were determined by pre-COVID schedules. People would commute to and from work roughly at the same time. They’d relax on the couch and browse social media for a bit most evenings. They may be more likely to buy something at a weekend when they have time to sit down and consider the item. That’s all out the window now, and may not be back for a while.

Likewise, people are also going to be spending more time catching up with loved ones if they do choose to go out. There are arguments to suggest that coronavirus could be the end of abject consumerism, and that marketers will have to be more creative in their efforts to draw people away from personal connections and back to social platforms to witness content and advertising.

To acclimatize to the new reality of your customer base you need to either conduct new audience research or find new avenues to reach your base in. A post-COVID strategy will be reflective of new lifestyles, slowly easing itself back into traditional timings. Consider experimenting with new approaches in your advertising, such as Google paid campaigns that can catch search audiences looking for something specific, rather than casting a wide net across social media.

Marketing in a post-COVID world will be challenging, there’s no doubt about that. It won’t be an impossible task though. It will require more audience research and tactile reading of public mood than ever before. Be prepared to backtrack at points and be cautious when taking risks.

Feature Image Credit: Unsplash

By Rodney Laws

Rodney Laws has more than a decade of experience providing marketing advice to online entrepreneurs and businesses. He’s set up and marketed his own businesses and consulted on crafting campaigns for established companies. See what Rodney can do to help you or your business by heading over to EcommercePlatforms.io and visiting @EcomPlatformsio for even more news and views on marketing as an ecommerce brand.

 

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5 B2B Marketing Trends During Lockdowns And Outlook Post-Covid

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  • A sharp rise in screen time on smartphones

  • The right time to invest in paid digital advertising and automation platforms

  • Virtual on-demand events and content will grow significantly

Coming out sturdier from a crisis marks the ones slated for success. Last 10 years have been the golden decade for marketing with technology and automation increasing numbers. 

Covid-19 pandemic is an unprecedented event none of us have experienced in the past. It is grand, all-encompassing, has affected over 200 countries at once and has necessitated that the price of doing the same old thing in the new normal can be detrimental. Therefore, now is the time to slow down and take stock of what went wrong first, then what went right for marketing in the past decade.

With social distancing and remote work being normalized to base our future course of actions on, consumer patterns will change significantly in the post-Covid world.

Reduced Marketing Budgets Can Be A Blessing In Disguise

As per HBR research, 17% of companies did not survive the last recession in 2008.

With a sharp cut in marketing budgets across the board, the usual discretionary spends are not welcome anymore. A PGA Labs survey report, released as lockdowns started in India, said 53% of startups already cut discretionary marketing spends in March 2020.

From a long-term perspective, things will permanently change on the marketing front as far as budgets are concerned, putting a high focus on top-funnel marketing and converging marketing and communications.

This may put off a lot of marketers aiming for revenues from the bottom-funnel but till things clear up, as a mark of respect for clients and businesses, these times warrant us to soften the sales pitches and hard call to actions.

In the more intricate B2B environment where the percentage of the marketing budget is already skewed towards training and analytics and building a robust and experienced talent team internally, new paradigms of engaging the top-funnel will gain focus.

Not undermining the scope of generating revenue, events, webinars, and ebooks will gain momentum in a post-Covid world. On the talent side, steep technology adoption, human resilience, and professional experience will be of the utmost value for brands in a ‘frugal new normal.’

What Changes For B2B Marketing Post-Covid

Putting your old strategy on a back-burner and creating a fresh one can be taxing. A sudden work from home mandate has left most of us in limbo from a networking perspective. Sharing the top 5 trends which can help marketers reaccelerate the business and create brand equity in a ‘with and post-Covid world:

On-Demand Niche Video Content

If you have been dilly-dallying, this is the time to commit to video. Agile times require agile methods and given recent cancellations of on-ground activities; it is time to create quality content IPs with revenue generation opportunities as you:

  • Budget for experienced video professionals, and editing and automation software
  • Align your operations, fulfilment teams with marketing to create insightful niche topic-led video content that is crisp and sharp
  • Leverage brand equity to reflect specific services aligned to trending topics

Organic Vs Paid Marketing

As we focus on top-funnel marketing, organic is usually the go-to method for B2B businesses. A spike in web traffic on short formats, videos, and news and entertainment content lays focus on CONTENT and using it wisely to generate revenues. However, on the other side, this is also the right time to start testing lead generation digital advertising for firms only using their budgets on digital this year. As per a recent report from PGA Labs, India’s digital ad penetration is expected to reach 32% by 2022, this percentage will multiply further in a post-Covid scenario. Due to decreased competition for bids, ads have also become cheaper and ROI has increased.

Email Marketing

Being the direct link with your clients and prospect network, upgrading audience and email limits on the mailbox is a good idea. Investing in email marketing platforms can be helpful as content becomes a hook for most audience and your timely response to the crisis will be a key differentiator for the brand. A keen focus on sharing insights, videos, tutorials, and educational content can save the day for B2B businesses. However, exercise caution to not overwhelm the audience with more than 2-3 well-paced quality communications in a month with softer CTAs.

E-Networking

All conferences and events have been cancelled until further notice. Getting the arsenal on board virtually is the need of the hour. Do not let the lockdowns stop you from organizing the event you had scheduled. In the current scenario, chances are people will not pay the registration fees, therefore balancing this by saving logistics and reaching out to a wider audience will be the way to go.

Help Others Selflessly

Navigating a crisis can seem scary. In this extraordinary time where everyone is affected in one way or the other, it is important to think about marketing as a ‘person to person’ effort rather than a ‘business to business’ approach. Marketing and Communications need to work in tandems like the brain and the heart as we move ahead. How we connect back to the roots as individuals and businesses, and compassionately give back, will define our way forward.

This is the time to hand-hold customers, clients, and employees into the new normal. To do this, as a brand we launched the #ReAcceleratewithPraxis series in March to help our clients and businesses at large, proactively sharing our team’s experience from the previous recessions and proprietary knowledge IP for wading through the tough waters.

As we go forward, TRUST becomes the new currency to survive in a work from home economy, and marketing can open new doors to build trust and credibility and minimize the adverse effects on business due to Covid.

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Sourced from Inc42

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SEO Expert Guide for Successful Marketing

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By Abhishek Kumar.

What do you desire when you set up a website or blog? It would mostly be to sell a product or idea or provide solutions to the pain points of those you visit your site. The digital space has come up with numerous techniques and tools that can help you to attract the audience whose needs match your offerings. One of the most popular techniques that businesses operating online use is search engine optimization (SEO). There are various nuances to SEO and its power to attract traffic to your site, but the one will look at in this article is search intent.

What is search intent?

This is where the entire online transaction process begins. Search intent, also known as keyword intent, is the reason that drives a person to enter their need/query in search engines to know more. The need/query maybe for some information, or a desire to buy something. When you enter the query/search keyword in the search engine, it fetches a list of top-ranked site options for the seeker to cruise through. The intent initiates the search that eventually is present in the first few search engine results pages (SERP).

How does this work?

In order to increase the traffic on your site to drive your sales revenue, you must ensure that you are among the top search results. If you base your content or optimize your website with the search intent at the center, you may succeed in getting into the SERPs. Performing comprehensive research to find the pain points of your target audience that you can solve with your offerings is critical. Once you know what your target audience wants, you can arrive at numerous keywords that they can use to search for a solution. Optimizing your site with such keywords will help you be in the first few pages of the SERPs.

How to optimize your site with search intent in mind?

As optimizing your site based on search intent is a great place to start your SEO journey, it is helpful to follow the steps listed below

1) Find strong keywords which express search intent:

One of the best ways to do this is to check and record the top-ranking pages. Thereafter, see if you can strongly confirm the search intent for your niche. Once you have a list of these keywords, track their search history for a span of at least 3 to 6 months. There are tools you can find that can help you do the trend tracking. Tracking is critical in this process since Google ranking keeps changing as the search intent changes with time. If the ranking history has stabilized or is subject to very marginal changes, you can resolve that the search intent keywords are strong and usable.

What if the ranking history is subject to immense fluctuation? In that case, you are to deduce that Google results have still not zeroed-in on what your audience’s intent is. As the search intent is unclear, it would not be wise to base your SEO optimization on the underlying keywords.

Finding strong keywords that stem from your audience’s search intent will give you a shot at immense success during optimization.

2) Content streamlining for effective targeting:

There 4 aspects to content you need to look at and work on in SEO optimizing through search intent.

  • Style: The ranking history and top-ranking pages are the reference point for you to help decide on a content style. If the top pages carry results that are predominantly in the form of videos, it is the right strategy for you to create and upload videos. If you find more static pictures, focus on uploads high-quality pictures to drive traffic. In other words, follow the trend to reach the first SERP.
  • Type: This refers to the place where you plug-in your call to action (CTA) and product information, testimonials, etc. It is effective if your content type is a landing page to which all your email and social media marketing redirect to. It can also be a blog post or product/category page.
  • Format: These are important to improve traffic and increase the dwell time of the visitors. This is especially important in the case of blog posts. Using certain blog types such as ‘how-to’, listicles, common mistakes, #1 posts, among others act as magnets that attract prospects.
  • Proposition: When you search for a keyword (use the ones you have found during search intent determination), you will find numerous proposition dimensions in the SERP. Take into consideration all the varied angles and develop a proposition that is unique and magnetic.

3) Use SERP to gain insights:

When you look for a keyword, Google will list out ‘people also search for’, ‘related sites’, and the like. Paying attention to these can help you strategize better. Various keyword research tools available on the web can help you gain such insights.

By following these 3 steps after successfully determining viable keywords based on search intent, will help you savor success. With these steps, you find yourself a place in the SERP and thereby attract large traffic thereby generating pursuable leads.

By Abhishek Kumar

Experienced Founder with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry. Skilled in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SEO Content Writing, Mobile Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Content Marketing. Strong business development professional with a Bachelor of Technology – BTech focused in Computer Engineering from Lovely Professional University.

Sourced from Promotion World

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How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy to Make Your Business Stand Out

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By Anders Hjorth

To make your content king on social media, you need a strategy. These are the steps required to create it.

Content is at the heart of social media. “Content is king,” they say, and it takes many forms: text, images, photos, videos, and emojis 😉💪🔥🙏🥇. But it’s not the individual components that give content a royal stance, it’s the story it tells and the emotions it generates in its audience.

That’s why you need a content strategy to define your brand’s storyline and ensure you fully reap the benefits of social media.

When building your social content strategy, remember that engagement is an integral part of how social media platforms work: The more your content resonates with your audience, the further it will be distributed on the social platform to be seen by more people — and if you’re lucky, it might even go viral.

There’s never a guarantee your content will go viral, but a structured approach to building your strategy will increase your chances.

Let’s look at the steps for defining a social media content strategy.

Here are 7 steps to develop a social media content strategy:

  • Define your audience
  • Audit your content
  • Define your themes and topics
  • Map out your hashtags
  • Create the story and the content mix
  • Set publication frequencies and goals
  • Build your social media content calendar

How to create a social media content strategy for your small business

To make your strategy successful, you should tell a story with your social media content, be ambitious, use automation as your invisible friend and creativity as your magic wand. And above all, maintain your rhythm and consistency throughout the entire process.

Step 1: Define your audience

Before we look at the content itself, we need to consider who it’s for. Your social media audience should correspond to your target market, but it doesn’t have to be limited to just individuals in that market.

Adjacent audiences, or those who can exert an influence on your target market, can serve as an entry point to your audience and shouldn’t be overlooked.

A great way to define your target audience for social media is by using personas. Personas are a simplified representation of your target audience with a name as well as geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics.

A persona is like a sketch of a segment of your audience that you can improve over time.

Make sure to include motivations, interests, fears, and pain points in your persona definitions, and keep your persona(s) in mind every time you shape new content.

Persona Template

By formalizing your personas into easily understandable formats that can be put on posters on the wall and summarized with memorable names, you can keep them in mind during the entire content creation process.

Tips for defining your audience:

  • Use Facebook Audience Insights: Via your Facebook business page, you’ll have access to free audience insights from Facebook. This tool can help you further define and quantity your target audience.
  • Try Sparktoro: By querying Sparktoro with some of the key elements from your persona overview, the tool will identify audience characteristics such as what sites they visit or what influencers they follow.

Step 2: Audit your existing content

Keeping your audience in mind, it’s time to look at your existing content. This can be quite a challenging and time-consuming process as it involves identifying all of the articles on your blog, any historical publications on social media, and even content you’ve created for using offline.

If you plan to reuse some of this content, it would be a great idea to organize the content in a repository or a digital asset management tool.

Here are some ways to find your content:

  • Find popular content on your blog with Google Analytics: In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > All pages and select a long time frame (for example, one year back) to see the most popular pages on your website. Ignore the homepage and all the static pages on your site, and copy the list of all the popular articles on your website.
  • Find popular posts on your Facebook page: Go to Facebook Insights and select Posts to see a list of your posts organized chronologically. You can scroll to see pieces of historical content and extract the most successful posts if you haven’t already identified them elsewhere. (An easier way to do this is by using a social media management tool to extract and organize your posts on various social networks. We’ll look at those options in more detail below.)
  • Crawl your website from the outside: Content audits are often performed in relation with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and there are a number of tools available to help you with this. For a small website, the Screaming Frog site crawler is free to use (up to 500 URLs). It will allow you to extract all of the URLs your content represents so you can add the list to your content repository. Perhaps you’ve already done an SEO audit to gather some recommendations about your content that you can use as well.

Now you should be able to start identifying your highest-quality content, as the most popular content will be prioritized in the searches you do. However, you shouldn’t assume that your most popular content is also the best representation of your brand.

Keep in mind your audience personas as well as the values of your brand. Perhaps you’ve performed a brand audit or detailed the values of your brand in your social media marketing plan or your business plan. Look them up, and qualify your best-performing content against those criteria.

There’s also a fun way to audit your existing content: Let artificial intelligence (AI) have a look at your existing articles: “What does Walt think?” Analyzing your content with AI can help you understand how credible it is.

Walt uses artificial intelligence to analyze any article

The artificial intelligence (named “Walt”) from Fakerfact will analyze any article you submit via its URL and score it according to various content dimensions. Source: Fakerfact.org.

The ideal outcome of your content audit should be a complete overview of your existing usable content, which we will categorize in the next step.

Step 3: Define your content themes, topics, and channels

While auditing your content, you may have realized that most of it fell into natural categories corresponding to the themes you most often communicate about. In this step, take the time to define the full range of themes you want to cover.

Keep an open mind; you may discover content gaps between what you have and what you need, which will help you in the process of developing content.

You also need to define what social media channels you want to use in your content strategy and what their function will be. Define your primary social media channel as well as a few secondary channels, too, that can piggyback on your primary channel to increase the reach of your communications.

Don’t forget to define the role of your website in your social media content strategy, and create an overview of the themes and topics your content needs to address.

Step 4: Map out your hashtags

With your themes in mind, do some hashtags research. Hashtags are an essential component of social media navigation on Twitter and Instagram, and they have a secondary role on most other social media networks, too.

The four roles of hashtags:

  1. Drive discovery. When hashtags are used to drive discovery, as it is the case on Instagram, Twitter, and increasingly, LinkedIn, it’s important to choose related hashtags that are already being used by other social media profiles, as these hashtags can start to trend. If your post has used a trending hashtag, it can appear when new users are looking for content by navigating via that hashtag.
  2. Give context to a message. Hashtags are also used more generally to provide context for a message and thereby use fewer words. The hashtag gives context to the other words in the post: “How are we all doing today? #coronavirus” means something totally different than “How are we all doing today? #brexit.”
  3. Create an anchor. Hashtags can also be used for creating an anchor. If, for example, you’ve created a report about marketing on Amazon, and you post extracts and content from the report to drive awareness about it, you could use the hashtag #AmazonMarketingReport in all of your posts to create a way to anchor the different posts together as well as create a concept that spans multiple social media platforms.
  4. Reference events. Finally, don’t forget events hashtags. These can be used for yearly recurring events, such as #MayThe4thBeWithYou and #BlackFriday, or they can be associated with specific events such as a conference, like #sxsw2019.

Twitter's trending events hashtag

If your post is visible on a trending events hashtag, you will have created significant visibility for your brand.

The next step is to associate various hashtags to each of the themes you identified in the last step. Focus on the ones that can drive discovery, and analyze the reach and consistency of each of them. You should end up with a prioritized list of hashtags you should be using for new posts on each topic.

To check the consistency of a hashtag, simply search for it and look at the results. Would a post from your brand belong in the search results? To check the volume of searches for various hashtags, here are a couple of free tools that can help analyze the amount of traffic on hashtags:

The social media management tool you’re using might be also able to provide this functionality. Keep a number of hashtags on your list so you can vary the audiences you target from time to time.

Use restraint with hashtags, though: A good limit to respect is 3-5 hashtags per post, allowing you to use events or discovery, context, and an anchor.

Step 5: Create the story and the content mix

Now that you know your personas, have identified your existing content, and have defined the themes that should be present in your social media marketing strategy, it’s time to take a step back and look at the big picture.

  • What’s the story for your brand in that context?
  • Perhaps you need some inspiration for outstanding content?

Use your newly defined content themes and hashtags to look at content that has stood out for the theme in the past using BuzzSumo, which is a database of articles that appear on blogs and social media sorted by popularity. What outstanding creative content do you need your story to wind itself around?

Next, consider content types. YouTube put the Hero, Hub, Hygiene framework forward in 2014, which defines three functions for the pieces in your content strategy.

  1. Hero: The main piece is the “hero” content that’s the driving element of your storyline.
  2. Hub: Around the storyline, you build “hub” content that can be curated from other sources and keeps your audience engaged with your main themes.
  3. Hygiene: Finally, the “hygiene” content — renamed to “help” by Google — consists of more practical information about your products, services, or offerings.

The creativity of your hero content can strongly influence the success of your content strategy. It is the “Don Draper” of your content strategy: Don Draper is the main character of the Mad Men TV series, depicting the advertising industry in the 1960s.

He spends his time looking for outstanding yet simple concepts that will connect end users with brands.

Take some time to build the concept for your hero content, and consider it the most important content element in your mix. Next, consider all the elements that can support the main hero content and how they can prepare and expand the main story element.

When building up the storyline itself, consider learning from Pixar in this online course. The framework won’t be directly applicable to your social media strategy, but it should inspire you to apply some of the same storytelling principles in your communications.

Content strategy outlined as themes and hashtags

The building bricks for a content strategy can be outlined as themes, hashtags, and content that apply to your personas via your main social channels.

Step 6: Define publication frequencies and goals

To make it all come together, you need to define a more detailed plan. Identify a top storyline and a list of themes to cover in your communications. Also, be sure to insert the calls-to-actions and promotional elements required for this strategy to serve your marketing plan as well.

The next step will be to define your publication frequencies.

  • What will your personas expect of you?
  • What is the natural frequency of news related to your hero content?
  • How can you fill the gap in a natural way?

A good way to define publication frequencies is to look at the strategy from the viewpoint of social media metrics: Calculate your reach on social networks, and compare this to your communication goals.

Your ideal publication frequency will derive from this comparison as you will need to reach your entire audience many times per month — and maybe several times per day — to meet your goals.

If you can’t reach your goals via a higher publication frequency, you’ll need to activate social media advertising campaigns to close the gap. You should, however, look into as many alternative digital marketing ideas you can find before investing in paid media.

Step 7: Outline your social media content calendar

You’ve now put all of the components of your content strategy together. In order to further materialize it, consider building a detailed content calendar of individual posts, themes, hashtags, and publication dates.

A content calendar helps you organize when and where each of your posts will publish, allowing you to optimize your content as well as each social media platform you use.

A content calendar is one of the best social media content strategy tools you have at your disposal, and one way to organize it is by using a social media management tool.

The best social media management tools to execute your content strategy

Your new social media content strategy is ready, and you may feel a little overwhelmed with the objectives you’ve set for yourself and your team. If not, go back and revise your objectives upwards: Social media objectives should be daring!

Beyond the strategy, you now need to address the execution of your strategy, and for this, a number of tools in the market can help you automate a wide range of the activities you need to undertake, including automatic scheduling, competitive analysis, and reporting.

We’ve looked at some of the best tools for social media management below.

1. Later.com

If your primary social media channel is Instagram, then Later might be your preferred tool. Its strongest functionality is the preparation of a social media calendar from an image repository and the automatic publication of posts.

In addition to Instagram, the tool also allows you to manage your Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest activity.

Later's visual content calendar

The visual content calendar and its drag-and-drop functionality from an image repository is one of the strengths of Later.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a longstanding leader in the area of social media management. With Hootsuite, you can cover four key aspects of your social media management: post scheduling, social listening, content curation, and analytics.

There is a further integration of direct management of advertising in Facebook and LinkedIn as well as project management for your social media team.

The basic Hootsuite plan is free for a limited number of social networks and posts per month.

Hootsuite's Core Features List

Beyond the basic functionalities of social media management, Hootsuite also allows you to manage your team and integrate with a number of apps and external solutions.

3. Sprout Social

At the high end of the social media management tools spectrum, we find Sprout Social. The basic functionalities covered include social listening, post scheduling via a content calendar, centralized engagement management across various social networks, and analytics.

Sprout claims additional access to consumer research and influencer identification as some of its strengths. These more advanced features can be helpful in some of the stages of the content strategy process.

Sprout Social User Interface

Sprout Social has a great user interface with clear illustrations of the performance of your social media channels.

Content does not become king all by itself

The myth of viral content that suddenly becomes a worldwide phenomenon simply because it was outstanding has endured for many years. In reality, though, it is preparation that allows for great social media success.

Social media teams who have their finger on the pulse, who abound with creativity, who detect every competitor move, and who constantly optimize their presence on the various platforms are the most likely to generate success.

And at the very foundation of a social media presence lies a well-researched and documented content strategy, which will guarantee that your content resonates with its target audience so you can meet your business objectives.

By Anders Hjorth

Digital Marketing Strategist

Sourced from the blueprint

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7 books to carry with you in 2020 — UX designer edition

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By Chan Karunaratne

Be it if you’re on your daily commute, looking to sharpen your skills, or just plain bored, books are always there for you. Here are some great books to not just keep you busy during these tough times, but to take you to the next level.

1. Sprint (Okay, the usual suspect first)

cover of the sprint book

Sprint by GV is a fundamental book every designer should read regardless of the process used at their agencies. This book by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky at Google speak about implementing the Sprint method developed at GV.

Sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. You will learn how to produce a prototype for your product in just 5 days. No more months of design thinking for one feature.

We recently did a rethinking of our sprint process at Thiken to match our needs, and I highly recommend it for you as well.

Link

2. Hacking Growth

cover of the Hacking Growth book

This awesome read by Sean Ellis highlights the effects of applying non-traditional marketing methods to massively increase growth in startups and big companies alike. As a product designer, this book will definitely come in handy while conducting user research and building a business model.

The most interesting part about Hacking Growth is its use alongside the Sprint Book we talked about earlier. At AJ&Smart (the biggest design sprint agency in the world, probably) they use a hybrid of the two books for their sprint process. They call this Growth Design.

In this process, you focus on 3 main growth techniques from the book; Acquisition, Activation, and Retention and how to use it hand in hand with the design sprint process.

Link

3. Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

Illustration with the storybrand book cover

Okay, this is a marketing book. Story Brand explains how to tell a story to your users in order to drive sales by teaching listeners the seven universal story points all humans respond to.

This book will introduce us to the concept of the hero’s journey that you might have heard of. How you treat the customer or user as the hero and your product as the guide in his journey.

A story brand style brandscript can help in your sprint to understand the product and its customers better. PurpleBunny talks about how the brandscript became helpful when they redesigned Feedly’s homepage.

Link

4. 100 things every designer needs to know about people

Illustration with the book cover

Another read to add to a designer’s fundamental must-reads. 100 Things (I don’t wanna type the entire thing every time) talks about the science behind creating apps, websites, print, and almost anything that matches the way people think, work, and play.

What grabs the attention of the users? How can you predict the type of errors they might make? Why are some fonts better than others? Find answers to these questions and many more from this brilliant book by Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.

Link

5. Steal like an artist

Illustration with the book cover

Alright. I’m gonna get straight with you on this. This book does not have a vast amount of knowledge. It’s doesn’t have 300 pages of content. But what it does have is some great tips on how to discover your artistic side and ignite your creativity. Oh, and it has pictures.

According to Austin Kleon, nothing is original. It’s all about getting inspiration and learning from the works of others to reimagine your own path.

It has only 133 pages to be exact and took me about 4 hours to finish. Yes, just 4 hours. So the next time you grab a flight, take this book with you. Trust me, you’re gonna thank me by the end of it.

Link

6. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

Illustration with the book cover

This is a book by David Kelly and Tom Kelly. Yes, the founders of IDEO. It explains the principles and strategies that help us to tap into our creative potential in our work and personal lives.

IDEO is one of the leading design and consulting firms in the world. They helped establish the concept of Design Thinking. David and Tom Kelly are well respected in the industry and their new book was highly acclaimed.

Referring to case studies from both IDEO and other leading companies in the world, the Kelly brothers talk about how we can discover our creative and innovative side.

Link

7. Power of Moments

Illustration with the book cover

And at last but not at least, this book by Chip and Dan Heath, the authors of Switch and Made to Stick, explains how certain moments in our lives change us.

In this best-selling book, the authors get into the details about how creative individuals have changed their businesses and lives around by creating “moments of magic” for their customers.

The book uses practical examples of these moments to showcase how the most ordinary of events can leave a lasting impact on you or your business.

Link

By Chan Karunaratne

Sourced from UX Collective

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How to Make a Great Marketing Campaign

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Sourced from appPicker

Every successful marketer would want to create a marketing campaign that would bring about the company’s desired results. Alas, every marketing campaign, no matter how well formulated is never devoid of challenges. Add in the fact that budgetary constraints is also another factor that complicates the entire process. The good news is that it is indeed possible to be able to do more even on a meagre budget. You just have to determine the best approach that will help make your marketing campaign entirely successful. Below are some tips that have been proven helpful in making a marketing campaign work to your company’s favour.

Invest on a perfect platform.

No matter how good you think your marketing campaign is but if you are not using the right platform for it chances are high that your efforts will only be in vain. If you truly want to make your campaigns reap the expected results, invest in the best marketing platform that has been known to work wonders in turning everything into a successful campaign. Never let your precious time be wasted on manually sending emails to your targeted audience. Let the power of automation send those emails to the right people, at the right time.

Be more specific.

If you think you can do it on a granular approach, then the better your marketing campaign would be. This way, you will be able to target your most specific audience and then design all your marketing efforts in a way that pleases every persona in your target market. Make sure that your created content, planned events and promotions will most likely engage every persona that fits your company’s target audience. Do not forget to harness the benefits of data capture as well so it would be easier for you to remarket later as you need to come up with future marketing campaigns.

Never settle for mediocre content.

Instead, always opt for an evergreen content that is classified high-value to your target audience. Although this may sometimes depend on the budget that has been earmarked for a specific marketing campaign but in most cases a greater amount of budget is usually set aside for content distribution rather than for content creation. However, if you want your marketing campaign to have increased organic growth then invest more into the creation of high-quality content.

Test and analyse.

Testing your promotional activities can be quite costly and time-consuming. However, if it is part of your first-ever marketing campaign you will realize that it will be more cost-effective if you consider testing your promotions to focus groups before declaring an official launch. This is when you have to make use of feedback and surveys. Afterwards, study the results and carefully analyse the efficiency of your campaign. If you need to hire an expert to help you analyse the results, then do so.

The best marketing campaign allows your brand to be known to its target market. Otherwise, your start-up business will only remain the best kept-secret in town – literally. Luckily, you have many ways to prevent such a thing from happening. Follow the tips mentioned in this article and be prepared to get blown away by the results.

Sourced from appPicker

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6 DIGITAL MARKETING TRENDS THAT WILL OWN 2020

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Sourced from Rank me Locally

As technology is advancing with a rampant pace, so are the trends of digital marketing that has changed the outlook of the industry. In today’s digital space, it is not merely enough to have a website and social media; you need more to stay ahead of the game.

The digital world is revolutionizing with brilliant ideas, trends and technologies that are rising and prevailing in 2020 and beyond. These trends are changing the way of marketing for businesses and individuals.

Here are the six innovative digital marketing trends that will own 2020:

The Rise of Video Marketing

Videos will have a rise in 2020 and beyond. It is the best strategy for businesses to market their brands online and influence customers with their brand story. The customers are keen on watching short and long length interactive live streaming videos on YouTube. Not only YouTube, but Facebook, Instagram, snap chat, and Pinterest are showing trends of live video marketing for brands.

These videos deliver enormous entertainment and information to the audience to increase traffic views by hitting like share and subscribe to social media. Video marketing will be among the top of the list in digital marketing in the year 2020 and captive huge audience attention.

A successful video marketing involves many components like attention-grabbing introduction, problem-solving content, high-quality screen resolution, compelling punch line, and call to action elements.

Interactive Content is the Future of Digital Marketing

Interactive content is the future of digital marketing. The term “Interactive Content” defines the strong interaction between the brand and the audience. It triggers viewers to take some action and engage with your website or social media to enhance a dynamic experience with users.

Today’s audiences are bored with blogs, articles, and white paper content. They need something exciting and engaging to hold them back with a website. To get over with boredom, marketers should find new ways to present content to communicate and connect with the audience. There can be plenty of ways to interact with the audience, such as infographics, live videos, contests, wizards, quizzes, e-books, and snackable content.

The snackable content is a combination of visually appealing content to grab instant attention of readers at first glance. It combines short-form and long-form content to connect with readers and enhance traffic, ranking, and lead conversion of businesses.

Emerging Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Technology Trends in Digital Marketing

The emergence of augmented reality and virtual reality in digital marketing has taken marketing automation far beyond the imagination. Now, businesses can use augmented reality AR to bring innovation in product marketing and show products to customers from three-dimensional angles.

Virtual reality (VR) is popular among all ages of audiences in the gaming industry. These technologies are ideal in promoting 5G internet broadband with faster live streaming than before.

Many leading shopping and furniture product brands are increasing their sales and revenues by using augmented reality trends in digital marketing. There are a variety of other industry applications implementing AR and VR technologies in brand marketing in 2020.

Using Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

The artificial intelligence is one of the latest trends in digital marketing that is taking the industry by storm. Businesses are using artificial intelligence in various activities like rapid and automated e-commerce transactions, product recommendation, email personalization, and content creation.

Artificial Intelligence is being used in predictive data analysis of companies and businesses to improve their sales and revenues. The use of robotics intelligence is ideal for ease of execution of tasks and improves productivity, efficiency, and profitability of businesses in the long run.

AI is a scientific technology of designing intelligent robotic machines that think and respond like humans. It allows businesses to make smarter decisions in designing websites, improving user experience, creating successful advertising campaigns, SEO A/B Testing, personalizing content, and predicting consumer behaviors.

Introducing the Era of Voice Searches and Chat bots in Digital Marketing

Voice searches are long-tailed conversational queries that anyone can ask from a device and receive a fast and instant response. Voice search has changed the way of search engine optimization and digital marketing.

The value of written type-based search queries is less effective than voice search. There are a few popular voice search devices such as Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Alexa, iPhone Siri, and android phones. These devices are ideal for translating voice-based queries and showing desired results for businesses and individuals.

Chatbots are generally used as a popup in websites to allow users to ask any query regarding a website. The sales and support chat agents are always there to help and guide customers in any technical issue. Chatbots offer written style conversation between an agent and a customer and use natural language processing technology to execute and translate query. Now with the latest advancement and innovation, there are voice chatbots available for customers to respond to them in a voice-based conversation style.

Shoppable Social Media Posts

Social media has a considerable influence on businesses to share posts content and reach their desired target audiences. The emergence of e-commerce has created an enormous demand for social media for businesses. Many companies use different social media platforms for marketing their e-commerce products to the online audience.

Shoppable social media posts are introduced by a popular social media platform known as Instagram. It allows users to directly tag and purchase shopping products from the featured post content. Businesses can also create their brand stories by signing up a new business profile account and selling their labeled products online.

Conclusion

Hence, in a nutshell, those mentioned above are the latest and innovative digital marketing trends that will own in 2020. Some essential trends in digital marketing are last long to stay, such as organic search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media marketing.

Online reputation management, email marketing, content marketing, lead generation, and inbound marketing also have tremendous value and demand in digital marketing. These trends are ideal for increasing ranking, traffic, lead conversion, sales, and revenue for businesses.

Rank Me Locally is the best Local SEO Company that offers affordable Local SEO Services to clients. We are among the leading Local SEO Agencies in the United States that have a team of dedicated and qualified Local SEO Consultants to bring your website to the top of Google.

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Apple may soon take marketing to new depths

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The latest rumors surrounding Apple’s new over-ear headphones give a whole new meaning to, well, meaning.

One of the stranger opinions about Apple products is that they’re all marketing.

For many years, soberly technical types insisted that Cupertino’s wares are actually inferior. It’s just that they’re brilliantly marketed.

That’s largely been balderdash, with a helping of nonsense.

The products themselves — iMac, iPhone, iPad — have been more powerful marketing tools than any ad could ever be.

You see them out in the world and they speak with a different tone, a different style.

Even today, look at AirPods and you know that the things themselves make more of a statement than any ad for them has. In fact, most AirPods ads have made the statement: “Oh, dear. The creative team’s out of ideas again.”

And now Apple is rumored to be releasing over-ear headphones. No, not the Beats varietal, but your actual Apple-branded over-ear rivals.

Some say they’ll be equipped with splendid technology that’ll allow you to wear them back to front. Yes, just like your baseball cap.

I, though, am more moved by their alleged name. Serial rumorist Jon Prosser insists they’ll be called AirPods Studio.

I sense your misgivings. AirPods, in your eyes and ears, are cute little things that hang discreetly. Like little pea-pods.

How can they possibly have anything in common with hulking great over-ear phones that scream: “Look at me! I’m just like LeBron James!”?

Ah, but you’re not looking closely enough at Apple’s deep, meaningful approach to product naming.

Yes, the word AirPods does make them sound like tiny cute things. But where does that leave HomePod? I happen to think HomePods are cute, but tiny they certainly aren’t. Unless you compare them to the size of your house, perhaps.

And then, somewhere in the past, there was the iPod. Now that was small, but it wasn’t entirely tiny. Though, in its day, humans marveled at how something of its size could house so many songs.

Perhaps, then, you’ll conclude that, in Apple’s Nomenclature Orchard, Pod just means Music. Loosely.

Well, perhaps. But then how do you explain the existence of Apple podcasts? Those tend to enjoy a little bit of music at the beginning and end, and a lot of talking in the middle. Why, I was on one only last week and talked far too much.

So, you see, this Pod word isn’t quite what you think. Apple is clearly using its deeper neuropsychological bent to simply find names that make you feel good, even if they don’t make a grote’s worth of rational sense.

That’s the beauty of marketing, you see. Look at it rationally and all you see is gossamer. But examine your feelings — in the company of your friendly psychologist, perhaps — and you’ll see just how much it’s affected you.

The feeling of AirPods Studio isn’t hard, then, to discern. Regular old AirPods look great — they really don’t — on the street or in Zoom meetings. Over-ear headphones just look cooler in studios, right? And who isn’t a music producer at heart these days?

The alleged AirPods Studio are said to be $349, so they have to look really cool — whichever way you look at them while you’re recording your new demo.

There, now do you get it? These naming rituals are deep, truly deep.

Or perhaps you’re already au fait with these things. Perhaps you were one of the first to grasp what the R in iPhone XR stood for, long before Apple’s EVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller made the great revelation: Nothing.

Feature Image Credit:Big Apple. Big headphones.

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What Marketing Executives Wished They’d Known When They First Started Their Careers

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By Kimberly A. Whitler

I was recently asked some thought-provoking, career related questions by somebody entering the workforce. It made me pause. While I could provide one point of view, I thought it might be helpful to ask a number of executive leaders the same set of questions. Below is Part One in a series designed to provide insight and advice to aspiring C-level growth engineers (i.e., marketers).

What do you wish you knew when you first started your career?

Katie Borger, Vice President of Marketing of Boston Pizza Restaurants

Being “right” isn’t enough. Everyone has to believe you … whether it’s your guests, your stakeholders, your internal team, etc. No matter how good your idea or your point is, building advocacy, trust and ultimately respect will be the smarter play.

Brooke Budke, Vice President of Marketing of TITLE Boxing Club

The more you grow yourself, the more you will grow in the company. Many young professionals are led to believe it’s the company’s job to grow and develop its employees. I believe it’s your job to become obsessed with your own personal development.

Kathy Collins, Chief Marketing Officer of Massage Envy

Everything will be okay if you work hard, respect the people around you and love what you do. Work for companies with a strong culture and a clear vision. Above everything else, be a good person and things will work out.

Amy Halford, Global Chief Marketing Officer of Self Esteem Brands

I loved school. I loved learning and testing my learning. I really liked getting an A. One-hundred percent was always my target. That kind of thinking spilled into my early career, and I would apply the lens, “if I’m not 100 percent, then I’m not ready for X,” or, “if my experience and skills don’t match 100 percent, then I’m not a fit.” I could have been braver.

Eric Keshin, President and Chief Marketing Officer of Great Harvest Bread Company

Marketing is as much a “science” as an “art.” Relying strictly on opinions to persuade others can be a dead end. Relying on data / results and applying judgment to that is the better way to go.

Rebecca Miller, Chief Marketing Officer of Smoothie King

When I first started working, I had my entire career path and timeline all mapped out, but I wish I had been more open to change and trying new things from the start. You never know what doors will open by being receptive to new opportunities.

Christine Pescatore, Director of Marketing of Venture X

I wish I knew that you can plan your career to a certain extent, but experiences, external forces and your personal life can drive you to opportunities you would never have expected. My role now at Venture X, a coworking space franchise, didn’t exist when I started my career!

Derek Panfil, former Chief Merchandising and Marketing Officer of Pet Supplies Plus

When I started my career, I thought my career progression would be linear, and that is far from the case. It has had ups, downs, successes, and failures. What I would tell all those just beginning their career: be prepared to handle the ups and downs that you will encounter on your journey, and those that succeed do not let setbacks deter their overall passion to do great things.

Bill Zinke, Senior Vice President of Marketing of BELFOR Franchise Group

You can’t fast track experience. Every success, failure, good or bad decision has made me a better marketer and leader. I wish I’d known how important company culture is. Job-seekers typically focus on a job’s responsibilities and growth potential, but forget about finding a company with a positive, people-centric environment.

Mandy Nowels, Vice President of Marketing & Ecommerce of The Spice and Tea Exchange

Probably how important it is to understand how to motivate and communicate with people. No matter how good you are at your trade, the biggest opportunities for advancement lie in being able to manage more people. Quite often, your growth is determined by how effective and efficient your team is. You can fine tune your craft with yourself and your team every day, but companies want to promote people who motivate others towards the company’s goals and mission.

Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler

Note: The titles, positions, and company affiliations may have changed since the insight was generated.

Feature Image Credit: Wish came true, GETTY

By Kimberly A. Whitler

As a former General Manager and CMO, who worked for nearly 20 years before getting a PhD and working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, I conduct research that focuses on helping the C-suite (and aspiring C-level marketers) better understand, develop, and lead marketing excellence.

Sourced from Forbes

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