Goss Media
Goss.ie are looking for a budding entertainment reporter to work alongside our best and brightest entertainment team.
During your internship programme, you will shadow our reports and editor and learn how to create showbiz news content from scratch, interview stars, and work on our show The Daily Goss.
A strong understanding of celebrity culture is a must, as is a strong knowledge of social media.
The programme runs from June 1st – September 1st
Click HERE to apply for this job.
By Tara Dulake
Sixty per cent of Instagram users say that they discover new products on the platform, so to say that no-one connects with a brand they don’t know is not true. Nearly half of the world’s population is on one social media channel or another. Social media platforms offer you the chance to increase the awareness of your brand and get new customers talking about you.
2 Get established as a thought leader
As an expert in your field, you should be promoting who you are and what you can offer. If you have the expertise within a local area, you want to be promoting that, rather than having online generic estate agents come in and take your customers. Make your social media channel the go-to source for information on topics related to your niche.
3 Build your online authority for search engine optimisation
It is becoming more apparent that the number of links from social media posts and brand mentions on social channels is becoming an important part of search engine optimisation. The more brand mentions and links to your website, the higher in search engines for keyword terms you might find yourself.
4 Customer service, support and reputation management
Tara Dulake
When something goes wrong and a customer has been given bad service from a company, they are quite often found telling the world about it on social media. Whilst this might not be a service you want to offer, at least by responding to complaints and comments, you are being shown to provide a good level of customer service. This won’t always then create a negative view with new potential customers, as they can see you are dealing with customer issues, rather than ignoring them.
Because social media allows you to connect with customers, you can use social media to conduct marketing research of your own.
5 Get new ideas
There is so much content on the web – video, photography, articles and infographics – that there is a lot to share and gain inspiration from. Social media can help you find the top trending topics and interests within a specific location or area, all of which can be useful for your target market.
6 Stay on top of industry news
In the online world, things move fast –and you can’t afford to be left behind. If you are able to manage your social channels and use social listening tools, you’ll find yourself more up to date with what is happening within your industry, local area, and within the world.
7 Learn about your customers
Social media platforms offer data and information about your customers. With everyone inputting their personal information such as where they live, date of birth, interests etc, and with social platforms tracking activity and search terms, there is a whole host of information you can gather about your audience that can then be used to help develop a content strategy.
8 Connect with customers
Perhaps the most important thing social media can do for a business is to give owners the opportunity to engage customers in a whole new way. Social media allows you to get personal with your customers, and form a bond of trust with them.
9 A great addition to your PR strategy
Press releases are an important part of any marketing strategy, especially when you are launching a new product, moving into new areas and launching a new estate agency or making a change to your top-level staff members. Twitter and LinkedIn are great platforms to help promote your press releases and promote any coverage you might get.
10 Increase leads
Interacting with customers and engaging with them illustrates the interest in their experience. Good customer service can often translate into further sales. 20 – 50% of purchase decisions have been known to come from word of mouth.
11 Market research
Because social media allows you to connect with customers, you can use social media to conduct marketing research of your own. Use polls and online survey tools to ask customers to provide feedback. You can also ask them to provide reviews about your products or services.
12 Analyse the competition
You can see what your competitors are doing, which can be helpful in planning your own marketing strategy.
Making the decision to be on social media platforms is not something to take lightly. Make sure that the platforms you choose are managed well and regularly. You will then see some of the above benefits come through.
Tara Dulake, Digital Marketing Director
www.theoraclegroup.co.uk
By Gabrielle Olya
A 20-year tech veteran, Christian Selchau-Hansen started his career doing data-driven work at companies like Square and Zynga. Eventually, he wanted to see how data could be used to improve the most human aspect of business — the customer relationship. That’s exactly what he’s doing as the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an enterprise software company that optimizes the customer journey through personalized marketing experiences. Formation counts Starbucks as both a client and investor and has raised $30 million in funding, according to CrunchBase. It was also named one of the 50 most sought-after startups in the U.S. by LinkedIn.
Each week, GOBankingRates sets out to discover what makes the people behind top companies tick. We like to call this series “Best in Business” — and Selchau-Hansen really is one of the best. He told us why it’s important to not get caught up in the short term, his three-pronged approach to success and ways that you can find (or build) your own dream job, too. Below, find our favorite moments from the story of how Selchau-Hansen launched his business.
Motivation: 12 Inspiring Leaders Who Didn’t Strike It Rich ‘Til After 30
Our origins trace back to my time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at BCG Digital Ventures. I was there after stints at Square and Zynga, and [was] interested in developing some machine learning-enabled concepts. Early on, I met one of my co-founders. We envisioned a world where customer experiences and offers were personal, relevant and helpful — effectively, good for both the customer and the brand. We also saw a gap in the market, and so began working on a concept for an AI platform that could leverage data to truly engage the customer and deliver on our vision. Shortly thereafter, lightning struck.
That lightning came in the form of a delicious cup of coffee. We had the opportunity to pitch our idea to one of the world’s largest restaurant brands. It was an awesome meeting. Their aspirations for their customer relationship matched many elements of our vision. With our concept and vision validated, we set out to develop the concept further, and quickly test whether or not it would drive the kind of impact we believed it would.
Delivering highly engaging, individual experiences at enterprise scale is really complicated. Customers are not static creatures — they’re always in a state of flux. Machine learning seemed particularly suited to the challenge, being able to both conduct the deep analysis needed to surface customer motivations and adapt as the customer changes and grows. And that really was the genesis of Formation and our mission — to use artificial intelligence to build and deepen customer relationships.
Check Out: Learn About These Businesses That Are Changing the World
Working in mobile gaming was a crash course in customer engagement. After all, that’s what the gaming industry is ultimately selling — engaging customer experiences. Engaging games must be challenging without being frustrating; they must be tailored to the player’s abilities; they must be fun. Formation’s experiences reflect those lessons. Our intelligent multistep offers are specifically calibrated to the individual customer, with the right level of challenge and incentive. And by employing these lessons, our marketing experiences have a level of repeat engagement that’s on par with the best customer experiences.
There’s a trap that data-driven companies can fall into, where they focus on the short term, where data is more accurate and more granular, over the long term, where data is often less certain and less precise. That was definitely something we wanted to avoid — and for that matter, want to help our clients avoid. Data remains central to our decision-making, but we want to be sure we’re always broadening our investigative horizon and putting equal emphasis on our short- and long-term needs.
Tips: This Founder Thought Failure Might Be Inevitable — Until He Got Advice From Mark Cuban
Recruiting top talent is important for any startup, but the technical sophistication of our product gave our recruiting efforts an extra layer of complexity. We really needed to attract the best and the brightest in cutting-edge, in-demand specialties across engineering and machine learning. Initially, this seemed daunting. But as we started to tell our story, we found that people want to be challenged, to have an impact, to have fun.
By Raviv Turner
For years our customers have been telling us that using Agile marketing to learn fast, spend wisely, and optimize marketing campaigns has transformed their business. And the benefits don’t just come from our personal experience: a study conducted by MIT suggests that Agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than non-Agile organizations.
There are three simple metrics you could use today to measure Agile marketing success at the process level, which is a crucial step in optimizing operations. But what about all the time needed to train people and implement technology so operations can actually be optimized?
In other words, how do you prove the ROI of Agile marketing?
In this blog post, we will have some fun with basic math. Don’t worry — there’s no algebra or trig ahead. We’ll simply be using the power of compound interest to prove Agile marketing ROI to your boss.
“It’s not one high-level decision each year around marketing mix that makes or breaks us. It is the million little optimizations that we will make all year long that means the difference between success and failure of our marketing” – CMO of a global tech company
Let’s demonstrate the logic behind this CMO quote using something simple from your day to day life. If you do some basic money management for your household, then you’re already familiar with the concept of simple versus compound interest.
Simple interest is based on the principal amount of a deposit, while compound interest is based on the principal amount and the interest that accumulates on it in every period.
When you earn interest on savings, that interest then earns interest on itself and this amount is compounded monthly. The higher the interest, the faster your money grows!
If your team is still doing traditional marketing, where you use annual year-in-review, “hind-sighting” decks or post campaign wrap-up reports from your agency to run annual mix models to help reallocate spend, then your marketing ROI looks a lot like simple interest.
Let’s say you start with a $10 million marketing budget. You spend it, and then the next year you think, “Hey, I think we can get a little bit better” and get a little bit more budget. Then next year you review again, and so forth and so on. In this cycle you’re just getting simple interest.
However, if your marketing team can commit to the continuous course corrections that Agile marketing represents, then the benefits start building on themselves.
This is where you really unlock the power of compound interest. If you’re committed to ongoing agility and ongoing optimization, you can actually get much more out of your marketing dollars.
Let me explain this concept using the formula of compound interest calculation:
P = present value (the amount of money you have available)
i = interest rate (how much improvement you think you can get)
n = length of time
c = compounding interval (are you doing this once a year? multiple times per year?)
FV = future value (your outcome)
Here’s the marketing parallel you should use to demonstrate the ROI on Agile marketing:
P = Present Value of Your Marketing Dollars
How much are you committing to Agile marketing? Is it your whole marketing budget, or are you just devoting a little piece of your marketing spend to the Agile experiment? Whatever the amount of your marketing spend that you’re willing to optimize is your P value.
I = The Improvement
What improvement you think you can realistically get on reach, engagement, leads conversion etc.? Here you can use an industry benchmark, or even better your own historic data, if you have it, to hypothesize.
N = Length of Agile Marketing Optimization
How long will you commit to Agile marketing optimization? If you’re just doing a three-month pilot, then you can’t expect to see much change to your budget during that time (even though you’ll likely learn a lot about your Agile process).
On the other hand, if your team is embarking on an Agile marketing transformation for the next few years, you have a much longer time horizon to enjoy the benefits of compounding optimization.
C = Frequency
The C represents the compounding interval, or how frequently you’ll act and optimize your spend each year. If you only optimize annually, then your C=1.
However, let’s say you’re running two-week marketing Sprints, which you’re then using to measure and optimize, your C=26! The higher you can push your optimization frequency, the better your Agile marketing ROI.
FV = Effective Marketing Spend
The results of this formula essentially quantify how much farther your marketing budget will go after your recurring Agile optimizations.
This is the potential value of your usual marketing spend after running Agile marketing for the allotted time period.
Now that you understand how to prove Agile marketing ROI using compound interest calculation, let’s put the formula to work.
In our example below both Team A (Traditional Marketing) and Team B (Agile Marketing) have the same $1 million content marketing budget (p) and expect the same 20% lift (i) via Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
However, Team A is only committed to a 3 month pilot (n) while Team B is embarking on a 2 year commitment to Agile marketing.
Team A gets to optimize its content once a year (c), while Team B is running on two weeks Sprint and optimizes its copy, images, calls-to-action etc. every two weeks using Agile marketing measurement.
As you can see, Team B gets 10x the ROI (FV) on their content marketing budget using Agile marketing compared to Team A still on traditional marketing.
| Team A Traditional Marketing |
Team B Agile Marketing |
|
| P = Content Marketing Budget | $1,000,000 | $1,000,000 |
| I = Conversion Rate Optimization | 20 (%) | 20 (%) |
| N = Length of Optimization | 0.25 (3mo Pilot) | 2 (2yr Commitment) |
| C = Frequency of Action | 1 (Annual Optimization) | 26 (Bi-weekly Sprints) |
| FV = Effective Value | $1,046,635 | $1,489,543 |
| ROI | 4.6% | 48.9% |
Using Agile marketing allows you to enjoy compound interest on your marketing budget, rather than relegate your optimization efforts to an annual planning event.
If you’d like to play with the numbers yourself, here is a simple Agile Marketing ROI Calculator you can use.
When you live in an earthquake state, you’re highly attuned to things that don’t matter elsewhere. You’re aware, for example, of the open shelving in your kitchen – is the stemware so attractively displayed there vulnerable to shattering in one fell swoop? Do you have a decent insurance policy? Does your flashlight even have batteries? You’re always, to some extent, prepping for “the big one,” the quake all of the natural scientists warn about: the one that will compromise the ground we stand on, that we’ve built our houses on. The one that will change everything.
Today, the digital advertising industry is facing a major shakeup, and Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention rollouts, now officially at version 2.2, can be considered the first tremor. Cookie-based, cross-web user analytics has been, for a long time, the earth crust of this ecosystem – and it’s crumbling. Though perhaps not physically life threatening, marketers best not ignore the warning signs, because these rules and changes, once adopted more broadly across the web’s leading browsers and publishers, will indeed change everything.
So I’ll ask: does your flashlight even have batteries?
Suffice it to say, Apple’s ITP restrictions have made it more difficult for marketers to measure Safari traffic – who comprise 21% of mobile and 10% of desktop browser users worldwide (no insignificant chunk) – for remarketing, to accurately attribute conversions, and to run reliable A/B tests. By capping (even) first-party cookies to one day, your independent view of the behavior of your Safari base over time, across websites and devices, will be limited.
But what if you don’t live in an earthquake state? In other words, what if your Safari users are an even smaller than average portion of your specific audience? Consider that Google Chrome, where another 60% of mobile and 69% of desktop browser action takes place, is reportedly contemplating blocking third party cookies soon, as well. We still don’t know exactly when or to what degree Google will increase individual privacy protection by restricting cookies on Chrome, and we can expect it won’t be as extreme. Regardless, when it does, some of those limits will extend to the vast majority of your user base. In other words, the fault line is only expanding, and quick.
Since both your campaign optimizations and investment strategies are (hopefully!) based on this holistic, cross-channel understanding of your audience and their measured engagement with your brand, it’s easy to see how, without this very foundation, those wedding-registry champagne glasses you finally had a dinner party for are about to come tumbling off the shelf. Just when you started to feel good about your multi-touch attribution model and sophisticated retargeting strategy, ITP expansion will leave serious gaps in your ability to connect the dots between your customer touchpoints. Your marketing channels, long predicted to become more interconnected, are likely instead to appear more siloed than ever.
With measurement askew and opaque, the advertising and marketing platforms you rely on for AI-based actions and automation will need to rethink the inputs to their algorithms for optimization, which are based on performance data that may no longer be independently vetted. Audience strategy that relies on third-party data for creation and segmentation will need to learn to rely far more heavily on personification than personalization.
Oh yeah. And that best-practice, test-and-learn culture you’ve worked so hard to instill? You’re going to need to revisit that, because in this post-apocalyptic digital universe, the A/B tests of yore (read: Q1) are going to be much less meaningful based on a seven- or even one-day window of intel, after which all users, regardless of their history with your brand or exposure to another side of the split, are rendered unique again.
The good news is, as a customer, your privacy online will be safer; the data Wild West of the past few years has finally reached a reckoning. As a marketer, there’s a bright future ahead, too, albeit a different one. You’ll withstand the wobbles and see the other side of ITP if you’re thinking ahead and asking the right questions now.
But you are going to need a good flashlight.
Start by assessing your infrastructure: How strong are your in-house measurement and technical teams? If the garage is pretty well stocked with the expertise for building attribution and measurement models yourself, and you can absorb the significant R&D investment required, you may be able to set up an alternative to traditional cookie-based tracking, such as Custom Domain Tracking, which leverages server side capabilities, and won’t be affected by ITP2.2. Your third party ad tech platform may support such a solution, which registers its tracking servers in your domain via a CName record, allowing for durable cookie placement. It bears mentioning, though, that this is more of a short term fix; Safari or other browsers can still block it, if they choose to, and few advertisers will have the resources and infrastructure in place to implement it in the first place.
In a more broadly applicable approach, your technology provider can help fill in the conversion blanks left by Safari (and other tracking-prevented browsers) by modeling—AI-based estimations based on behavior across other browsers still unaffected by the restrictions. Sophisticated modeling can give you a more complete picture of the number of conversions that may have occurred on Safari but escaped attribution to paid media due to ITP. However, in order to be something you can really rely on for optimization, proper modeling should include a mix of data points from multiple publishers, and requires calibration from an external source like incrementality testing, a newer testing modality that, unlike A/B testing, can continue to be effective post-ITP. The approach measures the overall impact of added investment in any particular area on all conversions (rather than only those attributed) against a holdout group, and layers in secondary insights analyses such as overall incremental effect by mobile browser. This means you can not only capture lost conversions due to Safari ITP, but also those captured by other channels, like SEO, to understand the true value of your mobile investment.
Modeling comprises the two categories of tools integral to your measurement True North of tomorrow: counters and calibrators. Counters, such as analytics systems, third-party digital tracking, offline sales metrics, call tracking, and publisher data (think: reported conversions from Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like) record events and attribute them to specific entities, like keywords or ad campaigns. Increasingly fractured links between devices, media and websites mean that your once trusty counters will require further validation than they did until now. With Apple’s most recent update, and Google’s presumably on the horizon, it’s not only prudent to start leveraging promising new stats-based methods for calibration, like incrementality testing, or cross-device vendors with probabilistic models—it’s reckless not to. Combined, all of these measures can reveal the true holistic impact of your advertising investments, both across channels and within them.
In the long term, of course, you should be thinking about strategies for obtaining true first-party data from registered users. As from-the-horse’s-mouth becomes the holy grail, audience segmentation via any third party solution or data management platform (DMP) will be much more difficult, and having well developed first party audience management capabilities that much more critical. We’re likely to see new types of user subscriptions emerge, with reengineered expectations, such as heavily discounted subscriptions and more “freemium” models where the value exchanged isn’t monetary, but permissions-based.
The digital advertising industry is definitely an earthquake state, and it’s time to do a serious preparedness check-in, to assess what’s already happened, and to raise some what ifs within your marketing organization before the big one hits. How we got here is a layered and complicated tale of power, responsibility, and capability—but it both starts and ends with good intentions. For an industry that may have gone too far, ITP’s tough-love measures can offer a restart. Because as advertisers, media and technology platforms, we can do better. We actually can deliver highly relevant messages to our audiences, measure our efforts, and even respect privacy while we’re at it. We just need to change our approach.
Bonang Mohale is CEO of Business Leadership SA and cofounder and executive chair of SiSebenza.
By
The thing about marketing trends, particularly for B2B marketers, is that they change frequently. If you don’t stay on top of them, you risk missing out on serious potential for revenue growth and customer acquisition.
So what’s hot these days? What do you need to pay attention to and learn to embrace? Recently, I interviewed several industry leaders to see what they consider to be the most significant marketing trends happening right now.
Just a few years ago, personalization in marketing meant customizing an email to address the recipient by name. Brandi Smith, VP of demand generation marketing at Uberflip, says we’ve come a long way since then. Account-based marketing (ABM) and technology are being used to dive deep into an audience base to deliver highly personalized content, especially for B2B marketers.
If you don’t stay on top of the latest trends, you risk missing out on serious potential for revenue growth and customer acquisition. Industry leaders share what’s hot.
Smith says, “We can creep their social profiles to see what information is hot and trending to them, we can look at their company’s annual reports, and look at the footnotes or just the content in general to find out what might actually be a key focus in a key directive for their business moving into the new fiscal year.”
It’s necessary, she says, to use tools like artificial intelligence in meaningful ways to create a personal experience without the customer feeling like the company has crossed a line into creepy.
Nissar Ahamed, senior director of demand generation at Atomic Reach, agrees with Smith. “There’s too much noise, which makes it more difficult and also more expensive to create content that hits the mark and converts,” he says. And that’s why, according to Ahamed, hyper-personalized content based on the buyer’s journey, demographics, location, etc., make for much more effective marketing. He cites the example of emails that Amazon sends: no two are the same because they’re based on a shopper’s past history, profile, and demographics.
Ahamed encourages marketers to invest in tools and automation that can help personalize content in a meaningful and relevant way.
Though we’ve heard this claim already, “email marketing is just as effective today as before,” says Ahamed. That’s due, he says, to the fact that it’s become more integrated with content marketing to build audiences. As algorithms and advertising policies change on social media, it has become more difficult to own an audience there.
Meanwhile, reliable email marketing offers distribution and the ability to build an audience through an established and proven channel.
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Content marketing certainly isn’t a trend; it’s here to stay, but its delivery and consumption continue to evolve.
Gaurav Harode, founder and CEO of Enablix, sees that content is becoming more and more interactive. “So, right now we have static content, maybe some web content and video. But I think there is going to be a middle ground where there are going to be a lot of platforms and a lot of flexibility where content is going to be interactive,” he says.
One example Harode gives is calculators that businesses use to attract leads. You can use these calculators to calculate ROI, auto or home loan payments, and more. But what’s less obvious is these are interactive content tools designed to drive business to a company.
Ahamed concurs: “Content is no longer a siloed department within marketing.” He says it’s now a cross-team function, and he also sees more integration of content in other aspects of marketing, sales, and other departments.
Ahamed also says that 2019 is going to be the year of heavy exploration and implementation of artificial intelligence for brands. He believes that as companies of every size start to realize that AI isn’t there to replace humans and jobs—that it is, in fact, there to augment and complement those roles—more brands will adopt AI in innovative ways through marketing.
Smith also sees that chatbots are going to increase their presence in 2019. In fact, 35% of consumers would interact with one to resolve a complaint or problem, and 33% would use one to make a reservation at a restaurant or hotel.
There are plenty of marketing functions chatbots can serve, from directing a website visitor to a particular product, color, and size to offering instantly redeemable coupons. And as more brands find proven success with chatbots, we’ll see an increase in adoption as well as inspiration for how to use them to reach an audience.
If you’re serious about reaching your customers on their terms, pay attention to these trends. While they may evolve (or even disappear completely) over time, right now they are an effective means to build a real and sustainable relationship with your audience.
Feature Image Credit: weyo – Adobe Stock
I am the president of Ariad Partners, a marketing and sales firm specializing in creating breakthrough growth strategies for small to mid-market companies. I also blog about small business, lead generation, and sales at B2Community.com, AllBusiness.com, FoxBusiness.com, Business.com, HubSpot.com, Eloqua.com, and SharpSpring.com. Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.
By Krystal Manrique
Aside from your usual Facebook business page, having a Messenger chatbot is a great way to boost your brand awareness and your online presence. A Messenger chatbot can receive pizza orders, schedule meetings, and answer queries. Quite a number of brands are continually coming up with more and more ways to make this feature still more useful and effective.
With chatbot software widely available, you don’t have to be or hire a computer programmer in order to create one in just a matter of minutes. But when you make your chatbot, make sure that you provide a brief description for Facebook to check and verify and for users to read. You should also add your chatbot into the appropriate primary and secondary categories so you can reach your intended audience. Think about ten keywords that your target Messenger users will type into their chat line that would make Facebook’s algorithms show your chatbot link, and include these keywords among your bot’s properties as well. These are the minimum requirements to make your chatbot visible.
As simple as making a chatbot visible may be, it is very different from making it grow in popularity. You must craft a separate strategy to ensure that it gets the right amount of promotion so that more people will know, use, and spread the word about your bot. Here are a few things that will make more people subscribe to your Facebook Messenger chatbot:
Adding a social button to your website is one of the easiest ways to generate traffic for your Messenger chatbot. It is a great idea to give website visitors something to click through to go to or share content on your social media channels. A “Send to Messenger” button on your website is sure to enable more users to connect with your chatbot. You can do this by copying and pasting embed codes from your Facebook page that would bring the site visitors to your landing page. You may also use plugins. Adding a “Send Message” button on your Facebook business page itself may also help to generate traffic for your bot.
Instead of sharing as many pieces of content as you can, make a point of ensuring that your Facebook Messenger chatbot subscribers receive only the finest quality and most popular material so that they will not unsubscribe from you or worse, block you. Since your audience is most likely to engage with you on Facebook Messenger, don’t annoy them with spammy content. Be selective about the content that would want to propagate among them so that you don’t appear to be too invasive.
Click-to-Messenger ads can be used to reach out and attract potential subscribers among Facebook’s users. Not only will you be able to advertise your brand or service but you would generate more traffic for your Messenger chatbot as well. Those who will become interested will click your ad to be able to subscribe to your emails, online newsletters, announcements, podcasts, and other content. Just make sure to make a relevant and compelling ad that is strategically targeted towards an audience to make them more likely to click through. The team at Mobile Monkey with Larry Kim have developed an elite Facebook Advertising Virtual Summit that helps users understand more about Facebook advertising and best practices.
Adding a link to your Facebook Messenger chatbot along with your email signature in your emails can also help spread awareness for your bot. You can also insert your Twitter handle and other social media links. To see how effective this move is, add a UTM code to the link, or use a URL shortening service like bit.ly. Doing this will give you the stats as to how many people are clicking on the Facebook Messenger chatbot link embedded within your email signature.
Facebook’s Messenger Discovery Tab is another arena in which you can become more well-known. However, you will need to start by filling out Facebook’s submission form in order for your chatbot to be included in the Discovery Tab. Facebook’s algorithms will make your chatbot link appear in the Discovery Tab of Facebook users whose psychological profile would make them more likely to click your bot.
Today I have some branding strategies to help you create more visibility and increase your brand reputation. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your work week.
Establishing your business as a leader in our industry takes time and cultivation through the right relationships and marketing methods. Using the strategies can help you connect more with your audience and influencers. There are several ways to help you focus your efforts and improve awareness. Take advantage of these ideas, and let me know how these work for you!
Build a wider audience through offline marketing. With this strategy your business can reach interested prospects by being active and engaged with them at places like industry trade shows, concerts, book signings, and more. By making a personal connection you can create a memorable experience that will translate into your online properties as well.
People who trust your business enough will the spread the word online and offline. This is free advertising for your company that can have a continual payoff. As you build relationships within your niche through methods such as exclusive events, live video, and Twitter chats your customers will have an opportunity to share their experiences. As you take a positive, and encouraging approach with a high value offer you will begin to see your products or services being recommended by others online.
Make an action plan to connect with leaders in your industry. This will open the doors for guest blogging opportunities and recommendations that can help bring more visitors to your website and social networks. Engage on places like LinkedIn, Medium, and other blogs to attract more brand followers. After establishing your expertise and authority it won’t be long before your business or name is recommend on authority websites.
Would you like people to find your brand online quickly? This is a powerful and popular way to bring interested prospects into your business, provide a how-to segment, or showcase an expert interview. Hosting a podcast or uploading videos to YouTube are effective with both live and pre-recorded methods.
Hopefully you will find these brand reputation methods useful to your online strategy. Are there any that you would like to add as well?
Have fun with these tips and tools.
By
How can inbound marketing impact your customer’s happiness level? The answer might be in the reviews. The growth of social media has led to the growth of consumer power. If a customer loves a product, they have the power to recommend it to friends and family. If a customer felt like they didn’t receive a five-star experience, they have the power to let you know.
Due to the pressure of maintaining a positive online reputation, many brands are beginning to dedicate a customer service specialist to manage and monitor their online reputation. In fact, in 2018, 78 percent of people who complain to a brand via Twitter expect a response within an hour. If the customer holds the power to your online reputation, then shouldn’t they be the focus of your marketing strategy?
The way we communicate is evolving, and so is the way marketing operates. Traditional outbound marketing meant fighting for your potential customer’s attention. Inbound marketing differs because it is customer-centric. By generating content curated to tackle the needs and problems of your ideal customers, you appeal to qualified prospects and build confidence for your business.
Why is this important? Because “customer success is your success!” Reviews and customer opinions matter.
Eighty-one percent of people trust advice from friends and family over advice from a business. 69 percent do not trust advertisements.
Customers are your greatest marketers!
The inbound marketing process is known as a flywheel, while traditional outbound marketing is thought of as a funnel. This funnel starts with marketing, then trickles down to sales and ends with customers as an afterthought. The issue with the funnel is that the only way to grow is at the top because growth is confined to what you can put in for marketing efforts, which are becoming increasingly expensive.
Meanwhile, the flywheel places customers at the center. The customers are the driving force. The basic definition of a flywheel is a mechanism that stores energy and releases it. In a car, a flywheel is designed to keep an engine running even when you aren’t “pressing the gas pedal,” which is what your content is doing online. The flywheel concept forces you to really take stock and invest in your customers in order to achieve growth.
The flywheel puts the customer at the center with three elements based around the customer’s experience with your brand. The goal is for your content to keep attracting, engaging and delighting customers. There are three parts that make up the flywheel components:
Attract
In this stage, through relevant and helpful content you attract potential customers, they “enter your flywheel” and interact with your company for the first time.
Engage
In this stage, through conversational tools like chat and email, you engage with potential customers to promise continued value. In return, this influences the decision-making and purchasing process as early as possible.
Delight
In the final stage, you delight customers by continuing to act as an understanding guide and expert in your field. In return, it gives customers the potential to become advocates for your company.
The content necessary for creating a successful inbound marketing approach needs to pull rather than push. It needs to educate rather than interrupt, and it needs to provide value rather than to sell or persuade. Below are five unique ways to stand out while providing inbound content.
With Facebook Live the possibilities to offer inbound content are endless from expert interviews to meet the team specials and more! Customers watching also have the ability to comment and hit reaction buttons to what is happening during the live video. Through this tool you can provide customers with helpful knowledge in a creative and interactive way.
Instagram is a visually driven platform, but when helpful information is turned into a post it can be a game changer. Simply feature creative graphics, created on a program like Canva, which contain blog-like information in either a carousel or single image that provides customers with tips, knowledge, or tools. It’s a growing way to grab a potential customer’s attention.
Who doesn’t like FREE? By offering a free trial of an online service or e-book, you have a chance to catch your potential customer’s attention with a more in-depth story than a short social media blurb, and the customer feels they are getting something of value in return. The most efficient way to offer a free trial is to have potential customers enter their contact information in a form. That way you have the ability to engage with them in the near future.
People love content that is ready-to-use and a template can really appeal to a customer. For example, a social media manager can offer a free calendar template for planning posts. An accountant can offer a simple excel template for formulas. The most efficient way to offer a free template is to offer the download after a potential customer enters their email in a form. That way you have their contact information to engage with them in the future.
Podcasts are becoming extremely popular as many people are on the go! Fifty one percent (144 million) of the US population has listened to a podcast – up from 44 percent in 2018. Potential customers can listen to podcasts while commuting, working or just on their own time. A podcast gives you a unique chance to humanize your brand through your voice and stories. According to Podcast Insights, Podcast listeners are much more active on every social media channel (94 percent are active on at least one – vs 81 percent for the entire population). This is important to note for the delight stage of the flywheel.
We are entering into the review revolution where customers have more power than brands do. Your best marketers are your customers.
By building a flywheel, you can take advantage of the power of your customers’ influence through inbound marketing. Using a flywheel strategy you can transform your company by doubling down on customer success. It’s not easy and it can be costly to make this change in your organization, but it’s an important one to get right.