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How to Effectively Use Storytelling to Attract a Larger Brand Following

May 29, 2017 No Comments

In order to establish a credible personal brand that people trust you need great content that speaks directly to them. Without this you will not be successful in your lead generation and conversion rates.

How can your brand better connect with your community in an authentic way? A compelling brand story will make them want to spread the word about your company. Publishing and promoting content is not enough to hold people’s attention any more, and with a little effort and target market research you can reach out to your community and create loyal brand ambassadors.

Social media marketing is not about selling, but rather about meeting the needs of your customers, and presenting a message that solves their biggest problems. There are several ways to attract followers to your personal brand with a powerful story.

Steps to building a winning storytelling content strategy:

Today’s brand message comes from being real with your audience. It takes transparency and building relationships through your marketing execution to make this work:

1. Improve your content

Educate yourself and find out what is working well in your industry today. If video garners more attention then focus on that. Some businesses have a higher number of followers from mobile than computers. Do some research to learn where your community is active the most and the types of content they prefer then adjust yours according to this data.

2. Send invitations to connect

Stay in touch with your subscribers and brand followers on social media. Provide them with valuable offers and information that can be helpful in solving their needs. Use this as an opportunity to not sell, but build relationships with them.

3. Create a sales page

Once you have established a good following create a separate sales page where they can go to learn more about your products and services. This is the place where your actual sales pitch comes in, and is best done through testimonials and real-life examples such as a video from a happy client.

Storytelling for your personal brand is a great way to connect more with your leads and customers. Attract new customers with creative ideas that have a profound impact on their lives and tell the story of your company.

Image credit: Shutterstock

By Susan Gilbert

This story originally appeared on Personal Branding Blog

Sourced from Entrepreneur

Amazon: Mistakes Brands Make

May 11, 2017 No Comments

By Laurie Sullivan,

Optimizing products to rank in Amazon’s marketplace is very different compared with optimizing for Google, Bing or Yahoo, according to CEO Casey Gauss, 24, cofounded Viral Launch, a 23-person company based in Indianapolis.
“Sometimes the specifics on Amazon are counterintuitive to business logic,” Gauss said. “Marketers don’t realize that recognizable national brands could grow much easier on Amazon if they just put in the same effort that smaller private-label brands do.”

Marketers from major brands typically think their brand power will drive sales on Amazon, so they don’t optimize product listings and run campaigns in the marketplace as they would on Google, Bing or Yahoo search engines, he said. Their lack of knowledge and willingness to put in the effort creates a huge opportunity for third-party sellers to come in and dominate the space.

The young entrepreneur boasts 16,000 product launches from 3,500 brands, with some experiencing a 250% increase in revenue. A couple of those brands are Fortune 500 companies, he said.

According to Feedvisor’s State of the Amazon Marketplace 2017 study released Thursday, almost 50% of third-party sellers surveyed said they sell almost exclusively on Amazon, but 59% of them plan to expand elsewhere in 2017.

Private-label sales continue to play a strong role on Amazon. Nearly one-third of sellers sell at least some private-label items, and 18% sell private-label items exclusively, per the study.

Search on the generic keywords “duffel bag” and the well-known brands like Nike and Samsonite are not the first products in the list to serve up. The first products are from obscure brand that most consumers don’t know, but these are companies employing marketers who understand how to optimize product listings for searches in Amazon. They know how to drive keyword ranking and know the nuances of the platform.

Here’s another tip from Gauss for those optimizing copy in Amazon: Put a colon or a hyphen punctuation mark after the fifth word in the title because it changes the canonical URL for Google, which helps boost rankings in the search engine.

Also, depending on some product subcategories, words after a colon on a bulletted point in Amazon are not indexed in Google.

So what are some of the other big mistakes that brands make when running and optimizing search campaigns in Amazon? Redundancy in descriptions and weak bulletted points that often serve up at the top of the page with the words “Imported” or “Made in China,” Gauss said. He added that there is nothing wrong with products being made in China, but marketers wouldn’t add that bulletted point in a sitelink on Google AdWords, so why would they do it on Amazon? Instead, marketers would write “beautiful copy” to let consumers know about the “amazing features” of the product.

Keyword stuffing is another tactic used on Amazon. Yes, Amazon allows brands to keyword stuff, whereas Google does not, per Gauss. He said the word “sales” is the largest driver of keyword ranking on Amazon. “It’s not nearly as complex as Google,” he said.

Amazon shoppers are not digging as much into the nuances of what the products are made of if the information isn’t readily available. They might look at the reviews and price, but take the readily available information at face value. One thing is certain, he said — Amazon’s ranking algorithm has not yet adapted to consumer behavior. It’s still young.

If nothing else, being well-optimized on Amazon improves a consumer’s perception of the brand.

By Laurie Sullivan,

Sourced from MediaPost

How do Brands Overcome Email Fatigue?

December 14, 2016 No Comments

By Kalpit Jain.

Personalized communication brings in 40-50% higher results than any other digital campaign.

The internet in India has seen explosive growth and penetration in the last decade. Demographics from Tier II and Tier III markets today have shown high rates of digital consumption and smartphone penetration. Multiple applications such as email, Facebook, Whatsapp etc., are now widely used in these markets. India has over 370 to 400 million mobile users and 325 million smartphone users. Because of the popularity of digital, the quality of messaging has become critical for B2C brands to market their offerings effectively. The communication that goes to consumers has to be relevant, effective, substantial, and on time.

How are brands finding the ‘connect’ with their audience?

A lot of brands today have started tracking their consumers’ preferences and needs by tracking the digital footprints that they leave on multiple digital channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, etc. For example, when a consumer visits an e-commerce brand, he or she leaves a digital footprint on the website or on the app. Brands can use these footprints to create a profile for each consumer that lists their likes, purchasing patterns, and the medium on which information is accessed (desktop/mobile). The brands can then customize their content based on their consumer’s preferences in order to better engage with them. Advanced digital technology in the marketing space, called MarTech, is now available for consumer brands to help gather information about their consumers. Brands are now able to easily find out the amount of time a person spends on a particular page online and for how long they scan a product; this data is captured by a digital marketing technology platform that helps the brand design content tailored to their consumers’ needs. Another way to successfully engage with consumers is to connect in real-time through marketing technology and automation.

Connecting effectively via email

Contrary to the opinions of some marketers today, email marketing is not on its way out. In fact, recent trends have shown that email consumption has increased recently. The prime reason for the increase is that the medium is still considered to be an extremely credible source of information if packaged with relevant and crisp content. Before the internet became available on mobile devices, most people did not check their personal email more than twice a day, as they needed to be at a computer to do so. Now however, with increased smartphone penetration, people tend to sync their email on their mobile phones and access their email regularly.

Smartphone penetration has tripled email usage. With email, the key to effective email engagement is personalisation. Brands need to identify and analyze the medium through which the content is accessed by the consumer – desktop or mobile, based on which they can structure the content.

Segmentation also plays a vital role in brand message delivery. The market is now moving toward mass, one-to-one personalization. Email is frequently used in the e-commerce sector since digital is the only market universe for those brands and they get to track ROI digitally.

About 50-70% of their revenue is generated on a daily basis through email as a channel.

That proves that the dependency on email marketing is extremely high in the Indian market. Offline retail brands are focusing on mobile for marketing purposes. They now have realized that they need to obtain the digital identity of consumers in order to be able to engage with them. Mobile marketing is considered a more intrusive form of communication compared to email and even the banking sector uses mobile as a medium, mostly for transactional purposes.

Brand engagement with consumers via mobile

There has been a decline in SMS marketing with the rising popularity of Whatsapp and other messaging apps. SMS is also relatively expensive and has a character limit of 160 characters. Numerous regulations on the use of SMS for product promotion is another reason for its decline.

However, an optimal combination of both email and mobile mediums is what consumer brands usually deploy. SMS is used in the initial phase, to gather information about consumer behavior especially in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. Then email and voice communication/push notifications are used to communicate with and market to the customer. Push notifications as a channel is becoming increasingly popular for mobile marketing. A recent example of the same is the recent currency demonetization where brands used digital marketing in the form of push notifications to promote their services for transactions.

Omni-channel engagement

A lot of companies are looking at a mix of both email and mobile marketing to create an omni-channel platform to market their products/services. Through MarTech, consumer brands are channelizing their messaging on different mediums. There is a lot of research and innovation underway in email marketing. Marketers are now inserting real-time content in their emails.

For example, in the event of a flash sale of a particular brand on a particular date, brands can send out real-time emails to their consumers to lure them to the sale. This means that when a consumer opens their email inbox, they will receive real-time information on the exact number of hours left to make the most of the sale. This technology updates the content based on the time that the consumer accesses the mail. Another emerging trend in email marketing is video emailing.

Summing up

Millennials are estimated to be a brand’s most coveted customer segment thanks to their higher annual purchasing power in the coming years. To create relationships with this demographic, omni-channel connections are required, given their habits and consumption behavior. While email helps build personalized connections with consumers, SMS helps to engage with on-the-go consumers.

Through marketing technology, the content that a brand shares with its consumers are bifurcated and developed according to different age segments and their preferred medium of communication. Sending the same data to the same set of customers is usually not very effective and creates content fatigue.

Here, marketing technology plays a vital role by helping brands customize their messaging based on consumer needs. Recently, we have seen that personalized, triggered communication brings in 40-50% higher results than any other digital campaign for consumer brands.