Digital Marketing Archives - Page 13 of 17

In News

7 Ways to Promote your E-commerce Product without Being Salesy

May 31, 2018 No Comments

By Lucy Benton

Have you spent thousands of dollars on an online campaign but haven’t seen the results you have expected once the campaign is over? If the campaign was all about letting everybody know how amazing your product is and what excellent features it holds, then the reason for the lack of success is obvious. People probably did not respond well to your ads because they were focused on the brand or product. Modern market asks for a different type of approach when it comes to building up customer awareness for your business.

No matter how powerful and compelling your marketing content is, clients need more to become confident about your brand. There are new e-commerce businesses popping out almost every day so why should anyone trust the word of brand A instead of brand B? To capture the audience and create a bond between you and your client base, there must be some sort of personal relation among the two sides. The customers want to see you caring, not just thinking about how to get them into buying your product.

The best way to communicate with your audience is through social networks, as they offer the most ways to interact. This, however, doesn’t mean flooding everyone’s feed with status updates and promotional content. Your social network activities should be versatile and offer everyone a chance to speak their mind as well as bring your product closer, through creative non-sales related content. It’s less about pushing the sale and more about showing the effort and devotion put into your product.

Simply put, the audience is interested in what you have to say about your business, but what really makes the difference is what everybody else has to say about your brand. There are several ways to promote your business in a manner that doesn’t seem generic and won’t bounce people back but inspire them into wanting to know more about you. Marketing experts at College Paper went to work and created an easy to understand infographics depicting some of the best online marketing strategies. We encourage you to take a look and see how easy it is to bring your business to a whole new level by simply putting an extra effort into your social network marketing activities.

By Lucy Benton

Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, business consultant and helps people to turn their dreams into the profitable business. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. Also Lucy has her own blog Prowritingpartner.com where you can check her last publications. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Twitter.

Sourced from Irish Tech News – Alison McGuire

In News

5 Easy Ways You Can Turn B2B Marketing into Success

May 2, 2018 No Comments

By Brown Hill

These Strategies Can Be Utilised To Increase Leads, Return On Investment And, Most Importantly, Sales

The world of B2B marketing is ever evolving, and today’s marketing team needs to be able to adopt new strategies and leverage a mix of technologies that educate, engage and increase conversions. Having a well-defined strategy is the key to improving the effectiveness of your B2B marketing efforts. There is no scope for any mistakes in B2B marketing. Because if you fail to impress one company about your services, then your potential target audience shrinks immediately.

Today we are going to cover the top five B2B marketing strategies that you can use to increase leads, return on investment (ROI) and, most importantly, sales.

Content Marketing

Most companies do a great job of explaining what they do but fail when it comes to using more dynamic content (blogs, videos, infographics) to show how they can help. You may have heard this repeatedly, but content marketing continues to rule strong for B2B marketers. In the past, a sales representative, dealer, or channel partner was the key point of contact for gathering information.

Content continues to cover the web and for performance-oriented marketing professionals, finding new and creative ways to show content can be a real challenge. According to a recent study by Regalix, 80% of senior marketers said creating marketing collateral is a top priority. In another study by TopRank, the most effective content marketing tactics according to B2B marketers are:

In-person events (70%)
Case studies (65%)
Videos (63%)
Webinars (63%)
Blogs (62%)
Newsletters (60%)
White papers and research reports (59%)

Interactive B2B content possibilities are only as limited as your imagination, and budget. Your writers should prepare a content-based experience for the target audience so that they fall in love with your services quickly.

Build Relationships

All marketing activities should be directed to establishing, developing and maintaining successful relationships with customers. Customer satisfaction is imperative to the success of any B2B company. Without happy customers, a business will struggle to achieve the rest of its goals. Your customer support team can help maintain positive relationships and improve customer retention rates.

Here are 5 ways to improve your B2B relationships:

Know yourself.
Re-imagine your B2B relationships.
Consider “scalability” in all that you do.
Find B2B partners with complementary technology.
Improve trust to enhance further partnering.

Large or small, improving your relationship with each and every prospect will undoubtedly have a positive effect on your ability to generate more, high quality leads now and in the future.

Make a Relevant Call To Action

Do you want to boost email engagement and conversion rates for your brand? No matter your business, CTAs can help you engage subscribers and encourage them to take action. Good CTAs build brand awareness, increase web traffic, and ultimately result in more conversions and sales.

Why Are Calls-to-Action So Important?

For those of you new to Inbound, strong CTAs are an essential part of a conversion path and the lead generation process. Check out the Act-On Center of Excellence to find resources that help you create more effective emails and landing pages in order to optimize the results of your next campaign.

The use of effective calls to action by email can help you generate conversions, but they are not all you need to consider for an effective email strategy. All of your website’s power comes to a fine point in the CTA. The user’s action is what it’s all about. Once you understand the basic of what a CTA is, its function, purpose, and appropriate content and use, you can create CTAs that improve conversion.

Digital Marketing Channels

What are the top digital marketing channels for your company? Is it Email Marketing, PPC, SEO, partnership program? Before starting to plan an effective digital marketing strategy, you must understand the different channels of digital marketing. The digital marketing has introduced several digital marketing channels that help advertisers target the right audience and attract them to the product or service that is marketed.

Popular Digital Marketing Channels

Social Media Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Email Marketing
Content Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Display Advertising
Online PR

By setting up a digital marketing campaign for your company, you cannot rely on just one resource to generate all the results you want. The right digital marketing channel for your brand or business also depends on your brand’s business goals. Each marketing channel has to be evaluated for its relevance in your overall marketing strategy and needs to be aligned in keeping with your business objectives. With so many companies turning towards digital marketing, it’s important that you pull your socks up and make optimal use of what you can.

Marketing Automation

However, for B2B marketing specialists, evolving technology is not always a bad thing. The evolution of marketing automation is creating new opportunities for marketers to deliver better quality leads to their sales teams, bridge the gap between marketing and sales, and measure their direct impact on their business.

As companies that provide B2B services look to implement more effective marketing strategies, marketing automation has become one of the most useful tactics being implemented. In fact, the use of marketing automation by B2B companies increased by 1100% between 2011 and 2015.

Faced with these challenging market dynamics and increasing ROI pressure, B2B marketers at companies of all sizes can gain these benefits from a marketing automation:

Perfecting the Client Experience
Lead Nurturing
Increase in Revenue
Decreases Lead Conversion Time.
Reduce Marketing Costs
Customer Retention
Receive Multi-Channel Efficiency

As it stands today, business competition has reached cutthroat levels, and the marketing landscape is no exception. Now is the time to re-examine your essentials, take an inventory of current capabilities and talk with your marketing automation section and other marketing and sales technology providers.

Note: The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views held by Inc42, its creators or employees. Inc42 is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by guest bloggers.

By Brown Hill

Sourced from Inc42

In News

How Branding Can Help Your Customers Choose Your Business

April 30, 2018 No Comments

By Alex Schnee

When you are looking for new ways to encourage customers to find your business and be excited about what you do, you might need to take a look at how you are choosing to brand yourself. Branding might seem like something that you don’t really need to do in order to find success as a company, but you would be surprised to know how much it can end up helping you.

Here are some ways you might want to reconsider your brand and the type of audience you are reaching.

Branding targets customers

Do you know exactly who you want to attract as a customer and why? It’s not always easy to describe your ideal client unless you’ve taken some time to brand yourself properly and to know what type of customer would be attracted to your product or service. By developing a brand, you’re taking the time to know who you are reaching and why, what your buyer’s habits are, and how you can best market to those who will deliver results.

Branding creates a recognizable image

Most companies that do well are ones that stand out a bit from the crowd. Either they have taken the time to differentiate themselves from the competition in the market, or they are seen as the top competitor. When you can easily recognize a logo or a business model, then a company is already one step ahead in terms of marketing and being competitive on the market. Having a recognizable face as a business can bring in new customers because they are already aware of your reputation.

Branding can create your marketing strategy

If you’ve had trouble putting together a comprehensive marketing strategy for your business, then it might be time to consider whether you are getting the message across through your branding. Your strategy should be based around what you are trying to convey with your brand and the types of customers that you want to reach. This can mean investing in better content, advertising, and the use of social media in order to achieve what you want.

Branding can create reputation

Some of the biggest names in several industries do not necessarily create better products than their competitors, but they do have a reputation to rest on. When customers know what to expect from your business, you are creating a brand name that has a connotation of caring for clients. Consistency tends to be key when you want to develop a brand that customers feel like they can rely on. Reputation can either make or break a business, so it’s in every company’s best interest to foster a positive one and to take the time to use branding as a tool for creating a quality reputation that will last.

Branding deserves time and effort and evaluation of how you can approach new customer. Because it is such an essential part of a business and how you choose to market yourself, sitting down and developing a strategy can go a long way toward creating repeat and consistent business in the long run.

By Alex Schnee

The Wayfaring Voyager

I’m an explorer in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and first and foremost a writer.I have worked as a freelance writer for years and have been published in publications such as the Huffington Post, Elite Daily, the Price of Travel, Pink Pangea, and many others. I was also formerly the Generation-Y blogger at Wanderlust and Lipstick and I am currently USA Today’s 10Best Local Expert on Florence, Italy.

Sourced from customer THINK

In News

How to Get Payback from Instagram?

April 11, 2018 No Comments

By Walter Moore

Choosing Instagram for business provides huge opportunities to reach 700 million potential followers who can positively impact your business fortune. Yes, the number of Instagram users crossed the 700 million mark almost a year ago. The most positive aspect of Instagram is the outlook of Instagrammers towards business. They are eager and ready to engage with it both within the app and beyond.

The business friendliness of the social media platform becomes evident from the fact that numerous business brands enjoy the interaction with 120 million users on the platform. This is great news for SEO because all Instagram business accounts carry links to the business websites that enjoy the patronage of the Instagram traffic. It thus becomes clear that Instagram can reinforce your SEO campaign and make it more effective. That 80 percent Instagram users track (follow) at least one business is the reason that more and more businesses are turning to Instagram as the chosen social media platform.

Connect with real people

Since followers are at the core of your Instagram performance, it is natural that people often go into overdrive to expand their fan base. While you can buy Instagram views that can prop up your business albeit artificially, garnering the attention of viewers organically would ensure that you interact with real people only. Unless you have meaningful interaction with real people, you can never derive the real gains for business. Only when people take an interest in your niche, build a relationship with you and engage with your content that you can develop a band of loyal followers that no bots can match.

For succeeding with Instagram, you must know your target audience and have the means of connecting with them. You must create powerful content that provides a meaningful way of building followers comprising of real people who can contribute to better business results. What you should do to develop real followers that can pay back to your business would become clear on going through the remaining part of this article.

Have a sound strategy for Instagram

To ensure that you can justify the returns on investment, you must have a good plan for using Instagram as a marketing platform. Be clear about what you want to achieve by using the platform, mostly it could be for boosting SEO so that you can devise suitable strategies for implementing the plan. It would point out the audience that you must target to fulfill your business goals.

Know what competitors are doing

By researching on what your competitors are doing, you could know what kind of realistic following you should expect. It would also help to know what kind of content would work for you, the frequency of posting content, what are the key industry hashtags including branded hashtags and more. You would also gain insight into how other businesses interact and engage with the audience that you are trying to reach.

Set goals

Set goals to achieve because it forms the foundation of the Instagram strategy. Consider your overall business and marketing strategy to get leads about how you must frame your Instagram strategy that aligns with the business goals. Whether you want to drive more traffic to websites, build brands or support the SEO and marketing campaign, the platform can support you well.

Give a purpose to your content

Create a compelling story that you can tell by using images that would give a purpose to the content and make it interesting. When there is a purpose behind the content, it creates engagement among the audience you target and would lead to sharing of content that opens the doors for would-be followers. You can share some inside information about your products, uphold how others perceive the brand or present the brand by showing how it has received the wholehearted acceptance of customers.

Engage in cross promotion

Since the purpose of taking your business on Instagram is to acquire high visibility that leads to increased followers, an easy way of doing it is to propagate your Instagram content and account on other social media channels through cross promotion. As you are likely to have business accounts on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. you must make those fans aware of your Instagram account. By mentioning your Instagram account on other social media platforms and by incentivizing them to visit your Instagram account, you can drive more followers to your account. You can even publish your Instagram posts on other channels.

Hashtags must be relevant

The hashtags have to be relevant to the industry niche or your business so that potential followers who are keen to engage with photos and content relevant to your business would be able to discover you. This would lead to the enrichment of the follower base. When creating hashtags make sure that you infuse enough originality into it that makes it exclusive for your business. Indeed, you must take a cue from popular hashtags by using the search function of Instagram, but you must add your creativity to it. However, you must avoid the lure of going overboard to create hashtags that can be quite weird. Also, avoid using gimmicks in hashtags that might momentarily seem profitable but would keep you away from engaging with real people meaningfully.

Drive people to your Instagram account from all channels of communication

You must not lose any opportunity to showcase your Instagram account and must use all communication tools at your disposal to drive more traffic to Instagram. Spread the Instagram links on all social media platforms and website as well as in online newsletters and e-mail signature so that whenever people visit those places, they know about your Instagram account. Since these people already know you, they would not hesitate to visit your Instagram account. Even providing Instagram links or hashtags in blog posts would further expand the horizon of followers that originate from the blogs.

How much advantage you get from Instagram depends on your capabilities of using the platform correctly.

By Walter Moore

Sourced from iamWIRE

In News

10 Trends That Will Reshape Digital Marketing in 2018 and Beyond

April 10, 2018 No Comments

By Charulata Ravi Kumar.

AI will play a critical and ever increasing role in 2018 and beyond and marketers must invest and ride these trends effectively

Today, digital trends seem to be fashionably altering too rapidly to keep pace with. What’s not keeping up is an organization’s agility to adapt. Social platforms have made it imperative for marketers to be the first or be scrolled out and in the fusillade of messaging, a consumer trolls down any that is not unique or irrelevant.

10 important trends will define the marketing framework of organizations. Five of which are in the organization process framework and five are emerging trends driven by consumer preferences. To be able to ride this hyper-wave, we need to ask ourselves a few questions… everyday!

Transforming a legacy organization to a dynamic one requires a fundamental change in thinking, structure and process evolutions. The more visionary ones that lead the way will be the change makers, large or small in size irrespective.

Five Organizational Trends That Will Impact Digital Marketing Frameworks

Structure on Demand – Legacy organization structures are a bane to its agility. Unless the entire internal eco-system is networked to remove all hurdles and expedite the process from idea to end delivery and service management, the threat of getting disrupted hangs sword on its head. Organizations will be forced to create “structure on demand” teams that emerge and dissolve to needs without the baggage of the old-fashioned matrix reporting hierarchies. Marketing will no longer be the sole ownership of the marketers but will be split into specialized parts being led by experts.

Leader on Demand – A ‘Structure on Demand’ will also require ‘Leaders on Demand’. Leadership too will become more project based than a fixed organization structure based since solutions at any point in time will require a very different set of leadership skills suited to a particular project. The concept of a universal leadership will loose its appeal in the coming years and we are beginning to see this trend in the more progressive marketing organizations.

New Marketing Roles – With the core of marketing shifting from brand-centricity to unique Customer Experience (CX) creation, traditional designations of digital marketing and channel marketing etc will start to disappear. Marketing teams will be led by CX Managers, Omnichannel Managers, Content Marketers & Design Managers. Digital by itself will no longer be a role as it become ubiquitous in the organisation.

The Marketing FlexiForce: The future will be run by young professionals, especially in fast changing markets like India. And these young bees choose flexibility and freedom over fixed pay and formula. Ubiquitous digital makes remote talent leverage possible and allows for speed of innovation and delivery making marketing super agile. Transcending time zones keeps the engine running 24×7, a new expectation that customers are demanding.

Automated Marketing – Automation in marketing platforms and programmatic deliveries will also be complemented with automated CRM processes relieving organizations of its dependence on human timelines and errors. Visionary organizations are building strong capabilities in automating the infrastructure for production and logistics to support this speed-need of marketing teams. Stronger inter-dependencies will be established between departments forcing co-marketing KPIs across functions.

Five Trends That Will Reshape Digital Marketing and the Brand-Customer Equation

No two global markets are in the same level of digital maturity and so reflect trends unique to each. However, they do converge at some level on customer choices of the 3 Vs – video, voice and visual. This is of particular significance in lower literacy geographies and multi-lingual needs that drive new trends in search and social platforms.

Mobile Video on Demand (VoD)

VoD is now a no-brainer. Over a billion hours of video consumption daily by Youtube viewers, over 8 billion videos by Facebookers and with equally staggering numbers on Twitter and Snapchat, it is no surprise that over 87% of online marketers use video content. But the next wave of VoD will be the increase of what I call “RFC Content” I.e. Relevant, Forwardable & Commercializable Content. Much of what we see is a churn out of the old advertising style with tear-shedding emotional messages. The rise of this medium will be in geometric proportions. Especially in the inner markets, over-riding language and literacy barriers propelled by increase in mobile connections will see a rise in Product and Conversational Content; and Commerce embedded social content taking over.

Voice as the Primary Tool for Search and Social Media

Perhaps not fully leveraged all through 2018, but this will clearly become a growing trend in the near future. Human lethargy to type as well as lower literacy levels in inner markets will catalyze this shift. Marketers will be wiser to create voice based interactive modules that can engage users better than verbose text to provide information. So better fine tune that voice of yours as you begin to leave voice-prints all over the net!

Visual Search Over Text

Image search, together with voice search, will ease the tedious task and errors of type search. The Power of Google Lens and its immense application potential will open up great possibilities in sectors such as Travel, Healthcare, Education, Fashion to name a few. Marketers must collaborate with leaders in visual search tools to leverage this for their brands early and even participate in its Beta stage.

Augmented and Interactive Video Group Chats

Still in its nascent stage, this trend will be a definite enhancement of chat platforms that are currently very text restrictive. And as voice and video grow in search and social use, this natural extension will bring like-minded social groups closer together and creating stronger but closed peer to peer influence groups. Marketers will need to create data access points to weave into these micro group chats and use extensive AI to leverage conversations to their advantage.

Customer Becomes the New Big Influencer

Already a trend in the West, the trend of customer-certified products will rise and brand claims will lose relevance on hard sell promotions. Social influencers are already impacting purchase decision amongst the netizens and the credibility they bring steadily peels off the delusive claims of celebrity endorsers. And now, customer influencers are beginning to add a whole new dimension of post purchase review authenticity. Organizations must work on managing long term customer relations to ensure these brand ambassadors are active throughout their product use journey.

AI will play a critical and ever increasing role in 2018 and beyond and marketers must invest and ride these trends effectively. Simply embedding the features to their digital assets will yield little result and ROIs will be under the scanner. Marketers are getting overly swayed by content storytelling. That’s great for a few awards if it tugs at the heart but smart digital presence has to bear concrete business results and marketers who seamlessly integrate the organizational fluidity with agile innovative customer solutions will wear the crown and hold the shield with pride.

Feature Image credit: Shutterstock

By Charulata Ravi Kumar

Director of Digital Marketing at SP Jain School of Global Management

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

Digital Marketers Will Devote More Resources to Online Reputation Management in 2018

March 28, 2018 No Comments

Online reputation management is very necessary all of a sudden.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Businesses say they plan to allocate more resources to their online reputations in response to the growing popularity of social media and online reviews.

According to a new survey from Clutch, 40% of businesses will increase their investment in online reputation management (ORM) this year.

All this is due to the growing power of social media and third-party reviews sites, which impact businesses’ control over their online reputation.

Clutch surveyed 224 digital marketers and found that more than half of businesses (54%) consider ORM “very necessary” for success. As a result, 34% said they allocated more resources to ORM in 2018, and an additional 43% said they plan to hire a professional public relations or ORM agency in 2018.

Businesses already invest a significant amount of time observing their online reputation, Clutch found. More than 40% of digital marketers (42%) monitor their companies’ brand online daily, while 21% monitor their online reputation hourly.

According to public relations experts, businesses frequently monitor how their brand is portrayed online because they know even one negative media mention can quickly damage the public’s perception of their company.

“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” explained Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK. “If potential customers find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”

Social media also has shifted the ORM landscape because it gives consumers free-reign to share their opinions and experiences quickly and frequently: 46% of businesses look to social media most often to monitor their online reputation.

By using professional agencies that have expertise in online reputation management, businesses can minimise losing new customers who may be dissuaded from purchasing their product or service.

To read the complete report, click here.

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In News

Getting People to Focus on your Product Will Make Them Desire It More

March 27, 2018 No Comments

Here’s why you need to get your advertising to zoom in.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

The relationship between desire and attention was long thought to only work in one direction: When a person desires something, they focus their attention on it.

Now, new research reveals this relationship works the other way, too. Increasing a person’s focus on a desirable object makes them want the object even more – a finding with important implications for marketers seeking to influence behaviour.

The study, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, is the first to demonstrate a two-way relationship.

“People will block out distraction and narrow their attention on something they want,” said Anne Kotynski, author of the study. “Now we know this works in the opposite direction, too.”

In marketing, advertisements with a hyper focus on a product’s desirable aspect – say zooming in on the texture of icing and frosting – might help sell a certain brand of cake.

Findings suggest the ad could be targeted to people who have shown an interest in a similar product, such as running the cake commercial during a baking show.

This finding also works in other areas outside advertising too. For example, doctors could potentially help their patients develop a stronger focus on healthy activities that they may desire but otherwise resist, such as exercising or eating a balanced diet.

The study’s findings also add a wrinkle to knowledge of focus and emotion. According to a spate of previous research, positive emotions, such as happiness and joy, widen a person’s attention span, while negative emotions such as disgust and fear, do the opposite: narrowing a person’s focus.

“We conceptualise fear as drastically different from desire,” Kotynski said. “But our findings contribute to growing evidence that these different emotions have something key in common: They both narrow our focus in similar ways.”

The findings also fit the notion that both of these emotions – fear (negative) and desire (positive) – are associated with evolutionarily pursuits that narrowed our ancestors’ attentions.

For example, fear of predators motivated attention focused on an escape route, while an urge to mate motivated focus on a sexual partner.

“If a person has a strong desire, research says this positive emotion would make them have a wide attention span,” Kotynski said. “Our research shows we developed a more beneficial behaviour around desire: focusing our mental energy on the important object, much like fear would.”

The study

Study participants were shown images of desserts mixed in with mundane items. They were instructed to pull a joystick toward them if the image was tilted one direction and push the stick away if it was tilted the opposite direction. Researchers recorded the reaction time of each.

Participants who responded fastest to pull the images of desserts were those whose attention had been narrowed. Responses were much slower to the mundane, and for participants whose attention was broad, suggesting narrowed attention increases desire for desserts but not for everyday objects.

The study used dessert pictures to measure reaction time because such images have been shown to increase desire across individuals, most likely due to a motivation to seek high fat, high calorie foods that is rooted in evolution.

There you go people. If people love cars and you can get them to focus on the car you are hawking, you’ll have a better chance of converting that to a sale. May the ROI forever be in your favour.

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In News

Women-Owned Small Businesses More Likely to Use Social Media

March 23, 2018 No Comments

Women-owned businesses are most likely to use social media. Men! What y’all doing?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A woman-owned small business is more likely to use social media, according to a new survey from Clutch, a leading B2B research and reviews firm.

Among women-owned businesses, 74% use social media, compared to 66% of men-owned businesses.

The findings came as no surprise to experts, who said women overall are more likely to use social media. Given that trend, female small business owners more easily can bring their business onto social media.

“Women are generally better conversationalists than men,” said Jeff Gibbard, chief social strategist at digital agency I’m From the Future. “They tend to be more expressive and more emotive. It’s no surprise to me why more women business owners use social media.”

Women often communicate better than men, which translates to the online world where they are more likely to use social media effectively.

Millennial-Owned Small Businesses Lead Social Media Use

There is also a generational divide among small businesses’ social media use. The survey finds that 79% of millennial-owned small businesses use social media compared to 65% of small businesses owned by older generations.

Millennials, like women in general, frequently use social media for their personal lives. Their social media skills easily carry over into their businesses – unlike older generations, experts say.

“The older people didn’t grow up with social media, so many don’t understand how to use it for their business,” said Shawn Alain, president of social media agency Viral in Nature. “They went through a significant part of their life without even the internet, and they remember what it was like not to have a smartphone or email.”

Millennials are also more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat than older generations, but Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are more likely to use LinkedIn.

Most Small Businesses Use Facebook

Facebook remains the most popular social media channel for small businesses, no matter the gender or generation of the owner – 86% say they use it, which is nearly twice the number of small businesses that use the second-place channel, Instagram (48%).

Among small business users of social media, 12% say they use Facebook exclusively for their social media efforts.

Overall, 71% of small businesses use social media, and more than half (52%) share content at least once per day. Images and infographics (54%) are the most popular content types that businesses post to social media.

Read the full report here.

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In News

Facebook’s Trust Crisis: What Now?

March 22, 2018 No Comments

Less than 1 in 3 people call Facebook a responsible company, according to a new survey.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Barraged by accusations of spreading divisive fake news and amid new allegations that it handed over personal information on up to 50 million users without their consent, Facebook is losing the faith of the people, according to a new survey.

Almost 4 out of 10 people surveyed said: “Facebook is not a responsible company because it puts making profits most of the time ahead of trying to do the right thing.” Less than 1 in 3 said that Facebook is a “responsible company because it tries to do the right thing most of the time even if that gets in the way of it making profits.” The rest were unsure.

By a 7-1 ratio people surveyed said that Facebook has had a negative influence on political discourse. Sixty-one percent said that “Facebook has damaged American politics and made it more negative by enabling manipulation and falsehoods that polarize people.”

The survey was conducted as new revelations surfaced that the company connected to the 2016 Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, inappropriately harvested personal information on millions of Facebook users.

The sharp rise in negative feelings is a significant departure from Facebook’s standing prior to the 2016 election, when the rise of so-called Fake News and polarizing content led to calls for the company to take greater responsibility for the content on the popular social media site – or face government regulation.

By a 2-1 margin, people surveyed said it’s Facebook’s responsibility to remove or warn about posts that contain false or misleading information. And 59 percent reported that the company is not doing enough to address the issues of false and inflammatory information that appear on its site.

“Facebook is at a crossroads because of its inability – nearly a year-and-a-half after the election – to get a handle on its divisive effects on society,” said Tom Galvin, Executive Director of Digital Citizens, who commissioned the survey. “From spreading fake and manipulative information to becoming a ‘Dark Web-like’ place for illicit commerce, Facebook seems to losing the trust of the American public. Regulation will not be far behind for social media companies if things don’t change.”

This declining trust reflects a growing concern about the impact Facebook and other social media sites have on young teens. In the survey, more than two in five people surveyed said that the minimum age to have a Facebook account should be at least 18 years old.

“Digital platforms have to rise to the occasion and assure internet users that their personal information will be safe, that the content will be legal, safe and not contrived to manipulate. In short, they have to demonstrate they will be the positive influence on our society that they espouse to be,” said Galvin.

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In News

Netflix Shows Are Entertaining Enough, But It’s the Digital Marketing That’s Masterful

March 22, 2018 No Comments

By John Boitnott

Effective digital marketing has more to do with creative strategies focused on the individual customer than it does with big budgets and advanced technology.

In five years, the share of households with a Netflix subscription has increased 92 percent. Today the majority of households in the United States subscribe to Netflix, and that number is slated to rise this year.

Why is this happening? The product is designed so well that you and I have been sucked into shows, only to emerge from our homes days later. The creative team is skilled at creating programs that receive both popular and critical praise.

But Netflix doesn’t just produce good shows, it also knows how to use advanced digital marketing techniques to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. Let’s talk about a few of the digital marketing principles that make Netflix so successful. Follow them and you may just see similar results.

Personalized content is the best kind.

What sets Netflix apart from other streaming services? Amazon, HBO and Vudu all have access to thousands of television shows and movies. They offer intuitive user interfaces, and they are available across devices. Yet Netflix is uniquely situated to dominate the streaming video revolution thanks to the company’s obsessive approach to content personalization.

My Netflix homepage looks entirely different from yours. This is thanks to the power of proprietary algorithms that predict what kind of content you’ll enjoy, and hide the rest. On Amazon Prime Video, I can’t even find the last thing I viewed there easily. Netflix has them beat here.

You might be thinking that content personalization is only available to companies like Netflix that have the capital to employ hundreds of the world’s smartest engineers. But entrepreneurs can also tap into content personalization in a few different ways.

Tools like Optimizely and Adobe Experience Cloud let you to personalize content based on a variety of data points like the country associated with an IP address, or whether or not a visitor is already a lead in a CRM. Based on this information, marketers can choose to display different website experiences in order to better serve the interests of a particular visitor.

As an alternative to third-party software platforms, marketers can always “fake” personalization with a little elbow grease. By building behavior based email workflows, marketers can ask email recipients to click various links depending on their interest. Once their interest is registered, the rest of the email workflow can be based on the interests articulated by recipients.

Takeaway:

Remember, personalization isn’t about relying on advanced algorithms. Instead, it’s about identifying and providing the kind of experience the prospect, customer or visitor is most interested in having.

Multi-channel campaigns are key to getting your message out.

Netflix is available on seemingly every device. From computers to smart televisions, users can access Netflix wherever and whenever they want. Marketers at Netflix take a similar approach to promotion.

To hype season two of the company’s hit show Stranger Things, Netflix teamed up with Snapchat to release an augmented reality experience. At the same time, Netflix used Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and email marketing to promote the upcoming season.

Takeaway:

Multi-channel marketing isn’t about spending big bucks on advertising stunts. It’s about creating marketing campaigns that meet members of the target audience wherever they “live.” In the case of Stranger Things viewers, Netflix knew that their target audience would spend hours on social platforms, so they developed a strategy accordingly.

Simple is powerful in a complex world.

We live in complicated and noisy times. As a result, the average person has an attention span of just eight seconds, according to the New York Times. Netflix chooses to keep things simple when creating a mission statement or designing a user interface.

The company’s investor relations page says, “We are a relief from the complexity and frustration that embody most MVPD relationships with their customers. We strive to be extremely straightforward.”

It’s no surprise then that for non-customers, the Netflix homepage is so simple it’s sparse. It takes just two scrolls to reach the bottom of the page, and features two messages: “watch anywhere” and “cancel anytime.”

Takeaway:

Use simplicity as a differentiating factor, and make it easy for members of the target audience to understand what you do and how you can help them. Ensure that this approach translates to marketing material, product experience and customer service.

Email marketing is still a key component to customer onboarding.

Despite claims to the contrary, email marketing is not dead. In fact, it’s used by Netflix as a key component of customer onboarding and nurturing.

New Netflix customers receive a series of emails that make content recommendations and encourage new users to explore the platform. This is a way of driving platform adoption, which improves customer retention in the long run.

Long time customers also receive periodic emails from Netflix. To promote the release of a new show called The Punisher, Netflix sent customers a marketing email that appeared to be spam at first glance. But once opened, the email played a GIF that slowly redacted information until a button at the bottom appeared, encouraging subscribers to watch the new show.

Takeaway:

Email marketing is not dead; unimaginative email marketing is. Netflix marketers invest hours in building creative email marketing campaigns designed to engage and delight recipients. You don’t need sophisticated tech to engage people in your database. You just need to understand the target audience, and apply some imagination to email marketing.

Netflix is successful thanks to a focus on understanding target audiences. Once that happens, marketers launch creative cross-platform campaigns that deliver simple and clear value propositions.

Remember that success in digital marketing isn’t a result of big budgets and advanced technology. It comes from creative and customer-centric strategies.

Feature Image Credit: Jonathan Nackstrand | Getty Images

By John Boitnott

Journalist, Digital Media Consultant and Investor

Sourced from Entrepreneur