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Tips to help small business owners choose a marketing method

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By JOYCE M. ROSENBERG

NEW YORK (AP) — The growth of the internet and social media has changed the way small businesses market themselves — the variety of online marketing channels allows businesses, whether they serve consumers or other companies, to focus on a broad or narrow population.

But many owners find that low-tech marketing methods can work for them. For example, a new retailer or restaurant might send discount coupons through the mail to homes in their area. Some owners who consult or provide services like accounting may find that networking and word-of-mouth are their best bets for finding clients. Often, it can take trial and error to find the right approach.

Before owners pick a marketing channel or channels, they need to answer some key questions for themselves, says Ramon Ray, a small business consultant who often speaks publicly about marketing. Who is your target market? Are you clear about how your service or product will help them?

Here are some tips from small business owners about selecting a marketing method:

— Owners should consider which marketing method is the best way to get information to prospective customers to help build a relationship, Ray says. For example, an accountant could offer in social media posts to send tax tips in return for a potential customer’s email.

“I’m not trying to sell to the customer first,” Ray says. “I want to get their attention.”

— Social media can be ideal for start-ups. Carolyn Bothwell, whose marketing consulting business is just about a year old, social media has been low-cost and effective. “Over 80 percent of my inquiries come in directly from Instagram,” she says. Many of her clients are also young companies and social media channels including LinkedIn and Facebook have worked for them.

— Different social media channels will yield different results. Germain Chastel, CEO of technology consultant NewtonX, says Twitter helps the company be more visible — it shows up at the top of Google searches. LinkedIn is the social media channel most of the company’s clients use, so it’s a natural to try to reach them there.

“You just need to be on the channels that can lend real value,” Chastel says.

— Face-to-face contacts can be just as valuable as online marketing. Robyn Lanci, owner of Owl PR, a marketing firm, has “found the best methods for marketing my business are networking groups and pure, organic conversation.”

By JOYCE M. ROSENBERG

Follow Joyce Rosenberg at www.twitter.com/JoyceMRosenberg . Her work can be found here: https://apnews.com

Sourced from AP News

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4 Social Media Marketing Bad Habits (and How to Break Them)

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Social media is the one thing that almost everyone has access to, yet few fully understand, and this is especially true when it comes to business.

Many people – even some with years of marketing experience – believe that posting pretty pictures on Instagram is “doing social media,” when posting images is really only the tip of the iceberg. The activity that lies beneath the surface is much more complex, and important for successful social media marketing.

There are a heap of posts out there which outline tips on things you should start doing in order to maximize your social media marketing success, but in this piece, I want to look at some things that you should stop doing, immediately, to get your process on the right track.

Here are four social media marketing bad habits, and how to break them in 2019.

1. Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics

Guess what? Followers and on-platform engagement alone will not help grow your business.

This is a fact – thousands upon thousands of studies and articles can prove it. Sure, there’s a correlation between the amount of time consumers spend with a brand online and their likelihood of going on to make a purchase from said brand, while there’s also something to be said for positive consumer sentiment. But brands and marketers who are content to simply track the number of followers they gain on Instagram, and/or the amount of likes they get on a Facebook video, are making a huge mistake.

You absolutely have to base your social media marketing success off of more than just vanity metrics.

While community growth and engagement are pieces of the puzzle, you would be much better served by including metrics such as impressions, website visits, time on site, conversions, and bounce rate. By layering in these true digital marketing metrics, you can start to see how social media activity helps you meet your business goals.

Now, it is important to note that sometimes the main objective of your social media marketing efforts truly might be brand awareness – which is fine. In this case, you’re going to want to push for as many Impressions and targeted brand engagements as possible.

The big thing to avoid here is judging your social media marketing activities by follower growth or engagements alone.

2. Lack of Storytelling

One of the most underused strengths of social media marketing is storytelling.

Let me clarify by saying that storytelling in marketing isn’t this majestic fable that your brand is stringing together. Storytelling is how your brand provides snackable, contextually full snippets about why your brand exists, and how you do what you do. These stories should be concise and easy to understand for uber-distracted social media users.

Sometimes brands try to string out storytelling across a few different blog posts or content pieces, without realizing that distracted social media users are more likely to get confused by the lack of ongoing context than to follow a single story from start to finish. To avoid any confusion, I typically recommend a series of independent stories which can stand alone and be easily digested.

After all, how realistic is it that users will remember post #1 of a five-post series about your product or service?

It’s a fragmented experience – imagine scrolling through your own social media feed and seeing a content piece that’s in the middle of an ongoing story, one which you’ve missed the beginning of (and will likely miss the end). Pretty confusing right?

Consider creating smaller stories that build your brand up, individually, and over time. This way, if users get interested by one content piece, they can dive deeper into those stories across your social accounts and/or blog.

3. Your Analytics are Weak

There are so many data points being spun off by social media activity that it’s unacceptable not to have your analytics organized in a way to capitalize on such insights.

Too many brands simply post daily and hope for the best, as opposed to reviewing detailed reports to learn about what worked, what didn’t, and what opportunities might be on the horizon. To avoid having weak, or useless, analytics, you’re going to want to organize your data so that it helps you derive context from the numbers.

For example, are your impressions lower than the previous month, but your overall engagements are up? This suggests that your content was favored less by social platform algorithms, but people really liked it.

Did your website visits from Facebook spike, but no conversions came through? This suggests that the experience on your landing page might not be optimal or there was an inconsistent experience along the way.

By improving the data collected, you can optimize your social media marketing efforts to ensure that you aren’t wasting time, money, or resources.

Here are the data points I recommend you analyze:

  • Social community
  • Social media impressions
  • Social media engagements
  • Social media website visits
  • Time on site from social media
  • Pages per visit from social media
  • Bounce rate from social media
  • Conversions from social media

You can use a tool like Sprout Social to easily collect social media analytics. I also highly recommend using Google Analytics to review how traffic from social media sites is behaving on your website. This will enable you to standardize activity, and find trends across marketing channels.

4. Social Media is Siloed

A big mistake that a lot of brands make is thinking that social media marketing alone should be responsible for business success.

All too often I’m asked to launch a social media strategy without a high-quality website, an email marketing strategy, or even a solid search engine marketing approach. When social media marketing is the only player out on the field, your team will lose.

When you think about user behavior and your own activity when making a purchase online, it becomes apparent that consumers interact with multiple stimuli before making a final buying decision. By only relying on social media marketing to make sales, you’re leaning on a channel that really focuses on upper funnel awareness activity to carry a consumer all the way through to final buying decision. Don’t get me wrong, it can happen, however it’s not likely to happen as frequently as you might hope.

Another point here is that many brands fail to use social media marketing to support an overarching initiative. For example, if your company has a really awesome piece of downloadable content, you should create blog posts which support it (be sure they are optimized for search engine visibility), deploy email marketing campaigns to generate traffic to the content, publish paid and/or organic social media content supporting the effort, and retarget all traffic that’s visited the content landing page but didn’t convert.

An integrated approach like this will go much further for your brand than placing social media marketing in a silo and hoping for the best.

5. Neglecting Advertising

I am a huge fan of social media advertising. Comparatively, you’d be hard pressed to find a more cost-effective method for targeting consumers online.

With interest data, behavioral data, CRM data, and lookalike modeling, social media advertising can target almost any group of consumers in one way or another. But unfortunately, many brands have been slow to embrace social media advertising. I personally believe there are two main reasons why:

  1. The altruistic intention of social media marketing to bring brands and consumers eye-to-eye digitally doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just unrealistic. There are so many distractions and competitors online that it’s not rational to think that a brand can cut through all the noise via organic engagement alone. Almost all social platforms limit the reach of content in some way, so brands are already starting at a loss.
  2. Most brands don’t understand how attribution impacts the ROI of social media advertising. As noted earlier,  social media marketing tends to be very effective when it comes to building awareness. Social media can help stimulate direct sales, but most consumers bounce around between devices and marketing channels when shopping, so tracking breaks and social media activity doesn’t get the trackable credit it deserves for generating sales. There are ways to fix this, however, when brands are ignorant to the situation, they simply look at conversions and get disappointed that social media hasn’t generated more.

The big missed opportunity here is omitting social media advertising from your social media marketing strategy. No matter your business goals, there’s a social media platform and an ad unit that can help you achieve them.

Once you quit these four bad habits, you’ll undoubtedly begin to see improvements in your metrics, and be well on your way to achieving greater social media marketing success.

By 

Follow Nathan Mendenhall on Twitter

Sourced from Social Media Today

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4 Reasons Why Marketing Should Never Be the First Expense You Cut

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By Craig Bloem

Reducing marketing spending will, in most cases, only make a bad financial situation worse.

Early on in their startup’s life, many entrepreneurs find their expenses outpace their revenues. That’s especially true when you’re bootstrapping your startup.

That’s why for many entrepreneurs, growth is the only path to early stage success (although there can be great reasons your startup should not try to grow, at least for a period of time).

Yet sometimes growth — especially rapid growth — isn’t possible. When costs exceed revenue, sometimes your only option is to cut expenses: Inventory. Supplies. Product development. Fixed costs. Variable costs. Marketing.

Whoa. Not so fast.

Unlike many other costs, marketing expenses are relatively easy to cut. You can pause a Facebook ad campaign. You can shutter email or social media marketing campaigns. You can put traditional marketing campaigns on hold.

Sounds great but in the process, you may only increase your startup’s burn rate. It sounds simple, and it is: without sales, you don’t have revenue and without revenue — especially if you’re funding your business with that revenue — you soon won’t have a business.

Keep in mind there’s a difference between efficient marketing and simply throwing money at acquiring customers. While a high customer acquisition cost (CAC) can make sense if new customers generate consistent, long-term revenue, most startups can’t afford a high CAC.

We made that mistake with our business card product. Since customers loved our logo product, we decided to scale rapidly — and in the process paid too much for each new customer. Because we relentlessly tracked key metrics, we recognized the problem and quickly reined in our marketing expenses. Had we not, the company might have failed.

But that didn’t mean we eliminated our marketing expenses. After all, smart marketing is the lifeblood of any business.

So when you miss sales targets, or when you need to cut costs, make sure your marketing costs are not the first expense you cut.

Why?

You can almost never save your way to profitability.

Unless your startup’s spending is totally out of control, it’s almost impossible to save your way to profitability. When fixed costs are high, when cash flow is poor, when labour makes up a major portion of your costs, the only way to become profitable is to increase sales.

And what is the best way to increase sales?

Marketing is the ultimate Catch-22 for a small business.

A startup is like the cliché about a tree falling in the forest: if no one hears about your products and services, your top line won’t make a sound.

It’s almost impossible to raise awareness, generate leads, land customers and build a brand without spending money on marketing. Sure, word of mouth helps, as do referrals. But early adopters — much less raving fans — must come from somewhere.

And that “somewhere” is marketing.

Effective marketing requires time and repetition.

While the “rule of 7” (in short, the idea in which potential customers need to be exposed to an ad seven times before they will act) might be outdated, frequency and repetition are still important. Many potential customers will not act the first time they see an ad, a promotion, or a piece of content marketing. Many will not act the second or third time.

Value propositions take time to establish themselves. Brand awareness takes time. While direct-response marketing can often produce short-term results, most forms of marketing require longer-term investments in money and time to pay off.

That’s why cutting your marketing expense might be the worst thing you can do — especially if all the groundwork you have laid is about to pay off.

The contrarian approach is often the best approach.

A number of studies show that companies who increase spending during a recession enjoy greater gains in market share than those who cut their advertising investment.  In fact, when markets expand, market share is much harder to come by. If your industry as a whole is experiencing a downturn, that may mean the right approach is to increase your marketing spending.

But what if your industry is doing fine and your startup is not?

Take a hard look at your products and services. Make sure your business truly fills a need or solves a problem. Make sure your business provides excellent service. Make sure your operations are as streamlined and efficient as possible. In short, make sure your business is taking care of business.

If it is, don’t let marketing be the first thing you cut.

If you provide great products or services, helping people understand the benefits you provide — and the difference you can make in their lives — could be the one thing you can’t afford not to do.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Craig Bloem

Founder and CEO, FreeLogoServices.com@craigbloem

Sourced from Inc.

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11 Trends That Will Shape Marketing In 2019

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Sourced from Forbes

Building brand awareness and successfully interacting with consumers is a crucial part of doing business today. Customers enjoy and expect a personalized experience, and delivering just that will set you apart from your competition.

Voice search and live videos were just two of the methods marketers explored to improve consumer interactions and brand awareness in 2018. As innovations in technology and ideas come forward, 2019 is also sure to see its share of trends having an impact on marketing. Below, 11 Forbes Agency Council members shared their predictions for the year ahead.

Members of Forbes Agency Council offer insights on what marketing trends to expect in 2019.Photos courtesy of the individual members.

1. A Bigger Role For AI In Personalization And Automation

We are all watching the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing and how it affects our clients’ relationships with consumers. As a company that focuses on bringing out emotional connections through physical environments, we’ll see AI play an even bigger role for brands as they look to personalize and automate more digital and traditional communications. – Jessica Reznick, We’re Magnetic

2. Smart Speaker Advertising Opportunities

Smart speakers and voice assistant devices are more affordable than ever before, making them a huge potential marketing tool in the upcoming year. As the relationship between big tech and the consumer grows deeper, marketers can more effectively reach their target audiences with personalized messaging and content. Expect to see more ad opportunities surrounding smart speakers in 2019. – Timothy Nichols, ExactDrive, Inc.

3. Growth In Content Marketing

Content marketing will always have a strong impact because of the exposure and backlinks you can receive for your brand. Writing interesting content and marketing it to influencers is a win-win. You are helping people with solution-oriented content, and the influencers help your exposure and outreach so it’s widely seen by the right audience and shared with their peers. – Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design

4. A Turn To The Human Side Of Marketing

We are fortunate to live in an age of advancing technology, but we run a risk of oversaturating our market with off-the-shelf tools that gather faceless data and create ineffective content. Marketing has a remarkable power to inspire audiences. Instead of an influx of new tech to adopt, I predict we’ll embrace a deeper understanding of human behavior that will foster more meaningful relationships. – Hamid Ghanadan, LINUS

5. Integrated Online, Social And Mobile Marketing

2019 will be all about the integration of online, social and mobile marketing. Many businesses have dabbled in one or all of these marketing strategies, but true success in the year ahead will be marked by a fully integrated marketing program that incorporates all three. This will eliminate redundancies, increase efficiency and fully leverage content across these three major players. – Laura Cole, Vivial

6. The Growth Of Micro-Influencers

As influencer-tracking technologies continue to improve, brands are becoming better equipped at fielding and managing large networks of high-engagement, low-following micro influencers for their campaigns. This largely untapped market will soon allow for more brands to avoid the significant costs of mid- to high-level influencers and invest in more down-to-earth and relatable influencer marketing. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC

7. Audiences Made Part Of Brand Stories

The ability to engage with audiences (that is, making audiences part of the brand story) will have a huge impact. The less friction there is to engagement, the more connected people feel. Brands that are more willing to interact with customers publicly will have a strong impact—and brands that can show how this engagement influences their products and services will make an even bigger impact. – Bernard May, National Positions

8. Thought Leadership

Audiences seek expertise, critical insight and ways to be better at all points of interest. Experiential and interactive engagement with a brand is the future of consumer-brand connectivity. From live video, to recorded advice, to content with real-time responses, to contests and beyond, it’s about offering information and encouraging feedback from stakeholders in a way that establishes trust. – Scott Kellner, GPJ Experience Marketing

9. Transparency As Key To Winning Customers

Technology is giving us so many new tools and platforms that sometimes we forget that communication always happens between human beings. Brands are groups of people who try to communicate with other persons: their customers. In 2019, I expect transparency to be the key to winning the hearts of consumers, who will reward those brands that share their values in an authentic and transparent way. – Daniela Pavan, The Ad Store New York

10. Quality Trumping Quantity In Marketing

Content marketing has been preached to death by most marketers. Content marketing is important, but oftentimes companies are capitalizing on this strategy with over-optimized and bland content that is largely regurgitated from other companies doing the same thing. In 2019, I believe we will get more discerning and choose low-volume, high-quality content instead of high-volume, low-quality. – Brandon Stapper, Nonstop Signs

11. Customers Empowered As Brand Ambassadors

By utilizing tools like YotPo and BazaarVoice, we can now chalk up a percentage of a marketing campaign to leveraging our customers as brand ambassadors by asking them to share info on a product to their own networks. This helps bypass “influencer marketing” to an extent and lets us empower our customers to do the talking. – Loren Baker, Foundation Digital

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Find out if you qualify at forbesagencycouncil.com/qualify. Questions about an article? [email protected]

Sourced from Forbes

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Use These Four Tools to Increase Your Marketing Knowledge

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By Susan Gilbert

Monday Tips is a short list of the best finds across the internet to start your week off right.

Today I have some great resources to help you gain more knowledge that will help you become more successful with your marketing strategy. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.

Learning something new about a specific topic will help provide more opportunities for your brand to reach a larger audience in a meaningful way. And you can gain new skills that can be used today for your marketing campaigns. There some top online resources that can teach you anything from social media management to building a better brand image for your business. Do you need to improve your knowledge, but don’t know where to begin? Take advantage of these resources, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Gain the skills you need to build your business – Facebook Blueprint

Reach your marketing goals at no cost with over 75 courses. Facebook Blueprint is available to anyone who wants to learn how to master digital marketing or take a new career path. Learn at your own pace and find out more about terminology, creative best practices, and more. Schedule an exam to add an official blueprint to your profile online.

2) Gain in-demand certification – ALISON

Learn the latest in business and marketing with this free online course website. ALISON offers the best classes for businesses, authors, entrepreneurs, ect. who need to expand on or get new knowledge. Earn your certification in subjects like online business, business intelligence, and marketing management. There are hundreds of programs to choose from, and getting started is simple with a self-paced curriculum.

3) Improve your digital marketing knowledge – Google Ad Grants Online Marketing Challenge

If you are an undergraduate or graduate student you can learn directly from Google with real-world marketing classes. Google Ad Grants Online Marketing Challenge is a comprehensive online training challenge that enables you to master the skills you need to successfully launch and grow a campaign. Modules are self-paced and taught by actual professors in topics that include search advertising, analytics, AdWords fundamentals, ect.

4) Learn social media analytics – Quintly Academy

Learn the basics of social media analytics with this free resource. Quintly Academy provides users with a full curriculum that starts with an introduction then moves you step-by-step through each stage of data, metrics, and goals. Whether you work for a brand, agency, or want to improve your business this is a great course to help take the guesswork out of complicated measurement.

Hopefully you will find these marketing education tools useful to your brand or business. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

Have fun with these Monday Tips and Tools.

Wishing you a FAN-tastic week!

Susan

By Susan Gilbert

I’m a small dog addict, miniature horse owner, online marketing maniac, bestselling author, and eHow video contributor who’s been working online since 1999. I guess that makes me an old timer who is learning new tricks every day!

 

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Channel 4 and Publicis ad price row rumbles on into 2019

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By Rebecca Stewart

Channel 4 and Publicis Media have failed to resolve a multimillion pound dispute over ad prices, leaving big spenders like Asda without airtime across the broadcaster’s portfolio of channels.

2019 planning talks between the pair broke down in December, after Publicis took issue with Channel 4 upping ad prices despite a decline in audiences. It is believed Channel 4 wants to link ad prices to the wider figure Publicis Media spends with its sales arm, instead of basing the cost on audience share.

Last month, the Guardian placed the potential loss of the ‘blackout’ to Channel 4 at £210m, although a source with knowledge of the matter told The Drum the number was significantly lower.

The network and media giant were geared to reach a solution in eleventh hour talks held at the tail end of last year. However, it’s understood that Publicis Media clients will now be kicking off 2019 without a deal in place to air commercials across Channel 4’s 26 linear channels and three on-demand platforms.

Channel 4 and Publicis Groupe were unable to comment.

The hold up means rivals like ITV, Sky and Channel 5 could stand to benefit from ad spend being diverted their way.

Starcom, Spark44 and Blue449 are among Publicis Media’s cohort of agency brands. Clients include Samsung and the world’s biggest advertiser P&G – although the latter will be unaffected by the blackout since as it has its own deal with Channel 4.

In December, Channel 4’s chief commercial officer Jonathan Allan took the unprecedented step of penning a letter to Publicis Media clients to inform them of the tussle.

In a statement to media in December, Allan said Channel 4 had “put forward competitive proposal to Publicis” and would continue discussions to “hopefully reach an agreement that suits both parties”.

The duo’s inability to reach a compromise ahead of the new year follows on from a similar row Channel 4 had with Denstu Aegis Network in 2018 which seen clients pulled off its inventory for just over a week until a resolve was agreed.

Channel 4’s portfolio includes E4 and Film4. It also sells inventory on behalf of BT Sport and UKTV’s multitude of channels.

The news comes amid huge pressures from advertisers on agency holding groups to drive down costs and break down internal silos.

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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The web design trends brands need to prepare for in 2019

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By James Pruden

2019 is set to see ecommerce sales increase by 19.5% globally, offering an opportunity to savvy brands who are up to speed on the latest web design trends and developments to drive significant additional market share.

But what do brands need to bear in mind in 2019 to ensure that they continue to deliver relevant standout online design, and therefore sales?

Mobile First

It’s vital to implement mobile first design in 2019. In 2015 mobile searches overtook those on desktop, making mobile search the highest search form worldwide. In accordance with this, Google has changed which sites they index first — they now prioritise mobile sites over those that aren’t mobile friendly.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that this push toward mobile first design isn’t just based on ranking factors or SEO, the visual result must enhance the user’s experience on the device that they will most likely be searching from.

This focus on mobile first requires a fundamental shift in the way that websites are designed. It used to be that a site would only be created for a desktop or laptop computer and a mobile-friendly or mobile responsive design might be added as well. Today, it’s critical to design the site for the mobile user first, before creating a version that will also standout for those on desktops.

Micro-animations/movement

Using moving micro-animations along with feedback loops – that deliver movement when hovering over an icon – help make websites more usable and engaging. The details of the micro-interactions: the button clicks and the page transitions can greatly improve a user’s experience on your site, meaning they are far more likely to return. It’s this meaningful motion, connecting an action with a reaction, that satisfies a user’s desire for interactivity. And with touch interfaces, especially on small screens, it has never been more important to deliver motion in micro-animations and feedback loops to make the interaction smooth and guide users on their journey to checkout.

Custom and classic fonts

Expect a move back to custom and classic font design – clean but formal – with bigger and bolder typefaces, and a move away from humanist fonts as brands aim to standout against the proliferation of humanist typefaces.

Colour

Bright colours should be used more liberally in 2019 to deliver greater standout. The last two years has seen an explosion of big, bold colour across the internet with an increasing number of brands choosing to use their core packaging brand colours as backing for their graphics, with clashing tones moving away from the edgy start-ups into the mainstream. Those who have embraced arresting colours include The Premier League, Sky and eBay. Though bear in mind a classic font design and bright colours won’t be suitable for all. The choice of font and colours has to be right for the values of the brand and resonate with the audience they are targeting.

Optimise for search

As is always the case, making sure the design of your website is optimised for search algorithms is vital. Developments in web design will be driven by what Google’s constantly evolving search algorithm looks for. To this end, make sure that the content being communicated is relevant to your target audience and written as naturally as possible. Google looks for honest, human generated content. Of course, this must be quality content to encourage others to have weblinks back to your site to aid your SEO efforts. If users want to share your copy this highlights to Google that you are a valuable resource and the reward for your efforts will be an improved organic search ranking.

Speed

With research revealing over half of consumers leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, websites must be designed with speed in mind. Also, the faster your site loads the better it will rank in search results, particularly in Google search. This is not to say that websites should be sparse affairs with limited content and imagery for the purposes of speed. With better broadband it’s much easier to have image and content heavy sites that can load quickly. However if you have an app it’s seriously worth considering hosting it on a Progressive Web App (PWA) for speed purposes. A PWA can be launched from a home screen and can be ready in less than a second, often beating native apps in load times.

All brands need to constantly evolve their web design to continue to standout and deliver an engaging experience to their users that generates sales. By recognising and having these six web design points front of mind, brands will be well placed for a profitable 2019 online.

By James Pruden

James Pruden is studio director at Xigen

Sourced from The Drum

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4 Marketing Strategies Every Startup Can Afford

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By Juupiner

You don’t need to outspend your competition. You just need to out-think and out-work them.

Do your products sell themselves?

Having a great product is essential, but that alone isn’t enough to make your startup successful. Aside from your fantastic product, you’ll also need a stellar marketing strategy to grow your startup. But for many entrepreneurs, it’s simply not realistic to spend a lot of money to acquire new business.

Instead, consider a few of these cost-effective marketing strategies that can help generate early successes.

Affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is the most cost-effective marketing strategy that works. I believe all businesses — regardless of size — should adopt referral, or affiliate, marketing. I’ve used it with a good deal of success and put it to work in all my online businesses.

Here’s how it works: Encourage people to recommend your products to others, and pay a commission only when someone purchases your products through those referrals.

Start by setting up an affiliate program though networks such as ShareASale or ImpactRadius. You then can promote your affiliate program by featuring it prominently on your website and inviting customers to join the program. Additionally, you can choose the right reward structure — one that’s compelling enough for your network’s members to engage.

Email outreach also can serve as an efficient tool when communicating with influencers:

  • Create a list of influencers and experts in your industry,
  • Send an outreach email requesting they try your product for free, and
  • Explain the monetary rewards they could earn by referring a user.
Click HERE to read the remainder of the article
Feature Image Credit: Getty

Sourced from Juupiner

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Which Brands Have The Best Social Media Marketing?

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By Mike Gingerich

We have always witnessed and admired huge marketing campaigns from global top-most brands like Apple, Pepsi, Adidas and Coca Cola among others. These market leaders invest millions of dollars on viral commercials, and influencer marketing that never goes unnoticed. Unfortunately, not every brand has the financial muscles to compete with the giants. But, no need to worry!

In the last couple of years, social media has leveled the ground for marketers. It is no longer about the company size or the budget. Today, any business can use social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many others to run effective marketing campaigns without spending millions. Additionally, there are several helpful tools such as rank tracking software by serpbook to enhance your digital marketing strategy.

Effective Social Media Marketing (SMM)

In today’s digital world, SMM is undoubtedly one of the most marketing tools for small to large brands in the world. However, some companies have succeeded in social media, while others are still struggling. It all runs down to the strategy.  For effective social media marketing strategy, you need creativity and unique online marketing ideas which involves:

  • Choosing the ideal social media platform(s) for your business – You may target multiple networks with large and active audience.
  • Understanding your audience – Learn their challenges and what solutions they are looking for.
  • Excellent Communication – Deliver your brand message in simple and precise manner.
  • Great content – Generating regular, interesting and readable content for your audience.
  • Evaluating the SMM strategy – A good example is the use of serpbook rank tracker to assess the progress of your strategy.
  • Improving existing campaigns – Use the analytic tools to identify mistakes and new opportunities in the market and make the right adjustments.

For most brands, the main challenge has always been coming up with creative ideas to execute the right strategy. Below are a few top brands with the best social media marketing campaigns.

Top Brands with the Best Social Media Marketing Strategy

  • Reebok – LinkedIn Masters

The brand is known for its quality shoes and sportswear. Reebok SMM strategy focus on multi-platform digital marketing across a range of social networks. On Instagram and Facebook the brand uses colorful fitness and latest Reebok products photos. It also generates informative visual content for the YouTube Channel.

Surprisingly, Reebok stands out for its successful LinkedIn marketing. Their secret is not only regular update posts, it also creates valuable content for its audience as well as shares links to their blog. Reebok understand its audience and uses videos, simple formatting and photos to attract audience and encourage them to read through.

  • Pop-Tart – Twitter Marketing

A legend in production of toaster pastries, the brand’s Twitter account does it all. Pop-Tart maintains a sarcastic voice on Twitter with a target on young and Twitter-biased demographic. The brand mimics popular accounts and are quick to create their version of any viral or trending content. The brand has over 164, 000 followers on Twitter and more brands in the sector have started to copy their style because it pays off.

Pop-Tart SMM success comes from actively interacting with their audience in a funny way. It works because they have identified the right audience and defined a SMM tone that suits them.

  • Peel – Facebook Ads

Peel has become a powerful brand that deals with stylish phone cases. Its strength comes from its massive social support, especially on Facebook. Peel marketers use Facebook ads to showcase the different features of their products. The Facebook strategy has increased its revenue by over 100%. It also runs a visually impressive Instagram feed.  Peel focuses on differentiating themselves from competitor and telling their story through SMM.

In summary, the common thing across the above brand is simple. A successful SMM starts with understanding your audience and choosing a channel that they use most. It is also evident that choosing a style and tone for your marketing strategy is vital and can win you the right followership. Additionally, it helps to try various strategies, measure their effectiveness and focus on one or two that works best for you.

Sourced from Mike Gingerich

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Influencer Marketing Tips Going Into 2019

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Sourced from onalytica

Recently we hosted our fourth Influencer Marketing Huddle event, gathering senior marketing and PR professionals from B2C, B2B and Not-for-profit brands to bounce ideas and experiences off each other, listen to brand & influencer panels, presentations & case studies and participate in practical workshop sessions where they can effectively create their strategies and outline next practical steps. Attendees left the room with an abundance of excitement, feeling inspired and full of knowledge and ideas.

Of course, nothing beats being in the room in and amongst the atmosphere, but Onalytica are all about educating and helping the industry to not just do influencer marketing, but to do it well. So as we begin to round up 2018 and start planning for 2019, we want to let you in to a few of the top tips shared with the group from the influencer marketing experts, brand experiences and the influencers themselves, around influencer best practice. From identifying influencers and engaging with them, through to measuring the success of the program.

1. Have a clear direction

Our first presentation of the day was from Teri Donovan, EMEAR Audience Expert & Head of Campaigns at Cisco, who shared a case study on how Cisco created their influencer marketing program. She kicked off her presentation with a personal story about her and her husband spontaneously buying a boat. They didn’t know where they wanted to go, or how to do it, but they did it. When they set off on their first journey, they had no real plan or strategy in place, so consequently came across lots of hurdles, such as running out of food and having to trek for miles to find a pub to eat.

This is a great analogy of how lots of brands first approach influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a huge buzzword at the moment, so lots of brands are starting to do it, simply because they think they should. But they’re starting it blindly without a real plan, strategy or set of objectives in place. So consequently, they hit hurdles and do not reap the full potential.

2. Dream big, start small, learn fast

Again from Teri, she recommended to dream big, start small and learn fast. Create long term objectives and give yourself a vision to work towards – be optimistic, but also be realistic about what you can achieve and in what time frame. In addition to your long term vision, set short term goals to give you focus and get you started. Learn what’s working and what’s not working quickly and use this to accelerate your program growth to hit your long term goals.

Petya, Global Influencer Marketing Manager at NetApp drove this point home in the context of building a business case internally, too: “start small, get the results and then present that as a business case. If you get results, nobody will tell you no”.

3. Writing down your influencer strategy increases your chances of success

Tim Williams, CEO at Onalytica highlighted that simply writing down your strategy will significantly increase your chances of success. Writing it down makes you more accountable, focused and gives you something to reference regularly when measuring program success. This is something that is so simple, yet neglected by most. So make this something you do before entering 2019!

4. Tap into your goldmine of internal influencers

We were very lucky to be joined by Sarah Goodall, employee advocacy expert and Founder of Tribal Impact, who presented our co-authored Employee Advocacy 2.0 Guide.

When we talk about influencer marketing, we immediately think of influencers with big audiences that are external to our brand, when in reality, we are all influencers. Brands have a whole network of influencers right at their fingertips: their employees. Your employees know your brand inside and out and have networks that trust and value their opinion. Shift your focus on helping your employees become influencers and subject matter experts by giving them quality content to share with their audiences, and training them and giving them the tools to create their own content.

5. Integrate influencers into your whole marketing mix

Owain Williams, Founder of Make it Manna highlighted that influencer marketing is often looked at as a totally new and different marketing division. While it is important to have individuals and teams leading on influencer marketing, it is most successful when integrated across all other areas of marketing. Why re-invent the wheel when you can integrate influencers into existing stuff that’s already going on across the business?

For example, communicate and work with your content marketing team to co-create content with influencers, your events marketing team to invite relevant influencers to events and your product team on new product releases.

6. Be transparent with your influencers about your business outcomes

Olly Lynch, Director of Digital Marketing at Travelport, expressed that he wouldn’t invest in any other type of marketing without a breakdown of the numbers & what can be achieved and influencer marketing should be no different. However, when asking the influencer panel if they had ever been set KPIs or objectives by brands, they said they hadn’t, but, they strongly believe that they can indeed help brands achieve business outcomes and so would be willing to have open discussions about this.

While influencer marketing is all about building relationships, brands shouldn’t be afraid to have open and transparent conversations with influencers about their business outcomes. Influencers that can actualyl help you drive these outcomes will be open to discussing and bringing ideas to the table as to how they can help you achieve this. After all, being an influencer is a business – they get it!

7. Do you want top of funnel awareness, or to drive outcomes?

Influencer Marketing and Influencer Advertising tend to be interchanged as terms, despite them being inherently different. Influencer Marketing is all about organically building partnerships with influencers that are aligned with your brand to gain your target audience’s trust, while influencer advertising tends to revolve around paying influencers to bring awareness to your products through their audiences. Both influencer marketing and influencer advertising are effective and have a place in their own right.

If you’re looking to drive top of funnel awareness then influencer advertising can be a great way to get quick wins. If you’re looking to drive consideration and action then organically working with subject matter experts to win your audience’s trust is more appropriate.

8. Marketers are undervaluing early or exclusive access to products and research

Alistair Wheate, Head of Product and Dominik Nosalik, Director of Client Services presented Onalytica’s recent research study into the alignment between influencer and brand partnerships, where we surveyed 267 influencers and 233 brand marketers. What was really interesting, was that 15% of influencers surveyed stated that their main outcome when working with brands is to gain industry insights, while only 2% of brands stated that their main outcome from working with influencers is to carry out research and drive innovation. This highlights a huge untapped for both brands and influencers to collaborate on industry research.

Reiterating this point further, 34% of influencers stated that early or exclusive access to research and products was attractive to them when working with a brand, while only 18% of brands offer this to their influencers.

 

9.  Marketers are overvaluing free tickets to events

On the flip side of marketers undervaluing early or exclusive access to products and research, they’re overvaluing free tickets to events. What this ultimately says, is that influencers feel that they have more value to give brands, than they can gain from attending these events.

Now this doesn’t mean that brands should stop giving influencers free tickets to events, but brands must rethink their complete offer around events to provide maximum value to influencers. Influencer budgets can in many cases be difficult to work with so free tickets to events are an attractive offer for brands, but instead of just offering free tickets, explore if you’re able to offer VIP access and tours, introduce them to another influencers of interest, or include them in a panel/give them a speaking slot – use the event as a facilitator to help them achieve the outcomes that are important to them. If attending the event will help them gain industry insights, expand their network or help them be more influential in a certain topic, they’ll go for it.

10. Don’t underestimate the time needed to build genuine relationships, but also the value

Marie Faulkner, Senior Social Media Manager from Marie Curie emphasised that the biggest learning curve for their team has been learning that the time and effort needed to build genuine relationships and partnerships with influencers is time consuming, but the value that can be gained from doing so is unparalleled. As Theodore Roosevelt so famously put it: “nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain and difficulty”.

11. We’re in a trust economy

Throughout Sarah Goodall’s presentation, she really focused on in the concept that we’re in an economy of trust. What this ultimately means, is that as marketers, we’re constantly competing to earn our target audience’s trust. Consumers are trusting brands less and people more, and so in order for us to gain their trust we need to leverage people more – be it our internal influencers (employees) and external influencers.

12. Influencers want to work with brands that they align themselves with

The key takeaway message from our influencer panel was that it is important for them to stay true to their personal brand values and beliefs when choosing which brands to work with. Jane Frankland, Managing Director of Cyber Security Capital said: “I only align with brands who believe the same thing as me…I want to understand the mission statement before I want to work with that brand”.

13. It is possible to reach your C-Suite through influencer marketing

There’s a common misconception that influencer marketing isn’t suitable if you’re intending to reach C-Level professionals, as they’re not often on social media. While the latter part of this is often true, the C-Suite have internal influencers within their organisation that heavily impact their decisions. These mid-level managers are on social media and reading and engaging with influencer content that is floating around their network, and then sharing this through ‘dark social’ (Whatsapp, email, direct messenger and face-to-face) with the C-Suite.

14. Listen to the influencer community to feed your content strategy

When it comes to integrating content marketing with influencer marketing, it is usually approached in a way that involves influencers in the latter stages to amplify content, by collaborating on content or getting influencers to share the content. Brands should look to the influencers much earlier than this, by listening to the influencer community and paying attention to what they’re talking about and the kind of content they’re sharing, to feed into their content strategy and content creation. Collaborating on content and amplifying your content through influencers will be much easier to do if you’re creating content that interests and is aligned with the influencers in the first place.

15. Influencer fraud is a good thing for the industry

Now when Scott Guthrie, Strategic Advisor at CampaignDeus first started talking about influencer fraud being a good thing, there were lots of shocked faces across the room. But the more he elaborated, the more those shocked faces turned into nodding heads: “Influencer marketing should get back to its roots, focusing on advocacy and authenticity. Fraud issues are forcing marketers to focus away from vanity metrics, which is a good thing”. 

Onalytica’s Employee Advocacy 2.0 guide and research study into influencer and brand partnerships were huge talking points throughout our event. If you would like to receive a copies, get in touch here.

Sourced from onalytica

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