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Internet Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide in 2024

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By Kristy Snyder

Move over print ads and direct mail: Internet marketing is the new trend. Digital marketing accounts for 56% of total marketing spend, and the industry as a whole is expected to reach over $786 billion by 2026.

This means that if your company isn’t already dabbling in online marketing, it needs to be. Use this beginner’s guide to internet marketing to learn more about the basics.

What Is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing—also known as digital marketing—is the process of using online channels to help an audience learn more about your products. Using tools such as websites, email, online advertising, social media and more, you can reach potential consumers, educate them on your offerings and hopefully convert them into customers.

Types of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is far more than just setting up a website. There are many different approaches to leveraging digital platforms. Here’s a look at some of the most popular types of internet marketing. Keep in mind, many of these overlap, which is why it’s best to utilize several when crafting your overall internet marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Content marketing encompasses all consumable materials you might use to promote your company. It includes everything from blog posts to infographics to podcasts. The goal of content marketing is to establish your expertise, promote your brand and provide some sort of value to consumers. That might be by educating them on a new subject, providing a relevant tip or even offering entertainment.

To effectively utilize content marketing, you’ll need to pair up with copywriters, video editors, graphic designers and more. Define your objectives for each piece of content by planning and researching, create the content and then distribute it across various online channels including your website, email newsletters, guest posts and more. Depending on your strategy, content marketing can bleed over a lot into social media marketing and SEO marketing.

More and more small businesses are throwing weight into content marketing. In fact, 30% said they’d be increasing their content budget up to 10% in the following year. If your business jumps in as well, you can enjoy increased audience retention, higher conversion rates and increased brand awareness.

SEO Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) marketing involves perfecting your content so it ranks highly in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate compared to just 1.7% for outbound leads, so getting listed higher on Google can definitely be financially worthwhile.

This doesn’t mean paying Google to place your ad higher. Instead, it means following Google’s E-E-A-T criteria to naturally hack the system. What does E-E-A-T mean? It stands for:

  • Experience: Your content is created by someone with first-hand experience in the field.
  • Expertise: Your content is highly researched or created by an expert.
  • Authoritativeness: Other sites link to your content.
  • Trustworthiness: Your content is accurate and your site has good security.

Of course, there’s more to SEO marketing than E-E-A-T. You also want to use good keywords that potential customers are searching for and optimize your on-page title tags, meta descriptions, headers and images. Also, this should go without saying, but your content should be well-written, relevant and not filled to the brim with keyword stuffing that makes it hard to read.

Social Media Marketing

In social media marketing, you’ll use platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to promote your brand and connect with potential customers. And there’s a lot of them out there—an estimated 4.89 billion people spend an average of 151 minutes on social media per day.

Running a social media marketing campaign is not as easy as it sounds, as you’ll need to stand out in a crowded sea of competition. This involves planning out posts in advance, creating a posting schedule and setting an advertising budget. Posts on social media usually include a mix of photos, videos, text and stories based on your brand and your products.

Using social media marketing gives you the chance to interact with followers, humanizing your business and brand. You can also use it as a way to drive traffic to your website, generate leads, increase brand awareness and build relationships.

Affiliate Marketing

Humans are easily influenced. That’s likely why affiliate marketing has grown so much in recent years. It involves partnering with a highly influential individual or entity that can promote your product or service to their followers. For every sale or lead they generate, you’ll pay them a commission.

While affiliates can promote your product on their blog or website, social media is the most popular platform. As many as 61% of Gen Zers and Millennials trust recommendations from social media influencers, and 33% and 26% have bought a product based on an influencer’s recommendation in the last three months, respectively.

Don’t worry—you won’t have to go out into the wild yourself to find affiliate marketers. You can often sign up for an affiliate network that links you up with eligible influencers. Then, you’ll give them a personalized tracking URL and any assets or guidance they need to promote your product. The rest of the campaign is in their hands, meaning you don’t have to worry about anything.

Email Marketing

Email marketing involves sending targeted, personalized and relevant emails to a specific audience with the aim of promoting products, services or fostering customer engagement. These aren’t just random users; instead, they’re people who have willingly signed up for your email newsletter, whether that was through a promotion or after creating an account.

Email marketing can drive a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent. That’s more than any other type of marketing. To take advantage of that potential, you’ll need to provide meaningful content to your subscribers. It should educate them on your products, announce important updates or even inform about special promotions. Design and formatting are also crucial for establishing a brand identity.

You can monitor the performance of your email campaigns by using an email marketing platform. You’ll want to track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and unsubscribe rates to measure the effectiveness of your emails.

Internet Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

While internet marketing and traditional marketing can share the same goals, they’re actually quite different. Each one has a distinct approach to promoting services, products and brands. Here are the key differences between the two.

Communication Mediums

For an internet marketing campaign, all of your communications take place online. You might use a variety of platforms, including websites, social media, emails and search engines.

Traditional marketing, on the other hand, takes place off-line. Your ads are shown in person, such as on billboards, direct mail flyers or print publications. They can also be in non-digital media, including radio, television or podcasts.

Demographic Targeting

One of the great things about internet marketing is that you can custom-target specific demographics. Maybe your ideal audience is women in their 30s who are interested in Taylor Swift. Platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram let you narrow down the exact type of people you want to show your ads to, making your promotional spend more effective.

Unfortunately, traditional marketing doesn’t always offer such highly targeted approaches. Often, it involves targeting people who live in a certain geographical area. You may be able to somewhat tailor television or radio ads based on the time of day or show that’s on, but there’s still no way to guarantee who is watching or listening.

Budgeting

On the whole, internet marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing. Consider the cost to reach 1,000 people (also known as the cost per mille or CPM) in each category. In 2022, the CPM for social media marketing was $8.15. Reaching the same number of people with direct mail, on the other hand, could cost anywhere from $300 to $3,000.

Lead Tracking

It’s incredibly easy to track internet marketing campaigns. You can collect data on impressions (how many times people see your ad), the number of clicks and even conversions. It’s simple to compare different versions of an ad to see which is performing better, or even look at the actions customers took after clicking your ad.

With traditional marketing, all of this is a lot more complicated. Sure, you can monitor website traffic and sales after starting a new campaign, but you’ll never really be sure if it was the ad that increased your traffic or another factor. Calculating your ROI can be a lot more challenging.

Interactivity and Engagement

If done correctly, internet marketing facilitates two-way communication. For example, imagine you run an ad on Facebook. Users can comment, like and share the ad, giving you greater reach than you’re paying for. You can also reply to their comments and messages, directly answering any questions that arise so they’re more informed on your solutions.

This isn’t quite as intuitive with traditional marketing. Sure, it’s possible to offer a phone number or email address for people to reach out to, but it’s an additional step that many won’t bother to take.

Global Reach

Obviously, internet marketing can reach a lot more people than traditional advertising. The world is just a few clicks away, and you can set up ads that people will see across the globe.

But for many businesses, that’s not always necessary. For example, if you’re a localized business that only services American customers, it’s probably not helpful if you run ads that go viral in China. You may appreciate the limited geographical reach of traditional advertising, especially if you’ve found good niche publications or programming to advertise with.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Now that you know a little more about the ways to market your company on the internet, exactly how do you go about doing it? These internet marketing strategies can guide your efforts as you initialize your first campaign.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As part of SEO marketing, you’ll need to optimize your website so it stands out in SERPs. You can do this by strategically using keywords in your content. You’ll also want to craft compelling meta tags and descriptions—these are what show up in Google search results.

Optimizing headings and content, structuring user-friendly URLs and effectively linking within your site are a few more good tips. The technical aspects of your website are also important, including site speed, mobile responsiveness, sitemap structure, URL structure and overall user experience. There are plenty of SEO tools that can help you if you get stuck figuring this stuff out.

Don’t forget about off-page SEO! It involves building high-quality backlinks, engaging in social media, collaborating with influencers, contributing guest posts and participating in relevant online communities.

User-Friendly Website Design

Did you know that 88% of online users won’t return to a site after a bad experience? Furthermore, 61% of users say they’ll bail if they can’t find what they’re looking for within five seconds. All of this means that you need to nail your website design.

Users want a site that’s easy to navigate, especially if they’re coming to a landing page from one of your ads. Make sure to include well-structured menus, a logical flow of content and an efficient search function. They’ll also want it to load fast, so optimize your image sizes and enable caching to improve site speeds.

Also, make sure your site is responsive and accessible. Responsive design ensures your website functions well and appears correctly on various devices. To improve accessibility, use readable fonts, suitable font sizes and proper colour contrasts to enhance readability.

Social Media Outreach

Actively engaging with your social media community is essential for building a loyal following. Responding to comments and messages and participating in discussions demonstrate your brand’s genuine interest in its audience. That’s especially true if you’re running an ad and people have questions. Leaving these concerns unaddressed can cause people to lose trust in your brand.

And your social media outreach doesn’t have to stand on its own. Link up your posts with your content strategy so you don’t have to come up with all original content.

Finally, choose the social media platforms where your target audience is most active. This lets you tailor your content and engagement strategies accordingly.

Customer-Centric Approach

A customer-centric approach means you place the needs, preferences and satisfaction of the customer at the forefront of all marketing efforts. The primary objective is to deeply understand your target audience, empathize with their challenges and provide tailored solutions that meet their specific requirements.

To do this, you’ll need to do lots of customer research and profiling. Develop detailed customer personas to create a clear and accurate representation of your ideal customers. Then, map out the entire customer journey—from the first interaction to conversion and beyond. Identify touchpoints where customers engage with your brand, and try to understand their motivations, concerns and expectations at each stage.

Using this information, create tailored messaging and content. Establish a feedback loop where you regularly review customer feedback, analyse data and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Pay-per-Click Advertising

It’s totally possible to craft an internet marketing campaign without spending any money. But if you want to guarantee people will see your content, then you’ll want to try pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is when you pay advertisers such as Google or Facebook to display your ad to relevant audiences.

The good news? You’re not paying for every person who sees the ad. Instead, you only pay whenever someone clicks on the ad. Now, there’s no guarantee that someone who clicks on your ad will make a purchase or create an account on your site. However, at least you’re only paying to reach interested consumers.

There’s a lot more to PPC ads, including bidding and ad placement. If you’re interested in trying out this strategy, we recommend checking out our guide on PPC advertising, which dives deeper into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Bottom Line

Internet marketing is a powerful tool that’s cost-effective, reaches a global audience, helps target the right people and provides measurable results, engagement and insights. In short, it’s a must-do for your small business.

There are a lot of different methods you can utilize to reach online audiences, but we recommend pairing several together to see the best results. That way, you can tackle your marketing efforts in every digital frontier, from social media to email to video. The result? Hopefully, your business will see a boom in sales, brand awareness and customer trust.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Kristy Snyder

Sourced from Forbes

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Social Media Marketing: What It Is, How It Works

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By Lisa Anthony 

Social media marketing can be cost-effective when you pick platforms suited to your business and consistently deliver messages that engage your target audience.

Social media marketing, a type of digital marketing, uses social media platforms to deliver online content to a business’s target audiences. Content is generally designed to build brand awareness and promote products or services, but it can also help a business increase visitors to its website and gather information about followers that can be used in email marketing and other campaigns.

Social media marketing allows you to engage in a more direct way with your target audience, even in one-on-one conversations in some instances. It can be less expensive than other forms of marketing, but it’s also highly competitive due to continuous streams of social posts vying for the attention of consumers. Creating an intentional social media marketing strategy can help you maximize your efforts and improve your return on investment.

How to create a social media marketing strategy

Social media marketing works like other forms of marketing as far as defining goals, identifying a target audience and creating content. However, to keep an active social media presence, a business will need to post regularly on their platforms of choice and regularly monitor brand mentions and customer comments.

Determine your social media marketing goals

Plotting out your goals from the outset will help guide you in the other decisions you’ll need to make, such as which social media platforms to use and the type of content to post.

Here are some general goals that are common to social media marketing:

  • Increase brand awareness.

  • Gain customer insights.

  • Increase sales.

  • Develop leads.

  • Increase website traffic.

  • Respond to customer complaints.

  • Retarget visitors to your website who don’t make purchases.

  • Get followers to share your content on promotional events.

  • Draw attention to a charity or non-profit organization you support.

When possible, be specific when setting goals, but also keep in mind that the success of some of your efforts may be hard to document. For example, it can be more difficult to measure an increase in brand awareness, but the goal of higher website traffic can be documented through marketing tools such as Google Analytics.

Define your target audience

Knowing your customers is important to any marketing effort. Customer information, such as interests, buying behaviours, pain points and demographic details like age, gender and annual income, can help you create content that will interest your target audience.

Also, demographic details may influence your choice of social media platforms. For example, if your target audience is primarily women, you may want to market on a platform that has a higher percentage of women than men. Or, if your target audience is younger, you may want to use a platform that is popular with that age group.

However, with daily users numbering in the millions on many popular platforms, your target audience may be well represented on any platform. Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram are a few of the platforms that offer audience insights tools you can use to learn about the people using the platform. Talking directly to your customers about which platforms they frequent most can also help inform your social media strategy.

Pick your social media platforms

You may choose to target even more niche social platforms based on your type of business and customers, but here are some of the most popular and how they’re used:

  • Facebook: Text, image and video sharing. A Facebook business page can provide important information about your business and build community.

  • YouTube: Video sharing.

  • Twitter: This social networking platform is mostly used for text-based Tweets, but you can also incorporate images, videos and GIFs.

  • Instagram: Photo and video sharing.

  • TikTok: Video sharing. Compared to YouTube, this is best for shorter videos.

  • Pinterest: Image sharing.

  • LinkedIn: A professional networking platform, LinkedIn is primarily used to market to businesses rather than consumers, or to increase brand awareness by participating in industry-specific forums.

  • Snapchat. Instant messaging, image and video platform.

  • Reddit: Forum-style discussions.

Assess your content needs

The type of content you’ll post on social media will depend on your business, goals and which platforms you’re using. It can range from promotional to educational and should reflect the human characteristics and voice that best define your brand, or your brand personality. For example, if your business sells outdoor gear, your brand personality might be rugged and adventurous. Or, if your business sells products and services for small children, your brand personality might be playful but nurturing.

Social media content can include text, images and videos. You may also be able to link to other content you’ve created such as articles, blogs, e-books and videos. Depending on the platform, there may be limits to what can be included in posts. For example, on Twitter, a Tweet can contain up to 280 characters plus up to four images, videos and/or GIFs.

Your social media marketing efforts might also include the use of digital ads on multiple social media platforms and search engines such as Google and Bing. Each platform will have its own requirements for ads and typically offer content recommendations. For example, YouTube offers step-by-step instructions on creating video ads, with pre-made templates and other tools.

Post consistently

Posting consistently is an important factor in successfully promoting your business on social media. Each business’s posting cadence, whether it’s daily, a few times a week or weekly, will depend on its goals and audience. You’ll also want to factor in the time it takes to produce quality content — a video or high-quality photos may take longer than a text-only Tweet, for instance.

Creating a posting schedule can help your business post consistently — and marketing software can help automate the process. While you can post the same content on all your platforms, it’s better to customize the content for the audience of each individual platform. Plus, as discussed, each platform has unique requirements for postings.

Posting regularly can help a business to:

  • Increase brand authority, credibility and reputation.

  • Build followers.

  • Gain familiarity with the platforms and tools.

  • Establish its brand voice.

  • Improve content rankings on platform feeds.

  • Support paid advertising efforts.

Monitor mentions and respond quickly

It’s important to monitor the mentions of your brand and comments made on your posts. Customers frequently take to a business’s social media when they have customer service questions or complaints. In those instances, responding quickly and positively is key, but aim to resolve the issue privately, by encouraging them to direct message or email your business.

Monitoring mentions — and encouraging customers to post about your business (while tagging your account) — can also help you identify brand advocates and gather user-generated content to repost, which can ease the burden of content creation.

It may take months before you see noticeable progress toward your marketing goals, but social media management tools like Hootsuite, Zoho Social and Buffer can help you monitor your content as well as help with posting, scheduling and measuring results.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Lisa Anthony 

Lead Writer  |  Personal finance, lending, personal taxes

Lisa A. Anthony is a writer on NerdWallet’s small-business team, primarily covering payroll software and payment processing. She has over 20 years of diverse experience in finance, lending and personal taxes. Prior to becoming a writer, Lisa worked as a loan officer, business analyst and freelance marketing consultant. Over the years she has had the opportunity to interact directly with consumers to conduct product research, gather insights and evaluate user experiences. She is based in San Diego.

Sourced from nerdwallet

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A How-to Guide for Local Marketing

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By Scott Clark
Local marketing aims to build a strong presence in the local market, increase brand visibility, attract local customers and drive traffic to physical stores.

The Gist

  • Geo-targeting essential. Social media offers geo-targeting for precise local advertising, increasing community engagement.
  • SEO optimization. “Near me” searches are frequent, making a Google Business Profile and mobile-first strategy critical.
  • Traditional Tactics. Traditional methods like radio and event presence alongside digital strategies amplify local marketing reach.

Local marketing refers to the strategies and activities that are used by businesses to target and engage with customers in a specific area or local community. It focuses on promoting products or services to customers within a particular region or area. Local marketing aims to build a strong presence in the local market, increase brand visibility, attract local customers and drive traffic to physical stores. This article will examine tactics, strategies and tips for brands interested in local marketing.

What Are Some of the Types of Local Marketing?

Many types of marketing practices are included under the umbrella of local marketing. One example is a brand that sells gift products that tourists often buy when they visit destinations such as the beach, the mountains or specific locations, such as the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. In each case, businesses that sell such products simply reach out to companies near each locale to see if they would like to carry the brand’s tourist products in their stores. Additionally, they participate in Facebook Groups for each tourist destination.

Another example of local marketing is when businesses adjust the products or services they sell based on the tastes, habits, culture and beliefs of the people living in the area of the service. Such a business would also adjust the marketing or advertising copy to reflect the social norms of the people in the area. One can see examples of this in international brands that sell their goods or services across the globe to people with very different tastes, habits and beliefs.

Yet another example of local marketing is the use of geolocation apps that send customers a text message or alert when they are physically near a brand’s location, such as driving by in their car, walking past a store or restaurant, or strolling through a large store that has other businesses within its premises. One example would be a fast food restaurant in a Super Walmart. When a customer that has downloaded the restaurant’s app to their mobile device is in Walmart, the app sends an alert to the customer’s phone, letting them know that they are offering a two-for-one deal on Quarter Pounders, for instance.

Finally, many businesses operate exclusively as local brands. Buckeye Donuts, which is located in Columbus, Ohio, is not trying to market its goods to people in other states. Its marketing and advertising campaigns are mainly based on word-of-mouth, local advertising, radio, local periodicals and participation in community events.

How Are Brands Using Local Marketing?

Many brands today are using local marketing in their communities and around the world. One unique instance of local marketing involves a collaboration between Mattel and Airbnb. Initially launched in October 2019, Airbnb announced that the Barbie Malibu Dreamhouse, located in Malibu, California, would be available for rent by one lucky guest, who could bring along three guests of their own, for the low price of $60 per night. It was designed to raise awareness of The Barbie Dream Gap Project GoFundMe initiative, which aims to help level the playing field for young women so they can follow their dreams.

We recently looked at another excellent example of a brand’s use of local marketing in an article on cultural intelligence. McDonald’s demonstrated the importance of adapting to different cultures in its marketing practices, product offerings and even its pricing. In India, where religious prohibitions prevent adherents from eating beef, McDonald’s introduced vegetarian options and replaced beef patties with mutton, chicken or fish.

mcdonalds

In Thailand, where the minimum wage is much lower than in other parts of the world, McDonald’s lowered the cost of its Big Mac to approximately US $2.20 (contrasted to Switzerland, where Big Macs sold for around US $6.20). In order to adapt to local culture in China, McDonald’s offered rice as a french fry alternative.

Additionally, McDonald’s uses different media personalities and influencers to promote its brand based on the cultural tastes of the locale. Its ability to adapt and change its products, marketing practices, pricing and advertising strategies to suit different geographical and sociological differences is a good indication of why it has become a hugely successful global brand.

Often, local marketing is not about reaching customers in their locale, but rather, bringing them to the brand through community building. The US Sports Network, Bally Sports, was interested in finding a better strategy to understand and engage its local fan base through the use of third-party data, but very quickly this became extremely costly. Instead, Bally turned to its online customer community, FanZone. This inclusive online community became the place where Bally’s diverse fans could get together with other fans, share their thoughts and experience a feeling of belonging.

Sports fans cheering their favorite team, representing the power of local marketing.

Using its FanZone community, Bally Sports enhanced and improved its ability to connect with regional fans in new and unique ways. It obtained on-demand feedback from customers, enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of its audience’s preferences and doubling its fan community through targeted live on-air promotion efforts.

Use Social Media for Local Marketing

Most brands today have a social media presence, but for local marketing, social media is a necessity rather than an option. The benefits of social media for local marketing include:

  • Geo-Targeting: Many social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, offer geo-targeting features for advertising. This enables businesses to target users in a particular location or radius specifically.
  • Local Engagement: Social media enables local businesses to engage directly with their community. Businesses can foster a sense of community and build local loyalty by sharing local news, participating in local events or spotlighting community members.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Social media can be cost-effective compared to traditional advertising channels like TV or print. Businesses can start with a small budget and scale up based on results.
  • Real-Time Feedback: Local businesses can receive immediate feedback from their community. This can be invaluable for understanding the needs and preferences of local customers.
  • Word-of-Mouth Amplification: Satisfied customers can easily share their experiences and recommendations, resulting in word-of-mouth marketing.
  • Versatility: Social media provides a platform for various content types, from videos to images to stories, enabling businesses to be creative and diverse in their messaging.

Aside from advertising on social media and regularly contributing appropriate content, many brands use the community aspects of social media to engage with and attract customers. Ashley Mason, marketing consultant and founder of Dash of Social, a social media management consultancy, told CMSWire that she built the client base for her business through the use of Facebook groups.

“For me, as a Massachusetts resident, I started joining several Boston-based Facebook groups revolving around entrepreneurship, business, etc. in 2016,” said Mason. “Because many members in these groups were often business owners looking to hire social media managers or marketers for their companies, I was able to use these communities to my advantage to establish thought leadership, build trust, gather leads, and grow my business.”

Mason attributes much of her revenue to Facebook groups and wrote about her success on Instagram. “Approximately $630,000 of my total business revenue came from Facebook groups, either by working with people who were in the same Facebook groups as me, or getting referred to other businesses by people I met in those Facebook groups.”

Optimize SEO for “Near Me” Local Searches

Consumers today often search for local businesses by using the phrase “near me.” In fact, a 2022 Statista survey revealed that 82% of US consumers who used their smartphone to shop had used near me searches.

Local businesses trying to increase their online presence and show up more often in near me searches should create a Google Business Profile. It’s free, and once a business has been verified, it will appear in near me search results. The name, address and phone number displayed on a brand’s Google Business Profile should match what is displayed on the brand’s website and any promotional material.

google business profile

 

A 2023 BroadbandSearch report indicated that 54.4% of web traffic was conducted on mobile devices (compared to 0.7% in 2009). Additionally, a recent Hubspot report revealed that local searches are what lead 50% of mobile users to visit stores within 24 hours. Brands today should create their website with a mobile-first strategy, optimizing for mobile devices as a priority, rather than optimizing for desktop displays.

Amy Jennette, senior director of brand marketing at the popular web host GoDaddy, told CMSWire that ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is a key part of the equation. “Consumers want information on the go, so double check that your site has mobile-friendly text, menus, forms, and buttons that make it simple for your audience to browse site information on the go.”

Jennette said that businesses should localize their website to make the content relevant to their target community. “For example, if I was the owner of an electric bicycle shop in my hometown of Seattle, I may rephrase the terms on my website’s homepage to say, ‘bringing our community the greenest bikes for a greener Seattle’ rather than simply putting ‘electric bike shop.’ And this moves beyond just your website —localizing your marketing should be applied across your digital and print ads, social media pages, and other public marketing materials,” said Jennette, who added that these simple tweaks could make a major difference for your audience as they research online local businesses that best fit their needs.

Leverage Traditional and Non-Traditional Advertising

Local marketing often relies on more traditional methods of obtaining the eyes and ears of customers and leads, such as TV and radio advertising, having a visible presence at local events, word-of-mouth, billboards and collaborations with other local businesses. “Whenever possible, join in on local industry-specific events, fairs and festivals, and neighborhood gatherings to boost your brand awareness, show off your locality, and further press the importance of supporting small, local businesses,” said Jennette. “In no time you’ll be the local authority in your industry, and you’ll have the local marketing tools in your toolbelt to thank for it.”

Other brands are using local marketing strategies that include digital displays located in areas where potential customers will see them. Geoff Crain, senior director of sales and marketing at Kingstar Media, a digital marketing and video production agency, told CMSWire that his business uses digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising for local marketing due to its ability to target local audiences precisely, deliver contextually relevant content and allow real-time updates. “By strategically placing digital displays in specific locations, we have the ability to reach specific and local communities effectively,” said Crain.

“DOOH also allows for dynamic and tailored messaging, incorporating local references and promotions to establish a deeper connection with the local community.” Crain explained that the real-time capabilities of DOOH enable businesses to adapt campaigns quickly, providing timely and accurate information to their desired local audience, enhancing engagement, and driving positive business outcomes in specific local markets.

Traditional marketing and advertising mediums can still be effective strategies for local businesses. Although many may not recognize radio’s reach today, a recent Statista report indicated that radio is one of the most powerful mediums in the United States, with a weekly reach of around 82.5% among adults, and 78% of those under 18. “Radio is another form of media we utilize for local marketing due to its ability to reach a wide and diverse audience within a specific geographical area,” said Crain. “With radio, we can effectively target local audiences, delivering our advertising messages directly to potential customers in their communities.”

Mobility is another benefit of radio advertising. “Radio also offers the advantage of being a mobile medium, reaching consumers in their cars, homes, or workplaces, allowing our clients to stay memorable and top-of-mind throughout the day,” said Crain. “Radio also allows for the creation of engaging and memorable audio content, leveraging the power of storytelling, music, and personalities to connect with the local audience on an emotional level, making it an impactful and cost-effective medium for local marketing.”

Final Thoughts on Local Marketing

Local marketing provides brands with the unique opportunity to intimately connect with their surrounding community, addressing its distinct tastes, cultures and preferences. By using a blend of traditional and digital strategies, from SEO and mobile optimization and social media engagement to radio advertising and participation in community events, businesses can effectively bolster their local presence.

Feature Image Credit: TensorSpark on Adobe Stock Photo

By Scott Clark

Scott Clark is a seasoned journalist based in Columbus, Ohio, who has made a name for himself covering the ever-evolving landscape of customer experience, marketing and technology. He has over 20 years of experience covering Information Technology and 27 years as a web developer. His coverage ranges across customer experience, AI, social media marketing, voice of customer, diversity & inclusion and more. Scott is a strong advocate for customer experience and corporate responsibility, bringing together statistics, facts, and insights from leading thought leaders to provide informative and thought-provoking articles. Connect with Scott Clark:

Sourced from CMSWIRE

local marketing, social media, marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing, advertising
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Social Media Marketing: What It Is, How It Works

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By Lisa Anthony 

Social media marketing can be cost-effective when you pick platforms suited to your business and consistently deliver messages that engage your target audience.

Social media marketing, a type of digital marketing, uses social media platforms to deliver online content to a business’s target audiences. Content is generally designed to build brand awareness and promote products or services, but it can also help a business increase visitors to its website and gather information about followers that can be used in email marketing and other campaigns.

Social media marketing allows you to engage in a more direct way with your target audience, even in one-on-one conversations in some instances. It can be less expensive than other forms of marketing, but it’s also highly competitive due to continuous streams of social posts vying for the attention of consumers. Creating an intentional social media marketing strategy can help you maximize your efforts and improve your return on investment.

How to create a social media marketing strategy

Social media marketing works like other forms of marketing as far as defining goals, identifying a target audience and creating content. However, to keep an active social media presence, a business will need to post regularly on their platforms of choice and regularly monitor brand mentions and customer comments.

Determine your social media marketing goals

Plotting out your goals from the outset will help guide you in the other decisions you’ll need to make, such as which social media platforms to use and the type of content to post.

Here are some general goals that are common to social media marketing:

  • Increase brand awareness.

  • Gain customer insights.

  • Increase sales.

  • Develop leads.

  • Increase website traffic.

  • Respond to customer complaints.

  • Retarget visitors to your website who don’t make purchases.

  • Get followers to share your content on promotional events.

  • Draw attention to a charity or non-profit organization you support.

When possible, be specific when setting goals, but also keep in mind that the success of some of your efforts may be hard to document. For example, it can be more difficult to measure an increase in brand awareness, but the goal of higher website traffic can be documented through marketing tools such as Google Analytics.

Define your target audience

Knowing your customers is important to any marketing effort. Customer information, such as interests, buying behaviors, pain points and demographic details like age, gender and annual income, can help you create content that will interest your target audience.

Also, demographic details may influence your choice of social media platforms. For example, if your target audience is primarily women, you may want to market on a platform that has a higher percentage of women than men. Or, if your target audience is younger, you may want to use a platform that is popular with that age group.

However, with daily users numbering in the millions on many popular platforms, your target audience may be well represented on any platform. Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram are a few of the platforms that offer audience insights tools you can use to learn about the people using the platform. Talking directly to your customers about which platforms they frequent most can also help inform your social media strategy.

Pick your social media platforms

You may choose to target even more niche social platforms based on your type of business and customers, but here are some of the most popular and how they’re used:

  • Facebook: Text, image and video sharing. A Facebook business page can provide important information about your business and build community.

  • YouTube: Video sharing.

  • Twitter: This social networking platform is mostly used for text-based Tweets, but you can also incorporate images, videos and GIFs.

  • Instagram: Photo and video sharing.

  • TikTok: Video sharing. Compared to YouTube, this is best for shorter videos.

  • Pinterest: Image sharing.

  • LinkedIn: A professional networking platform, LinkedIn is primarily used to market to businesses rather than consumers, or to increase brand awareness by participating in industry-specific forums.

  • Snapchat. Instant messaging, image and video platform.

  • Reddit: Forum-style discussions.

Assess your content needs

The type of content you’ll post on social media will depend on your business, goals and which platforms you’re using. It can range from promotional to educational and should reflect the human characteristics and voice that best define your brand, or your brand personality. For example, if your business sells outdoor gear, your brand personality might be rugged and adventurous. Or, if your business sells products and services for small children, your brand personality might be playful but nurturing.

Social media content can include text, images and videos. You may also be able to link to other content you’ve created such as articles, blogs, e-books and videos. Depending on the platform, there may be limits to what can be included in posts. For example, on Twitter, a Tweet can contain up to 280 characters plus up to four images, videos and/or GIFs.

Your social media marketing efforts might also include the use of digital ads on multiple social media platforms and search engines such as Google and Bing. Each platform will have its own requirements for ads and typically offer content recommendations. For example, YouTube offers step-by-step instructions on creating video ads, with pre-made templates and other tools.

Post consistently

Posting consistently is an important factor in successfully promoting your business on social media. Each business’s posting cadence, whether it’s daily, a few times a week or weekly, will depend on its goals and audience. You’ll also want to factor in the time it takes to produce quality content — a video or high-quality photos may take longer than a text-only Tweet, for instance.

Creating a posting schedule can help your business post consistently — and marketing software can help automate the process. While you can post the same content on all your platforms, it’s better to customize the content for the audience of each individual platform. Plus, as discussed, each platform has unique requirements for postings.

Posting regularly can help a business to:

  • Increase brand authority, credibility and reputation.

  • Build followers.

  • Gain familiarity with the platforms and tools.

  • Establish its brand voice.

  • Improve content rankings on platform feeds.

  • Support paid advertising efforts.

Monitor mentions and respond quickly

It’s important to monitor the mentions of your brand and comments made on your posts. Customers frequently take to a business’s social media when they have customer service questions or complaints. In those instances, responding quickly and positively is key, but aim to resolve the issue privately, by encouraging them to direct message or email your business.

Monitoring mentions — and encouraging customers to post about your business (while tagging your account) — can also help you identify brand advocates and gather user-generated content to repost, which can ease the burden of content creation.

It may take months before you see noticeable progress toward your marketing goals, but social media management tools like Hootsuite, Zoho Social and Buffer can help you monitor your content as well as help with posting, scheduling and measuring results.

By Lisa Anthony 

Lisa is a small-business writer at NerdWallet and has more than 20 years of experience in banking and finance. Read more

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Facebook Is Building a Twitter Rival. Here’s What Marketers Need to Know

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By Dom Nicastro

Facebook’s mulling a decentralized platform that rivals Twitter and Mastodon, but can it be a marketing goldmine?

The Gist

  • Step aside, Twitter and Mastodon? Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is planning to build a standalone text-based app that integrates with ActivityPub, an open, decentralized social networking protocol that controls notifications and content. This could potentially rival Twitter and Mastodon.
  • Marketing goldmine, or landmine? Smaller social media apps like Mastodon and Post.news, which foster a decentralized, ad-free platform, could pose challenges for marketers since they don’t allow personalized content or ads.
  • Meet P92, eventually. Meta’s new social media app is still in the development stage and has been codenamed P92.

Remember that whole social media thing? You know, before generative artificial intelligence took over our brains last fall?

Well, the big social media platforms are still out there. Really out there, in some cases. Smaller ones have emerged, and emerged again. And the bigger ones are contemplating creating smaller spinoffs.

The latest: Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, wants to build a standalone, text-based app that integrates with ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that delivers APIs for content management and federated server-to-server content management that controls notifications and content. Moneycontrol first reported this news March 10.

Twitter rival? Mastodon rival? Maybe so.

This development means more questions for marketers and customer experience professionals. Particularly, this: will we be able to build true marketing content real estate and valuable customer experiences on these new rising social media apps?

The news comes as Facebook March 14 announced another round of layoffs — 10,000 employees.

Marketer- and Customer Experience-Friendly Social Media Apps?

Here’s the biggest problem with some of these new apps. They’re not exactly marketer-friendly. The point of Mastodon, for instance, is to foster a decentralized, open-source social media platform that has no ads and presents posts in chronological order rather than using an algorithm to predict best-matched content. The site describes itself as a federated network.

Wait, no ads? No personalized content? What is a marketer — and a brand — to do?

Meanwhile, the vision for another new social media app, Post.news, is to be a “virtual watercooler for journalists.” The model: access premium news content without subscriptions or ads where writers share their articles on the site under a paywall. Marketers, advertisers and brands will be limited to posting relevant, informative or entertaining content, rather than running advertisements or posting promotional material.

So that’s good, but not quite marketing nirvana, right?

What We Know About Meta’s Potential Social Media App

Will marketers and customer experience professionals be able to get more pieces of the Meta social media innovation pie? Outside of, of course, the tried and true Facebook and Instagram?

It’s early to tell. News of the possible new social media app from Meta — said to be a Twitter rival — came out just over the past few days. Here’s what we do know so far:

  • Meta’s confirmed the development. “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
  • It has a name. The project for this new social media app is codenamed P92, though sources told Moneycontrol it’s still in the idea stage and a work in progress. So it’s entirely unclear how far along it is on the development trail.
  • It may give users ability to share across servers. A source told Moneycontrol the Meta new social app would give users the ability to post to other servers. With Mastodon, you have to pick a server. What are servers related to decentralized social platforms? Mastodon servers, also called “instances,” are individual communities, each with its own rules and culture. A server can be owned by a person, a group or a professional organization, and the server owner is the one who dictates the community’s guidelines. (Imagine trying to crack some marketing eggs over that).
  • Preview, followers and likes. Sound familiar? This new app would have features like tappable links in posts with previews, user bio, username and verification badges, according to Moneycontrol. Comments and messages? Not clear yet. A source did tell Moneycontrol, “The team is also discussing whether to have the ability to reshare content like Twitter apart from business and creator accounts. A rights manager will be integrated from the beginning for first party content, but probably not for third party content from other apps and servers,” said another source.

With No Hard Plans for Meta, Focus on Content

The ultimate message with this latest social media development out of Meta for marketers and customer experience professionals? It’s hard to take any action on Meta’s plans since, for now, they are just that: plans. Nothing concrete.

Social media marketing will always be about what your customers and prospects think it is, and where they are, not you or your brand.

“Plan for more exploration of how to repurpose content, as no single format or platform will serve every moment or need,” CMSWire author Pierre DeBois wrote in an article on his social media vision for 2023: “Marketers should also plan campaign labels to compare channel lift and ROI. Doing so will deepen understanding what intent data streams are created from the video campaigns and events.”

By Dom Nicastro

Dom Nicastro is managing editor of CMSWire and an award-winning journalist with a passion for technology, customer experience and marketing. With more than 20 years of experience, he has written for various publications, like the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Magazine. He has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, informative, and engaging content to his readers. Dom works tirelessly to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry to provide readers with accurate, trustworthy information to help them make informed decisions.

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How to master Social Media Marketing in 2023

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By CARLOS GIL

Strategies for small-business owners to stay ahead of the curve.

As we move into 2023, here are a few key tips for small-business owners to master social- media marketing:

Know your audience

It’s crucial to research and understand your audience to create a social-media strategy that is tailored to its interests and needs. This will not only help you reach more potential customers but also increase engagement with your current ones. One way to do this is by conducting market research. Reach out to your current customers and ask for feedback, conduct surveys, and analyse the data. This will give you insights into their demographics, interests, and what they’re looking for in a brand. Additionally, use social-media analytics tools to track engagement, reach, and conversions. This will give you a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to make data-driven decisions.

Be strategic

Have a clear understanding of your goals and objectives for using social media. Whether you aim to improve customer service, promote your brand in your local community, or drive sales, it’s essential to start with a specific goal in mind. It’s equally important to be strategic in your approach and not waste time on platforms that don’t align with your target audience or objectives. As an example, if your target audience is a younger generation, investing more time on TikTok than a platform like Facebook could be beneficial.

Create a content strategy.

This strategy should be tailored to align with your overall business goals and should include a mix of content types, including text posts, images, videos, and live streams. Have a content calendar in place that outlines when and what types of content you’ll be sharing on your social-media channels. This will help ensure that you’re consistently creating and sharing content, which is crucial for building a following and engaging with your target audience. It’s also important to understand the importance of creating visually appealing and engaging content, as it has been proven that images and videos have greater engagement rates than text-only posts. You can leverage tools like Canva or Adobe Spark to create visually appealing designs and infographics that can help increase engagement and make your posts stand out.

Utilize automation tools

Tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social allow you to schedule your posts in advance, track analytics, and monitor mentions and engagement all in one place. This means you can focus on the more important tasks of running your business, while still maintaining a consistent presence on social media. Not only do these tools save time, but they also provide valuable insights into your audience engagement and performance, helping you to make more informed decisions about your social-media strategy.

Engage with your audience

Responding to comments and messages promptly not only shows that you value their input and feedback, it also helps to increase brand loyalty and trust. Using tools like polls and surveys can help you gain valuable insights about your audience’s preferences and needs, which can inform your content strategy and product offerings. In addition to responding to comments and messages, consider hosting Q&A sessions, live streams, and other interactive content to foster engagement and build a sense of community among your followers. By engaging with your audience, you’ll be able to create a loyal customer base that will help drive success for your small business.

Use influencer marketing

By partnering with industry influencers, small businesses can tap into their existing audience and gain access to a new group of potential customers. However, it’s important to choose influencers who align with your brand values and message, and be transparent with them about your expectations. For small businesses with limited marketing budgets, utilizing your own customers or clients as influencers can be a cost-effective way to make influencer marketing work for your business. For example, at our brick-and-mortar sneaker boutique, The Hype Section, we take advantage of customer reviews and social media tags to turn our customers into influencers.

Invest in paid advertising

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer highly targeted advertising options that allow you to reach specific demographics and interests, such as age, gender, location, and interests. Additionally, these platforms offer a variety of ad formats, such as photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, and more, that can be customized to suit your business needs. With the right targeting and creative, paid advertising can be a powerful tool for driving website traffic, increasing brand awareness, and generating leads and sales. It’s important to track your results and optimize your campaigns for the best ROI.

Measure your results

Utilizing built-in analytics tools like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Instagram Insights can provide valuable data on engagement, reach, and conversions. This information can help you identify the best times to post, the types of content that resonate with your audience, and the campaigns that drive the most conversions. Regularly monitoring your metrics will allow you to make data-driven decisions that improve your social-media strategy and ultimately drive success for your small business. Additionally, consider using third-party analytics tools that can give you an even more in-depth look at your social-media performance, such as Google Analytics, which can track website traffic from social-media channels. By utilizing these tools, you can create more effective campaigns and stay on top of the latest trends and strategies for mastering social-media marketing in 2023.

BY CARLOS GIL

BY CARLOS GIL, AUTHOR “THE END OF MARKETING: HUMANIZING YOUR BRAND IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND AI”

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7 Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Your Business

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By Kaloyan Gospodinov

These strategies will help you win and position yourself and your company in the best way this year.

A marketing strategy is the “plan identifying what marketing goals and objectives will be pursued to sell a particular product or product line and how these objectives will be achieved in the time available.” Keep in mind that you need to consider the following three pillars in your marketing strategy plan before execution:

  1. Core audience demographics
  2. Pricing and marketing budget
  3. Business goals

The following seven marketing strategies are vital for connecting with your target audience, achieving your marketing goals by promoting products and services, increasing brand awareness and engaging with your target audience through various channels.

1. Email marketing

Email marketing is an old concept that will be very relevant in 2023. Having lists of targeted audiences with a differentiated email structure for each can provide you with a great and “cheap” way to showcase the developments in your company and sell your products.

Here are three examples that you can implement in your email marketing. The first one is to increase your email interactivity. People are used to social media and the engagement they can give when reading or viewing content. Add videos, sliders, games and carousels of images that people can swipe.

The second one is the use of storytelling in your email copy. People are looking to connect to a brand’s values, and one of the best ways to do that is to tell your brand’s story. Tell them your origin story, show your personality, the company’s culture and team. Use videos, quotes and memes to build a relationship with your subscribers.

The last one is personalization. Personalization in the email body can improve your open rate by 13% and can increase the clickthrough rate by 28% while reducing the bounce rate by 18%.

Email is still thriving as you control how you approach your audience based on your marketing objectives without the need to comply with rules imposed by the platform you use.

2. Social media marketing

Social media marketing is here to stay, and we need to find the right platform for us to create content, connect with our audience and show our expertise or products. This will be dictated by your target demographics and where they spend the most time at.

It is also important to note that Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies will have specific platforms that can be used for their business model. For example, LinkedIn for B2B and TikTok for B2C. Remember that your audience can move to a different platform down the line.

One thing that you can integrate into your social media marketing strategy is to think of ways to incorporate user-generated content. This can be in the form of reviews, unboxing, tutorials, and product reviews. According to Stackla, 88% of consumers specify authenticity and relatability as crucial decision drivers to complete in-app purchases and increase their brand engagement.

The most important thing is to use your authentic voice and showcase the people in your company and their expertise, values and personalities.

3. Public relations (PR)

Another old-fashioned concept that still has a place in your marketing toolbox, especially in 2023. PR is relevant and can help you increase awareness around a milestone you’ve achieved or a product/ initiative you are launching. Media mentions will also help you with the SEO of your website/ brand name and how you rank in searches as you get authoritative websites mentioning your company.

According to Statista, the PR industry is expected to be worth $129 billion by 2025 or an increase of 68% from 2020, worth $88 billion.

4. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a must-do strategy in 2023. SEO aims to increase the searchability of your brand name and specific keywords relating to your offers while helping you grow traffic and sales.

Organic SEO can help you rank your content for specific keywords. I recommend learning how to do the basics of SEO in your content and focusing initially on long-tail keywords, as it will be easier for you to rank.

The main pillar in your SEO strategy should be creating high-quality content and targeting your customers’ needs and questions engagingly while targeting keyword phrases. Create evergreen content that will help customers understand your company and products better.

SEO can be integrated with paid ads so your articles can show on top of the search results.

5. Influencer marketing

Collaboration with influencers can help you scale your business in a short period by increasing your brand awareness and reputation. The key here is to research and get numerous quotes from different influencers so you can decide on the best deal.

I’d say that it’s not always beneficial to go for the biggest names in a particular niche, as your business might not be prepared for that growth. A better strategy will be to find smaller accounts with a more engaged audience so both parties can grow simultaneously and be more sustainable.

One growing trend in influencer marketing is live stream shopping, which means that potential customers can buy products through a live video. Influencers can showcase products, give opinions and answer questions from their followers about the product they are presenting. Instagram introduced Live Shopping in September 2022, which allows users to purchase products from Instagram Live directly, so expect this to be prioritized on the platform in 2023.

6. Virtual events

Virtual events are here to stay, especially after the last couple of years when travel was almost non-existent. Showing your expertise and value through online events can help you increase your brand awareness and reach. The list of attendees can be reused and segmented in your email communication, which will benefit your company in the long run.

Another strategy is to attract experts in the industry you are operating in and create an event where they talk about various subjects related to your company. The event videos can also be reused on social media in long and short-form videos.

7. Video marketing

The most important strategy in the last few years is video marketing. Closely related to hosting virtual events, video marketing can help you present your company from various perspectives.

People from your company can have topics they are working on and record video presentations for the world to see. Behind-the-scenes and company events can showcase the human side of your team, and the sky is the limit regarding creative ways to create video content.

Authenticity here is key as your willingness to open up in front of the camera so people can connect with who you are and what your company stands for.

Short vertical video content will be one of the biggest trends in video marketing in 2023. According to Zippia, 85% of U.S. adults own a smartphone as of 2022, and on average, Americans spend 5 hours and 24 minutes on their mobile devices daily. As vertical video content can take more real estate on a device and people are using TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, you need to focus your time and creativity to investigate that type of video content.

The world is moving towards personal branding, and video is one, if not the best, way to open up to your audience.

Win with marketing in 2023

To summarise, test and see what works for you and your company. Do not focus and do all the strategies mentioned here simultaneously — experiment with what resonates with you as a personality and your business niche. Adapt and develop the best marketing mix for your desired outcome that will help you win in 2023.

By Kaloyan Gospodinov

Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor. CEO and Founder at Aezir. Kaloyan is an entrepreneur with global experience. Past successes include 1m+ app downloads, six figures from Amazon FBA, and managing a million-dollar crypto project. Currently, he advises Swiss biotech and runs a London marketing agency. His motivation is helping people pursue their dreams.

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Twitter vs. Mastodon: The Marketing Reality

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By Jennifer Torres

Will Mastodon provide safe harbour for marketers amid a growing Twitter exodus?

While there’s still a long way to go for Mastodon to catch up with Twitter’s 238 million daily active users, the decentralized social network’s recent announcement it reached 1 million monthly active users could create fertile ground for a Twitter takeover.

Fears spawned by an increase in posts encouraging hate speech and conspiracy following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, led to a swell of users and brands making the decision to jump ship in an effort to avoid association — and left marketers asking what to do amid the Mastodon vs. Twitter debate.

Some Marketers Still All in on Twitter

Khalil Garriott, vice president for creative content and copywriting strategy with the American Bankers Association, said he currently has no plans or interest in joining Mastodon.

“As a Twitter power user since January 2011, I am still all in on the little blue birdie,” Garriott said. “I’ll admit to not knowing much about Mastodon. I understand that its feed is presented in chrono order instead of algo-based, and I gather that it is an ad-free platform. Both of those seem to be benefits, which might entice me to explore it in the future. So, it’s a wait-and-see approach for me.”

While Garriott waits it out, Mark Freeman II, a senior data scientist at Humu, jumped right on. As someone who provides his audience with content on data and technology, he said he ultimately chose Mastodon for one simple reason — his target audience is already curated.

Mastodon provides access to individual communities, called “instances” or servers, and Freeman is currently part of an “instance” consisting solely of data professionals.

“What’s more exciting is that many of the people I’m meeting on Mastodon are not on LinkedIn and thus increasing my reach to new audiences,” Freeman said. “In addition, even though my ‘home’ instance is curated for data professionals, I can still reach other communities indirectly since Mastodon is federated. Thus, my current strategy to grow on the platform is to create two types of content, data content for my ‘home; community and meta content about Mastodon with hashtags utilized by other communities.”

Is Twitter Experiencing a Mass Exodus?

So who is leaving Twitter? In analyzing more than 3.1 million accounts on Twitter, Bot Sentinel believes approximately 877,000 accounts were deactivated between Oct. 27-Nov. 1.

According to PR Week, several brands including General Motors, General Mills, Volkswagen Group, Pfizer and United Airlines have announced a “pause” on Twitter ad. Ad-purchasing goliath, Interpublic Group, recommended its clients, which include Coca Cola, Accenture, American Express, Fitbit, GoPro, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Co, Mattel, Spotify and others, followed suit.

In a call to action, the NAACP and nearly 50 other organizations wrote an open letter to Twitter’s 20 largest US advertisers, calling on them to make a public announcement of their intention to “cease all advertising on Twitter globally” if Musk “follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”

NAACP CEO and President Derrick Johnson tweeted that “Until he makes this a safe space for all communities, companies cannot in good conscience put their money behind Twitter.”

Should Leaders Flock to Mastodon?

George Davidson, founder of the marketing consultancy The Lantern and adjunct instructor on Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Strategy at the University of Chicago, said it’s not clear Mastodon will take off. However, brands that like to be first in a space and show their customers they’re leaders, had better get a move on, he added.

“This in itself, may create some momentum for Mastodon and who knows what can happen when a Mastodon gets momentum?” he said.

Davidson applied for Mastodon account but said the rush in the UK has been so great, they are currently processing a backlog. He foresees two big possible impacts for marketers.

“First, Twitter has advertising and Mastodon does not, so marketers used to paying for adverts will have to create compelling creatives that are interesting enough to get shared,” Davidson said. “Secondly, we are used to a rush to claim names online through bagging website addresses and Twitter handles. Owning your own name online has been difficult in the wild, wild web in the past. On Mastodon, you have to make a case to the person running your local server, and that ought to favor marketers who feel they own their own name. You just have to persuade the server owner they agree.”

Check out Michelle Hawley’s thorough examination of what Mastodon servers actually are and other important information on Mastodon.

How Do You Actually Move on from a Social Media Platform?

Curtis Sparrer, principal and co-founder of Bospar, said he often finds the “wait and see” approach cowardly; however, he does think this might be a moment when it’s a good idea.

“While some are fleeing Twitter, this creates an opportunity for some brands to command a stronger share of voice. That said, this is a time for brands to take a serious look at what constitutes their redline when it comes to Twitter,” Sparrer said. “In other words, what are the moments that make sense for your brand to publicly disassociate yourself from the platform? And, should that redline be breached, what is your communication strategy to make your position known so leaving Twitter doesn’t seem improvised, but rather part of a thoughtful communication strategy befitting of your brand?”

For brands that elect to leave Twitter, he recommends a creating a blog, a video testimony and a social media play with other outlets to demonstrate that you have moved on past Twitter and Elon Musk.

The Musk Effect: A Twitter Takeover

After months of machinations, Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Oct. 27 — and the same day addressed the advertising community in a tweet titled, Dear Twitter Advertisers, sharing his desire to make Twitter the “most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”

And despite previously tweeting “I hate advertising” in 2019 — he now urged advertisers to join him in building “something extraordinary together” and insisted the platform would not become “a “free-for-all-hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”

According to Investopedia, the majority of Twitter’s revenue (nearly 90%) is generated through selling ad space on its platform to global advertisers — bringing in $4.5 billion in 2021.

Just a few days after Musk’s takeover, Montclair State University released a study revealing a significant spike in hate speech on the platform just prior to — and immediately following — Musk’s acquisition. nd within the week, amid a mass reduction in staff, Musk admitted the company was losing more than $4 million a day, something he attributed to “activist groups pressuring advertisers.”

Should You Stay or Should You Go: Mastodon vs. Twitter

Rachel Happe, founder of Engaged Organizations, said she doesn’t think most marketers will leave Twitter for Mastodon — at least until there is more there. But she recently told her Twitter followers to follow her on Mastodon “should Twitter either go up in (flames) or become a hell hole.”

“I am not leaving Twitter yet — just hedging my bets,” she told CMSWire.

Benjamin Goh, managing partner BCG said Mastodon could be the way forward for social media apps on the open-source platform. “I used to be active in Twitter, but it’s not popular in Southeast Asian countries where most of my contacts are located, so I’ve stopped using it,” Goh said. “As for Mastodon, my initial inquiry with my network is that most of them have not even heard of it. I guess it will require some time before it gains some significant presence here.”

Bret Smith, CEO and founder of HIPB2B, quit Twitter two months ago, leaving 70,000 followers behind. “As for Mastodon, not seeing lots of upside for B2B yet so will wait and see,” Smith said.

Marketers Can ‘Safely Ignore Mastodon’

David Meerman Scott, the author 12 books including “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” wrote about Mastodon back in 2017 in a blog “Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter But You Should Ignore It.”

Five years later, he told CMSWire his thoughts remain the same.

“I just don’t believe that people will switch in any significant numbers,” Scott said. “As I said in the post, when a new social network pops up and the defining characteristic is that it is like another social network but better, it’s doomed,” Scott said. “I think marketers can safely ignore Mastodon. I do not think that this little flurry of interest is sustainable, and I do not think that Mastodon or any other social media service will take the place of Twitter. Throughout history, social networks that pioneer a new model can thrive — Instagram, TikTok come to mind — but copycats like Google Plus fail.”

Decentralized Mastodon Could Be Appealing

While Mastodon isn’t nearly as populated at Twitter at the moment, Zacharias Joseph, chief ideations and operations officer at ZACH Multimedia, said that’s exactly where opportunity lies. The decentralized nature of Mastodon should be very attractive to the crypto community.

“A rapid scaling up can help Mastodon pull near or alongside Twitter, especially with the anger of large sections of users, including me, against the childish, capricious manner in which Elon Musk conducts the business and himself,” Joseph said. “Before marketers join the bandwagon of Mastodon with just one million users, Mastodon has to aggressively market itself globally.”

At the moment, he said, it appears Mastodon is a bit slow-moving and needs to be out there aggressively with innovative schemes to ramp up the numbers quickly, especially using the zeal of the newly converted. In addition, a top priority should be to ensure the ease of signing up.

“I tried to join and will join, but the first time I tried I found the process too irksome, so I left it halfway through,” he said. “I am not familiar with the behind-the-screen architecture of Mastodon, and how to work around it, but if Mastodon can provide a unified face for the various federated servers, then the navigation and sign-up functions for customers could be considerably eased, and that would have a force multiplier effect.”

Is Community the Key to Social Platform Success?

Evan Hamilton, director of community at HubSpot and former director of community and customer experience for Reddit, said he was part of the first wave to join Mastodon.

“Having been at Reddit during the long cleanup to get advertisers to return and seeing the challenges of driving subscription adoption, I don’t have a lot of faith Twitter is going to thrive in the coming months,” Hamilton said. “I joined Mastodon to secure my username and explore. Marketers should absolutely do this — it’s good to explore new territory — but I worry that the complexity of Mastodon and the difficulty of moving your audience will keep it from taking off.”

Hamilton said the buzz he’s hearing from people is that they’re realizing Twitter (or at least corners of it) had a culture. They’re not so much lamenting the potential loss of a tool to communicate — because there are plenty of those — but the loss of the culture.

“So, while I think Mastodon, LinkedIn and others will get some bump, I actually think what people are realizing they want is a community, not a public-commons,” Hamilton said. “I predict we’ll see more sustained growth in communities focused on specific interests and practices. … I encourage marketers to think about how they can invest in building owned communities or participating in communities run by others.”

Sourced from CMSWire

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Is It the 11th Hour for TikTok?

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By Phil Britt

With TikTok expected to rake in $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022, a ban would likely have a serious effect on marketers and advertisers.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr called last month for the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to take action to ban TikTok, according to an Axios report. And the FBI weighed in on TikTok security concerns this past week.

Though the FCC itself has no outright power to ban the popular social media platform, which has a reported 200 million downloads in the United States alone, the popular app has come under fire due to its Chinese ownership as well as concerns about security and the spread of misinformation. A strong stance by the FCC — Carr is one of five commissioners — could prompt Congress to take action regarding the platform.

Such a ban would have an effect on marketers and advertisers. According to a New York Times article, TikTok expects to generate $10 billion in ad revenue this year.

Below are some of the pros and cons of potentially banning the platform.

Pro: TikTok Is Poor at Handling Data

TikTok should be banned in the United States, said Lyle Solomon, Oak View Law Group principal attorney, citing TikTok’s handling of US user data and its “blatant contradictions” in how it handles the data.

TikTok’s US branch has repeatedly claimed that its data centers are in the country, Solomon explained. “However, the more extensive links of sharing US user data with the parent company, ByteDance, cannot be underplayed. Data from US users was repeatedly accessed within China’s borders by ByteDance employees. Senior TikTok employees claimed that certain ByteDance employees in China had access to all US personal data.”

Chinese law also concerns Solomon because the government can ask Chinese companies for any amount of user data. He pointed out that TikTok’s close ties with its parent company, ByteDance, the fact that Chinese authorities can legally ask for the personal data of US citizens and that TikTok has repeatedly misused US user data has put him in favour of a TikTok ban.

Con: Another TikTok-Like Platform Would Fill the Void

Suggesting that TikTok should be banned is reactionary and fails to consider the nature of such platforms, according to William Pickering, digital marketing executive at The Big Phone Store. “If TikTok were to be banned, another platform would simply fill the gap left in the market, just as TikTok was once Music.ly, and Vine acted as a precursor to both platforms in delivering short-form video content.”

Arguing that TikTok should be banned is taking a prescriptivist attitude toward technology based on one’s own personal biases and refusing to accept the inevitable evolution and proliferation of social media platforms based on current trends, Pickering added. “I think you would be hard pressed to find a member of Gen Z who holds the opinion that TikTok should be outright banned, outside of blatant contrarianism and paranoia over Chinese state surveillance.”

TikTok could make some changes to address objections about its business practices and platform, Pickering said. “But such issues are present on any major social media platform. There are problems with any system based on delivering users’ content specifically tailored to their preferences through an algorithm: such as echo chambers, the grooming of young children, reduction in attention span, etc.”

But a knee-jerk banning of TikTok in its entirety is a refusal to accept that these issues are based on the manipulation of base human psychological traits, Pickering concluded.

Pro: TikTok Is a ‘Cancerous’ Technology

Nima Olumi, Lightyear Strategies CEO, thinks not only that TikTok should be banned, but regulators should also take a hard look at Meta’s Facebook.

“TikTok and Meta are cancerous technologies that destroy human productivity and attention spans,” Olumi argues. “We need to tax social media — either the company or the user — to get daily active usage down. The average American currently spends four hours a day on social media.”

Just over one-fifth (21%) of Americans made 2022 New Year’s resolutions that included reducing time on social media, but, like many such resolutions, there’s no indication of a slowdown, with users spending 95 minutes a day on TikTok alone.

“This is clearly a cry for help,” Olumi said, adding that these platforms detract from a person’s productivity. “Apps like TikTok and Meta are designed to keep users on the platform for as much time as possible. They make their revenue through ad dollars and engagement is the only metric they care about.”

Con: TikTok Ban Would Negatively Impact US Livelihoods

Luke Lintz, HighKey Enterprises LLC founder and CEO, agreed that TikTok is no different from many other social media platforms, though it likely collects more data than others.

TikTok is expanding into a wide range of industries and partnering with major merchants to launch a marketplace to compete with Amazon, Lintz added. TikTok has already figured out the top of the marketing funnel, so the expansion will enable users to buy products and services without leaving the TikTok platform.

“Banning TikTok is not the correct solution because there are so many US content creators making their livelihoods from TikTok, and many users enjoy the platform,” Lintz added. “I believe the correct solution is setting guidelines for a USA majority stake ownership in TikTok.”

Final Thoughts on Banning TikTok

There is no questioning the popularity of the platform, nor its use as an effective marketing tool for many. Even so, members of both major political parties are wary of anything involving oversight by the Chinese government, and the privacy of personal data is a major concern, with the United States and European Union continuing to strengthen laws concerning personally identifiable information.

So the debate regarding whether or not to ban TikTok is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

By Phil Britt

Sourced from CMSWire

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Finding Your Target Audience Through Social Media

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By Brian Wallace
Today, influencer and content creator are two of the most sought after jobs. Not everyone can go viral, but everyone can make an impact.

In today’s world, western countries, and the world at large, are not just influenced — but socially dominated — by social media. Platforms like Facebook have risen to have nearly 3 billion users, and others like YouTube and Instagram are not far behind. For younger demographics between the ages of 18 and 29, 90% have used at least one form of social media.

The interesting thing about social media, though, is the power rests in the hands of individuals. The top accounts and creators are individual people who tend to have extremely loyal and influenceable bases. This is why brands and companies are willing to spend so much on social media advertising; there are few other means to reach a consumer in such an effective manner.

Now Hiring: Influencers and Content Creators

Today, influencer and content creator are two of the most sought after jobs. For children the dream has moved from astronaut to YouTuber, and by definition, most content creators are destined to not be mega-stars. Still, anyone can find a perfect audience using social media, and it’s certainly not all up to luck.

Building a Loyal Audience

The way to build a reliable and loyal audience consists primarily of three major phases:

Phase 1

Phase 1 is the first two to three months and is all about the foundation. First a creator must understand their context, what platform they are on, what kind of content they would want to create, what would make them successful.

The next step is creating some wide-reaching content and seeing what sticks, using data to analyze their audience and specify. And the final step is an awareness of the base audience, what are the demographics, who is watching, is that changing depending on changes in the content? Through these steps a solid small viewer base can be built.

Phase 2

From here phase 2 begins. This phase is all about gaining control over the details of one’s content. The first step in this is securing one’s tone. Any content one puts out there is going to have a tone and natural reaction from the audience. More consciously turning that into a way to communicate a message is essential to growing an audience, moving beyond simply making content and starting to send a message.

Also vital to this second phase is timing. This consists of understanding both the timing of when to release content and what effects that has on the base one is growing. Releasing content at certain times may garner a different audience than others, and longer form content will certainly produce a different audience than shorter form. Working on this will help one’s content take on a deeper level of quality and depth.

Phase 3

Finally phase 3 is likely the most simple; it consists of emotions. Once a creator does start to build an audience, criticism and praise are going to be daily occurrences. This can be great, learning from the audience. Repeated comments can move a creator toward better content; although responding to every comment and set of criticisms is a sure fire way towards failure.

Instead, through phase 1 and 2, the creator should have confidence in their content. While there is always room for improvement, the strong base one builds should give them the mental strength to avoid any rash decisions based on criticism. The best creators are both reactive but not too reactive. Finding the balance between these two is phase 3.

Conclusion: You Can Make an Impact on Social

And once all of this is accomplished, with some creativity and a lot of hard work, one can expect to have a solid and loyal audience. This is not to say that everyone is destined for greatness, but that everyone can have an impact. Carving out an individual niche and going about it the right way is plausible for anyone interested.

By Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency based in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH which works with companies that range from startups to Fortune 500s. Brian also runs #LinkedInLocal events nationwide, hosts the Next Action Podcast, and has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-2018.

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