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7 reasons why effective PR is more important than ever

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By Dorothy Crenshaw 

Landing coverage in reputable news outlets is essential in this era of dwindling public trust. Skilled practitioners can seize the moment, with help from technology for metrics and scale.

Drastic changes in the media and cultural landscape have altered PR and marketing in recent years.

Challenges for PR practitioners include a faster-than-ever news cycle and what seems like constant political and cultural controversy. Combine that with an erosion of faith in government and private institutions, and it can make for a difficult environment.

How do we navigate the media landscape when “fake news” accusations are thrown around and the very business of media is under siege?

Yet the business of public relations is thriving. One reason is that PR is more relevant—and valuable—than ever. Here’s why:

1. Credibility is paramount.

According to the Cision State of the Media Report, 59% of U.S. consumers say they are suspicious of news content. On social media platforms, skepticism is far greater, as it should be.

This means the credibility of media outlets and other information sources is more important than in the past. The public values journalism, and people are moving to media channels they trust. Traditional news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have reported double-digit increases, and cable news ad revenue is up a whopping 25%.

PR practitioners understand that a brand or personal reputation built through bylined content, executive speeches, legitimate user reviews and media profiles will earn the credibility that comes from implied endorsement by recognized third parties. That beats self-promotion every time.

2. PR drives SEO.

PR’s role goes beyond earned media coverage, but it’s still an essential piece of many PR campaigns. Established publications that link to a brand will boost search listings due to their domain authority, and ever since Google determined that brand mentions are “implied links,” they work harder to drive SEO. Anyone who has managed a content marketing program understands high-quality, “evergreen” content can live for years, pushing up page rank and attracting traffic for a brand or business.

3. PR generates influence.

Beyond earned media, typical PR tactics build relationships, engage influencers, and even help change public perception and behavior. PR skills once used exclusively in media relations are easily transferred to social community management, influencer relations, and content marketing. Word-of-mouth PR spread on social media platforms is not only cost-effective, but highly trackable and persuasive.

4. PR is (nearly) immune to ad blocking.

Publisher panic over ad blocking has largely receded, but the number of blocked impressions on mobile is growing as browsing migrates to mobile devices. What’s bad for digital content providers is also bad for the PR industry. Ad blocking cuts revenue for digital publishers just when they need it most. Yet PR programs that generate visibility through earned and owned content are more valuable than ever during times of digital marketing disruption.

5. PR is more measurable than ever.

Today, the outcomes of a PR program are more measurable than they’ve ever been, thanks to a concerted effort by the industry, but also to digital tools. Of course, metrics will always vary by program, but even with simple (and free) tools like Google trends and access to web analytics, we can often pinpoint the impact of earned and owned content and social sharing with a fair degree of accuracy. One digital business service has found that business profitability coincides almost perfectly with peaks in web analytics driven by earned media.

6. Goodwill has value.

What is more valuable than a brand (or personal) reputation? Many PR deliverables are powerful in building reputation over time, and social media accelerates and amplifies their impact. A glowing review (or unfortunate video interview) can blow up on social platforms in the time it takes to say, “Call the PR firm.” It’s hard to put a price tag on customer loyalty or positive perception, but in today’s unpredictable media environment, it’s like money in the bank.

7. Technology helps it scale.

What we do to generate earned media is not always efficient, and it has traditionally been hard to scale. Yet many agencies have added capabilities in content marketing, digital content creation and brand journalism that can amplify earned media or add to its impact through shareable content. Automation has changed intelligence gathering and data analysis, which often inform a PR program’s messaging and content.

By Dorothy Crenshaw 

Dorothy Crenshaw is CEO of Crenshaw Communications. A version of this post first appeared on the Crenshaw Communications blog.

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What’s the right way to sponsor a YouTube influencer?

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By Julian Shapiro

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here, here and here.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

How do you sponsor YouTube influencers cost-effectively?

Based on insights from Bjarke Felbo of Rune (LinkedIn). Lightly edited with permission.

  • Influencers often expect compensation proportional to subscribers, but conversions happen proportional to views. So go after the influencers with high views and low subscribers. That’s the trick.
  • We’ve had the best success with 30-60 second promo spots at the beginning of the influencer’s video.
  • We’ve seen success depend on the video it’s attached to and what time of day/week it’s posted, so we’re strict about setting rules around that. Or, we give them a bonus based on the video’s view count to incentivize them to put our spot on a high-quality video.
  • Be careful with repeat promotions with the same influencer. These haven’t yielded noteworthy returns for us — even after months. It’s likely that the audience becomes saturated.

For SEO, how much does link building really matter in 2019?

From Nat Eliason of Growth Machine. Lightly edited by Demand Curve with permission.

  • Links are still important, but their importance is decreasing steadily. Google is getting better at evaluating content quality, and it’s focusing more on that.
  • Consider this: Google doesn’t want to be gameable, and domain authority and link building are very gameable. But content quality is not. You can’t fake good content.
  • Many major blogs outside of high authority spaces have grown rapidly using less link-building. Much of their energy is instead spent on choosing the right keywords (low competition, but still acceptable volume) and writing useful content that satisfies the searcher’s intent.
  • However, link-building can still speed up the process quite a bit if you’re on a tight timeline, or if you’ve given content 3-4 months to rank and aren’t seeing the results you want.

Growth masterclasses kick off now

Today, the advanced growth masterclasses kick off. They’re all free.

These are rapid-fire, short, and advanced webinars. They’re not boring introductory lectures. This is some of the best content we produce. Don’t miss these, especially when they’re free.

Enroll here: demandcurve.com/webinars

What’s the best way to take over a Twitter account from an inactive user?

Based on insights from Andrew Ettinger of Atoms. Lightly edited with permission.

Someone has your brand name as their Twitter handle and their account is inactive. How do you get access to it?

  1. Create an ads account with an existing handle you want to swap for the one you’re trying to claim.
  2. Go to twitter.com/en/help
  3. Click on Account issues -> Claim an inactive username.
  4. Submit a case.

You’ll then want your Twitter ads account manager to escalate your case (give them the case #).

This is not guaranteed. Your best chance of claiming that handle will be to have an existing Twitter employee escalate your case.

Demand Curve’s Asher King Abramson will lead a growth marketing session where he’ll tear down your landing pages and Facebook/Instagram ads in front of a live audience. He’ll deconstruct how effective they are at (1) conveying what you do (2) and doing so enticingly — so that people click.

Feature Image Credits: Anueing / Getty Images

By Julian Shapiro

Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, the growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps you hire senior growth marketers, and finds you vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com.

Sourced from TechCrunch

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10 Social Media Tactics to Drive Traffic to Your Website

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By Boni Satani

Are you in search of some great social media tactics? Do you want to drive exceptional traffic to your business website? Here we share with you some useful social media tips to convert your visitors to leads.

Let us first understand social media and traffic.

Social Media and Traffic:

The social media world is home to more than 3.4 billion active users. Social media is said to be the primary source for generating eCommerce traffic. Social media leads ahead of the traditional media in driving traffic to your website. They bring in ample of opportunities to gain the business visitors and convert into leads.

How do you strike a conversation? How can you increase the visibility of your social media posts? How to engage your audiences? How to generate leads through constant digital engagement?

In this post, we’ll show you how.

Strategies to Boost Website Traffic:

For a relevant and persuasive social media marketing strategy, here are some must-have strategies to boost website traffic for your online store.

1. Optimize Your Social Media Profiles:

Social media profiles play a crucial role in brand building and recognition. A good social media profile can drive a good amount of traffic to your website. Optimizing your social media profiles are as important as optimizing your website’s SEO. Ensure your social media biographies include relevant keywords. Also, make sure you do not miss any information while filling your profile details.

Your website SEO will rank good if you add its links in your social media profile biographies. Also, this is an essential rule for good SEO on your website.

Thus, social media profiles can be a great asset to brand awareness. For an optimized website, a streamlined social media profile with the right set of keywords and information is a must.

2. Engage with Your Target Audience Consistently:

Social media helps you connect to your target audience directly. You can interact with your audience, get feedback in real-time, and better your customer experience. Consistent engagement with your audience can boost traffic to your social media profile and website. This also improves the opinion of audiences in the company’s perspective.

One of the most vital aspects of social media management is to keep your audience consistently engaged. Digital engagement with your audience is a seamless process and should not be combined with self-promotion. For a successful audience engagement with your brand or website, you need to consider several points in mind:

  • Social media is not a one-way strategy. It is more of a two-way street
  • Do not ignore your audience. Keep them engaged. Or else you might lose them in the process
  • Only 11% of customers receive replies from online brands
  • Nearly 34% of customers prefer social media for customer care

One of the social media marketing strategies is managing your social media inboxes regularly.
Once, you learn the art of using social media management tools, you can stay at the top of the social game. Lead through your single-stream inbox with social events, and a niche content in your social feeds. Gaining your audience’s visibility will take time, but you need to put efforts to drive traffic continuously.

 

3. Post Consistently:

Every social media user desires to achieve accountability of a good list of followers. Posting regularly on your social media can help you develop an excellent social media marketing strategy. Posting frequency and the number of followers and likes you gain depends on certain factors like:

  • Region/Time zone
  • Target Audience
  • Days in a week
  • Content
  • Hashtags
  • Profile bios

According to stats, different social media have different posting frequency.

  • For Twitter, the minimum posting frequency is 15 tweets daily
  • For Facebook, the minimum posting frequency is one post daily
  • For Instagram, the minimum posting frequency is 1-2 posts weekly

For this, you must measure the best frequency with your audience. You can also monitor the posting frequencies of other brands and your competitors. This helps you define your frequency to increase social media engagement.

4. Create Viral Content like Memes:

The term “viral” is pretty much related to social media. Anything you find unique, enticing or relatable has the potential to drive more traffic. Viral contents are quintessential if you want to increase your site traffic. However, it is not an easy deal at all. Remember, not all your posts can be viral. For content to be viral, it is essential that:

  • People have a willingness to share your content
  • People spread your message to reach the maximum audience

Some instances of viral content are the most lively example.

  • Memes:

We all dig into content that contains humor or hilarious memes. All of us are enjoying them and welcoming them. Some are funny videos, gifs, or images with secure messages or funny captions. You can easily incorporate these memes to your brands or products. Make sure you use it for fun and publicity. Stay away from any sensitive issues that may get in the way of your brand identity or that may stir controversy.

  • Content that Appeals to Human Senses:

The viral recipe or food videos are taking over social media by a storm. These drooling videos and visuals make us want more. These viral videos have something in common. They are appealing to human senses, and things that make them more indulging are

  • Sight (videos with vibrant colors and effects)
  • Hearing (upbeat music)
  • Smell (imagining the scent or aroma of spices)
  • Taste (mouthwatering recipes)
  • Touch (when your mouth touches these mouthwatering food)

5. Focus on Sharing Visual Content:

As per the factual figures, visual content can get you more likes and shares than the ordinary content. Invest time in creating visuals that speak volumes about you, your brand, and your niche products. Make sure your visuals are too unique to get unnoticed. Later, focus on sharing the same with your target audience.

The main idea of creating visual content is to obtain social media visibility. To create the out of the box visuals, here are some key points to include:

  • HD photography
  • Vibrant colors
  • Well-designed layouts
  • Well-planned visuals that deliver to the point information
  • Visuals that tell stories
  • Visuals focusing on services and products

6. Post Actively and When your Audience is Active:

The key to increasing your follower count is consistent posting. For these businesses have to be proactive in their social media game. To increase the visibility of your profile, focus on regular publishing. Once you see a spark in your social media traffic, do not be lazy to post. It is a continuous effort that you need to make to shine in this challenging world.

To maintain a publishing schedule, you can use social media management tools available online. You can also use social media planner or calendar to optimize your publishing activity. These tools help you post regularly considering the location, time zone, and necessary factors. Take out the metrics of how much you post typically on each social site, and what is the time you publish your post?

Following these, you can see substantial growth in your social media traffic.

6. Run Q&A Polls and Social Media Contests:

Social media contests and polls are interesting and exciting ways to engage your audience. Such activities also help you improve the communication gap between you and your target audience. Running quizzes, polls, and contests can indulge your audience in sharing, talking, liking, and following. This also makes them aware of your brand, website, and products.

Here are some powerful tips on how to host such activities.

Instagram:

Instagram has powerful and interactive features that help you connect with your audience. Go live on your social media, create polls in your story and use hashtags. You can use hashtags, or ask them to follow or tag your profiles. However, more importantly, create links that link to your site. Remember, we discussed why backlinks are an important part of your social media strategy.

Twitter:

The Twitter poll is an interactive feature on Twitter that helps you conduct polls. This helps you interact with your audiences and know their opinions and thought process. Another exciting and engaging feature is Twitter Q&A.

These features encourage your community to connect with you. More importantly, they build brand awareness and promote your products.

7. Research Your Competitors Thoroughly:

An actual marketing strategy is understanding how well your competitors are performing. The same holds for any social media marketing strategy. You can leverage the online tools to get insights and performance metrics of how your competitors. The social media competitive analysis helps you deeply analyze your traffic. They help you gather ideas and key performance metrics of your opponent’s social posts.

Social media is a challenging world to live in. Before plunging into posting sessions, get in-depth insights of your competitors. This gives you a clear vision of how you can build your social family. Do not imitate your competitors; instead, understand their strategies to create your own. This helps you analyze your competitor’s moves, such as:

  • Most engaging social media channels
  • Successful post in a day
  • Types of content published
  • Strategies to engage more traffic
  • How often they indulge in activities like polls and quizzes

8. Participate in Social Groups:

Join active community groups where you find high chances of getting your target audience. You can find people with the same interests and identify their inclination towards your products. You can join these groups on Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, LikedIn, and Pinterest. These groups can help you potentially drive traffic to your site.

Jot down what interests, characteristics, and personalities, your target market is comprised of. For instance, if you are a retailer of sports shoes, your target audience should be sportsperson and youth. So, it would help if you found online groups which have the same audience. Join such groups as an individual and then promote yourself as an influencer. This way you can improve your products and introduce them to your online store.

This is a smart way to become an influencer and promote your products and business on a larger scale.

9. Get Inspiration from Influencers:

The social media influencers are creating a significant impact in this digital world. Influencers are often referred to as “online celebs”. They have a huge followers count and immense popularity on social media. They have the power to influence the way their followers think. They have a big network of followers through their channels like social media, blogs, YouTube, etc.

You must identify the top social media influencershttps://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675437703/guide-to-influencer-marketing to boost your sales. The key to building this strategy is to find the right influencer to endorse your brand and products. And then focus on establishing a good relationship.

Conclusion:

Patience and persistence is the key to staying alive in the social media world.

Social media marketing strategies are great, but they take time to come into effect. These proven strategies are sure to reap benefits in the long term. Being customer-centric is the only key for a successful social media marketing campaign. Remember, social media is a game changer only if you use it the right way.

By Boni Satani

Boni Satani is a T Shaped Marketer with a Huge Interest in SEO & Link Building. He is currently the Director of Marketing at Zestard Technologies, overseeing multiple digital marketing campaigns for clients.

Sourced from wishpond

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The Technology That’s Disrupting Social Media Advertising for Mobile Retail

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By Madeleine Streets

Are retailers hearing the call of mobile?

A recent report by Forrester found that smartphones were used in more than one-third of U.S. retail sales in 2018, from product research to checkout. For retailers looking to convert greater mobile sales, they might want to reevaluate their social media advertising.

According to a Think With Google survey, 51% of smartphone users purchased an item from a different company than originally intended, due to messaging appearing exactly when they needed it. That suggests social media advertising campaigns could attract new customers, if deployed strategically. Designed to help retailers capitalize on this opportunity, marketing platform SmarterHQ launched an Ad Personalization program on Tuesday morning.

In order for brands to acquire and retain valuable customers, they must have a personalized, cross-channel strategy that spans ad platforms,” said Michael Osborne, president & CEO at SmarterHQ. “But until now, targeting within these platforms hasn’t been comprehensive enough. Syncing first-party data to power highly relevant ads often requires extra manual work and IT resources, which has hindered these efforts.”

The program builds on SmarterHQ’s existing behavioral marketing offering, which centers on collecting omnichannel data to inform brand messaging. Through Ad Personalization, the same omnichannel analysis can be integrated with the user’s Facebook and Google advertising to create individualized and customized campaigns. These can then work in conjunction with email, web and mobile pushes that the user already coordinates through SmarterHQ.

But SmarterHQ isn’t the only company taking advantage of the growing emphasis on social advertising and the new data technology available. At Pattern89, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for digital marketers, data from all of its customers is anonymized and run through the company’s algorithms. This turns more than 100 billion impressions into 2,900 dimensions of analysis that are available to all users.

Pattern89 Computer screen
The Pattern89 platform is popular with e-commerce brands looking to roll out new campaigns every few days. This made possible by AI, which is able to process data and generate new recommendations daily.
CREDIT: Pattern89

“One footwear retailer wouldn’t see the results of another footwear retailer because the machine doesn’t look at the data in that way,” said RJ Talyor, CEO and founder of Pattern89. “Instead, it looks at all of the red shoes, or all of the ads that are targeting women between the ages of 17 and 23. It anonymizes all this data, runs the analysis and identifies where the biggest opportunities are for you.”

Users of the program are then presented with a daily to-do list to optimize advertising performance, which Talyor estimates can be completed in five minutes. A new feature introduced this week, Gemini, enables users to automate the daily to-do list by clicking a “do it for me” button. Then there is the Creative Planner program, which makes broader advertising strategy recommendations based on AI learnings.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more common in retail; Salesforce projects that the percentage of retail and consumer goods marketers that are leveraging some form of AI will increase to 70%, from 20%, in the next two years. It also found that, during the 2018 holiday season, AI-powered recommendations yielded 14% higher, on average, order value.

Nevertheless, many retailers are still resistant to AI findings. As Pattern89’s algorithm looks at data from across industries, users receive insights collected from unexpected places; the same customer might buy both a pair of shoes and a mattress, revealing trends that work across contexts. But these recommendations can seem counterintuitive or untrustworthy, such as when one woman’s brand was told it should target men in its advertising. The brand chose not to follow the suggestion, but Talyor believes that not trusting AI is a mistake.

“There’s no bias in the machine; it’s looking for the lowest opportunity,” said Talyor. “It requires humans to intervene — and sometimes humans are unwilling to part with their intuition and their experience. But others are and when they do, they find untapped pockets of opportunity.”

Want more?

How Chatting on Social Media Could Bring Big Business Gains

This Mobile Platform Wants to Help Everyone Become an Influencer

This Acquisition Means More Data and Actionable Insights for Retailers

Feature Image: Salesforce found that 87 percent of consumers begin their shopping journey with digital tools, such as smartphones.CREDIT: Glenn Hunt/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

 

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28 Qualities of Amazing Content Marketing

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By Pam Moore,

Content marketing is the new yet not new buzzword. The truth is content marketing has been around for decades, since conversations and business has existed. Content marketing is not a new shiny object invented via social media.

Yet, content is at the core of everything brands and people do online. Without content and humans, social media and digital marketing wouldn’t exist.

The big question is… how do you actually use content marketing to grow your business. Keep reading and I’ll help you understand the exact qualities of amazing content marketing.

Is everyone really a content expert?

Every agency, marketer and consultant seems to be talking about content marketing. Unfortunately very few of them have ever done it themselves or really know how to help others produce, integrate or distribute content to drive real results.

If you are working with a digital marketing or social media marketing consultant or agency be sure to look behind the magic curtain.

Do they have a blog, podcast or video channel of their own? When is the last time they wrote or recorded really good content? Is anyone reading the content? Is the content getting shared? Is it integrated with the rest of their business or is it an add-on band-aid?

When is the last time they sent an email to the list of names they have been collecting via their blog the past year? What were the open rates? How is their content converting to real business?

Do they have an editorial calendar or any rhyme or reason to why and how they are using content marketing, if at all?

It’s similar to the concept of the Facebook page pushers of a few years ago who were bashing “strategy” telling customers all you need to do is tweet and get a Facebook page for $1k with a side of a website that tweets for another $2k.  Those same people are now often slingin’ Facebook groups or some random other shiny object telling you it is going to save your business.

It’s crazy how now overnight they are all “strategy experts” yet in checking their career profile you’ll find they have spent little time to none actually ever doing strategy for any real business, including their own.

You get what you pay for with any service or product. The best thing you can do is educate yourself the best you can and do your research. It doesn’t have to be more expensive or take more time to do it right. Chances are finding a resource with the right experience to help your business will save you money and bring a higher return than many of the fly by night social media operations.

Becoming a social business is not the same thing as doing social media or being social. Social business requires integration of processes, mindset changes and direct investment in specific goals and objectives.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.
*Source: Wikipedia

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
*Source: Content Marketing Institute

I know what it is, now what?

I like to simplify where many want to complicate. Below are what I believe to be the top attributes for content marketing that will drive results.

If you have spent any time working in marketing then this should seem like common sense to you.

Bottom line you want to develop content that inspires and connects with your audience with a goal of bringing them closer to you and your brand. You want them to click, double click, share, and come back for more.

28 Qualities of Content Marketing that Rocks! 

1. Goal Driven – Set goals and objectives for each piece. Is the goal to inspire, educate, establish authority, generate leads? Should support higher level business and marketing goals and objectives.

2. Audience focused – Content must be focused on the reader more so than your own self promotion. Know your audience. Know what they want, need, desire. Get in their head and connect with them via content that helps them in business and/or life.

3. Findable – If your target audience can’t find it, it’s all for nothin’!

4. Shareable – Make it easy for people to share with their friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, email, etc.

5. Simple – Shouldn’t require a PHD in rocket science to understand.

6. Authoritative – Author speaks and writes from knowledge, experience and authority.

7. Engages – People are inspired to click, double click, comment and become part of the community.

8. Actionable – Should be clear what action the reader should take to learn more, join community, contact you for further information, hire you, request proposal etc.

9. Real – Should have a healthy balance of transparency, authenticity and professionalism.

10. Believable – There should be no doubt that they can trust you and believe what you say. Many factors play a role with this including design & layout of site, source of content, grammar, quality of information, authority and more.

11. Validated – If facts, data, or stats are used the source is clearly provided and all can be validated as truth. This will also help establish authority and ensure content is believable.

12. Valuable – Provides reader with valuable content to help them learn, grow or be inspired.

13. Relevant – Should  be relevant to where the reader is in business or life.

14. Resonates – Should invoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief with the reader.  They should understand and be able to relate to the content, context and meaning.

15. Compelling – Grabs attention, unique enough to read, understand, persuade, change thinking and remember.

16. Integrated – Not stand alone information. You brand, expertise, experience, services offered should support the content to best establish authority, believability etc.

17. Educational – Provides value in regard to knowledge and teaching of a topic reader is interested in.

18. Passionate – Should be obvious the writer is passionate about topic and is not just writing to drive blog traffic or other objectives.

19. Positive – Who wants to read a blog that does nothing but complain? Not many people. Content should be positive and make the person feel better, know more and be inspired to do more whenever possible.

20. Forward thinking – Should not dwell in the past, old technology but should at minimum be present day and preferably forward thinking. Take people along with where you are going if you are visionary person.

21. Inspires – Inspire readers to learn more, do more, be more and become one with you and your brand.

22. Connects – Inspires the reader to connect with you and your brand. Your goal is to build and nurture a relationship with them.

23. Achieves – Helps the reader, viewer or listener achieve their goals. If you focus first on helping reader achieve their goals, you will achieve yours by default.

24. Purposeful – The content has a purpose, is not rambling, meaningless mumbo jumbo.

25. Brand loyalty – Content should help drive brand loyalty with reader. The content should be a good representation of your brand, personality and not a glossy piece of corporate collateral from the 1990’s that describes what you wish you would be when you grow up.

26. Quality – Content is of high quality. Should not be written in a hurry, have grammatical errors or read like it was written by a 5th grader.

27. Open – Author is open to other ideas, willing to enter into a healthy debate and genuinely listen to differing opinions.

28. Conclusive – It has an end. It doesn’t just ramble and ramble but it is clear when the content piece starts and ends.

 

Avoid the following: 

  1. Focusing too much on sales. You don’t want to sound like a used car sales person.
  2. Overly opinionated.
  3. Closed minded.
  4. Argumentative. Don’t bite the fingers off of your readers who may comment with a differing opinion. Be open to new ideas and opinions.
  5.  Egotistical.
  6. Self promotion.
  7. Random Acts of Marketing – If it’s not in the budget, not in the plan and not integrated then chances are it’s a RAM. RAMs will eat every last dollar of your ROI for lunch, breakfast & dinner. Avoid them at all cost!

Supporting Resources:

By Pam Moore

CEO / Founder Marketing Nutz, full service social media, digital marketing, experiential brand, conversion optimization agency. Ranked by Forbes as Top 10 Social Media Women and 10 Social Media Power Influencer. Keynote speaker, author, strategist, consultant, coach, & trainer. Helps businesses of all sizes integrate social media into the DNA of their business, connect with target audiences to nurture authentic customer relationships. 15+ years experience working with Fortune 500, Franchised corporations with 4000+ local franchises to entrepreneurs and startups.

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The future of social media marketing

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By Alex Packham

Social media started out with Myspace and Bebo (oh the nostalgia) before graduating to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Here we are now in 2019, ‘hashtagging’ and ‘storying’ like it’s nobody’s business.

What’s next for the social media industry?

1. A shift in focus: less on feeds, more on private messages

The feed is such an integral part of social media networks that it could never just vanish overnight. Regardless, people are using social media more and more as a way to get in touch with people and have instant message conversations.

To remove the feed entirely could be problematic though. The feed is the main source of incoming for many social media networks as most people will spend their dwelling time here. It’s also used as a key space for advertising. With visual formats such as Stories and Facebook Watch gaining speed, it’s likely that advertising will inhabit these forms in the absence of a feed. After all, IGTV is in the midst of discussions on adding advertisements to the content as we speak.

We have no doubt that the feed will start to play a smaller role in the growth of social media networks, but it’s here to stay for a long while yet.

2. Despite numerous industry worries, influencers aren’t going away

2018 / 2019 has been a tricky time for influencers with a lot of bad press and finger-pointing documentaries. However, not all influencers are deserving of the bad rep.

Influencers who are troublesome in the industry will become extinct over the next few years. Their followers will lose trust and begin to diminish, while brands will ‘wise-up’ to influencer red flags and learn how to find influencers who will work more effectively with their brand.

Although social media networks are still likely to be saturated with #ad and influencers galore, it’s not really the end of the world. If trustworthy and authentic influencers are all that reminds then the odd paid promotion will be much less problematic than it is today.

One trend we expect to see more of very soon is brand marketers educating themselves more about the influencer marketing supply chain. This will enable them to only work with influencers who promote their brand effectively and actually sell their product. Watch this space for further developments.

3. Brands will be making more of an effort to plan their content and be more consistent across channels

As social media continues to be an incredibly saturated space, the quality of content must also rise.

Brands that are smart will invite a social media specialist to take a look at what they’re currently doing, as well as give advice on where social media (and the internet in general) is headed. This will enable them to get a leg-up on future trends and plan ahead for the next five years.

Brands not able to identify what works for their business will lose customers to their competitors.

Plan, execute, analyse and repeat what works.

4. Small communities will trump big networks for most businesses (even more than they already do)

We all know that Facebook Groups and messaging apps have become so very popular over the last couple of years as a way to unite people with similar interests in thousands of niche topics. Whatever your tipple, there’s a group for it, filled with like-minded individuals posed for a heated discussion.

The general public is bored of seeing the same story over and over again. But having the context of a group changes things. A post about a new coffee shop only becomes interesting and relevant to you when it’s posted within a Facebook Group specific to your location.

Furthermore, the average person is usually more comfortable participating in conversations and sharing opinions within a smaller community, without fear of judgement from the entire world wide web. This ‘safe space’ atmosphere will continue to help groups become a hub of activity and engagement.

One thing that won’t change is that social media is the cheapest, fastest and the most scalable marketing channel available to most companies. That isn’t going away, period.

Welcome to the next five years of social media marketing.

By Alex Packham

Sourced from The Drum

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Facebook’s social media dominance

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Sourced from CNBC

When Facebook filed for its initial public offering in early 2012, the company named the ongoing transition to mobile as one of the biggest risks to its future success. If the transition to mobile was indeed the biggest challenge in Mark Zuckerberg’s early career as CEO of a billion-dollar company, he managed it quite well. Not only does Facebook generate most of its revenue with mobile advertising now, the company also owns some of the most popular mobile apps in the world. In June 2018, Instagram announced that it had reached one billion monthly active users, making it the fourth platform in Facebook’s portfolio to pass that milestone.

Considering the size of Facebook’s social media empire and its recent involvement in several scandals, it’s no surprise that calls for the company to be regulated have been getting louder over the past twelve months.

Source: Statista

Sourced from CNBC

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On social media, sell your brand, not your stuff

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By Lee Simmons

Off the coast of New Zealand last year, a kayaker was drifting along quietly when a seal burst from the water and slapped him in the face with a large octopus. As it happens, the trip was funded by GoPro as part of a product launch, and that sucker punch was caught on video by one of the company’s cameras. When GoPro posted the clip to Facebook, it exploded, yielding a publicity bonanza.

It’s a marketer’s dream: What could be better than having viewers voluntarily send your branded content to friends (and “friends”), saying, “You gotta see this!” Chasing that dream, companies today are moving more and more of their media spend to social channels. It’s a natural evolution–business goes where the buyers are, and nowadays that’s on the platforms.

But what kind of content works best on social media? Opinions abound; evidence, not so much. “There’s been very little real-world research on this,” says Harikesh S. Nair, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The problem is data. Facebook could do it, but each commercial user on Facebook sees only its own metrics; there hasn’t been a way to draw general insights.

So Nair, along with Dokyun Lee of Carnegie Mellon and Kartik Hosanagar of the Wharton School, hooked up with an analytics firm that gathers daily performance figures for some 800 business users of Facebook. By pooling the data for more than 100,000 posts–and using novel machine-learning techniques to characterize their content–the researchers published a paper that offers real answers that companies can use to optimize their social media strategies.

Content matters

When firms first tiptoed into social media, Nair says, they brought to it a mind-set from old media, where the goal was to maximize “reach,” which is simply the number of people exposed to a brand message. The corollary online, it seemed, was to maximize one’s follower count–and companies employed a variety of inducements like coupons and free swag, not to mention sponsored posts, to amass followers.

But eyeballs didn’t equal engagement. “Early audits showed that awareness wasn’t enough,” Nair says. “Followers weren’t interacting with the content in any way.” Which isn’t surprising: Commercials were always an annoyance, the price of watching TV shows for free. Why would anyone “like” a corporation, comment on its self-serving ads, or share them with friends?

“The focus,” Nair says, “then became not just getting exposure, but figuring out what to put in the message so users will want to engage with it. This generated a whole new industry called ‘content marketing.’ The question became, what kind of content do I need to reach what kind of user, to generate what kind of engagement–and toward what goal?”

Be someone

The goal might seem obvious, but there are two distinct streams of social media marketing, Nair says, with different objectives. One, known as “performance marketing,” aims to generate immediate sales, or “conversion.” The other is “brand building,” where the goal is to connect with consumers in a more personal way, in hopes of earning their long-term loyalty.Interestingly, the data showed that most firms used one or the other exclusively–only a few did both at once. “I don’t know why that is,” Nair says, “but it could be an organizational thing–where the teams responsible for social media in different companies are more aligned with the sales or marketing departments.”

To characterize each post, the researchers first hired workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate a subset of about 5,000 posts and label content based upon soft attributes like humor and emotion or upon hard information like price deals. Then they used that labeled set to train a computer, with natural language processing and machine-learning algorithms, to power through the rest.

When they finally combined the content attributes with the engagement figures–the actual likes, shares, and comments for each post–they found stark differences in performance: “When a company says, ‘Hey, here’s a coupon for 20% off,’ it gets very little engagement,” Nair says. “When it uses what we call ‘brand-personality’ content–essentially, when it talks to users in ways that simulate a human being–it gets lots of engagement.”

Mix it up

On one level, of course, we know we’re being played–the bantering, irreverent personality on the other end is a construct, a brand profile, an avatar–but our brains can’t resist. Marketers hack our basic urge to connect with others who are like us, to sort ourselves into tribes. “There’s a lot of research showing that efforts at persuasion are more credible when they seem to come from an individual person, a friend,” Nair says, “instead of, say, a corporation in Cincinnati.”

However, performance marketing still has a place. Nair thinks users might be reluctant to share such posts because they don’t want to appear to be shilling for a company or seem unduly excited about saving money. “People are hyper-aware of the optics on social media,” he says. “They think about how their actions will look to others.” But that doesn’t mean they won’t click through for the coupon.

There’s also no reason a company can’t do both, he adds, and that may be where most of them fall short today: “A possible content strategy would be to combine them, to use informative posts to generate immediate leads and personality-driven posts to build long-term brand capital. A portfolio approach.”

Engagement is king

Still, they’re not equally important; the study shows that the crucial element in any social marketing campaign is the brand-personality content. And the reason for that, Nair says, gets at the key difference between traditional broadcast media and new media: In this new world, user engagement is noticed by the algorithms that drive reach.

“Facebook’s News Feed algorithm gives priority to content with good engagement. If you’re sending out posts that aren’t getting any visible traction, the algorithm will say, ‘Aha, users don’t like this company’s posts very much.’ Then you get buried farther and farther down in News Feed, so you have little chance of ever showing up in front of users.”

In this way, Nair says, maximizing engagement–those precious likes, shares, and comments–on social apps is perhaps today’s equivalent to search engine optimization, or SEO, on the web. In both cases, the goal is to reverse-engineer the ranking criteria used by systems that essentially equate popularity with value.

“It sounds paradoxical, but you can’t get engagement without engagement,” Nair says. “So even if you’re mainly interested in performance marketing and driving sales, it’s really essential to add some good brand-personality content–if only to remain visible in this crowded marketplace.”

This article was originally published on Stanford Business and is republished here with permission.

Feature Image Credit: [Photo: Jakob Owens/Unsplash]

By Lee Simmons

Sourced from Fast Company

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5 Ways to Build Your Brand That Aren’t Social Media Marketing

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By AJ Agrawal

When it comes to building a brand and marketing a business, social media is a powerful tool that all businesses need to be taking advantage of. Because 70 percent of Americans have at least one social media account, according to Lyfe Marketing, and because social media is considered the most relevant advertising channel for half of Gen Z and nearly half of millennials, social media marketing’s benefits for growth are obvious.

Not to mention that, according to the Sprout Index, 58 percent of consumers prefer content that focuses on the visual, making social media the perfect place to advertise and build a brand.

Although social media marketing understandably gets a lot of focus when it comes to building a brand and business, it’s not the only way to build a brand, so it’s not the only tactic businesses should be using. In fact, it may not even be the most effective brand building tactic for your business, depending on the type of business you run, your industry, your target market, and so on.

When it comes to building a brand, the more diverse your strategy is, the faster, better and more effectively you’ll be able to build the brand you want to. So, in addition to social media marketing, you may want to consider one or all of the following effective brand building strategies:

1. Really know your target audience.

Although knowing your target audience well doesn’t by itself build your brand, it is extremely important if you want to be able to build that brand effectively. So, whether you’re drop-shipping phone cases and other accessories or selling your personally designed, handmade clothing line through an online store, knowing your target audience can help you market more effectively and get a better return on investment in ads and other strategies.

Related: 9 Tips for Creating an Awesome Brand

To really get to know your audience, first consider who your ideal customer is; but just knowing that teens ages 14 to  19 tend to have cell phones isn’t enough.Instead, you should basically build an entire imaginary “persona” for your ideal customer — from where this person lives to what he or she likes to do for fun. Then you can really narrow down your marketing and start building and establishing your brand with the people most likely to purchase from you.

2. Build a blog.

Blogging helps build your brand; and not only is it easy and free, but when done right, t it can also be extremely powerful (businesses that make serious blogging efforts are 13 times more likely, according to Hubspot, to see a positive return on investment).

You can use your blog to do everything from notifying customers of an upcoming or ongoing promotion and educating customers on how to use your product, to improving SEO and, of course, establishing your brand and persona with your business’s own unique voice and value. Blogging does so much more than just act as a journal, and if you aren’t blogging already, you should start now.

3. Create an email subscription.

Offering an email subscription is a great way to build your brand, whether you want customers and potential customers to receive a monthly newsletter or simply get regular updates on sales, promotions and giveaways.You can not only interact with and engage customers but also personalize messages to establish a strong brand connection with customers on an individual basis.

4. Focus on customer service.

Customers are what make any business a success — without them, no business would make it past the first few stages of development. Although quality products, effective marketing, a good active presence and a likable content “voice” are all important aspects of a brand, customer service plays a part as well.

Customers greatly value positive experiences with a company, and less-than-great ones are enough to cause them to never shop with a company again. After a good experience, however, not only are they more likely to stay loyal, they’ll likely tell their friends and family about your company, helping you gain more customers and an enhanced brand reputation.

5. Make your brand visually memorable.

Many people think of logos and slogans when they think of branding, so visuals can be important. Your logo, including the colors and fonts you choose, all have an impact on how your brand is viewed and how recognizable it is. It only takes 10 seconds for a customer to form a first impression of a brand’s logo, so it’s important to do all you can to make your brand visually memorable.

In addition, you can make your brand more visually memorable by selling or giving away custom-branded merchandise. The more you can get your name out, the better. The goal is to make your company’s name recognizable at a glance, and creating a memorable logo and other consistent visuals can help build your brand.

In conclusion

Brand-building consists of many different aspects; however, a lot of focus is placed on social media marketing. Although social media marketing plays an important role, there are other things that you can do that are just as effective in building your brand.

Which of the steps outlined above are you currently following to help build your brand?

Feature Image Credit: Image credit: MathieuLphoto | Getty Images 

By AJ Agrawal

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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5 ways to increase leads from your website

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In case you are wondering why your website is not driving any traffic or generating any kind of leads, even after having the best interface, design and even the best integration for chatbox, then you’ve come to the right place. The reason can be that, you are not focusing on the digital marketing aspect of your website. Good traffic is always needed to build a strong client base and it will also help in building the leads as well.

Driving traffic will include concentrating on various aspects like SEM, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media, etcetera. Therefore, you need to know what kind of strategy will fit your business the most. There can be either free ways to do it, or paid ways as well. Thus, the following list of tips and tricks will help you to generate leads for your website and also the traffic as well.

  • SEO on-page performance: You have to make sure that the SEO on every page of your website works brilliantly in order to create traffic and leads. This is very important in moving your website on top of the search results. You also have to keep in mind about the changing algorithms as well. There are various factors connected with on-page SEO, like keyword density, keyword research, external and internal links, etcetera.
  • Using social media: Even if your website has top-notch content, then it will be of no use if people cannot find it. You have to promote your content. And there is not a better way to do it, than using social media. With the use of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, you will be able to create profiles, post content, pictures and videos as well. In case using social media is not your cup of tea, you can always hire an agency.
  • Use video marketing: Videos are a great way to increase engagement among your follers and customers. Consumers love watching videos and therefore you can use video channels like YouTube and Vine, and use it for promoting your website. It will not cost you huge amounts of money as well. This is because 70 per cent out of 100 per cent wants to watch a video over reading a blog.
  • Indulge in guest blogging: Even though some people might say that guest blogging is getting out of fashion, it indeed helps a lot in creating traffic on your website. You can always use proof to invite people who are subject matter experts to write on your website, on niche subjects. With a guest blogger, you can also contribute to their blog or website by adding a website link.
  • Marketing via email: Email marketing should not be ignored at all, because the cost of running email marketing is very less and it is also effective as well. The returns will be huge if your email marketing reaches success. Therefore, this method is highly recommended and effective as well, without a doubt.

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Mandeep Kaur is working as a Data Scientist in Webtunix Solutions Private Limited. I am very enthusiastic to learn about Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. I always express my knowledge to beginners who want to start their career as a Data Scientist.

Sourced from TECHIExpert

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