How Social Media Helps Define Brands as a Marketing Platform, Make the Most of It!!

Did you know that 90 percent of all marketers say social media marketing has increased their business exposure? Or that 66 percent of marketers that spend at least 6 hours on social per week has seen more leads? With the advent of social media, traditional marketing methods no longer seem enough to sustain a business. Social connectivity has become the key to marketing and building the brand’s image for the buyers. Analytics and other measurement tools can enable entrepreneurs to find how they can take advantage of social media as a marketing tool and also how to use data to optimize their social marketing campaigns.

The Great Panorama of Sites

Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are here to stay, which means that marketers can leverage this popularity and use it for their brand’s growth and also to pad their wallets. One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing is that it helps you reduce marketing costs, without sacrificing the results.

Not only can you reach a global audience with limited resources but social media can get you a target audience. Having access to all these customers will help boost traffic. When a new blog or update is put on the homepage, it can take time to get traction through Google, which means that few customers will know the new content if they are not searching for your product or service. Using social media for business also boosts your site’s SEO.

Understand Your Customers Better

Social media marketing will help you understand your audience. Social channels like Twitter and Instagram become effective marketing tools with the way they facilitate interaction with your customer base. As a matter of fact, many brands use YouTube to beta-test their ads before launching TV commercials. The reason is obvious: investment is low, the market is huge and the results are almost instantaneous. Brands for starters have started off by promoting itself in viral videos.

Another reason brands are taking to social media platforms to get their name out is that they have got most of the early adopters. Youth are the most likely target market for food delivery and car rental apps. It makes sense for brands to test their adoption online.

Also, by reading their tweets and status updates, brands can easily gain insight into the daily lives of users, thereby allowing you to gauge their behaviour as a consumer. Social media marketing, or SMM, can allow you to easily understand the kind of products that they are buying and why, their hobbies, the kind of posts that they share, the websites that they frequently visit.

This knowledge is bound to have obvious marketing benefits. If you understand your customer, you can write better content and more compelling posts, which leads to more traffic. But the benefits can sometimes go far beyond – it can help you in identifying customer pain points, refining your product strategy and also in improving sales.

Adds on Socia Media and Their Reach

Talking about social media ads, they have another plus point — they allow targeting and retargeting. Social media platforms offer highly targeted advertisement that can be customized based on the customer’s needs. For instance, Facebook ads can target customers by several factors — like age, education level, location, industry and even user behavior (the number and the kind of pages the user has liked).

Businesses that have high selling frequency can benefit more. Have you ever wondered why you see brand ads on your Facebook dashboard? Well, Facebook and Google allow you to retarget, making it easy for the brand to capture user information and share more offers with users that have used the service already.

Through social media, you can help get noticed and also earn media coverage. The success of an event heavily depends on effective promotion. And what better way for promotion than social media? An active social media presence is always an advantage. Brand image thrives on social media marketing. The way your brand is presented on social networking sites, nowadays, has more power to create an image in any potential customer’s mind than TV commercials. Since almost everyone is on social media and people constantly keep checking their phones, regular updates about the brand can also be given – like the launch of a new product or the betterment of an earlier service or sales and discount offers.

Brand Value and Loyalty

A strong media presence will also build brand loyalty. It can considerably reduce your customer response time as these days if there is a problem with your product or service, the consumer expects it to be solved right away. It was found in a report published by Texas Tech University that brands with an active social media presence are likely to have more customers.

Engagement with people on social media helps marketers develop a connection and a rapport, which in turn enables them to widen their customer base. It is a positive step in providing your followers with useful information and help, along with some entertainment that manages to keep their interest peaked. This will also project that you value your customers as people and not just a source of revenue. Customers will see you as an entity that cares about them and they too will be able to understand the brand’s vision. In the competitive business world of today, this has the ability to make a huge difference. Social media can also be perfect for a well-suited PR strategy.

Not only can you develop stronger relationships with your customers, but it will also enable you to acquire more customers. It has been estimated that 70 percent of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. So, yes, social media plays a great role than you can imagine in increasing your sales through its obvious innumerable benefits.

How to Ensure MailChimp Emails Actually Reach Your Users

If your emails are not reaching the inbox of your subscribers then your email marketing strategy will not be successful. The most crucial thing about your MailChimp newsletter and emails are their successful delivery. In order to do that, all you got to do is to authenticate your emails. In simpler words, you have to prove to the servers and subscribers that it is really you who is sending out the emails.

Why is authenticating necessary? Email, as you know, is a playground for spammers who use someone else’s email addresses to push out their own emails. MailChimp has its own authentication methods that you can use for this purpose. It provides a trackable identifier that indicates you are a genuine sender. More and more people are doing this and authentication by email marketers has increased to 67%.

Things You Will Need For the Authentication

You will need the following to carry out this important process:

• Access to domain registrar.
• Information regarding DNS to add records like TXT and CNAME to the domain.
• A custom domain.
• Time – it can take a day to process it.

Importance of Authenticating

This process is important because it has so many benefits.

• It is a proof that you are who you say you are and will tell your subscribers the emails are coming from an authentic source.
• It  shows the exact email address without appending some sort of gibberish link that makes no sense and looks like spam.
• Mail servers like Gmail, Yahoo and others will trust you and not immediately send your emails to a Spam folder. Therefore your email marketing or newsletter campaign to be successful.
• The trust will also increase among your subscribers as well.

If you are using MailChimp and still have not verified and/or authenticated your domain, it can truly ensure email marketing campaign will  reach its intended customers. We can help you get authenticated! Contact us for a custom quote today!

4 often-overlooked platforms for social media marketing

The social media marketing world does not end after Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The “big four” encompass about 90 percent of all social media marketing. According to a recent UMass-Dartmouth study, 91 percent of Fortune 500 level companies use Twitter, 89 percent use Facebook, 63 percent use Instagram, and 98 percent use LinkedIn.

However, a slew of niche social networks could help your social media marketing efforts.

Let’s look at the audiences you’ll find there, their potential uses for brand managers and which businesses might gain the most from them.

1. Quora

The stats:

• 190 million users
• 400,000 topics
• 775,000 monthly visitors in the U.S. alone

Quora is essentially a Q&A site, so this is a great place for brand managers to establish authority by answering customers’ questions—and teach them about their products or services. A few simple queries can tell you what people are interested in.

2. Pinterest

The stats:

• 250 million active users
• 175 billion pins
• 50 percent of millennials using Pinterest daily

Long tail-pins last indefinitely, and that means long-term engagement and traffic. Also, according to research, 87 percent of pinners have bought a product because of Pinterest. Finally, it drives a lot of traffic. According to Shareaholic, around 5 percent of all referral traffic to websites comes from Pinterest—second only to Facebook.

3. Reddit

The stats:

• 300 million users
• More than 850,000 subreddits
• 58 million daily votes
• Average visit: 15 minutes, 47 seconds

Reddit isn’t a marketing play, as most social networks can be; it’s a community play. Microsoft uses Reddit as a customer service channel. It’s not marketing Xbox; it’s answering questions and addressing concerns about the product line. Redditors (site users) have a long history of calling out companies that try to market (the traditional way, at least) on Reddit. So, you have to take creative approaches, such as AMAs—“Ask Me Anything” sessions.  That concept started on Reddit, and it’s a great way for brand managers to interact on the platform.

4. Nextdoor

The stats:

• 200,000 active neighborhoods
• More than 17M recommendations
• 90 percent of U.S. neighborhoods participating

There’s already a fair amount of “brand spam” on Nextdoor, with companies pitching their products right in the feed—which seems out of place. What really works well here, though, is government and nonprofit content. The city of Minneapolis offers regular posts about hyper-local events and programs, such as street sweeping and its 2020 strategic plan.

5 Best SEO Tips for 2019

Search Engines have become the go-to method of finding goods, services, and information for the majority of the world.

It is only natural that everyone is going to fight for that higher ranking in the results page, survival of the highest.

SEO the cheapest way to reach a huge number of people and of course, you can do it too.

Here are a few tips:

Content Structuring

The moment one is clicks on the link, the first thing they will look at is how the page looks. Which means, does the pages seem to contain information they are looking for and how easy or pleasant for them to navigate and go through the content.

Menu bars, logos, headers, footers, sidebars are some of the basics that need to be done right. Use the important keywords in these main structures.

Content Quality

Now, it is a widely established factor that content is one of the most valuable resources today.

Basically, a search query means the user is looking for information about something, if you have the most relevant and most engaging information, you will rank higher.

It may be simple to create content, but to create an engaging and optimized content, one will need to put in a lot of effort.

Research for the right keywords, use the words efficiently and make sure the content is reader-friendly and engaging.

The key is to identify what the audience needs and provide the same in a way they get the most satisfaction from.

Mobile Optimization   

More than 52.2 % search traffic comes from mobile searches and this is a trend that is only bound to increase in the future.

There is more than a 50% chance that you are reading this very article on you mobile.

So if your site is not mobile optimized, you are losing more than half the potential traffic.

Moreover, mobile friendliness is considered as a ranking factor in desktop too.

The more responsive and mobile friendly the page is, the better are the chances of ranking high on among both desktop and mobile searches.

Speed Up

It is not a marathon, it is a race. You page should be the Usain Bolt of web page loading race.

Loading icons are something of a nightmare for the modern web surfers; nobody has the patience to wait for more than a few seconds to get their information.

You can have all the useful information but, if your page takes more than few seconds, no one is going to bother to read it.

Use the available online tools to check how your page fares, Google itself provides the tool for this purpose. If it is not the optimum levels, find the solutions and fix it.

Business Profile in Google

Well, most of the search traffic comes from users of Google, only seems fair to seek support from Google itself for better rankings.

Set up your Business Profile with Google My Business.

It’ll help your business appear on searches among Google searches and Google maps searches and the best part is that this is all for free!!  Sweet isn’t it?

Now go on, people are looking for the information/goods and services you provide, makes sure you reach them first.