Social Media Marketing | Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus

A Marketer's Guide to Social Media Marketing 

Between Facebook, Twitter and Google+, your business can benefit from using social media to reach a wider audience of potential customers.

Your potential customers and clients are spending more time browsing the online ecosystem we know as social media. In fact, a recent study from marketing agency Mediakix estimated that the average person will spend more than five years of their life on social media. It trailed behind watching television, and totally beat out eating, grooming, socializing and laundry.

With traditional marketing mediums, such as print and broadcast in decline, businesses can no longer afford to ignore this platform. In this guide, we detail the most important aspects of social media, explain the latest terminology and help you understand the latest tools.

Social media cannot be an afterthought. It takes planning and forward thinking. It will take plenty of trial and error to discover the right way to attract an audience and then convert that audience into customers and clients with any degree of brand loyalty. The traditional rules of marketing don't always apply to social media, and different platforms require different strategies.

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Tim Ferriss | Tools of Titans | Business Strategies

Video Marketing - Tips, Strategy, Social Media

How To Build A Successful Live Video Marketing Plan

The rise of live video over the last year or so has given content marketers a powerful new weapon to add to their armory. To add to venerable email marketing, blogging, social media and static video content, marketing professionals can now add a format that brings a whole new set of benefits. Live video is urgent, interactive and exclusive. It’s also demanding. And while it's effective by itself, it achieves its best results when used as part of an integrated marketing plan.

That plan should have four elements:

1. Audience Building

Hit the "live" button on Facebook, and your audience members will receive a notification telling them that someone they know is broadcasting. That’s even more powerful of an interruption than telemarketing -- it’s a call from someone they know. But only a small share of the audience will be free to participate at that moment, and the larger the number of people who receive that notification, the bigger the actual audience will be.

The first part of a live video marketing plan then is audience building: Line up followers so that when you’re ready to broadcast, you’ll have people watching and participating. There are all sorts of techniques for rapid audience building on social media, but one of the most effective is the strategy followed by YouTube magician Julius Dein. Dein partnered with other pages to share content, forging agreements with larger pages as his own audience grew. He went from zero to 6.5 million followers within a year. Make that growth part of your live video marketing strategy.

2. Brand Definition

What you say on your live video broadcasts will be important, but how you say it will be equally as important. The live video broadcasts created by Benefit Cosmetics are informal, friendly and tongue-in-cheek. The videos produced by Sephora are still casual but they’re more controlled and polite. It's more like a gathering of women who lunch. Both broadcasts closely match their company's brands.

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SEO Tips | Data | Social Media Strategy

How to use SEO data in your social media strategy

Everyone understands that a good social media strategy is the holy grail for businesses; it molds the perception of a brand, carries the voice, creates the appeal, and as a result, increases revenue. There are a few fundamentals that can help enhance the strategy, but SEO, or search engine optimization, is hardly ever considered. Big mistake! Here’s why.

I’ll start by stating that social media and SEO are heavily tied to each other. SEO data can help improve your social efforts, and social media can help with the search rankings.

In fact, SEO data provides a bunch of information about your visibility and target audience: who they are, how they search for things, what keywords they’re using and what sites they’re surfing, not to mention the good old profiling data found in Google Analytics, SimilarWeb and SE Ranking.

Let’s dig in deeper.

Keywords

As a growing brand and business investing a lot into social media appearance, you need to know what people are saying about your company or products. To find that out, you can use different monitoring tools such as Mention or Google Alerts. However, to set the alerts correctly, you need to understand which search terms are being used.

This is where SEO gets into the game. It’s important to determine the most frequent search queries related to your niche. This data helps interpret the social community’s most urgent concerns.

Often, the best insights come from discussions about your niche overall, but not a specific product. In other words, you need to search for the keywords you want to target in organic and paid search and use them to track social media awareness.

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Social Media Marketing | Build Your Brand

How to Build a Social Media Marketing Plan for Your Brand

With billions of active users on social media, it’s still one of the best ways to reach a global audience and grow a loyal following in the process. Years ago, social media was much easier, as there were just a handful of networks to choose from — with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn being the most popular ones. Now that mobile usage is on the rise and social networks like Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest are gaining ground, it’s important to have a social media marketing plan in place to make sure you have all of your bases covered.

For most brands and businesses, their social media efforts start in the form of content creation. This is usually done through their website or blog, then adding social sharing buttons and making sure each new piece of content is then being shared to their social profile pages. While this is a viable solution, it’s still only scratching the surface.

To help with this process, today we are going to look at some of the most effective ways to start using social media marketing to not only send traffic back to your site but to also potentially go viral with your content. Implement these methods into your content creation and promotion efforts today, to see continue social media success tomorrow.

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Influencer Marketing | Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tips

12 Ways to Actually Get an ROI Using Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is all the rage in today’s day and age. Yet, it's no guarantee: You may have every intention of generating high-level results, but getting a return on investment (ROI), much less a solid one, using influencer marketing, is easier said than done.

Here’s the problem: Many people assume that getting an influencer to mention their product or service is the difficult part. They assume that once this happens, sales will follow. And this isn’t always the case.

Instead, to get a solid ROI using influencer marketing, you need a plan. Here are 12 things that plan absolutely needs to include:

1. Keep your budget in check.

Just as with any marketing strategy, "more money" doesn’t mean better results.

Instead, set a budget and work within it, to give you the groundwork necessary to achieve all your goals. For example, sponsored Instagram posts have an average cost of $300. How many of these can you afford each month? Is it a good idea to push your budget to the limit?

2. Track everything.

This goes back to what was mentioned above: You can’t assume that a mention is all it takes for the money to start flowing. You need to track everything from the actual influencer, to the time of the day, to the content. By doing this, you’ll gain a better understanding of what is and isn’t working.

3. Know your target market.

Who’s your target market? Answering this one question will give you a better idea of the type of influencers you need to connect with. Get this: 70 percent of teenage YouTube subscribers trust influencers more than traditional celebrities.

4. Give creative control.

It goes without saying that you want some control over how your message is conveyed. However, don’t be so “hands on” that the influencer finds it a challenge to communicate in his or her unique voice.

5. Consider every available platform.

Don’t get so caught up on Instagram (the king of influencer marketing) that you overlook other platforms that can also have a positive impact. For example, more than 50 percent of marketers believe that video content produces the highest return on investment. Could this lead you to turn your attention to YouTube?

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Social Media Tips | Social Media Marketing

How to Drive Event Engagement Using Social Media Marketing

Summer has solidified its place as the season for hosting events, which makes it important to make sure you’re utilizing social media management to the fullest extent. Social media has changed not only how events are promoted, but also how attendees engage with the brands and influencers at play. Creating a conversation between the event and the attendees is a crucial step to guarantee utmost attendance, hype, and engagement.

There has been a surge of social media trends event curators have been embracing to increase engagement. Creating a unique hashtag for an event has become a staple for organizers to be able to interact with their audience when they share pictures and videos to various social media platforms. However, prompts such as this are only effective when the management is ceaseless, which is where many organizers fall short.

Staying active in regards to social media while the event is ongoing isn’t always easy, but it’s an incredibly important part in engaging attendees. Whatever method you decide to use during your event, creating interaction with your audience in real time can truly benefit the promotional goal. Here are 3 ways to use social media management to help propel engagement when hosting an event.

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Social Media Marketing | Content Marketing

Your Social Media Marketing Is Only as Good as Your Content

It’s super easy to get caught up in the fanfare of social media and lose sight of what really matters. While pay-per-click ads, profile designs and strategies for amassing thousands of followers are certainly relevant, they aren’t everything. At the end of the day, your ability to profit from social media will only go as far as your content takes you.

Why Content Matters

Have you ever thought about what exists at the core of social networking? When you trim away those extra features—likes, games, profile bylines, advertisements, etc.—what are you left with? Essentially, you have individual users accessing a website in the hopes of communicating with one another. And what do you find at the heart of online communication? Content.

If social media is a marketplace, content is your currency. You can use it to buy likes, followers, website traffic, conversions and even brand loyalty.

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Brand Positioning | Gary Vee, Paige Hathaway

Influencer Marketing | Business Strategy

This Is The Future Of Influencer Marketing

It’s a good time to be in the influencer marketing business.

According to TapInfluence, 73% of marketers say that they have an allocated budget for influencer marketing. ION found that 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference. And 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers trust influencer opinions over traditional celebrities.

For those who don’t know, influencers are individuals who have a significant impact or influence on a social media platform. Brands partner with these influencers to promote their product or service.

Many say we’re in an influencer bubble that’s about to explode. I don’t think that influencer ad spending will decrease, but I do think there are some changes coming that will change the business for years to come.

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Digital Marketing | Digital Marketing Strategy

54 Statistics & Trends That Will Shape Digital Marketing Strategy

Over 50 stats, facts and trends about digital advertising, mobile marketing, social media, content marketing, email and SEO that will influence the way you craft your strategy in digital channels. Use these the next time you need to build a presentation and make your case.

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Social Media Trends 2017 | Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing trends for 2017

With 2017 at the halfway mark, businesses face new challenges in terms of growth. Social media provides the best opportunities because it allows companies to connect and interact with audiences they want to reach. For greater #Business Development and growth, social media data provides the right information to reach these audiences and make sales.

Social media for business development

SmartBrief reported that businesses benefit when they use social intelligence. Understanding customers in the B2C market and understanding businesses in the B2B market make it easier to develop solutions to solve customer problems. No person or company looks for something to buy.

Social intelligence is about finding out about who potential customers are and then using that data to devise solutions. Many companies don't want to do that because it is hard work, and profits don't come immediately because there is no sale. When businesses show customers they understand them and understand their wants and needs, the conversions are higher when the time comes to make the sale. It also allows businesses to build credibility with their customers, especially online.

Best channels for social marketing

Marketing Profs reported that successful social media marketing focused on the top B2B and B2C channels and paid advertising channels. Based on recent research from Social Media Examiner, many marketers said they used Facebook for marketing their businesses. The survey covered 5,710 marketers from around the world.

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