Small Business Marketing Tips | Social Media. Blogging

3 affordable, effective marketing tips for your small business

ACHIEVING marketing success requires a constant awareness of upcoming trends and emerging platforms. And for small businesses who may have a small marketing team and an even smaller budget, choosing how best to grow their brand may be a tough task. 

Here are three simple marketing tips to help get you started.

Blogging: Put your story in words

Company blogs have become a trend that many businesses have adopted. Though maintaining a blog may seem like a big investment of your time, it can reap many benefits.

Blogging is an easy and cheap way to drive traffic to your site and attract potential customers.

Research has shown that 57 percent of companies who have a blog reported acquiring a customer as a result of it. In the same study, a survey of marketers revealed that 81 percent of businesses say that their business blog is critical for their business.

By keeping a business blog you can boost search engine rankings, develop relationships with potential and existing customers, establish your company as an industry leader, and create opportunities for sharing.

Social media marketing: Give it a personal touch

Social media marketing has become a critical part of effective brand strategy in the past few years, and your small business simply cannot afford to become complacent in their efforts.

Personalized marketing techniques are becoming increasingly popular, and can help boost sales quickly. It involves tracking customer behaviors and buying patterns, and targeting them based on their interests.

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B2B Marketing Strategy

The Key To Your B2B Marketing Strategy: Own It

The fragmentation of media has led to the rise of owned media. Marketing plans once revolved around paid and earned media, but their influence has waned over the years, offering diminishing returns at higher price points. That’s not to say that earned and paid media can no longer be effective, but it does mean that to get the most out of them, you must have a robust owned strategy.

What does that mean? In short, for B2B companies, nothing is more important than your website, email, videos, webinars, proprietary research reports, expert commentary and other assets that your marketing department fully controls. You can count social media platforms on that list provided that you understand that to have an effective social media campaign there needs to be a supporting paid strategy. Third-party validation remains instrumental in establishing credibility in the marketplace and among prospects, but earned media reaches its potential when owned media is utilized to provide the context necessary to make an impact with your constituency.

It used to be that earned media was wholly effective on its own. If a national publication that reaches your core prospects wrote a feature on your company, for example, it meant that your prospects were likely reading the story. But with the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, individual stories were less likely to single-handedly drive prospects to your business. Today, stories are archived quickly, which means your prospect either needs to be searching for your business specifically, or they need to be on the website in that small window of time during which your story remains “above the fold.”

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Social Media Marketing 2018 | Tips and Trends

5 Best Practices for Effective Social Media Marketing in 2018

Think for a moment; can you ignore social media in today’s marketing? Of course not. Nobody can afford to lose a borderless market that is bigger than China and India combined.

Owing to the same, companies are enthusiastically investing resources in social media marketing. In fact, social media is no more about branding or reputation only, the number of companies using it for business development has increased significantly. In 2015, 63% of the US companies were using social networks for lead generation and the percentage is expected to cross 90 percent by 2018.

However, there is another side of the story as well. Not every business is happy with the ROI offered by social networks.

According to a digital media survey, the brand’s (average) engagement rate on different social networks is very disturbing. It’s 0.007% on Facebook, 0.003% on Twitter, and 4.21% on Instagram.

Since ‘engagement’ is the prime objective of social media marketing, such lackluster response should be a big concern for marketers. However, changes to the algorithms and soaring usage of big data for social media marketing essentially means that marketers will have found out new and innovative ways to market their business as the organic reach of their posts will shrink with every passing day.

This article is aimed at helping you set the right tone for your social media marketing in 2018, and help you be more effective at engagement.

1. Set SMART Goals:

The starting point of any campaign should be your goals. Most of the digital marketers fail to determine their channel-specific goals and the vast majority wants to achieve “a set of goals” by single investments, which leads to failure. You should not plan to achieve leads, traffic, engagement, likes, shares, and follows from a single campaign; otherwise, the metrics will be too annoying.

If you set SMART goals, and clearly run a campaign against a particular one, success is a sure result. 92% of marketers believe that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses whereas 84% think it has directly impacted their web traffic. Therefore, you should set a clear goal of your campaign – say clicks or leads – and calculate results for the same.

2. Avoid Verbosity

They say: brevity is the soul of wit. Twitter’s popularity lies in its brevity and 140 character’s limitation. A study suggests that Facebook posts with less than 250 characters get 60 percent more engagement than the longer ones. Similarly, Tweets with 110 or fewer characters get 17% more engagement.

What does that mean?

In 2018, the scarcest of all resources is ‘time’. People do not have time to read your articles; they want brief, to-the-point, and striking content. If you have an idea for longer posts, don’t put in status; instead, go for a blog or LinkedIn Pulse.

3. Invest in Creative Contents

One key success principle for social media success is to have a good content mix. A balanced content mix ensures that people do not get bored of your similar posts. In this regards, it is a very good idea to make a content calendar with a focus on designing a decent content mix.

Never ignore the power of visual content. According to Social Media Examiner Study, 61% of marketers plan to increase their usage of live video, and 69 percent of them are eager to explore videos and creative contents. In 2017, the number of marketing professionals including live video into their marketing strategy increased by 14 percent – and the trend is expected growth further.

Also, never ignore the power of decent and branded images as tweets with images receive 150% more retweets. Brand’s engagement rate on Instagram is highest: 4.21 percent and the reason is visual content.

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SEO For Beginners | SEO Tips 2018 - Neil Patel

Social Media Marketing | Social Media Metrics

How to Master Social Media Marketing Metrics - Easy Lessons for 2018

As a digital marketer, you already know the important role of social media for your business.

Social Media marketing can take your brand to great heights, streamline the conversion and retention process, and facilitate the promotion of your brand promotion through user-generated content.

To use social media optimally without wasting precious marketing dollars, you must master metrics, even if numbers and graphs make you go “ugh” instead of “aah!”.

Mastering social media metrics help to improve your ROI (return on investment) by showing you where to adjust your campaigns for more targeted content and proactive customer care.

Metrics are just numbers.

Metrics are numbers (number of likes, number of newsletter signups, number of sales…).

Recorded over a specified time-period, they chart the up (or down) graphs of your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

If you produce 36,000 screen-printed T-shirts annually and your goal is to clear the inventory each year, then your KPI might be ‘sell at least 3000 pieces per month’.

The metric to watch would be ‘number of sales’.

Sales might spike on weekends, and drop on Mondays, but come month-end, they should add up to 3000 pieces, and match or exceed your KPI.

A standalone metric rarely gives the full picture.

Metrics on their own are quite useless. KPIs are best seen as a correlation between metrics.

Along with ‘number of sales’ you should also be watching out for helper metrics such as number of likes, shares, backlinks, conversions to newsletter subscriptions, unique visitors to your landing page, or bounce rates (how many left the page immediately?).

For instance, a high ‘number of sales’ on your page from ‘Facebook ad clicks’ sounds great, until you notice that the ‘number of unique visitors’ is even higher - and so is the ‘bounce rate’.

It means you got a large number of click-throughs (ad is working), but many visitors simply left quickly, without buying anything (something is wrong on the page itself).

If the metrics show most purchases were via desktops, yet half the visitors were on mobiles, maybe the page needs to be mobile-optimized. If metrics identify a clear demographic group in the bounced visitors, maybe target them again, but this time with a 10% off coupon code?

Marketing ultimately has one purpose: convert, then retain customers. Metrics data gives an unambiguous picture of what needs to be improved, without relying only on intuitive guesswork.

By correlating metrics, you can identify failure points and adjust your social media marketing strategy accordingly.

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SEO Strategies | Online Marketing Tips

5 Super Simple SEO Strategies You May Have Forgotten

We’ve all heard the false claim for years now: SEO is dead.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

What is dead are the quick fixes and shortcuts that defined SEO strategies in the beginning.

This post is not about how to get those back – far from it actually.

Honestly, you will probably have to spend some time to optimize your site properly.

But you don’t need a Ph.D. in computer science or machine learning to do it.

Don’t Forget These Basic SEO Strategies

It can be easy to get caught up in the latest SEO trends – mobile first, optimizing for featured snippets, using structured data – but you can’t take your eye off the ball.

This list has some of the most important SEO basics that anyone can apply to help their site rank better in the search engine results (SERPs), many of which I bet you skip.

1. Be Empathetic

User experience (UX) is not just an SEO tactic — it’s essential to the core of SEO.

A search engine’s number one function is to serve up the best possible answer to a user’s question. Every single ranking factor (including the remaining points in this article) boils down to user experience.

If you don’t invest time in a website that resonates, your site takes too long to load, or you don’t answer the right question, the users will leave. And that’s not going to reflect well on your site.

Start with the user. Put yourself in their shoes and create a site that’s functional.

Ask yourself:

• Does your site load quickly? (Page Speed)
• Did you answer their question? (Keyword and Content Strategy)
• Was it quick and easy for them to find that answer? (Page Layout)
• Did you give them something to do next and can they easily learn more about you if they’re interested? (Navigation and Site Structure)

Each of the basic SEO best practices stems from the value of a functional website.

2. Want Links? Build Relationships

Google weighs links so heavily because they’re still the cleanest way to measure whether you’re relevant to anyone other than yourself.

In the old days, it was easy to set link building on autopilot and watch the rankings roll in. But again, Google is smart and is looking for genuine authority to enhance UX. They will not be fooled by your spammy links.

Not only is it more important than ever for links to your website to be of quality, it’s a time consuming and often overwhelming mountain to climb.

Try taking a break from the “Hey I saw you wrote about this thing that I also wrote about so maybe you’d like to link to me” tactic.

Go offline and explore building links based on genuine connections – join an organization that will list you as a member or start a co-marketing campaign with a related business – form relationships and the links will come.

3. Words Matter, a Lot

This concept ties back to the first point on user experience, but it’s important enough to have its own spotlight. I’m not talking about picking the right keyword (which we’ll get to in a bit).

But slight adjustments in the actual language you choose can be the difference between a 10 percent click-through rate and 60 percent — which in turn (you guessed it), impacts your SEO.

Take time selecting the right language and organizing it in an impactful way and you will have a much better chance of engaging and converting an audience. Research shows that people respond more strongly to language that mirrors their own.

Plus, brushing up on how to make your headlines sexier and your calls to action more persuasive will help you stand out in the SERPs.

Don’t make the mistake of relying solely on a strong technical foundation — pull out your writer’s cap and get creative.

The old Upworthy trick of writing the same sentence or headline out multiple ways can be an effective way to push you past your perceived creative limitations.

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SEO and SEM For Small Businesses | Internet Marketing

The Value Of SEO And SEM For Small Businesses

Finding online success for a small business involves a comprehensive and methodical marketing strategy that uniquely combines search engine optimization and search engine marketing. I have found that incorporating both SEO and SEM can provide substantial digital growth and success for small businesses in any industry.

SEO Versus SEM

The value of SEO and SEM is most often questioned in terms of comparison. In reality, they should be considered in combination. When used cohesively, brands can create integrated digital campaigns that produce results. However, in order to accurately measure the value of combined strategies, we first must understand their individual values and significance.

SEO

SEO is a complex system of digital techniques, strategies and practices designed to increase the quantity and quality of online traffic to your website through organic search engine results. With quality SEO, small business owners are able to generate traffic from their target audience through the customer's own searches.

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