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How to Boost Your Digital Marketing Productivity

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Digital marketing can be overwhelming: Here are the two essential steps to get it under control:

1. Develop, monitor and defend brand identity

When you first enter a room, and no one knows you, you wield a certain power – The power to be anything, the power to recreate yourself. However only some of that power is truly yours, the rest is a result of circumstance and the other people in that room.

The first step is finding a brand name that will be easy to market. This business name generator will be a great help!

This is why most marketers believe that the “brand” isn’t created by the company, but their customers. But you can control certain factors that help your social media audience form that “brand perception”. The content you put out is the primary cause, and every social media manager’s most valiant struggle.

The solution:

  1. Identify the intersection of your buyer personas and your social media audience (on each platform) using surveys and secondary research.
  2. Note down their topics of interest that correlate with your business niche
  3. Create and curate useful content that matches those topics of interest
  4. Use a social media monitoring tool to catch and respond to mentions of your brand

You could set up notifications on a social monitoring tool like Brand24 on which each mention of your brand is associated with a “sentiment” and reported to you real time. This is great for averting potential boil-ups and making good on valuable opportunities to gain invaluable social capital (favor with your audience).

2. Fight the noise/value ratio battle on multiple platforms

Your established clients may encourage you to be present and active on all social media platforms. The classic ones, and the upcoming ones all the same. They’re afraid of missing out on action and falling behind in the development curve.

Not being on some social platforms isn’t necessarily a hindrance. In fact, you can allocate resources to social media platforms that matter more if you aren’t squandering them on social media platforms that don’t matter. There’s just so much content out there, that there is no point pushing on platforms that aren’t worth the effort.

The solution:

  1. Survey social media audiences and pinpoint where most of your brand’s potential buyers are present (You could do this by creating accounts and actually testing the platform or by accessing third party research of demographics)
  2. Allocate most resources (time, monetary and human) on the social media platform that promises the most returns and accordingly focus resources on the rest

Ensure your company’s unified communication readiness to avoid organization silos and build a productive digital marketing strategy.

I hope your digital marketing strategy will become much more productive and effective after this article. Good luck!

Image source: Pixabay

The Simple Guide to Online Referral Marketing

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These days, with so much competition online, it’s harder than ever to get your product’s name out there. Simply updating a social media feed or sending out a newsletter just isn’t enough anymore.

In response, marketers and SEO experts have been turning to another avenue of exposure: referral marketing. Referral marketing, which relies on customers to spread the word about your product, has a lot of appeal, but it may be unclear where you should start. Here are five tips for incorporating referral marketing into your online strategy.

Create an Effective Sales Funnel

This is the fundamental step that defines success of any campaign. Make sure your CTAs are planned out and no click is wasted. Use online form builders to put together lead generation forms and capture any sale!

Keep a close eye on your conversion funnel to make sure you are making the most of your traffic.

Create Viral Content

The most important thing to remember when marketing a product or service is being sure that the marketing content – whether it’s an eBook, a sales page, or a video – is worth sharing.

Too many forget that they shouldn’t be creating this content for themselves. It’s for the customer.

You should already know what your demographic likes and dislikes, but also consider what kinds of things they share. Take a look at what your demographic does on social media. Do you notice any trends that you could follow?

Make Content Shareable

Once you have a killer idea, you need to make it shareable among your demographic. Don’t just put your video up on YouTube and expect people to flock to it without any notice or incentive.

Post a notice on all the social media channels you operate. Send out a newsletter to let people know you’ve got something worth sharing. Mention it to customers as you communicate with them. If you’re making a big push, you could even contact media outlets with a press release to get even more exposure.

Hold Contests to Incentivize Sharing

Although people may know about your content, they may not be willing to share it, let alone view it. In this case, it may be best to offer an incentive for sharing.

Some successful strategies include holding a lottery of sorts by offering a prize for everyone who tweets about your content or your business.

Work with Brand Ambassadors

Sometimes you can’t just rely on yourself or your customers to get the word out. One trend in online marketing lately has been for marketers to work with brand ambassadors.

The term “brand ambassador” is a bit of a loose term, but it generally means someone who is willing to promote your product in return for money, free samples, or other benefits. Brand ambassadors can promote your product through their own social media or blog, giving you access to an audience you might not have had a chance at before.

Customer Referrals

Don’t forget the old-fashioned method of offering customers rewards for referring your product to new customers. This strategy dates back to before the internet, but it is still applicable today.

In fact, the rideshare app company Uber recently used it to great success, offering customers free rides if they referred the app to their friends. It was a win-win. The referral program gave users free use of the product, and company gained tons of new customers.

It’s hard not to see why referral marketing is so tempting. For one, it’s another avenue for advertising your brand.

And also, the weight of the work of getting your brand out there shifts from you to your customers, who are essentially doing the advertising for you. Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

Watch Your Tone! Finding Your Brand Voice

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Whether you realize it or not, your brand has a tone of voice. You may have a hard time identifying it, but you can bet your customers are aware of it. 

The good news is that you can control and shape this tone – but you better act sooner rather than later.

The Value of Your Voice

The term “tone of voice” typically conjures up thoughts about spoken words and how we speak in certain situations. However, in the case of marketing and branding, it refers to written words – or the words a brand uses on websites, emails, advertisements, social media, and packaging.

“A tone of voice both embodies and expresses the brand’s personality and set of values,” writes Harriet Cummings, freelance writer and content marketer. “It’s about the people that make up the brand – the things that drive them, their loves and hates, and what they want to share with the world.”

Your brand’s tone of voice doesn’t just refer to the words you select, though. It’s also defined by the order, pace, and rhythm of the words. All of these factors come together to create something that’s bigger than the words themselves.

Three Tips for Shaping Your Voice

As a brand, how often do you consider your tone of voice? Don’t be ashamed if the answer is “never.” 

Many marketers and modern business professionals have been taught to focus too much on the mode of communication and not enough on the words used. If this is true in your situation, it’s time to reevaluate. Here are a few things you need to know about shaping your brand’s tone of voice:

1. Understand Your Audience

“It may seem simple, but it is more important than ever to understand who your audience is and what they expect,” says Lisa Giosi, social media manager for Active Web Group. “Gone are the days when one message fit all consumers. Today’s sophisticated audiences expect there to be a conversation, as opposed to just one-way communication.”

Do you know who your audience is? Your audience will shape your voice to a large degree. The good news is that you can learn a lot about how your customers speak and interact by studying what they do and like on social media.

Set up a customer appreciation week to get to know your customers better, or organize a local meetup. Implement email marketing to collect customers’ feedback, use surveys and feedback forms, etc.

2. Hone in on Your Values

Your audience plays a large role in shaping your voice, but there are also plenty of internal factors that determine the tone you select. Think about your brand’s core values, goals, inspirations, and other important factors. 

How do you want them to come across in your messaging? In most cases, these elements will coincide with your audience’s preferences, but there can be subtle differences.

3. Study Relevant Examples

One of the best things you can do is study other successful brands and evaluate their tones. You don’t want to mimic what they’re doing, but it can be incredibly helpful to see what they’re doing and watch the consistency they achieve across the board.

This resource over at Marketing Land has 20 different examples of effective social media voices. Check out a few of them and see if there are some lessons you can apply to your own brand’s tone of voice.

Do Your Brand Justice

Your brand’s voice says a lot about the values your company stands for and believes in. In order to connect with customers and create meaningful online experiences, you must master the art of crafting and using a compelling voice that does your brand justice. 

Using the tips in this article, and your own intuition about your brand and its target audience, begin shaping your voice for the future. Your ability to create effective content depends on it.

How to Humanize Your Brand

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Have you ever had an amazing experience with a company and taken right to social media to express your feelings? What about a not so great experience? If you have, what were your expectations of the people behind the brand’s social media accounts?

With technology platforms on the rise, it is important to humanize companies and brand messages. It is necessary to make companies personable to foster good relations and trust, and even to drive engagement and sales. Companies also need to communicate well online because it helps people understand what they do and what they stand for, as well as stave off miscommunication and misunderstandings.

Nielson’s report estimates that 33% of users prefer to contact brands using social media as opposed to using the phone. With all of the stressors of online customer service, it is important to improve service by humanizing and communicating the brand message online. Consumers are more likely to identify with a brand that has values in alignment with their own, and this connection will make a customer more likely to engage with the brand on an ongoing basis.

So, how can you improve online customer service by humanizing and communicating your brand message?

Lose Anonymity

A great way to help customers see a company as a personable entity, and less as a corporate business, is by personifying it and giving it a face. It also helps to garner publicity by using a company’s personality. 

Showing personality that stands for the brand message helps to authenticate a company and increase perceived transparency, leading to customer trust and improved service. Having an authentic brand is also one of the strongest ranking factors, according to UR Digital, so being authentic will likely improve your organic search visibility as well!

Businesses can emulate personality and create brand personas by doing some of the following:

  • Feature real-life employees or customers on websites or advertisements
  • Post photos of the human elements of the business, from candid photos on the job to snapshots from employee functions
  • Publish articles and other literature from the company’s employees on a blog or by guest blogging
  • Host and/or give talks sponsored by the company that pertain to the company’s area of expertise
  • Add a phone support! Even small businesses can now afford phone support with solutions like Cloud PBX.

Stay Active on Social Media Accounts

Upkeep of social media accounts is extremely important in maintaining a presence online, with 63% of millennials staying updated on companies through social networks (Leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal study).

Keeping up on accounts not only establishes the company’s existence and innovation, but also helps to stand as evidence of what the company does, promotes, and is involved in. Up-to-date accounts show the public that the company itself is online and paying attention, and shows the consumer the company is more likely to be responsive to any comments or concerns that they may have.

Some ways that a company can work on customer service via social media accounts include:

  • Being responsive and have a quick turnaround time for comments, questions, and complaints
  • Paying attention to what is being said about the company, and other companies in the industry
  • Being interactive through new postings, trend followings, and consumer engagement
  • Partaking in active listening, admitting mistakes and sharing apologies, and showing implementation of customer suggestions

“Over” Communicate

To improve your customer communication, it is a good idea to do what may seem to be over communication. Take time to ask yourself some of the following: Is your brand message clearly stated? Are there more than adequate ways for customers to contact you? Is your message expressed in terms that are easily understood?

Businesses can improve on communication by taking some of these things into account:

  • Blatantly stated brand messages, or easily accessible mission and value statements
  • Easy to understand language and tone (in fact, a study from Carnegie Melon showed that most presidential candidates speak at a 6th-8th-grade education level)
  • Regular check-ins with customers
  • Phone, chat, email, and other communication support availability and offerings at all times

Research Your Current Brand’s Sentiment

What do people think of you and your brand? Which associations does it currently trigger?

Text Optimizer helps you find answers to all those questions by searching for your brand name in Google and analyzing search snippets that show up for that search.

Here’s how semantic search works if you are curious!

Cater to the Audience

Showing interest in the audience is an important part of good communication with consumers because it often cultivates further engagement.

By incorporating and inviting feedback from customers, it not only allows for businesses to assess their target audience, but it also lets the audience feel included and important. In addition, adding content that the audience is interested in helps the audience see the company as a more human entity with a shared interest, something that will encourage the audience to take a liking to the company.

Companies can cater to the audience in many ways, such as:

  • Posting things for enjoyment, not simply promotion of the brand
  • Using consumer generated or created content
  • Hosting audience involvement initiatives such as social media campaign competitions or giveaways
  • Sharing, liking, or re-tweeting pertinent customer mentions or tags

Cultivating Communication and Humanization Habits

Taking the first steps towards brand humanization and communication is no doubt important, but it is also imperative to continue the routine of good communication with customers.

Maintaining open lines of communication with consumers is a great way to constantly improve upon the service being offered, it enables businesses to hear how customers are feeling and adjust practices accordingly.

By taking customer thoughts and feelings into consideration, customers and businesses can foster positive and long-term relationships, which culminate into giving customers the service they want.

7 Tips to Write Stellar Blog Posts

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Do you know that only two in 10 of your visitors will read your articles until the end?

People don’t have time to waste. They want to find the information they need quickly and easily. And it has to be presented in a friendly manner.

Today, let’s go back to the basics. Here are seven tips to format your blog posts so that they get read — and shared.

Titles matter

What prompts you to read an article? Its title, of course.

A headline is the first thing a person sees. If it grabs their attention, they will read further.

Here are some good examples below:

  • Intriguing titles – “How to Create a Massive Buzz about Your Product Hollywood-Style!”
  • “Ultimate” titles – “The Only List of Content Curation Sites You Will Ever Need”
  • List titles – “30 Tips to Promote Your Events Online”

Be clear and concise.

Hit them with a strong first paragraph

Introductions are just as important as titles. They set the tone.

If you read my blog regularly, you know I love starting my articles with questions and stories. Quotes are also a great option.

Break your content into short paragraphs

Nobody likes long blocks of text. They make content dull and boring.

The only way to keep visitors interested and happy is to make their reading experience enjoyable. So, stick to short paragraphs — 75 words or 3-4 sentences.

Bulleted text is also a great way to present ideas in an attractive manner. It helps set important facts apart from the rest.

Use subheadings

People love being able to skim content. Actually, that’s the second thing they do after looking at headlines.

It’s always a good practice to try and group several paragraphs together under a common subheading. Plus, it allows you to use the H2 or H3 tag, which is a great way to optimize your posts for search engines.

Make your links clickable

While this may not be news to most of you, I have seen quite a few blogs that have no clickable link in their articles.

When you reference an outside source or even your own content, allow your readers to access it easily. Don’t have them copy and paste in a new tab.

It may also be a good idea to use exit popups to prevent your readers from leaving too early.

Use pictures and videos

Since I have covered this topic in many articles, I’ll just repeat myself here. People crave visual content. That’s because he brain processes it much faster than text.

There’s a scientific case for using images in content. According to Megaphone Marketing, our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and retains 80 percent of what we see versus just 20 percent of what we read.

Conclude your posts

With a conclusion, you put everything in perspective for your readers. Try using the space as an invitation to continue the conversation. Ask people a question or two.

If the context warrants it, don’t forget to include a call to action.

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

7 reasons why visitors leave websites for ever

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When I built my first website in 2003, none of the tools we have today existed. WordPress was a newborn and you had to know HTML!

For an entire week, I worked my butt off within Microsoft FrontPage. I was so proud of the result that I spent the first day staring at the site and sending its URL to friends and family.

In a nutshell, I felt on top of the world.

Then, someone brought me back to reality. “You know, the animated gif of the mouse lifting weights on your landing page? It looks very cheesy. Get rid of it,” they said. And, of course, little me had no idea that the browsing experience would vary depending on screen sizes. Needless to say that I was heartbroken.

It took me a little while to realize that website design is an art. If I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to do some research and educate myself.

Well, 13 years and six websites later, self-education is far from over. Actually, I learn something new almost every day.

If you cannot grab the attention of your audience within a couple of seconds of them seeing your website, chances are your bounce rate will remain high.

Here are seven areas of concern that you should address when thinking of creating or upgrading your website.

1) Automatic music player

Years ago, a business owner sent me a link to her website. The only thing I remember when landing on the home page was the blaring music. The player was impossible to find, so I left and never visited again.

Auto players are at the top of most people’s dislike lists (alongside automated DMs on Twitter). Why? Because when you are looking for specific information, unexpected noise and content distracts attention. Even radio stations stopped using auto players a long time ago.

If you must have music on your site, visitors should have the last word when it comes to clicking the “play” button.

2) No call to action

A call to action is a short message that urges people to take action (e.g. “Follow us on Twitter,” “Subscribe to our YouTube Channel”).

Installing a web form to convert readers into subscribers is always a good idea. Here are some great web form templates to use!

When they land on your website, visitors want to find relevant information right away. So, do not leave them hanging. Tell them where to go and what to do. You will be surprised by the results!

3) Confusing menu section

A menu is one of the most important areas of a website. Think of it as your personal portfolio, where you feature exactly what visitors need to know about you, your work, and/or your products.

Drop-down menus, in particular, allow you to regroup several related sections under a main theme and make things a little less confusing for visitors.

When deciding what to show in your menu, do not forget to include an “About,” “Contact,” and “More” sections — especially when your pages do not have a common theme.

4) Lack of key information on the landing page

Do not delay information delivery by forcing visitors to click through several pages. Use your home page and sidebar to give them a good idea of what your website is about. Then, let them decide what they want to do next.

Also, pay attention to your keywords and avoid making grandiloquent statements and promises.

5) No “About” section

A website is designed by human beings for human beings. As such, if there is no human touch, visitors will leave right away.

Without an “About” section, a site looks impersonal and cold. People do not do business with robots, unless you are in a science fiction movie.

Want to see an example of a great About page? Moz has one of the best I have seen.

Visualizing your About page is always a good idea to make it more engaging. Digital Eagles offers some great visual marketing ideas for you to get inspired!

6) Typos

I have blogged about this several times, but it bears repeating. Occasional typos and grammatical errors happen. However, when they are recurrent, they will lead visitors to wonder how serious you are about your business.

Nobody wants to have to stop on every other sentence to catch what you are trying to say. So, if writing is not your forte, ask somebody else for help. A (professional) proofreader is worth the investment. They may end up saving your reputation…

Here are more tips:

  • Find a few grammatical resources that you like, such as The New York Times’ Grammar News section or the Grammarly Handbook, and spend a few minutes every day reviewing a rule.
  • Subscribe to the Ragan’s PR Daily Writing & Editing section.
  • Read varied quality literature to teach your brain to think differently.
  • Play word games regularly to increase your vocabulary. Vocabulary.com is a great starting point.

Conclusion

Sometimes, a little help comes a long way. Do not hesitate to ask your own audience for feedback. They will be more than happy to give you a hand.

Your audience wants to play a part in your journey, so involving them in the process will make a huge difference in the way they respond to you in the long run.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay