Digital-Marketing

5 Digital Marketing Techniques That Can Elevate Your Business To The Next Level

Digital Marketing. It is a buzzword that gets loosely thrown around nowadays due to how hugely popular and impressive anything related to technology is.

But what exactly is Digital Marketing? Digital Marketing encompasses a wide scope of tools, ranging from Search Engine Optimization to Pay Per Click. It essentially refers to marketing via digital means. In this article, we will be covering 5 of the most effective digital marketing techniques that can elevate your business to the next level.

The average time spent by a person on the internet in the world is 6 hours and 42 minutes.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Life has been made so much easier for us since the creation of search engines. Searching for things online is a huge part of our lives to the point where terms like “Googling” or “Google” became verbs in the dictionary.

This shows how frequently and conveniently we search for things in our daily lives, reinforcing why it is integral for businesses to incorporate and manage their SEO as part of their digital marketing activities. By definition, SEO refers to getting traffic from organic or natural search results on search engines, which basically refers to the unpaid traffic that your website gets from users who happen to be searching for content within your domain.

Statistics have shown that 60% of the clicks go to the top three websites in the search results and a staggering 93% of all traffic come directly from a search engine. It is therefore of paramount importance that businesses use software like Ahrefs or Moz to help them with understanding the keywords that their users use in searching for the content relevant to their business.

Having a good grasp of the users’ behavior when they do their searching has helped businesses. Take the case of TechSpace IT Services for example. By changing up and increasing the quality of content that the site was providing coupled with proper keyword research and website optimization, the company gained results in the form of an 839% growth in traffic volume, with over 30 keywords appearing on the first page of a google search.

What SEO has done for IT Company Techspace

Want to learn more about how to effectively use SEO to boost your business’ search engine results? Read our quick, 9 steps simple beginners’ guide on SEO here.

2. Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine is all we need. Vector

SEO refers to the organic unpaid traffic that businesses get from users via a search engine. Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) is kind of like the premium paid version of SEO.

This technique is usually done by companies through platforms like Google AdWords where companies bid against each other to appear at the top of the users’ search results. They will pay Google based on the keywords that they want and as a result will appear as a top search result when users search for that particular keyword.

Google Paid Ads from PPC Advertising

For this technique to work effectively, a company must be able to identify the keywords that its intended target audience would search with. By identifying these keywords, they would then be able to appear at the top of their desired target audience’s search engine results, consequently giving them more traffic and possibly conversions. For some help to kickstart the process of identifying these keywords, company could use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.

For this technique to work effectively, a company must be able to identify the keywords that its intended target audience would search with. By identifying these keywords, they would then be able to appear at the top of their desired target audience’s search engine results, consequently giving them more traffic and possibly conversions. For some help to kickstart the process of identifying these keywords, company could use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner.

While this technique may seem very convenient and somewhat foolproof as it immediately helps boost your company all the way up to the top, it is an expensive technique to execute especially when your company is a small  company trying to compete with bigger companies. Therefore, it isn’t recommended for a start up to be using such a technique, unless they operate in a niche field.

3. Social Media Marketing

Let’s face it, in this day and age a large proportion of us cannot imagine life without social media. The stats on social media reflects that too. At least half the population of the people in the world are online (3.5 billion) and of that 3.5billion, 66% of them are on Facebook! The potential for engagement on social media platforms cannot be overlooked and must be capitalized by businesses who are looking for opportunities to seek out new potential new customers.

Social Media Marketing is the promoting of your business’s product through social networking platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or even more recently trendy ones like TikTok. The goal of social media marketing is to engage with your target audience through conversations. The greatest benefit of social media is how it can bring about exponential gains as consumers can share products or businesses they like with their friends, helping businesses experience more growth than expected.

One of the many savage Wendy's Twitter Roasts Image from justsomething.co

Successful Social Media Marketing does not rely solely on how interesting or popular the business’s products and services are. It could also be due to the kind of content that they are producing on their social media platforms. Take for example, Wendy’s, an American fast food chain’s Twitter account. They’ve amassed a following of 3.4million followers which is close to Mcdonald’s, an arguably more internationally renowned brand’s following of 3.6million followers. The content that Wendy’s Twitter produces are content that appeals to their target demographic of young adults and teenagers. They put out tweets that are entertaining and humorous and at the same time, make use of online memes to help connect them with their audience. Wendy’s Twitter page also regularly engage in hilarious conversations with their customers. The authenticity and personality of your business’s social media presence is crucial in ensuring success in the field of Social Media Marketing.

4. Content Marketing

People are more likely to be engaged and take an interest in your business if you are able to put out quality content that they enjoy. Content marketing essentially refers to attracting customers by publishing and creating free, relevant content that piques their interests.

There are many ways to execute a content marketing strategy due to the myriad of possible content that could be published by businesses. Examples are things like: Instructional Videos, Memes, Photos, Entertaining Videos. The possibilities are endless when it comes to content marketing.

One great example of how content marketing could help spark interest in a brand is the example of BlendTec. Blenders sound like a very ordinary product with nothing too special to rave about when marketing such a product. I mean, after all what other uses can a Blender have other than to make some good ole’ strawberry milkshakes and fruit juices right? BlendTec would however, beg to differ. BlendTec had an extremely successful viral YouTube campaign “Will It Blend” to promote their blenders. The premise of the show is basically the company experimenting to see if random objects like the iPad, the XBOX 360 and even diamonds could be blended when put through their BlendTec blender. This, coupled with their use of a goofy looking professor as the face of the show, helped skyrocket them into internet virality. The show garnered more than 10 million total views and its channel currently has a subscriber count of 876,000. By delivering entertaining and creative content, BlendTec successfully propelled their brand to becoming one of the most popular blender brands in the world.

As proven by BlendTec, content marketing is only limited and bound by your creativity!

5. Email Marketing

The common misconception about this strategy is that most consumers take e-mail advertising as spam. Afterall, who actually bothers reading advertising emails and not discard them right? It has however been proven that email marketing is an effective channel for reaching out to consumers and converting them. In 2018, the average return on investments that companies gain from email marketing amounted to $32 per every dollar spent. This is a drop from the figure of $38 per dollar spent in 2015. While this may indicate a declining trend and strength of the email marketing strategy, businesses who want to create a good first impression or retain its customers must still know how to effectively capture their audiences with the email channel.

82% of consumers will open a “welcome email” and 59% of marketers citing email as their biggest source of ROI.

Retention and capturing the audiences’ attention through email is crucial as figures have shown that on average, 82% of consumers will open a “welcome email” and 59% of marketers citing email as their biggest source of ROI.

If you’re still not convinced of the power of email marketing yet, look at the case of Vin Bin, a wine and cheese retailer’s email marketing success story. Vin Bin freshened up their email marketing strategy by sending out their newsletter via email to its customers. By sending out relevant content that their target audience is interested in through emails, they’ve seen returns of 5 times more subscribers to their e-newsletter and growth of their sales altogether.

Email marketing might be seeing a declining trend in terms of ROI, but with the right content to capture your target audiences, it can still prove to be one of the most effective digital marketing strategies

Up Up and Away!

Hopefully this article helps you understand how some of the digital marketing strategies are able to help take businesses to the next level. If you require further help in developing a marketing plan for your company, feel free to drop by our home page and request for a FREE (yes, you read that right!) SEO audit.

If you’re still not convinced that going digital is the way to go as opposed to sticking to traditional marketing means, just know that a Hootsuite report revealed that the average time spent by a person on the internet in the world is 6 hours and 42 minutes. This is a marginally large proportion of 27% of their life in a year! Ready to capture that 27% of their life? Continue reading to find out how…

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Blogging Beyond Trends: A Necessity for Business Growth

For years, blogging has been broadly known as one of the most powerful components of a business’s digital marketing strategy. Owing to a wide range of benefits, a sound blogging content can effectively enhance the overall image of your business in many different aspects. In this article, we will take a look at the reasons why blogging is still a necessity for your business growth, together with some helpful tips on how to create your own blogging content.

Why Blogging Becomes a Necessity?

In particular, blogging is significantly vital for a business digital marketing strategy for various reasons:

1. Blogging Brings About SEO Benefits.

In fact, search engines like Google favor websites that update their content on a regular basis. Therefore, creating a blog is definitely the answer for this situation. You can achieve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits with blogging by publishing fresh, high-quality, and keyword-rich content as usual in order to leverage your website’s visibility in search engine results.

2. Blogging Helps Increase Website Traffic.

Website traffic refers to the number of visitors who land on a website, as well as the overall interactions they have, which can help measure the popularity and success of a particular website. Accordingly, intriguing blogs will attract visitors who are interested in your business. As such, if you regularly provide valuable blogging content, you will be able to drive traffic to your website with the increase of brand awareness.

3. Blogging Builds Loyalty and Trust.

By sharing explicit guidance and reliable information in your blogs, you can represent how professional you are when it comes to specific blogging topics. The more you provide practical and accurate sources of information, the more your business gains loyalty and trust among visitors in the long run.

4. Blogging Establishes Authority.

As mentioned earlier, blogging is a notable way that allows you to share your value and expertise towards a particular topic through a string of texts. While giving reliable information and insights, you can establish your business as a thought leader among all competitors within an industry.

5. Blogging Builds Relationships.

When it comes to building relationships, publishing a blog is exactly worth a shot to enhance the engagement with your audience. By responding to insightful feedback, you can express how much you value and care about your customer’s opinions, which can lead to further creation of more relevant and valuable content for them.

6. Blogging Encourages New Leads.

While including an intended call-to-action (CTA) in your blogging strategy, you can motivate your audience to pay attention and take further actions for your business. For example, they may sign up for new accounts, go through your other online platforms, or even making a purchase with your products.

7. Blogging is Cost-Effective.

Compared to traditional forms of marketing like advertising, blogging seems to be relatively inexpensive. As such, this can be an optimal approach for reaching your target audience, together with promoting your business without the undesirable waste of money.

Helpful Tips to Create Blogging Content for Your Business

  • Define Your Audience: Understand your target audience and figure out what topics are truly relevant and valuable to them.
  • Set Clear Goals: Determine and make well-planned goals on your desirable achievements with your blogs.
  • Conduct Keyword Research: Find out and identify relevant keywords and topics that your audience is frequently searching for in order to optimize your blogging content for search engines.
  • Create a Content Calendar: Plan your blog posts in advance to make sure that they are literally suitable and align with your marketing strategy.
  • Focus on Quality: Create high-quality with well-researched content that places value to your audience and signifies a sense of leading professionals among others in your industry.
  • Use Visuals: Add some attractive images, infographics, or videos to leverage your blogs to the next level of more engaging, interesting, and shareable styles. 
  • Promote Your Content: Share your blog posts on different social media platforms, email newsletters, and other channels to increase visibility, reaching a wider base of audience to your website.
  • Measure and Analyze: Track the performance of your blogging masterpieces after publishing by utilizing analytics tools in order to see what’s working and what should be improved more.
  • Stay Consistent: Publish your new blogs as frequently as you can to keep your website up-to-date and keep your audience’s mainstream relentless.

Final Thoughts

All in all, it goes without saying that blogging is, and has always been, a fundamental necessity for businesses of all sizes, especially when they involve digital marketing into their active marketing strategy. Blogs remarkably help escalate business growth to another level with a variety of sustainable results. Thus, businesses should take blogging’s importance into account and embrace its power for overall expected outcomes.

Now, it’s your turn to embark on a blog’s journey, and MarketingGuru is here to fully support your determination! Follow us and get comprehensive digital marketing advice from our gurus right away!

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What is Branding? MarketingGuru’s Simple Guide to Branding Your Business

Ever wonder why Apple manages to get its customers so psyched for their latest launch all the time? Ever question why people would pay a significantly higher price for a bottle of Evian water as compared to other bottled water?

The reason why these phenomena occur lies in the branding of those companies. These companies have branded themselves well enough and are in the eyes of the consumers, products that are valuable.

Simply put, branding amplifies your products and services value.

Today, you will learn what is branding and how it can you establish a branding strategy to help with your business’s growth.

What is Branding?

In order to fully grasp what branding is, you must know that your brand doesn’t come to life overnight from your marketing team. Branding is what your company is in your customer’s minds. This perception is shaped as a result of all the interactions and impressions that your customers have with your company and its products.

Is your company the unorthodox, innovative company that goes against the grain? Is the product or service you’re selling the value for money option or is it the premium one that only an exclusive group of people are willing to afford? You must be able to decide on all these things in order to effectively position your company and create a brand that suits your desired market positioning.

omnichannel branding
An effective Branding Strategy is an Omnichannel one

Branding is also omnichannel. This means that every channel or mean that you have to reach out to your customers matter as it is a sum of all the impressions your customers have of you. Your customers will expect the same type of service, tone, and experience in every available touchpoint you have with them. Therefore, it is also important to show consistency and align with their expectations on all the different channels your company exists on.

The goal of branding is to ultimately build a strong, differentiated and positive perception for your company in order to effectively stand out from your competition and build a firm, loyal customer base.

What Should You Achieve From Branding?

Before embarking on crafting a branding strategy for your business, you must know what you want to achieve out of branding, much like every other marketing plan or strategy.

The main objective of establishing a brand is to differentiate yourselves and get your target audience to view your company as a trustworthy influencer in your industry. That is the big picture of what branding is supposed to do for your company.

While that is the theme that branding is built upon, your brand be able to also meet the following objectives:

  • Have a crystal-clear brand message delivered

This helps your consumers know in a short sentence or phrase what your brand stands for and what it seeks to do.

  • Connect and resonate with audience sentiments

Your brand must be able to have ideas and messages in the minds of consumers that resonate with what they need and expect from brands in your industry.

A good example would be Adidas’s message of “Impossible is Nothing” which clearly sits well with their target audience’s aspirational thoughts when partaking in sporting activities.

  • Establish Your Credentials

Branding has to help you establish the trust between you and your potential customers. It has to help your business reaffirm its reliability as well as trustworthiness in the eyes of the market. This will then allow you to stand out as a front-runner in your industry. It is exactly why people prefer a can of Coca Cola over a generic can of cola. People understand the quality and trust that Coca Cola always delivers on its products as opposed to a brandless cola.

  • Inspire and Motivate Your Target Audience

An effective branding strategy will allow your business to inspire the target audience to take action and buy the products or services that you’re selling.

How Do I Establish My Brand?

After knowing what needs to be achieved from your branding campaign, the next question will be what are the steps that you can take to create this presence.

Of course there’s no one size fit all solution for every business as different businesses would require certain needs. However, there is a guideline that could be easily followed to determine how to shape your branding strategy.

1. Design a Meaningful Logo

While it is essential to have an eye-catching logo that draws all the attention, it is also just as important to incorporate elements of what your brand means to people into the logo.

IKEA - Wikipedia

Look at IKEA’s logo for example. Without being told, you could probably tell which country (Sweden) the company originates from due to its logo’s design scheme. The simplicity of the logo also paints a picture of the company’s minimalistic designs and goal of giving its consumers reliable, fuss-free products. Thus you can clearly see why it is important to be create meaning behind your logo design for effective branding.

2. Know Your Customers Fully

For effective communication you have to understand your customers inside out. You need to know what are the things that motivate your customers to buy your products. Having an understanding of what their pain points are and what they seek from your brand is crucial in helping you set their expectations and create your brand’s promise to the customers.

3. Clearly Define Your Brand Promise

In your messages, the brand promise must be succinctly and distinctly delivered to the customers. They need to know what is it exactly that they can expect from your brand. Take for example – Starbucks. Starbucks’ level of personalization in their service, allowing customers to customize drinks however they like and addressing each customers by their name is a way of morphing their brand image. This aligns with Starbucks’ brand vision of “treating people like family” so that they “will be loyal and give their all”.

Starbucks Personalization - Evil, Funny, Or Brilliant?
Image Source: Forbes

The experience they deliver to customers is definitely consistent with what they promise (apart from the quality coffee of course!).

Your brand’s promise must be stated not only to customers, but also to every individual stakeholder and employees. Everyone in the organization has to be aware of what the company wants to portray so that they can behave in a certain manner that helps to project the brand image.

If you feel that your brand messages and advertising style may be too subtle for customers to catch, be explicit about it. State it loud and clear in your messages if you have to.

4. Consistency in Delivering on Every Touchpoint

As mentioned earlier, in branding literally EVERY touchpoint matters. As such it is important to integrate your what you seek out of your branding campaign into every facet of your business. Be it your retail staff’s service delivery, your e-mail marketing messages, your company’s policies to even the way you handle the backend of your business. They ALL matter.

The way that people will perceive your brand is an amalgamation of all these experiences they will have with your brand. To effectively carry out your branding strategy you must ensure that there is alignment across all departments and channels. Any inconsistency will only bring about cognitive dissonance in the way customers feel towards your brand, making them lose confidence.

By being consistent throughout all channels will leave your customers with a lasting impression, shaping the idea that your business is reliable.

5. Be Memorable

The Brand Brief Behind Nike's Just Do It Campaign

At the very core of your branding efforts is your company’s need to be known and remembered by your target audience. Which is why there is a need for your company to be memorable.

From having a catchy tagline, to creating buzzworthy campaigns, there are many ways that you could have your company’s brand image be imprinted in the minds of your consumers. Catchy taglines and jingle could go a long way in establishing your brand.

When people say “Just Do It”, you would immediately associate with a certain sports brand. Or when people tell you that they’re “Lovin It”, you would right away think of a particular fast food chain. Catchy taglines that reflect your brand’s identity and message go a long way in capturing new audience and reminding people of your brand’s existence.

6. Create a Brand Persona

Treat your brand like a person. Give it a persona. List down the characteristics that you want your brand to have and show that in your messages.

To develop a persona for your brand you have to think of it as a living person. What ideals and values do you want your brand to carry? How do you want people to think of your brand? These questions will help guide you in creating the kind of personality that you want to impart onto your brand.

Brand Personality: does it increase Brand Loyalty? – VEMT – The ...
The Aaker Brand Personality Framework – A Good Guide to Follow! (Source: VEMT)

Use frameworks like Jennifer Aaker’s widely used brand personality framework to help determine what kind of a personality you want to give your brand. As a result of the personality you wish for your brand to have, the tone in which you communicate with your customers and through your advertising will be altered to reflect that personality.

Conclusion

Branding is quintessential in helping businesses grow. That is a sentiment that is reflected by over 80% of marketers. It shouldn’t come as a surprise as we know how through branding, companies can create a perception in the consumers’ mind that make their business’s offerings seem way more valuable than it should be. Branding is a long-term investment that will reap benefits in the form of name recognition and increased customer loyalty. It is one of the most powerful tool in your business’s arsenal to help your business sustain competitive advantage over competitors.

Today, we have covered what you should achieve from an effective branding campaign as well as the means to achieve it. We understand that this may be quite overwhelming to do on your own and to digest. If there is one thing that you MUST not forget after reading today’s article it is that CONSISTENCY IS KING in branding.

If you need help with understanding branding and how can you better position your brand, you can reach our Gurus at MarketingGuru who will give you a FREE consultation on your online branding strategy. We will take the time to go through with you what we can do to help your business with your branding and give you a tailor-made proposal that can help you with strategizing your online branding strategy.

We do customized proposals because it aligns with our brand’s promise of delivering beyond expectations

We will go above and beyond to customize your proposal and help you find the best-fit strategies to help improve your branding.

We hope you enjoyed and learned a thing or two about branding from this article!

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MarketingGuru’s Guide to Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has become an integral part of our digital landscape, connecting people worldwide and shaping the way we consume media.  With almost four BILLION users, having a presence on the different social media platforms would mean reaching out to more than half the world. That statistic alone should already interest you to market your products on social media platforms.

But of course, Social Media Marketing requires a strategy. You have to craft a content strategy, figure out where to post them and how to get your target audience engaged. It isn’t as simple as just posting stuff on to your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram and hoping for people to randomly land on your page and liking your posts. There must be a game plan in order for your company to succeed.

Today, MarketingGuru will guide you through the crucial steps required to craft a social media marketing strategy

What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Before we start helping you plan a strategy, we must first establish an understanding of what social media marketing is. Social Media Marketing is a format of online marketing that involves the creation, curation, and sharing of content on social media platforms. Its purpose is to help businesses gain traffic, brand awareness, and attention through social media platforms.

Some companies may think that getting organic traffic through search engine optimization or having a well-optimized pay per click campaign is enough. What these companies have to understand is that social media and SEO are closely related.

Social Media mentions are beneficial in helping with search engine rankings. When you build your brand’s content and get people talking, your webpage’s search engine performance will be positively impacted. Social mentions are a factor in Google determining which websites have more authority which will in improving your rankings. This is why you need a good social media strategy to complement your search engine efforts, which also explains why digital marketing agencies tend to recommend using their SEO services and social media marketing services together.

Step 1: Setting Your Social Media Goals

There could be many reasons why your business is doing its marketing on social media platforms. Generally, companies use social media for purposes such as generating community engagement, increasing brand awareness, driving sales and boosting web traffic. However, before you embark on your social media marketing journey, it is important to establish which of these is your main objective.

Choosing an objective would impact the way your social media marketing strategy is crafted. The types of content would differ from objective to objective. Here are some social media goals that you can set and examples of content that you would be looking to produce for each goal.

Generate Community Engagement

Community engagement can be increased by giving your target audience something to do. Be it a question or contest that encourages user-generated content. Engagement will be generated if you get your community working!

Hosting live streams are also a great way to get your community to hop on to your stream and interact with you. These engagements can help to increase brand loyalty as it adds a personal touch for your business.

Increase Brand Awareness

Increasing brand awareness is different from driving sales. The kind of content that you would be looking to publish would NOT be content that hard sells your products and services. Instead, look to create content that shows your brand’s vision and values. This is the primary focus when it comes to increasing brand awareness as you want people to know your brand for more than just the products that you are selling.

Increase Sales and Traffic

When your goal is to be increasing web traffic and sales, it is more appropriate to be coming up with content that has a strong Call-to-Action. These posts can usually be boosted through the social media platform that you are marketing on. One crucial component in having a goal like this is to ensure that they are measurable, as such, you should make use of tools like Google Analytics to keep an eye on acquisitions through your social media channel.

Step 2: Determine Your Target Audience and Platform

Target Audience Graphic
Image Source: Infographic World

Social Media Marketing isn’t just marketing on Facebook and Twitter. There’s a whole array of platforms out there for you to choose from to market on! To find the right fit for your business, you must first establish who is your target audience and whether or not they use the platform that you’ve selected to market on.

To help guide you along, we have compiled a list of social media platforms and which demographics are they appropriate for.

Facebook

Total Users: 2.5 Billion

Good For: Advertising Products and Services, Increasing Brand Awareness, Engagement

Main Demographic: Gen X, Millennials and to some extent, Boomers

What’s Special: Facebook Business Page – Allows for you to have a community hub for your customers to interact and communicate with your brand

Instagram

Total Users: Over 1 Billion

Good For: Visually Appealing Content, Visual Promotion, and Advertising, User-Generated Content

Main Demographic: Millennials

What’s Special: Instagram Stories – which are short-form video content for you to promote your business’s offerings

Twitter

Total Users: 330 Million

Good For: Audience Engagement, Audience Interaction, Brand Awareness, Customer Relations

Main Demographic: Millennials

What’s Special: Tweets are short-form messages that allow for witty engagements with your target audience, helping your company build a brand personality

LinkedIn

Total Users: 575 Million

Good For: B2B Businesses and Business Development

Main Demographics: Gen X and Millennials

What’s Special: LinkedIn Publishing Platform – Allows for your company to publish articles on LinkedIn’s platform and for the content to be distributed organically within your network on LinkedIn.

TikTok

Total Users: 800 Million

Good For: Short-form videos content, Companies that can produce creative and attractive video content in 15 to 30 seconds, Increasing Brand Awareness and Advertising

Main Demographics: Millennials

Social Media Comparison Infographic
Image Source: Leverage

What’s Special: 66% of TikTok users are under the age of 30. If your business can produce visually striking video content and is targeted at young adults and teenagers, TikTok is right for you

.

If you still have trouble deciding on how and where to market your products or services, you can refer to HubSpot’s extremely useful Make My Persona tool. The tool can help you to create your target audience’s persona to give you a better idea of how and where should you be targeting.

Step 3: Content Creation

content creation social media marketing strategy

Having decided on the platform, your next step will be to create the content that you will be sharing on your social media platforms! If content creation is new to you, you can read up on how to get started with content marketing.

Based on the platform chosen, you will have to add value to give your customers reasons to follow your brand on its social media account. Content creation is an absolute must as it is the easiest way for you to start adding value to your audience’s lives on social media.

It isn’t easy to immediately think of ideas to generate content on social media. One useful tip to get you started would be to look at your competitor’s content. Through analyzing the kinds of content posted by your competitors, you can identify gaps in content and ways on how to improve on existing content from them. This will give your target audience reasons to follow your brand over your competitors.

Additionally, make sure to utilize your platform fully for content creation. For example, if you are going to be running your social media marketing on Instagram, fully utilize functions such as Instagram stories and Instagram product tags in your posts. For Facebook, you have to utilize its dynamic product ads to help you in converting leads.

Social Media Marketing is also good for using your customers to help your business generate content. You can either get social media influencers to help your brand generate content by reaching out to them to repost your content or gain organic content from your customers. Organic content can be created by creating your own hashtags and encouraging your audience to utilize the hashtag to share their stories and experiences of your products and services.

There is an endless variety of formats for you to create and present your content, find inspiration and create valuable, unique content to maximize your social media marketing!

Step 4: Create a Social Media Schedule

To keep your content fresh and up to date with trends, you can create a social media schedule to help plan ahead on what’s to be posted.

An easy solution to keeping a schedule for all your social media content would be to use a social media management software. SproutSocial and Hubspot both offer social media management solutions that allow you to plan and write posts ahead of time. They also help you to share the created content on the different social media platforms based on your schedule and help to monitor engagements and interactions of your posts.

Keeping a schedule will ensure that your business is able to consistently post content and create content that is relevant to the trends. For example, you can plan for blog articles related to things to do in the New Year when it is nearing New Year’s Day.

Step 5: Assess and Analyze Your Social Media Campaign

To measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns, social media metrics can be tracked and analyzed. The metrics will allow you to understand how well is your content engaging your customers and how much reach it is getting from the platforms.

Some of the metrics that you can measure include:

  • Impressions: The number of people that your content has been seen by
  • Engagement: Interactions with your post. This refers to things like clicks (even on the view more button in a Facebook post), likes, comments, replies, etc. Different platforms may have different engagement means. For example on Instagram, posts that are “saved” by users are also considered engagement
  • Mentions: The number of times that your company’s page has been mentioned in a post or tweet by the public
  • Shares: The number of times your content has been shared by people to their pages.

To track these metrics, you could use built in tools on different platforms such as Facebook Analytics and Instagram Insights. The social platforms would usually have tracking tools for social accounts. But do remember to set a conversion path for your website on Google Analytics if you want to track your campaign’s conversion!

These metrics when tracked will help you to plan for future content as they give you a clearer picture of what your target audience wants from you.

Help Your Business Float Like a (Social) Butterfly on Social Media!

The 5 steps listed above should help you get a good idea of how to create a social media marketing strategy. With the amount of time the world is spending on social media platforms as well as the reach you can gain from it, it isn’t hard to see why businesses these days see social media marketing as one of their key efforts. Get started today with these simple steps and help your business become the social butterfly it deserves to be!

If you have any questions regarding our blog content or are just looking for a Digital Marketing Agency to help you run your campaigns, you can contact us today!