|
Internet marketing is something that businesses can’t resist and it has been an essential part of everyday life of consumers. What internet marketing entails is actually maintaining a solid social media presence. One could hardly imagine having internet marketing plan without social media. So if you go ask a bunch of people on what are their thoughts of internet marketing, they will tell you about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and so on. While they might be aware of other internet marketing methods, social media just play a major role in it. It’s time to get to know the role of social media in maintaining an effective internet marketing strategy. Building and Maintaining Trust Trust plays a major role in establishing a business’ name. We all got to gain customers’ trust in order for them to make a purchase. Social media presents a unique opportunity for both large and small businesses to build and maintain trust. It gives a unique opportunity to interact and respond to customers in real time. Businesses can even select a target demographic they want to engage with. All these will contribute in building the trust needed to turn followers to customers and loyal community. Thus, trust is the bridge between company and social media with the community. Internet Search Engines All businesses would give it all to get their websites and brands on top of the list when people search for keywords related to their business line and brand. Who wouldn’t want that if they know that it’s very unlikely that people are checking the second and succeeding results page? Let us take Google as an example. It is taking content generated from social media very seriously. Its algorithm incorporates content from social media into its search results. Yes, they have developed a way where social media contents can be utilized to maximize search engine ranking. This means a business’ social media presence or the lack of it may directly affect how relevant they are online. Therefore, businesses need to actively support their social media accounts on a consistent basis. The more content a company generates through social media, the more authority its brand can receive in its market. Website and Social Media When considering what content to post on your social media, you can publish blogs, videos and articles on your website and post the link with effective visual and caption on your social media account. You can also boost the post and get more views. This is an effective way to give information to your customers while driving traffic on your website. Remember social media supports instant messaging thus your customers can talk about your blogs, articles and videos and this can drive traffic on your website real time! Social Media is a Must In the early years of traditional marketing and early years of social media, it may be true that having a social media is just optional. But now, those days are long gone. Businesses have already realized that social media are actually driving potential customers to become paying customers. It is now inevitable and today, it is clear that a strong web presence on social media can drive more traffic to websites than traditional search engines. So if you are ones of those who are still thinking that it’s just an option, think again. Do research and see results and stats that will prove you wrong. Cost-effective Strategy Spending on a social media campaign is a great investment to have visibility on the whole of internet and of course, this will carry on offline market. It is truly mind-blowing how much of a reach social media has when incorporated with some techniques. Imagine how much you can save when you spend on social media ads and campaigns compared to millions of investment when you do it the traditional methods. Moreover, investing on social media campaigns will give more worth to your money because it can give you the opportunity to reach to a wide variety of audience and at the same time select those that would probably turn to buying customers. This is an opportunity that was not offered before the traditional media. The Intersection Nowadays, internet marketing campaigns are now inextricably linked to social media. This linkage is here to stay and is so tight that working on social media presence is much needed. Proficiency in social media is not another check mark on a digital marketing to-do list. Rather, it is a wonderful opportunity for small and medium-sized companies to take control of their brand, interact with consumers, entice prospective customers, fix mistakes, learn, grow, improve, and strengthen their position on the internet. Another thing linking internet marketing and social media marketing are hashtags. Hashtags are utilized on most social media platforms. This allows easier search of the product or service a business is offering. This is also a way for businesses to be a part of the trend and drive traffic. Yes! Hashtags are used to drive traffic on sites because they affect the visibility of your sites. So next time you post a content on social media, you can get website visits though hashtags. Conclusion Now that you know the tight relationship of social media and internet, you need to make sure you will manage your accounts very well. Get more organic traffic on your website through high rankings on search engines. Conquer the world of Internet through the power of social media. Get more people engaged on your social media pages and build the trust needed to be a successful business in this world of competition. Even if you have already understood the connection of social media and internet marketing, it is still important to keep in mind that Internet or Online Marketing still needs to be maintained through offline marketing and community management. Any effort done online will be useless when not supported by quality products and outstanding services. Remember the customers are enticed through social media and online marketing but it’s definitely the business product and service itself that will make them stay. Prioritize social media management for your internet marketing plan or at least get professionals who has the required experience on social media marketing for companies.
0 Comments
We all know that a social media crisis has a potentially great impact on the business overall. Thus it is important to pay attention to it and resolve it as fast as possible. Before getting any further about social media crisis management, you have to understand that the best way to handle it is to try to prevent or at least minimize it. Furthermore, you got to be prepared before it happens. Set a plan in case worse comes to worse. If you don’t have time to study, research and prepare for crisis, at least get someone who can to set up a crisis prevention plan for your business. Waiting for a social media crisis to explode is never an option. If you ignore it, it will likely get worse. Social media can be an asset in a crisis when used correctly, not an extra problem. Here’s what you need to do to come out on the other side of a crisis with your company’s reputation intact. Plan Before Anything While it’s best to plan for crisis prevention, if the crisis already exists, you must have a plan in place. Time is crucial in times of crisis but you have to take time to plan before taking any action. Meet up and discuss the ins and outs of the company and understand which strategies to use on that specific crisis. Acknowledge The Issue If the issue is true, you should always acknowledge it specially if the fault is in the company. Let the people know that you realize something has happened. Say sorry and mean it. People appreciate honesty and humility so you will be forgiven. As long as you take full responsibility, you will get to have the chance to redeem your glory. Time is crucial and your speed of responding is very important. When issuing a statement, show compassion and your full commitment to the issue. Don’t be defensive, don’t justify your actions and most importantly, don’t hide from criticism. Assure customers that they’re your first priority. Choose The Right Space Make sure that you put together a well thought-out public statement, and share it first on the original space where the problem started. Wherever the crisis first broke, that should be the first place where you should publish your public statement. If the crisis initiated on Facebook, respond first on Facebook. Then circle around and respond in other venues that have picked up on the crisis. Publish the Crisis’ FAQs Create a Web page where you can put all the information about the crisis in one place. You may include acknowledgement of the crisis, details about the occurrence, photos or videos, if available, how the company found out who was alerted, when, and how, specific actions taken in response, real or potential effects, steps taken to prevent future occurrence, and the contact information for real people at the company. Having this page will allow you to respond to questions with a link instead of typing or pasting answers every time. This saves times and prevents misinterpretation of your responses. Preparing this landing page could take time and is very crucial so you can hire a team who knows how to manage social media crisis and have experienced making Crisis FAQs page for other businesses before. Monitor the Crisis After you have released a statement and also answered the questions using your FAQs page, don’t think that the job’s done. You have to monitor how it develops. Use a social media monitoring tool and check your notifications. Don’t miss on searching on the relevant hashtag. Also, keep track of all social media messages that still need a reply. Make sure that you still continuously post relevant updates via your social channels and respond directly to customers. Make sure you provide a well-crafted, rapid public response. You want to update anyone and everyone, so no one is left in the dark. Know When to Take It Offline Damage control is the essence of social media crisis management. Sometimes the best course of action is to offer your phone number or email address, and encourage someone to contact you that way. Remember that you can never please everyone with your responses so give a place to contact you besides your social networks. Pause Scheduled Posts You don’t want to give the impression that you are ignoring the crisis. Make sure all your scheduled posts are paused. People pay so much attention on sites that are involves on issues so you have to be extra careful. Do not underestimate the number of eyes on your pages. Wait until things get figured out before re-establishing regular communications. This is most important if you have a team handling you social media accounts. Make sure that you let the team know that all posts will be placed on hold. Learn Your Lessons After the crisis subsides, reconstruct and deconstruct the crisis. Make a documentation of what happened. You can make copies of all tweets, status updates, blog comments, and all emails. Analyze website traffic patterns and search volume patterns. Get to know where did the crisis break, and when? Where did it spread, and how? How did your internal notification work? How did your response protocol work? Did specific customers rise to your defense? Were your employees informed? How did the online crisis intersect with offline coverage? Make sure you keep a record of all these and do everything to try to prevent it from happening again. Social media crises can easily spread, damaging your brand’s reputation within minutes or even seconds. Handling a crisis can be overwhelming, but remember that how you respond and overcome the crisis is what matters. Use social media as a tool communicate and get some good out of a bad situation. If you want to regain the trust of your customers, you’ll need to step up your game. Never be unprepared for possible crises. So if you’d like to put a customized crisis plan together for your company, Coxier Social Media Management is 100% ready to help.
Since you have decided to use social media to promote your business, how many times have you looked at your competitors’ pages and bigger brand names’ posts and asked: “What am I doing wrong?” Yes, surely you have tried comparing your page with others and tried to find out why everything’s working out very well for others and not with you. You can easily get this found out and resolved with a help from social media marketing experts. Well, to do it on your own, let us try to take a look at the challenges of social media that you need to hurdle for a successful online business marketing. Choosing the Right Social Media Platform With people’s dependence on social media nowadays, having a social media page for your business is no longer optional if you want to get your brand across your audiences. Deciding which platform to build a presence on, however, can be a bit of a challenge. Luckily, if you know your audience, that solves this challenge almost totally. Knowledge on their demographics means knowledge on what social media platform they are active. A great number of followers won’t mean anything if you’re not reaching the right people. You have to target the audience that would most possibly be actual customers. Developing a Social Media Strategy It’s great if you already have established your goals in managing a social media account your business. However, that’s not supposed to be the end. You have to have a clear and specific plan to achieve your goals. You must have a social media strategy. Creating a social media strategy can be daunting so if you are not prepared, this needs an expert who would develop the ultimate strategy for your business. A social media strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business through the use of social networks. Start by creating a list of social media objectives and goals. The more specific you are, the more effective you’ll be at implementing them. These objectives should align with your broader marketing strategy and business goals. Keep it as concise as possible and make sure they’re attainable. The purpose of a social media strategy is to guide your actions, but it’ll also be a measure by which you determine whether you’re succeeding or failing. Start developing your social media strategy by answering the question of ‘why’ your business is on social and what you would like to accomplish. You also need to establish a process. Know the specific social channels, paid advertising budget, video or image creation, partnering with influencers. Get to know the key metrics and goals that you would like to accomplish broken down into days, weeks, months, and the year. Coming Up With a Consistent and Higher Level of Content Staying consistently creative and original is one of the toughest social media marketing challenges to overcome. One key of staying on the right path is to make your audience feel that it’s a real person whom that are engaging with. People love knowing that there is a “real person” behind the social media profile and by giving them a look into your company or brand you will evoke real human interaction. Another way to generate some excellent buzz is by creating original graphics and posting them to our social channels. Visual content has taken over almost every major social network, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Not only can adding an image to your social media posts increase engagement, but it can also help you tell a great story. Encouraging Shares of Contents If you want to increase your reach through social shares, start by optimizing your content. We don’t just ask people to share what we post. Make sure that they do it voluntarily because your content is worth sharing. Keep up with trends and monitor which posts your target demographic is engaging with. Go for those that are valuable and interesting for them. People would share to bring valuable and entertaining content to others. This can be possible by telling great stories, making your audience look smart, and using emotional appeal. If you’re consistently posting interesting, entertaining and relevant content, you’ll have no problem driving engagement and boosting your reach. Answering All of Your Customer’s Questions Business owners often forget that social media is meant to be a two-way communication channel. Too often it’s just used as a promotional mechanism. Missed messages specially complaints could simply result to followers un-following your page. Using a social media management tool can help you make sure that messages never go unnoticed. Respond to all queries, appreciation posts and complaints like how you would offline. Improving a Drop in Organic Reach Do not lose hope if you see a drop of reach on your social media contents. It’s not as easy for contents to stand out now because of all the published contents from other sites and your competitors. Do not get discouraged but instead you have to be looking at the decline of organic reach as an opportunity in disguise. The key to driving reach is finding the right content mix for your audience. Use a social media management tool to monitor the engagement with your posts. Know which posts are performing well and which ones aren’t. Posts with high engagement but low reach is a good barometer for potential success. Always track your performance and be flexible enough to make adjustments where needed. Measuring Social Media ROI Measuring your return of investment is something that you don’t want to disregard or else all your social media efforts will be useless. Social media ROI is what your business gets back from the time, money and resources you’re putting toward social media marketing. Social media ROI is based on your specific business goals. Before you can start measuring your ROI, you need to have clearly defined goals in place. This is why your social media strategy is so important. Make sure you have one in place with quantifiable goals. With strategic goals in place and the right tools, understanding what you’re getting back from social media isn’t too difficult. Knowing these challenges and the ways to overcome them is essential for business success. Start looking back on the way you manage these challenges. Know your channels, your audience, and your market inside and out and make strategic experiment decisions based on learning. If you still can’t see the results on your work, maybe it’s time to get help from social media campaign company. We will take care of your social media accounts while you relax your back in bed or enjoy quality time with your family. Shoot us an email today!
It’s great that you’ve decided to use social media to market your business. Now the real question is, are you using it effectively to make it work in gaining customers and increasing sales? Are you talking to the right audiences on the right sites? Make sure that you understand the ins and outs of using social media or at least have someone, who absolutely understands the process, manage your account. So what would you do for social media marketing to work for your business? Start taking notes. Know and Understand Your Customers When managing your account, focus on finding and creating good opportunities to connect with your target customers. You have to know them in terms of what they need and what they want. In that way, you understand how you can offer your business to them. There are times you have to choose a specific platform that best delivers the needs and wants of your audience. By understanding your audience and focusing your efforts on the most relevant sites, you’ll be able to maximize your efficiency, and your results. Engage Your Customers and Treat Them As Friends When it comes to social media, you want to engage your audience. If you don’t engage with them, people will feel that your site is fully automated and they would feel like they are not talking to business owners but to machine and computers. Your customers will feel more valued when a business responds directly to them, and social media makes doing so easier than ever. You just need to dedicate the time and resources to do it. If you can’t give the time this strategy requires, invest on getting someone to do the job as long as it’s done. Be Available and Active You need to make sure that your business is posting quality contents frequently and consistently. You should know by now how fast it is to lose followers because of lousy contents and inconsistent postings. Connect with your customers on a personal level. If a customer called you on the phone, emailed you, or walked up to your sales counter to ask a question, or make a comment, you wouldn’t ignore them, would you? The same thing is true in social media platform. When a customer or prospect takes the time to get in touch with you online, they should be treated no differently. Take the time to listen, engage and respond. – You must have a centralized plan for actively engaging with your community. Offer customer service Regardless of having or not having an experience on offering social media customer service, it is something that you need to get used of and learn. People who are trying to get in touch with you about your business will have a great chance of bringing it on your social media pages. Take this as a major opportunity for your business to give your business a competitive advantage. This can win points from your customers for being more accommodating and available. Social customer service can therefore help your marketing efforts by improving your company’s reputation. Remember that any help you render to consumers can automatically gain visibility, demonstrating your company’s commitment to high-quality service. The more helpful you are as a business, the more word will spread across the various social networks. Turn negative to positive Complaints are inevitable and you need to be willing to engage directly with your customers complaining about your products and services. Remember, negative feedback doesn’t have to result in creating a poor or negative image of your business, but it can if you ignore it. Take action and turn that negative situation into something positive. Social media marketing can sometimes be even more valuable when it comes to handling negative feedback. You have to stop thinking that your business is perfect and learn to admit errors. This is essential to successful social media marketing. Acknowledge your mistakes directly. A thoughtful, well-crafted response is very important. Take an extra moment to deliver a carefully worded, and measured response to your community. Don’t hide the mistake. The worst mistake however; is acting like there was no mistake at all. You need to accept responsibility. Own your mistake and be sincere. Acknowledge what transpired and that you understand why your followers are upset. Apologize sincerely and tell customers that you regret your actions. This shows that your business is responsible and cares about its clients enough to empathize with their feelings. Measure Results and Repeat Those That Worked Make sure that you don’t waste marketing efforts by making the mistake of not measuring the results. You need to know whether you’ve succeeded or not. You need to track social media activity through measurements of actual results using social media tools. As the saying goes, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it, and this couldn’t be truer than it is for social media marketing. Make sure you develop a thorough, achievable set of goals that you think social media marketing can help you to achieve, and then invest in the analytics and other tools you’ll need to determine your success or failure. Depending on these outcomes, you can adjust your strategies going forward, making your social marking efforts even better in the future. You can set goals and objectives to analyze virtually any variable in social media marketing. This will allow you to gauge what is working best and what is not. This is a step that you can’t compromise so if you are not sure on how to use it you can ask for help from a team who has the experience in measuring results. Conclusion Now that you know these tips, time to apply them on your account pages. Use them intelligently and creatively. These can provide you with advantages for gaining your company new heights of profitability and success. Don’t miss on steps and always be guided, you can’t cut corners. Always remember if you don’t have time to dedicate yourself, or if you want to make sure things would work, get an online social media marketing company that has the necessary skills, tools and experience.
It is not startling news that businesses use social media to spread the word and make interactions with its audiences. It’s not also a surprise that local businesses do not have the same resources, budgets and social tools available to gigantic international brand. Nonetheless, this should not be a hindrance to have and manage an awesome social media accounts and campaigns. Here is one thing that you should keep in mind throughout your social media management. “You need to focus on the community and the locals.” Through social media, you can directly communicate with your customers with the chance to turn those customers into a virtual sales team. More likely, you will be dealing with people from the local community who wants to either try your service or who wants to give feedback. Regardless of their purpose, respond to them as how you would respond to offline customers. Since we focus on the local, you also need to participate on community activities and affairs and of course share those activities online. This would not only make you more exposed to the target market but also will give them a sense of belonging. Since you’re reading this now, for sure you are ready to gain social media leap for your local business, boost your search engine rankings, and drive sales. Here’s how you can start: Choose Social Networks The first step towards marketing your brand is to decide what platform you are going to use. Remember you are not supposed to use each and every platform available. So how do you choose which social media network to use? Simple. You have to know which social media sites are used by your audiences. One way is to simply ask them when they come over to avail of your product or service. But that could be time consuming so here are other ways: First, allocate time and take a look through your audience demographic of various social networks and analise on which network they thrive. Once you have collated the data and found which social network they use, you can focus on that network. It’s not necessary that because Facebook has the greatest population, it also has your target audience. Another way of identifying the best social network to work on is to analyse your competitors. Discover where, as well as how, they perform their social media marketing. You don’t necessarily need to follow what they do but you can try to pattern your social media strategy on the successful techniques they use. There are tools that will help you uncover social media insights about your competitors. You can get those for free and use them to choose the best social network for your local business. Educate, Entertain and Give Great Impressions through High-Quality Content You need to find out the difference between your customers wanting to get updates about your business versus them being bombarded with too much information about you. People easily get tired with repetitive ads and promotions that do not have any variation. They feel that it’s unnecessary to follow someone who would just post automated contents on their site. So how can you post on your page quality content? First, make sure to have variants on the kinds of contents you post. Add images, videos, memes, and be humorous when applicable. Another effective way to post quality content is to post blogs on your website and share it to your social media site. This allows you to control what your audience will read while drawing more traffic to your website. It’s better to choose to write topics about things that would concern your local community. Offer Exclusive Deals One of the fastest ways to grow your business is to host contests or give away discounts exclusively for followers. You want them to feel rewarded for choosing your brand and at the same time, you can gain more followers by having more people attracted to the exclusive deals you offer. Remember: People love things that are free! On the other hand, you can also engage your audience in a contest. This means that they can get prizes while having fun. This strategy would build engagement and will deepen your bond with them. Different social media network would give you different options on conducting a contest so make sure to research first. Merge Offline and Online Marketing Strategy Thriving in social media is not done purely through online inviting and posting. You can also make small talks with your customers who visit your shop and have them follow your social media page. If you think this is too much of a work you can simply put posts and attach stickers on your shop walls or doors inviting people to like your page. Surely, they would be happy to follow you and even share their experience on your business. If you want to grow your social media community faster with less effort, you can reward followers who check-in to your store on Facebook and help you with your marketing campaign. This would give you organic reach and traffic. Now is the time to embrace social media. Now that you know that even local businesses needs it to thrive don’t waste the knowledge you discovered. Social media is where your customers are, so go to them! After doing these steps and after few posts and responses, make sure to repeat those things that worked and for those strategies that didn’t work, try something else of change some factors of that plan. Bear in mind that your investment for a few hours a week and a few clicks of a button can be huge in terms of gaining customers, building a community and making sales. It can heighten a company’s visibility, broaden reach and engage current and future customers. Social media management will only work if you do it. If you don’t have time, you have to choose a social media management company that has the experience and tools to help you out!
Promoting a business was never easy regardless of the business nature and size. Whether you are a huge corporation or a small business, you have to make sure you get to market your brand well. From TV Ads, Newspaper publishing Ads to giving flyers and brochures, you will take all these methods just to spread the word about your brand. Reaching out and marketing businesses has never been as easy as when social media has paved its way through people’s lifestyle. Getting in touch with a brand’s target market has been a lot easier since then. However, while you should be marketing your brand through social media, you shouldn't necessarily be on every platform. You have to choose and get to know the right platforms to invest in. Choose where you're more likely to reach and engage with your audience. Take some time to familiarize yourself with each platform. Start getting to know the basics of today's most popular social media platforms. Facebook Facebook could be the greatest social network that you wouldn’t want to neglect. It has the widest population with the most specific targeting. As we all know, Facebook facilitates connection and communication. Having a Facebook page is an easy way to introduce your brand and connect with possible customers. Thus, regardless of the industry, Facebook is an essential platform to have a name in. Establish a good reputation and a number of followers on this platform and see the impact of it on your business. Never underestimate the possibilities on this medium. It also offers Facebook Ads where you can invest your time and money in exchange of great exposure of your business and brand name. Target specific demographic too! Post contents of your followers’ interests and build rapport online. Use this space to answer questions and solve problems as well. Twitter Twitter is fast and responsive. With the limited characters, you can share short text updates. You can post real time and shot updates about your business without getting annoying. Twitter also facilitates fast response to queries and complaints. This means better customer service as people would usually tweet about their experiences on brands. Having a responsive twitter page is essential to make customers feel valued. This also allows fast spreading of the word about your business. Use hashtags to include your brand on trending topics. It helps boost your post’s exposure and interactions. Moreover, you can easily interact with other users by mentioning their usernames in your posts, so Twitter is a great way to quickly connect with people all around the world. Instagram Instagram is a visual social media platform based entirely on photo and video posts. This gives visualization to products and services that customers can only imagine on posts. This targets users on mobile who are engaging on image and video posts. This is great for business owners that have good eye for detail and at least basic photography skills for high quality content. This social network also gives you chance to post sponsored ads. This allows your content to be published on feeds of your followers for a greater chance of engagement and interactions. YouTube YouTube is a platform where people can view, upload, rate, share and comment on videos. As a huge hub for news and entertainment, it is a great platform to give more thorough information about your business. This is advantageous for businesses driven by creativity so it's important to have an eye for visually appealing content. You can effectively use this social network to target influencers and vloggers called YouTubers who have large audiences that believes on products and services they endorse. It is strategic to partner with YouTubers for product placement, because these users already have engaged audiences. It would be much easier and cheaper to endorse your product or services. As one that is owned by Google, you can also enjoy search engine optimization as your videos could appear more easily on Google results compared to other websites. LinkedIn Connection is the keyword of LinkedIn. Connecting with business professionals and with people from the same industry is easiest with LinkedIn. The platform allows you to target people by industry, job title, and others. This is the perfect platform for relationship building among business owners and other professionals. Just like in offline world, one can build LinkedIn Groups where discussions could be done. Pinterest By "pinning" boards, one can save and post visually appealing images. Like Instagram, this is focused on visuals that are classified according to different categories. It is important to use this platform if you have a business under its most popular categories. You may use this platform to post product details and even location maps. The technique on this platform is to keep your boards organized and search-friendly. Snapchat Snapchat is a platform based on temporary posts. It is known for its disappearing content. This platform allows its users to send videos and photos, available for up to 10 seconds at a time. One can also post public Stories, which disappears after 24 hours. Because posts are so temporary, posts are simpler and less complicated in nature. This platform is useful once you have a good amount of audience as they are the only ones who can view your posts. The good thing with this social network is once you post a content, it gets to be more interactive as your followers know you and they know that your posts are only temporary. Using social media to reach to customers is now a part of almost all business strategies. It’s very important to focus on the most suitable platform for your business. You wouldn’t want to be having a lot of accounts and end up posting mediocre posts for all of them. It’s important to post quality and interactive contents while targeting the right audience for your business. Now that you already have an idea about the top social media sites you can use start by identifying the most suitable platform for your business. Now is the perfect time to use social media to gain customers and boost sales. If you want to make sure you are launching your page right, get an experienced social media advertising company to do the job for you.
|
Archives
March 2018
Categories |
RSS Feed