Tag: digital marketing

How to Effectively Use eCommerce Product Videos?

July 10, 2015

It is a well-known fact that humans are visual in nature. They prefer to process information that is readily available visually, instead of having to imagine something and then understand. However, one of the greatest mysteries of mankind is the popularity of textual content. It is something that goes against most cognitive theories yet the dreaded truth continues to persist. However, there is also a growing need for visual content and it is quite baffling to realize that there aren’t many product videos as there are product descriptions. Moreover, video content is found to be more popular among youngsters, very busy people and those who do not want to process a lot of textual content. If we observe, there has been trend towards streaming videos, explainer videos and other forms of video content that have been successfully used in marketing. It need not then come as a surprise that e-commerce websites are finding product videos a great way to boost traffic and increase sales. In this article, we shall take a look at how we can make use of product videos on e-commerce websites. 1. Publish videos on the homepage One of the best ways to promote a product on an e-commerce website is by featuring it on the homepage. You could create a video for a particular video and then feature it on the homepage, where more people are likely to see it. You could use the homepage space to promote products that you think deserve more attention. In fact, your best products could be featured on the homepage in this manner. 2. Use videos to describe individual products A less known utility of videos is to provide product descriptions. Most people think that product descriptions are, usually, required to be in a textual format. However, this is not always necessary. For the purpose of SEO, you could have a textual content while your video maybe more appealing to your target audience. In reality, using both a video description of your products and a brief text that goes along with the product is the right way to go. 3. Use videos to enhance your social media strategy You could upload product videos to social media platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and others. This helps you to strike two birds with a single stone. People often publish videos just for the sake of social media marketing. With product videos, you can promote your products on your website and also use the same videos on social media platforms. This will help you to generate newer leads and also spread the word around about your products. 4. Use videos that go viral When you create a video, ensure that it has the potential to go viral. This is a very clichéd and often used word but yet, it makes sense to create videos that have the potential to go viral on social media & elsewhere. For this to happen, you might have to hire professional video companies that are well-versed with creating viral explainer and product videos. 5. An explainer video is not a product video You need to remember that there is a distinction between explainer videos and product videos. The two are not the same. An explainer video is, usually, for a more tech-savvy and professional audience than a product video is. Product videos are for general consumers and are the right choice for e-commerce websites that deal with general population. Explainer videos, on the other hand, cater to B2B solutions and are also for e-commerce websites that require a higher level of explanation within videos. Videos are only going to get bigger In the future, videos will gradually become more commonplace than before. People will begin to get used to seeing videos and some might even expect videos to exist alongside textual product descriptions. Adding to that, the Internet is going to get faster even in the more inaccessible parts of the world. With all this in mind, it makes sense to invest in product videos so that they can be used to boost conversion rates on e-commerce websites. If you need more information about product videos, contact one of our executives who would be glad to assist you.

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Are You Correcting the Major Digital Marketing Flaws in 2015?

July 8, 2015

A lot of small business players have realized the importance of digital marketing in their marketing budget. Digital marketing puts your business online and therefore becomes an essential part of your online reputation. Can your customers find you in search results? Are you engaging with your customers? Are you gaining insights into customer behavior? There is plenty to learn from your digital marketing efforts and get closer to your customers. However, many businessmen fail to rectify the flaws they are encountering in their pursuit. It is important to overcome your shortcomings and move ahead of competitors. This article will take a look at the major digital marketing flaws in the year gone-by and how you can mend them in 2015. 1. Mobile at the backburner A growing number of customers are consuming your content through the comfort of their smartphone. Small business owners can’t afford to remain stuck with desktop website by publishing content including text, photos and video, which is inaccessible or illegible on mobile. Having a mobile-friendly website with a responsive design is a necessity in 2015. The website needs to be published with just enough content that are easy to view on mobile. Furthermore, urban consumers prefer smartphone as their best friend while commuting to work. Tweaking your content into mobile-friendly form will enhance your reach. Push notifications feature for email and RSS feeds in mobile has long been used by digital marketers to share content with their target audience. Creating more mobile-friendly emails will further strengthen your effort. 2. Underutilization of Facebook page It is easier to create a Facebook page but it is a blunder to leave it unutilized. An unutilized Facebook page will soon go into oblivion and users unlike it; and it is very difficult to get the lost customers again. It is important to utilize it for sharing the most interesting content with your customers. Moreover, Facebook algorithm is changing in the way news feed works for the users and how businesses use their FB page. Use your FB page to know your audience. The main idea behind FB is to share content that is liked by your audience. So, shift your focus from selling on FB to posting engaging content. Let your employees support you in your initiative and respond to the customer queries. 3. Failure to form a content marketing strategy Digital marketing content is scattered across company website, blogs, social media profiles, emails, YouTube and so many other digital mediums but have you failed to form a coherent strategy that resonates clearly in the minds of your audience? There has to be some connection between your content across the mediums so that people don’t get confused. There are already too many digital marketers out there to steal your customers. Focus on quality content and use each medium as it is designed to be used. However, it does not mean that you can’t be resilient with your content strategy. The best way forward is to maintain a consistency of posting content, whatever medium(s) you choose. Experienced marketers have already realized the power of SEO with the right content. 4. Getting carried away by new trend Digital marketing arena evolves rapidly and digital marketers are always in search for new tactics. While a new trend might look exciting, it might not work for every marketer. They need to understand their target audience and find out what their audience likes. While the basic approach towards your well-known audience need not change, you can try new tactics over new customers. The idea is not to sway with the new trends. For instance, many big players indulge in flash sales and discounts to promote their products through social media but such a trend might turn into demise of a small player. Small players need to remember to play smart and fill in the gaps left by the bigger players. 5. Stuffing keywords to your disadvantage Google keeps changing its algorithm to be more just to original content providers. Keyword is an essential part of their algorithm. Digital marketers, in their bid to outsmart Google algorithm by stuffing keywords, relegate the quality of their content. On the other hand, Google makes sure that such unqualified content is not visible to the target audience. It is one of the significant changes made by the search engine giant to prepare for 2015. Try to use synonyms that relate to your keywords. Use the long-tail list of keywords rather than the most common ones to be more specific. Google Analytics is a great tool that helps you to do that. 6. Failure to track your digital marketing initiatives As we are already aware, digital marketing initiatives are speckled across various online mediums, it is quintessentially true that your customers too are varied and strewn across the internet. This brings us to pay importance to digital metrics that helps us to closely understand our audience. But, there is a caveat here. This exercise needs to be done precisely, else it might prove counter-productive. Boo.com and Pets.com failed miserably after they miscalculated their CLTV (Customer Lifetime value) and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). This led them to overestimate the size of their market and make wrong presumptions. Tracking your metrics rightly will get you closer to your marketing goals and objectives. Infographic like this often serves as a guide for small business owners to understand key digital marketing metrics. 7. Irrelevant landing pages It is irking for the customer who gets excited by your ad to land on an irrelevant page. Many marketers have done a slip-up to trap the customers into sign-up or pay a website visit by showing them an enticing product. Be clear with your call-to-action buttons to avoid turning-off your visitors. The customer acquisition cost is already running high as customers have become choosy and they are constantly bombarded with marketing messages from all sources. Follow a consistent approach in getting your message across through correct landing page. If your ad link says “sign up for newsletter”, then your landing page needs to

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How to Make Your Digital Marketing Experience More Meaningful?

July 6, 2015

As it is rightly said that change is the only constant factor, the same is applicable in every business world, especially when we are talking about digital marketing industry today. The process of integrating platforms and customer’s experience through a digital channel is extremely crucial. Digital marketing enhances the prospect of increasing and improving interactions and relationships with the existing and prospective customers. The whole process needs constant upgradation in order to stay relevant in the industry. It is time of the year again when your digital marketing strategy needs a boost to stay ahead of the curve. Marketers Need to Enhance Their Collaboration Effort When you’re trying to develop a brand as a marketer, you need to have a good collaboration skill to execute your responsibilities properly. Collaboration delivers the best results. It is a recursive process to realize and accomplish shared goals. It is more than the intersection of common goals and collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing learning, knowledge and consensus. And when a marketer can put together the right people, the right strategy and some well-advanced tools, he has the powerful plan of actions that can make any campaign successful. Understand the Meaning beyond Money Being authentic will better connect people to your brand. Understanding the core meaning of your business helps align your messaging and marketing efforts. Your brand story can significantly develop interests and engagement in your business. Your brand story is a picture of facts, feelings and interpretations, which are shared by you, your customers and your community. It is an effective way to keep you real and on top of mind. It inspires, educates, and builds indispensable relationships and loyalty with your clients. Crowdfunding, the Soon-to-be Digital Marketing Frontier Crowdfunding has been backing up several projects and has attracted millions of potential investors. It empowers passionate people with ideas to take their shots. The campaign raises a certain amount of monetary funding with contributions coming from a large number of people using the internet as their platform. The industry, as a whole, has ideas that are relatively young. While social media allows things to happen through communication and enables people to share and communicate, crowdfunding has added a commerce element, where people are not just asked to share their ideas but to raise money for them to make them a reality. Video Marketing Will Continue to be the Buzz As we all know how the Ice Bucket Challenge was one of the biggest sensations of 2014. The video generated billions of clicks. Video is an effective way for people to share their experience and tell their stories easily. These days, anyone can produce a quality short film using their camera along with the help of several video apps that can be accessed online. The 6 second approach with Vine or Twitter’s mobile video is playing an important part in the rising popularity of video content. Content does not necessarily have to be written text. Harnessing this enthusiastic medium to facilitate user-generated content can ultimately yield massive results in widening brand reach and getting target audience. Embracing Native Advertising Native advertising is the practice of using paid content to build trust and engagement with the would-be-customers. The content are creatively constructed and placed to flow naturally with the original content of a website. Native ads have the potential to pass as organic content to the untrained eyes. Consequently, you can create strong brand awareness through native advertising campaigns as it helps in generating clicks, shares and comments for the advertisers. This type of content is more likely to increase click-through-rates and encourages audience engagement than average banner ads. Your Presence in Social Media Channels Makes a Difference You are well-aware of the influence of social media but did you know the importance of social media data that can influence marketing decisions? Social media data is pretty complex and difficult to put into actions. However, digital marketing marketers can add a hat to their collections – the social media analyst hat. This analytics is the practice of collecting data from blogs and social media websites and later analyzing the data to make business decisions. Optimize All Marketing Channels Your biggest responsibility is to ensure that your brand message is unanimously conveyed across through marketing channels including: Blog post Paid marketing efforts Email marketing and follow-up emails to communicate the next steps of action Social media campaign Automated emails Create Micro Goals To make your goals easier to accomplish, break them into smaller action steps Create landing page for email list and allow visitors to subscribe to your newsletters Prepare automated emails and make a plan to send them on particular days of a week Make use of content idea creation tool to create content and add them to automated email series for newsletters Track the number of subscribers and improve your email marketing strategy until you found 1,000 subscribers Remember, not to repeat the mistakes as you had done in the previous years Are You Calculating the ROI of Your Digital Marketing Activities? To achieve success, companies must look back in their journey and measure digital proficiency. Companies approach digital marketing strategies in order to create an omnichannel experience that customers have come to expect. This entails starting the required infrastructure, digital strategy’s objectives and of course, its measurements. Calculating ROI of digital marketing movements is considered as the Holy Grail of marketing measurement. Although there are several factors that generate positive outcomes typically, two important things account for positive ROI – Bringing more visitors to the store Converting more visitors Businesses are finding it difficult, if not impossible to ignore the need to incorporate digital marketing as a part of their long term business strategies. It has become the priority for businesses around the world. An integrated digital marketing strategy gives you a strong foundation for all the key online marketing activities and helps you take the right decision to make a business successful online.

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Top Ten Tools to Increase Marketing Effectiveness

July 1, 2015

2015 is going to be more competitive than the last year. You must have realized it by this time. Whether you’ve a big marketing budget or you’re a start up, with little money in hand, harnessing the power of user experience marketing tools can be a major advantage in your ability to move swiftly in your professional field. Make a resolution to make better decisions and find effective ways to communicate with your audience with some of the finest marketing tools to successfully run your marketing campaign. Ten Most Powerful Tools to Gain Insights into Your Visitor’s Heart and Mind… 1. BuzzSumo BuzzSumo is a fabulous content development tool that is worthy of praise. Marketers can use BuzzSumo to research on content that your audience really want to read. All you need to do is enter a keyword or backlinks to get a detailed report on how well a content has performed based on social media shares. You can also filter the results based on language, time, type of content and country. 2. Crazy Egg If you’re curious enough to learn the reason behind why visitors are leaving your site, Crazy Egg is the apt tool for you. The Heat Map tool tells you exactly where people are clicking, and where they’re not. The Scroll Map tool shows you exactly what portion of the page that people are leaving on, and how you can place your most important content to make it more visible. And lastly, the Confetti Map that allows you to visualize what’s happening on your page and from which traffic source they’re coming from. 3. Uberflip If you do not want to let your visitors leave your site, Uberflip can be used to share a curated list of your content on your website. You can also create targeted call-to-action within your content to convert visitors into customers with the help of this user experience testing tools. 4. Kissmetrics Rather than simply tracking the general flow of traffic, Kissmetrics enables you to track a specific group of visitors and their online behaviours. The data collected can be extremely useful in increasing the marketing effectiveness. These insights help you to discover the best campaign sources, drive better retention and double the number of your most valuable customers. The primary strength of this software is its ability to handle user identities much more clearly. 5. Raven Tools If your marketing team need all-in-one internet marketing software, Raven tool is the solution. From robust SEO research tools to media monitoring to comprehensive reporting, Raven tool has it all. Once you’re set up with raven, you can easily create your first campaign within a minute. Raven is the ultimate time-saving machinery to make automated, interactive marketing report. Moreover, they’re continually innovating their platform with new features to make it better for their customers. 6. Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) VWO is a testing and optimizing tool that allows marketers to form A/B or Split tests and geo-behavioural targeting campaigns without the need for any HTML or technical knowledge. With split-testing, marketers can also test multiple versions of a website and landing pages and choose one that performs the best. VWO also has flexible multivariate testing software and a number of additional tools including usability testing, heat maps and behavioural targeting to ensure conversion rate optimization activities are taken care of. 7. Open.nr This tool allows you to add any relevant, targeted promotional message on any page that you share especially on social media platforms. With Open.nr you get your social media followers to share, buy, respond to your questions and also subscribe by adding a call-to-action to your social media posts. You can also conduct A/B testing, redirect link traffic back to the home page or customize your posts with brand colours and images. 8. SideKick Who’s opening your emails and how many times a day can now be easily tracked through Sidekick. It is always interesting to know your contact’s history, their latest tweets and other professional activities. Not only this, Sidekick also gives you the ability to schedule emails that you intend to send in the future. Furthermore, looking at contact information in Sidekick helps you to see which social media channels your prospects are active in. 9. Socedo No more you have to filter through millions of users on Twitter to find the relevant profiles. Socedo does the work for you. The tool also has the ability to boost web traffic, increase conversions by inputting hashtags, keywords or other search criteria. Socedo even helps you to automatically favorite tweets, follow prospects and send messages to initiate conversation. 10. Mention Wondering what people are talking about your brand? Now, it’s easy to keep a pulse on the conversation of customers, competitors and prospects with Mention. This powerful marketing tool helps you to track key phrases and brand names, in real time. This ensures that you never miss out a conversation with your existing and potential customers. So, here you’ve the best of tools to accomplish your goals.

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How to A/B Test the Home Page of Your Media and Publishing Site?

June 29, 2015

With the onset of digital era, the most important challenge for the Media, Publishing and Entertainment (MPE) industry is to go digital. This newly evolved age has not just brought in a number of new challenges but has even changed the way this industry used to work. Presently, you as a part of this industry have to cope up with a completely new set of user behaviour and meet highly competitive industry standard; and the first thing that you need to do to capitalize new opportunities in this consumer-driven, fast-paced industry is to have a properly functioning home page, if not a easily navigable website. Now, how to know whether you have the perfectly running homepage for your website? It’s easy! All you need to do is A/B test the home page before launching it. Here are some excellent ideas that can help you A/B test your media, publishing and entertainment site’s home page: Testing a Home Page Being the point of entry to your website, the home page gives visitors an idea about your brand value and products & services offerings. Hence, it’s highly important to have a proper home page that can encourage return visits. Here is how to test the homepage of your website: Content that Encourages Return Visits It is said that “Content is the King”. So, the first thing that you need to ensure is that your home page has got content interactive enough to not just attract and engage visitors but even to force them to come back to your site again and again. It’s always better to use short content modules in media and publishing sites as the separate headings attract more attention. Once you become sure that your home page has got interactive content, check whether it is able to increase the number of return visits and page views of your website. Page Navigation Make sure that your home page allows visitors to navigate around the website by category, without having to click on any particular category. This helps visitors consider content that they otherwise wouldn’t have checked. Hover states are even quite effective for attracting visitors’ attention to sections, which they might not explicitly look at. Hence, before testing the hover state, ensure that it includes sub-categories, top stories and imagery. However, too many categories and sub-categories might have a negative effect. Once done with the categorization, check if it has increased your page views or decreased the bounce rate of your home page. Though the test might sound a little difficult, however, you can simplify it by deploying the following methods: Choosing top five clicked sections Selecting top sub-categories in each section Hover displaying of those sub-categories Value Propositions Value prop is another essential aspect to be considered while A/B testing your home page. After all, it is highly important to make the visitors realize what value they would get, if they subscribe to any of your online publications. However, make sure that the content of the main value propositions are descriptive and clear. Once you have promoted the value props of your home page, test the page with and without value props & check which one has an increased subscription conversion rate. Now that you know how to A/B test your home page to get a better customer attention, it is no longer difficult for you to take your publishing business to a new height by going digital. All you need to do is follow all the aforementioned steps carefully.`

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Growing Your Blog Audience Is Not A Rocket Science

June 23, 2015

Whether it’s blogging about leaders or blogging about your favorite food joints, writing great stories and publishing them in your blog does not carry any value until they are exposed to the outer world. Do you know blogging can do a lot of your marketing effort? It can drive traffic to your website and help you capture leads. Provided you know the right ways, it can expand your reach to an extended network of individuals. Your blog can help you connect with people without spending any additional marketing dollars. All you need is a right strategy and not luck as many believe. Today’s blog post aims at focusing on your efforts to gain attention of people and help you to grow your blog. Quality is the King A blog post may contain 2,000 words or 4,000 words. Well, that’s quite a lot of text. To add to this, it should also have screenshots and images. However, only if the content has valuable information to impart, you’re bound to get traffic on a consistent basis. Most importantly, consider writing the hot topic of discussion in an extremely detailed manner so that no one dares to copy you. But of course, editing remains a crucial part. Conversational Tone of Writing By making your blog post sound like conversation, instead of an essay, you’re actually inviting more audience to read your content and encouraging them to comment naturally. The simple ways to bring in a conversational tone is by: Using ‘you’ and ‘I’ within your content Keeping the paragraphs short and to the point Using common words Asking questions in your blog post and solving readers’ problems Respond and Build a Fan Base If you’re thinking that why would anyone want to be your fan, you need to immediately stop thinking that way. Reciprocate and build your blog fan base. How often do you reply back to the comments on your blog? Comments are a great way to increase your readers’ loyalty. If people comment on your blog on a consistent basis, it means they’re reading your content and they’re more likely to share it via social platforms. Also when your readers email you, are you taking out the time to email them back? If not, it’s high time you start caring about your readers and help them as far as possible. They’ll certainly come back. Syndicate Your Content to Third Party Publications Third party sites are usually cited by a variety of people quite frequently. Therefore, syndicating your content to these sites will have a higher likelihood of getting more social shares. These sites can better expose your company, links, name and thought leadership to a wider spectrum of audience and turn steer more people back to your own site. However, you need to find sites that have high traffic and social sharing numbers and whose subject matter is relevant to your brand and content strategy. Promote Your Content The best way to grow your blog audience is to promote your content through different channels. Do not stick only to social media to share your post. You may email your list and reach out to influencers in your niche or pin the shares of your post either in your Facebook page or Twitter profile. You can also use social media advertising to promote shares of your blog post. Content Publication on a Consistent Basis Writing one or two content a month can never increase your fan base. It is important to write and publish content on a consistent basis. One blog post should get published at least once a week. If your readers are expecting a new article every week, don’t disappoint them. Give them the confidence that if they visit your blog, they’ll be greeted with a new content. Use Forums Forum like Quora is an effective way to drive relevant and targeted traffic to your blog. Search for questions and topics relevant to the subject matters you had covered and answer them with valuable information. If possible, add a link back to your appropriate blog post. Remember not to include a link forcefully. This helps establish you and your blog as a trustworthy and useful source of information. Link Other Relevant Sites to Your Own Post Readers, bloggers and even search engines appreciate valuable links. When your own material in-content are referred in such a way that is not manipulative, you automatically draw visitors to your content. Besides, it is always valuable to refer content of others, especially, the high quality sites and great content. When the site owners get to see that you’ve linked to their content, they’ll also reciprocate in the future. Guest Blogging Another best way to get your name or company’s name in front of a broader section of audience is through guest blogging. Make a list of relevant blogs who have the best crossover with the audience that you’d like to connect with. Now, start reaching out to the bloggers or editors who are most willing to accept high quality, free content on their site. Pitch in the specific blog topic ideas in your first inquiry email. Send a brief synopsis of what you’d write about. However, make sure you write all original content for any guest posting you do. Build a Strong Social Media Profile There are tons of social media networks that you could potentially use to market your blog. Most of the social media channels also have paid options that allow you to market to targeted individuals. Promote the best work through paid amplification including PPC, influencer outreach, social ads and different social networks. Community building is an art, what works for one community may not work for another one. Therefore keep engaging and optimizing your social efforts for the best outcomes. There is no rocket science behind growing your blog traffic. A few simple strategies should be able to get you visitors more than you expect in a month. So, why not give it a shot?

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A New Addition in Instagram’s Creative Platform

June 19, 2015

With 300 million people using Instagram satisfactorily, it is time for the advertisers to experience the same on this powerful social media platform. Instagram has always been a creative platform for visual content for business. To add to this, Instagram in this week, announced the expansion of its new ad system for brands to tell their ‘deeper stories’. Although advertising on social networks is commonplace now, the trick of using this new Instagram ad platform is to ensure that the ads are well targeted. Also it offers enough visually appealing content to prompt positive engagement from users. The News in Town Seeing Instagram having a younger audience than any other social media platforms, brands saw an excellent response in terms of brand awareness and reach, especially, among the 18-34 age groups. Keeping this in mind, Instagram, the well known photo sharing social media site, has recently rolled out its carousal ad platform worldwide to help brands become more ingenious and reach their target audience with their ads. The ad format is designed to serve advertisers drive business results across variety of objectives – from website visit to brand awareness or offline sales. According to Instagram’s global head of business and brand development, James Quarles ‘the quality of ad experience remains a very important point of differentiation for us’. The new ad system will enable advertisers reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests, as well as information businesses have about their customers. Besides, the platform will have feedback system within the network to allow people greater control and improve the relevancy of the ads they see. Instagram will increase the ad frequency up from 1-2 ads per user per day. Also the ads will soon be layered into Power Editor as well as available through partners. Control over Creativity With Instagram allowing ads on its platform, it has also offered advertisers more creative control over their assets. The Instagram users will have control over what advertising gets placed in areas they frequent. However, the call-to-action buttons will be beta tested before fully implementing it. The ads will look like regular Instagram post with only difference being the usual time stamp, which used to appear on a post will be replaced  by the word ‘sponsored’ marked above the top right corner of the photo, thereby, indicating to the users that they’re looking at a paid-for post. The Ad Platform to Empower Large and Small Businesses People want to connect with brands of all sizes on Instagram – from restaurants to their favourite local clothing store. Brands who have access to Instagram’s Sponsored posts are the ones who can incorporate ad content into the user’s Home Feeds as non-intrusively as possible. Instagram advertising will be available through an Instagram API and Facebook ad buying interface. With two million advertisers using Facebook to market their businesses, they can leverage the best of Facebook’s infrastructure for managing, purchasing and measuring the success of ads on Instagram.  The advertisers can link the ads to the external websites or app stores with button as ‘sign up’, ‘shop now’, ‘install now’ or ‘learn more’. This is, indeed, a golden opportunity for businesses to reach the right people through expanded targeting options. Not Anyone or Everyone can Advertise on Instagram It is not that any brand can pay to appear in the user’s Home feeds. Only brands with existing Instagram followers are chosen to advertise their posts. Advertisers of big brands including American Express, Starbucks, Stella Artois and Mercedes Benz are the first ones to get selected by Instagram to advertise on the platform. It aims at making any advertising look as natural as Instagram photos that are enjoyed by the followers from their favourite brands. Strategies to Use Advertisements on Instagram Instagram Giveaways Whether it’s a partnered or solo-branded giveaway, conducting giveaway is a popular option for businesses, especially, those who wants to invest for creating brand awareness on Instagram. To drive maximum awareness, host contests that require users to tag a friend in the post’s comment section. Even contests that require entrants to post photos or video on their personal Instagram profile and that tag the business or their contest Hashtag in their posts ideally get great exposures. Brand’s Instagram Account Takeover by Influencer When a brand invites a popular guest instagrammer who has a huge following to post on their account for a certain period of time, the process is called Instagram account takeover. This enables your business to get exposed to a unique group of followers and leads to an increase in followers, clicks and post likes on the bio’s URL. The influencer posts on their accounts whenever an Instagram takeover happens. This is done to let their followers know that they’re taking over a brand’s account. Pay the Influencers to Post for Your Brand In addition to hosting alluring giveaways, paying the influencers can do wonders. You’ll find that every time a paid influencer posts about your brand, there is a certain increase in the number of followers following your account. For instance, if you have fitness products, team up with fitness experts on Instagram and see the benefits. Business Partnership and Instagram If your business is planning for a partnership agreement with an influencer, it is always advantageous to include posting stipulations in your partnership contract. Both the partners can decide on a number of brand-related Instagram posts within a specific period of time. Also you may specify that influencer must use particular call-to-action and tag your brand’s Instagram account on their post’s copy. This would also help you to promote new products or promote your giveaways. A Great Go for the Followers It will be, indeed, exciting to see photo of Lebron’s newest sneakers in the Instagram feeds for those who’re following James, the NBA or any other sport-related account. Also, anyone searching for the nearest cafe on Facebook can have the advantage of seeing Starbuck photo in the Instagram feed provided the user have connected their Facebook account

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An Overview of Content Monetization in Recent Times

June 12, 2015

Whether you run a blog or a business website, monetizing your site to make some extra money is always beneficial for your business. Investments in content marketing are transforming business models; however, part of the investments often goes unmonetized, especially when it fails to generate highly qualified lead volume and purchases. So, to combat the spoilage of content marketing assets, content monetization is an effective method to quickly increase production efforts to repeat the content marketing cycle. Monetization of Content Since creation of each piece of content is time-effective, there is a finite and objective cost for a content marketing strategy. Content monetization entails learning new ways to distribute and market content. This is done to reach potential buyers and leads that offer a large number of engaged users who are ready to buy premium digital content. Before we proceed to the steps towards monetizing your content, your first priority should be to create high-quality content that people will love to read… Finding the Right Membership Sites The key to getting a great membership site is by understanding the right concept of membership. Membership sites ask users to create an account and pay membership fees before they can access pages of the website. People need to see the value of paying for the content. Members need to feel that they’re gaining high-value information, access to the director of the sites and networking opportunities with other members. The 3 Important Models for Paid Content Subscription It is users’ subscription to your membership site for a monthly or annual fee. Transaction Individual content involving reports, audio or video downloads or training programs are sold separately. Metered This model allows users to read some of your content before they decide to pay for the full access. Lifetime Membership Strategies to Follow Users need to pay for in-depth content Ask for membership ‘sign-in’ to continue reading Open a members-only forum and offer perks Create information products, books and course for a fee Direct Advertising of Your Content Direct advertising is easy to set up and removes the middlemen. You as a publisher get full incentive for your service. Besides, you can also offer almost any type of ad formats for the advertisers including: Banner RSS Ads Site Reviews Text Links Audio Video Ads Newsletter Ads Through direct advertising, you can accept multiple flexible payment options without any chance of losing the deal. This not only opens the door for consistent streams of income from the advertisers but also increases the probability of getting more advertising deals through referrals. A blog that acquires consistent direct advertisement deals automatically builds its credibility and is considered as an authority in its niche. Create Content to Sale The key to selling content is to provide high-quality content… Decide on the topic idea. Research and find the topic your followers are interested in. To do this, you can test your idea and produce short versions of your final idea to test responses. Post titles in social media and check the responses. Check responses through blog posts and do a guesswork regarding the acceptance of the subject matter. Send emails to your list of members and ask them to fill a survey. The survey should contain as few questions as possible. E-books, audio-video downloads or special reports are inexpensive and easy to digest. Highly premium content such as instructional materials, worksheets, ad resources, seminars or audio and video materials often offer personalized solutions. If you’re active on social media and say for instance, you’re active in Pinterest, you can create original graphics of your content that can be pinned in Pinterest board. The pictures will link to your content, which will bring more traffic to your sales funnel. Consider Affiliate Marketing A good way to monetize your articles is to start with affiliate marketing, guiding readers to a product or service in exchange for a charge on the sale. However, the product that you sell must be relevant to the topic you produce. Here are a few quick steps to monetize your blog through affiliate marketing: Place affiliate ads and encourage visitors to click on the ads and then either sign up, register or make a purchase before you get paid for the action. The more relevant the ad is to your content, the higher the likelihood that visitors will click on your ads and perform the required actions. Consider affiliate aggregator service such as VigLink, which will automatically monetize the links on your site. In addition to this, VigLink can also optionally insert new relevant links, which optimizes both the user experiences and revenue. Look for Sponsorship If you have enough traffic for your blog, you may find sponsors for your website/blog. Sponsors are organizations that pay a monthly fee for the space ads they place on your website because the majority of your audience is among their target groups. You may promote your sponsors in whatever way you can. How to Find the Sponsors? Check other blogs that have similar target audience as your own website Find the advertisings and sponsors on other sites in your niche Make a list of companies that specializes in your niche and their products & services must align to the topics you produce for your content How to Make Sponsors Find You? Create a sales page and place a link in your sidebar. This page should explain your different sponsorship prices, packages and payment methods. The sponsorship packages should have a ‘buy now’, ‘order’ or ‘make payment’ link at the end. Also, detail the benefits that sponsors will get. Give details of the traffic statistics and demographic information to help potential sponsors evaluate the value of sponsoring your website. The sponsors should be able to see the number of unique visitors, subscribers and page views. People are more likely to respond if they know the terms of sponsorship, the payment methods and your contact details. For an enhanced content monetization, you need to be constantly updating your content, re-launch, repost across

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Actionable Video Marketing Techniques for Online Business

June 10, 2015

In an era where digitalization has taken over traditional ways of businesses, companies also must invest in digital marketing to maintain their market presence. E-commerce is trending like never before and with it, there are new marketing techniques coming up. Video Marketing is a relatively new strategy in the digital world, which has become very popular among various audiences. Consumer psychology shows that when you market a product through videos, it remains in the memory of the audience for a longer time. It is a well-known fact that human beings process visual information much better than textual content. Yet, we have always been used to reading books, web copy and now, blogs. While we do not discount the utility of textual content and words, it is also useful to publish and create videos that help to present content in an audio-visual format. A lot of people prefer videos to text and we could be using videos to tap into this sub-section of the audience. While it is quite a task to create videos, it is yet another to create actionable videos. Actionable videos encourage the user to take some action, mostly respond to a call to action. This could involve signing up at the end of the video, providing e-mail address after watching the video or even buying the product. However, to create such actionable videos, we need to bear a few things in mind. Let us find some video marketing techniques that can act as a catalyst in boosting your business: Demos Descriptions of a product or a video demonstrating a product works well with the audience, as there are many websites and products competing for attention. You need to find a USP or unique selling proposition to increase your audience base and also to turn your audience into your future clients. You can do this by making your website more interesting; create small videos to showcase your product. You can use animation or a music video format to be different from others. Product demos can also be used to encourage viewers to take some action. This could be in the form of a covert message within the video to contact you for further information or to sign up at the end of the video, which is a more overt form of asking to take action. Both these methods work very well and demo videos are increasingly being used by companies that have a flagship product. Descriptive video content You can also use descriptive content for the videos on your webpage. You may wonder why anyone would want to add descriptive video when you can just post a video. However, research studies show that descriptive video content adds to the effect. It is quite natural, as we have been used to reading pages of content and all of a sudden, videos are becoming more visible. Adding the content will entertain the audience who are getting used to the new format. However, content need not be too long; it needs to be short and crisp. If possible, add in humor and quirkiness. This can be used as a subscript or as textual matter that is inserted within a video. What this actually does is, it grabs the attention of those people who are not very fond of watching videos. By making descriptive videos, we are targeting two different and opposing kinds of audience – one that loves videos and the other, which is still getting used to video content but is very much happy with text. Corporate videos Corporate videos are a big hit among the audience as it evokes a sense of loyalty in your customers. Everyone is interested in what goes on in a company, especially, a corporate company. Use this advantage and boost up your video marketing by bringing in more corporate videos. The themes could be anything from production of a product or showing the fun you have while working. In order to make corporate videos actionable, you could request viewers to add you on LinkedIn at the end of the video. A short note, which screams out your LinkedIn profile address, can also be useful. Another option is to have a running message at the bottom, which occasionally reads out your e-mail address or your LinkedIn address. This will help interested viewers to contact you and probably clinch a deal or two. Social videos What are social videos? Basically, using the marketing videos on social platforms constitutes the idea of social videos. You can use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to share your video, to reach out to a larger crowd & increase your audience base. You might probably think that if your target audience is youth or the IT sector, then this is the best way to turn them into your clients. However, this is not quite true. Social media is used by all ages and demographics & it is a great platform for you to showcase your products. If you can manage to create videos that can go viral on YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion, you can achieve surprisingly high rates of conversion. The key here is to make videos that can go viral. For that to happen, you need to hire good script writers and video producers. To make social videos more actionable, ensure that you always have a call-to-action when you share them on social platforms. This could include urging your audience to follow you back like your page or simply, share your content more. Market research Market research is a must. You need to be aware of new trends in video marketing, if you don’t constantly update your knowledge on the current themes and also the format of product videos. This will help you to bring innovation in your videos. The more ‘newness’ you bring into your videos, the more client base you will gain. The reason why market research is an actionable video marketing technique is because it helps you understand your audience better. You need to save all the

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Effective Social Media Marketing to Boost Your Content Reach

May 29, 2015

If you are looking for the best way to publicize your content and are looking for a greater social exposure, you need to try and exploit social media platforms more often. Using social media effectively helps you to build a larger audience and finally, disseminate your content to a larger audience. The moment you publish a blog post, article, a video or podcast, there needs to be enough social signals for it to be picked up by search engines. For this to happen, you need to utilize your social media tools effectively. Though it might sound daunting initially, it is not very difficult. In this article, let us take a look at how to use existing social media tools to our benefit and create a wider reach for our content. How to use Facebook When we speak about Facebook, we are speaking about a very large and diverse audience. Anybody could have a Facebook account and anyone could be following your page. In order to fully utilize this platform, you need to share your post within 24 hours once. Do not post new content more than two or three times after your first one goes live. Also, try to keep your content diverse. Your first piece of content could be a blog, then a video and then a link or an image & so on and so forth. This will help you to tap different kinds of audiences who like different forms of content. Ensure that your preview images are all different so that it does not look like you are duplicating your own posts. You can also ask your employees, friends and others to occasionally share your posts on their own wall. How to use Twitter to boost content marketing? With the first twenty four hours, you could share the same piece of content at least three or four times a day. Do not post the same content consequently. Instead, tweet other links, posts and statuses as well in between & respond to your followers’ tweets. You could play around with different hashtags, words and mentions each time you share the same link, so that it looks & feels different. If someone retweets or mentions you when you share an article, respond to them politely. Do not thank mechanically but try to engage them in a useful conversation. Twitter now provides useful tweets that were tweeted while your followers were away. Thus, it is quite possible that they will end up seeing your tweet in that list if your tweet becomes popular. How to use LinkedIn for content marketing? LinkedIn is a great way to reach your professional and business audience. It helps you to make new professional contacts, build client base and also interact with people who might prove to be useful to you later on. Within the first twenty four hours, you could either share your post as a status update or as a blog post within LinkedIn. Try and understand your audience & you can even share your content on a busy group that you are a member of. LinkedIn has the advantage of being one of the more serious social platforms and thus, you do not have to beat around the bush when it comes to content marketing. You can get down to business straightaway and that will help you to market your content to a more niche and sophisticated audience. Final thoughts Ultimately, we are not only looking at increasing our audience but also trying to get a better SEO score organically. The only ethical and professional way to do this is to fully utilize social media to widen our content reach. As word spreads about your newly published content, you will probably receive more calls regarding your business and you might be able to clinch new deals. Thus, in order to fully optimize your content marketing campaigns, you will need to fall back upon your social media marketing as well. In fact, both the techniques are tied to each other and the psychologists would say of a relationship, they are codependent. All that you need to ensure is that you have a formidable plan and strategy to combine both the techniques.

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