7 Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing

A successful social media marketing is exactly what you need for your business to grow. Social media marketing can be a dynamic powerhouse that solidifies branding, creates quality leads, and drives sales. Or, it can be a big time-wasting, task-oriented dud. The key is to know how to strategically create, carry out, and measure the overall plan.

1. Identify Your Goals

It’s a smart business practice to start with goal setting before all new plans, and social media marketing’s no different. After all, you can be the best bicycle salesperson in the state, but still fail if you are supposed to be selling ice cream.

Use the SMART goal setting strategy to create the foundation for successful social media marketing.

• Specific. Vague goals like “get more business” doesn’t help companies pinpoint their objective and create measures of success. Goals must nail down exactly what is expected of the initiative.
• Measurable. Being able to definitively answer “yes, we hit the goal” or “we missed the goal by 20%” is a good goal standard.
• Attainable. Out of reach goals are demoralizing and frustrating. Having to stretch to hit a goal is productive, but don’t go overboard with expectations.
• Relevant. A social media marketing goal needs to tie in to marketing’s overall goal. Is it to build an audience? Increase website traffic? Strengthen branding? Make sure the goal relates to the bigger picture.
• Timely. Dates and times keep companies accountable to their goals. Stay on track by breaking up a large project like this into mini-goals that each have their own deadline.

2. Identify Your Audience

Your message won’t be effective unless it’s specifically designed for who you are trying to target. Developing a relevant buyer persona is essential for successful social media marketing. Three pieces of information offer insight into pinpointing your audience.

• Review happy clients. Clients that have been pleased by a company’s product or service are prime starting points when building a buyer persona. Study their industries, demographics, and their goals closely to understand who you should be targeting.
• Nail down pain points. What question does your product answer? How does it make your buyer’s job easier? Only by thoroughly understanding this can an organization show their value.
• Survey customer support. Talk to the people who are on the front lines. What are the questions they hear most often? Knowing this shows you the direction to take in the content that will most likely engage and interest your targets.

Now let’s answer “where”.

3. Select the Best Platforms

It’s usually a mistake to try to cultivate followers on half a dozen or more social media channels. The person managing the social media efforts gets overwhelmed, off track, and the results end up being puny.

Facebook is the social media giant, of course. LinkedIn is also great for businesses to have a presence. But neither may be the one companies should focus on.

• Who needs the product or service? The offering is key to the platforms you should choose. Selling directly to consumers? Facebook is your best bet. Targeting a younger audience? Snapchat or Instagram might perform the best. Marketing to other companies? LinkedIn could be your golden ticket.
• Where are the competitors? Put your investigative hat on and figure out which channels your competitors are using. Study their presence, and look at their followers. It’s not required that you be on every channel they are on. But, seeing a competitor with tons of followers and engagement should prompt you to move that particular social media channel to the top of the list.

Successful social media marketing takes chunks of time to manage. It’s far better to choose one or two channels and really invest in them than five or six channels and spread the message to thin.

4. Deliver Consistently

An outstanding social media initiative is one that is nurtured constantly. Throwing up a blog here and a picture there won’t build a prosperous marketing strategy.

• Write content. Always keep the targeted buyer in mind when sharing content. Blogs, new white papers, and webinar invitations are smart choices.
• Curate content. Posting relevant industry information and articles written by others are additional ways to fill the social media calendar. Avoid always posting something sales-y. This turns audiences off.
• Listen. Tools that let companies listen to what competitors and the target audience are interested in and talking about guides them toward what they should be sharing.

5. Grow Your Audience

The more eyes that see your message, the more results you enjoy. The social media manager needs to work on increasing followers across all the social media channels deemed relevant for the product or service.

• Current customers. Make sure current happy customers follow your social media. Product updates, new content, and industry information are all valuable to customers. Do it well, and the message could prompt them to buy again.
• Content fans. People who run across and digest your content are primed to follow you. It’s vital to encourage them to subscribe to your blog, and make it easy for them to follow you for future updates. Contests are great ways to increase followers.
• Paid ads. Organic is awesome, but some companies also opt for paid advertising to grow their volume of followers. Ads are great ways to reach your buyers that would otherwise never come into contact with your message..

6. Engage Your Audience

For social media marketing to be successful, companies need to find ways to increase engagement in the followers they have and the ones they want.

• Respond. Social media management is not a one-way street. Respond personally to new followers, answer questions and address issues fast, and comment and like other posts.
• Tag. If there are followers you know are interested in a particular piece of information, tag them when you post about it. Showing personal touches like this helps drive the quality of your social media efforts.
• Link. Depending on your goals, include links in your posts. Otherwise, followers don’t know what you want them to do next. Link to blogs, your website, or other calls-to-action (CTA). Encouraging consumers to take action is key in developing successful social media marketing.
• Use hashtags. Help the audience cut through the enormous amount of noise with valuable hashtags. Decide in advance on a list of hashtags that the business will use. These are neon signs of the internet that help your message be more discoverable.

7. Measure Your Results

Close the loop by holding the results up to the goals you set and see how they compare. Otherwise, you won’t have any idea which strategies are paying off and which ones crashed.

• Followers. Total up the number of new followers each social media platform received, and compare this number to the goal. Interesting social media platforms always consistently add new followers.
• Likes/shares/comments. Measure the amount of engagement the audience has with the posts. It’s positive if you are receiving retweets, shares, comments, and likes. Note which type of content gets the biggest responses.
• Clicks. This is where the metrics start to show how social media efforts did, or didn’t, start moving the sales needle. Were there many clicks to your blog post or website? Did followers take that next step? The success of social media marketing depends on the ability to draw more visitors into the sales funnel.
• Downloads. If your audience responded to your posts by going to landing pages and downloading high-value content like eBooks and white papers chalk this up as a success!
• Leads. It all comes down to this. Ultimately, successful social media marketing increases the number of qualified leads for the company. This is the metric that tells you the most about your efforts. Be patient. It takes time to nurture strangers into leads, even with fantastic content and consistent posting. But they will trickle in eventually if it’s done right.

Successful social media marketing poses a variety of challenges to businesses, and it’s easy to take the wrong turn and end up with less-than-thrilling results. It’s also common to start out excited, and get burned out and lose commitment in the middle of your efforts.

Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends

The digital marketing landscape that comprises of SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media marketing has been quite progressive, more so in the last two years, than in the last decade. We predicted that the world of digital marketing would be dominated by artificial intelligence, video marketing, augmented reality, social proofing, search, and customer experience marketing.

1. Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots: AI has taken the world by storm. It can analyze search patterns and customer behavior and profile buyers, making a marketer’s life easier. AI helps marketers create pertinent content and hyper-personalize it, thus, creating unique customer journeys. AI-powered solutions can be referred to as the tools from the future bringing us this extraordinary mix of technologies like Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Predictive Analysis. Chatbots are here to stay as well. They help brands improve customer experience even in a contrived budget. Chatbots can be integrated into an application, a website, and even a social media platform. They’re quicker than humans in taking requests and providing any data-related requests. According to Grand View Research, the global chatbot market is reaching $1.2 billion with 24% annual growth rate and that 45% of end users prefer using them as a primary mode of communication in customer service.

2. Voice Search: According to Canalys, the global market for voice search devices grew 187% in Q2 of 2018. Apple, Google, Xiaomi, Amazon, and other manufacturers collectively shipped 16.8 million units in Q1 of 2018. Voice search helps you multi-task and handle several other high-priority things that you may have on your plate. Siri, Google Home, and Alexa have already made us dependent on them and see better voice search technology unravel.

3. Video Marketing: From being the ‘next big thing’ in content marketing, video is a norm now. The Social Media trinity (Facebook & Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn) is constantly emphasizing and investing in improving its video capabilities, primarily, because it’s directly proportional to higher engagement and customer retention. It leaves little to imagination and diminishes the grey areas that prospects/customers despise. Video is, now, a viral marketing method. Animoto’s 2015 Online and Social Video Marketing Study concluded that 4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. Last year, MarketingProfs found out that 56% of B2B marketers use YouTube to distribute content.

4. Programmatic Advertising: Buying and selling online media using automation and AI is what programmatic advertising is all about. It encompasses online ads, TV and streaming modules, voice, and video to digital-out-of-home media. Companies make real-time decisions, using programmatic advertising, regarding the kind of adverts they wish to deliver to the customer.

5. Content Marketing: 2018 was the year of content and we discovered that it’s the center of the online realm. We already have the ability to show personalized and localized content that can be distributed on the basis of IP addresses to our website visitors. Content Marketing is the quarterback of every digital marketing strategy. According to HubSpot, compounding blog posts make up 10% of all blog posts and generate 38% of overall traffic. So, it’s a no-brainer why blog content creation is the second highest priority for companies. According to DemandGen Report’s 2016 Content Preferences Survey, 47% of buyers viewed three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

These top 5 digital marketing trends are sure to give you a competitive edge in the market. The time to create your best digital marketing strategy is here and now. Now, get strategizing!

Why One should choose Digital Marketing as Career

 Digital Marketing is an inevitable element in today’s world because it can be used to promote a business irrespective of it’s volume – small, medium or large. It can used to brand a person, product, or a service. The result of Digital Marketing is enormous. 

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is defined as a marketing approach that primarily relies on the internet to connect with the target audience through various digital media channels and platforms.

Here are some general areas that a digital marketing professional will likely touch on during their training or career:

• Video/audio production
• YouTube Video Optimization
• Blogging and it's Optimization
• Interactive technology (such as AI)
• Mobile marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media
• E-commerce
• Email marketing
• Marketing automation
• Content Management
• Web development
• Web design
• Copywriting and Editing
• Analytics
• Business/marketing strategy

It’s a good idea to think about getting training in at least one or two specialty areas, unless you’re in management, in which case you’ll probably need to know quite a bit about them all.

Why choose a career in digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a career that has plenty of room for techs, creatives, and business people. There are so many avenues that you can follow; it’s best to focus on one or two things that you do best, then you can always learn more from there. If you have a business or communications background, you may want to consider going into management.

What kind of designation can be taken after Digital Marketing Training?

• SEO Executive
•  PPC Executive 
• Email Marketing Executive 
• Social Media Marketing Executive 
• Mobile Marketing Executive 
• E-commerce Executive 
• Content Marketing Executive 
• Affiliate Marketing Executive 
• Display Advertising Executive

Join Digital Marketing and Boost your Career.

How to Make a Compelling LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn Profile is in many cases the most important aspect of your professional presence online and sometimes it acts as professional online resume. You can use LinkedIn to connect with people in your network, and recruiters.

Your profile includes complete details about your job qualifications, employment history, education, skills, and experience. To get the most out of LinkedIn, it's important to make your LinkedIn profile as comprehensive and compelling as possible.

Also, your LinkedIn profile can increase your visibility online and help you build a professional brand that showcases your background to prospective employers. Here are tips to make your LinkedIn profile stand out from the crowd.

Write a Comprehensive and Engaging Profile

Here is the top tips to make your LinkedIn profile more compelling. It's important to be sure that your LinkedIn profile is complete, detailed, interesting and readable. In fact, you should consider your LinkedIn profile your online resume. It should have all the same information that is on your resume and more.

You should add a photo (a headshot) to your LinkedIn profile.

Don't forget to make your profile public - that's how the world can find it. Also, customizing your URL will give you a link that's easy to share on your resume and with employer and connections. If your name is available, use it.

Highlight Your Experience in the Summary

The Summary (About) section of your LinkedIn profile is a great way to highlight what makes you unique and indispensable to your industry.

Don't forget the headline, since it is right at the top of the page when someone views your profile. If applicable, it is appropriate to mention key professional certifications, bilingual skills, or key accomplishments. The more robust your profile, the more you likely you are to get notice. Select an industry, because recruiters often use that field to search.

If you're unemployed, there are several strategies you can use to present your current employment circumstances. Carefully consider options before you decide what to include and when you should update your profile.

Use Your Resume to Write the Experience Section

In a nutshell, the Experience section of your LinkedIn profile is your online resume. When formatting your LinkedIn profile, it is important to include employment (current and past), education, and industry. While you might not include every job in your past on a traditional resume, it is appropriate to include your entire work history on LinkedIn.

To quickly create a LinkedIn profile, review your resume and copy/paste the relevant information into your profile. It's essential that your resume matches your profile because prospective employers will check. However, when you get more time, make sure to add as much as possible to your LinkedIn profile. Employers expect your resume to be somewhat condensed and specific to the job you seek. But your LinkedIn Profile should be more vast and complete.

Showcase Your Skills

The Skills & Endorsements section is an important component to your profile. It's a way that recruiters can find you and how your connections can see, at a glance, your core competencies. In fact, your profile is more likely to get viewed if it includes skills. 

Just like you did with the Experience section, you can use your resume to get started with a list of skills to include. Focus on the skills that highlight your strongest assets and are most relevant to your career goals. 

Another approach is to read your past job descriptions, or the job descriptions of jobs you seek. Include any key words you find that are relevant to your skills and experience. 

Take the Time to Request Recommendations

Take time to request LinkedIn recommendations. Recommendations from people you have worked with carry a lot of weight. To a potential employer, a LinkedIn recommendation is like a reference in advance.

One way to get recommendations is to give them. When you recommend a LinkedIn member, you are attesting to their qualifications, and people love being recommended. They will most likely reciprocate if you take the time to recommend them. Another way to get recommendations is to request them from your former bosses (as long as you still have a decent relationship with them), mentors, and/or college professors.

On a "what not to do on LinkedIn" note, don't ask people you don't know for references. That's not how to ask for a recommendation, even if you do know the person. 

Include Your Accomplishments

Use the Accomplishments section of LinkedIn to highlight projects you've worked on, publications you have contributed to, languages you know, and other credentials you have earned.

Include Volunteer Experience and Causes

A LinkedIn survey reports that volunteer experience can give job candidates an edge with hiring managers. 41% of the professionals surveyed stated that when they are evaluating candidates, they consider volunteer work equally as valuable as paid work experience. 20% of the hiring managers surveyed have made a hiring decision based on a candidate's volunteer work experience. To add the Volunteer Experience and Causes field to your LinkedIn Profile:

• After logging in, click "Profile" at the top of LinkedIn.
• Click the "Add Sections" button.
• Select "Volunteer Experience."
• Click the plus button and then fill out the applicable fields.

Microsoft's Bing Launches an Interactive COVID-19 Map.

Bing has made an effort to launch an interactive map for COVID-19 in order to enable people to be up-to-date about the spread of COVID-19 by utilizing a tracking map.

People can use the map to know more about the confirmed cases per country, including currently active cases, recovered cases, and fatal cases. Information about the US cases is broken down state by state.

Clicking on an individual country or state will bring to the respective news stories and videos. The time of the stories varies in each region with some less than an hour old and others about two days old and the updates about the news are as fast as a news break.

Data provided by the map is being pulled from the following sources:

• World Health Organization (WHO)
• US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)
• Wikipedia

Bing now joins with Google in an effort to keep people updated about the coronavirus outbreak. Google is also a move to create an informational website, but it's uncertain about when it will launch or what it will contain.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends For 2020

The marketing field has evolved from traditional marketing to digital marketing and it has come in a long way. The trends for digital marketing is changing every year and likewise this year in 2020 we have some new trends for digital marketing and in order for a business to thrive in the competition we need to be updated with the latest trends or we will just fall behind in the competition.

If you are not updated with the latest trends then you are limiting your brand in terms of reach and repetition. So in order for you to keep up with the competition, I have compiled a list of some top digital marketing trends in 2020.

In 2020 some new trends have been introduced alongside the current trends in digital marketing which includes the following:

Chatbots: Personal assistance without the personnel, the already evolving chatbots saw some improvements in technology, in 2020 making it more intelligent and convincing.

Voice Searches: The voice search has come a long way with voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google assistant are evolving to an extent that optimizing a website for voice keywords has become mandatory.

Video Marketing: As video hosting has become super simple nowadays creating a video, optimizing it and uploading it a cakewalk for most to build for instance through vlogging.

With these existing trends in mind lets see some new trends for digital marketing in 2020:

Shoppable Posts (Social Commerce):

For a long time, it has been an issue of getting a customer from social media to the respective online stores but now social media has developed so much that one can buy a product directly from a social media post or ads without directing to another store and shopping has become hassle-free on social media. Though these shoppable posts are not new it has seen a major leap since the introduction of Instagram Check Outs in 2019.

According to studies at least 54% of people research products on social media. If you have a Shopify store it is as easy as linking an Instagram account or installing a plugin and shopping is just simplified.

Direct Messaging:

Direct messaging is another new trend for digital marketing in 2020, direct conversations are always a better method to delight our customers and build customer relationship, now we have lot of platforms for direct messaging our customers which helps in streamlining our customer services, sales and it is becoming one of the hottest trends in digital marketing in 2020.

Through messaging apps like Whatsapp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger and through private messaging apps like twitter and Instagram, brands are building stronger relations with their customers.

Micro-Influencers:

Influencer marketing is a trend in a digital marketing for a long time and has been very effective, but just sending some free samples to top influencers and waiting for them to review it will take a long time and there includes pricing lists and payment tables so competing with the global enterprisers for top tier influencers is a bit hard and it includes a lot of costs.

So there come micro-influencers who are medium-sized influencers with narrow niches - popular enough to be influential, still in touch with their followers and not overloaded with sponsorship offers.

Micro-influencers have better engagement than other popular influencers because they have fewer followers they can dedicate more time to each one. Moreover, it's easy to specialize in niches using micro-influencers as they are themselves niches.

Categorized as an account with around 30,000 followers, micro-influencers had 60% more engagement while being 6.7 x times more effective than influencers with more followers.

Polished and Interactive Emails:

ROI of email marketing as of now is around 3200% but the numbers are slowing and stagnating, that doesn't mean email marketing is not effective in 2020, but the new trend has shown that a polished email is still driving more results, that is in the sense that an attractive email will just not impress but drive more conversions. Readers are more likely to click stylized buttons than when they are just plain text links. Considering ROI its work making the emails more beautiful.

Sentiment Analysis:

Sentiment analysis or social listening is the practice of analyzing the reactions of users and customers to a product, or services usually on social media or some other places online. It is done through machine learning and data analytics, this is not a new trend in digital marketing, but advancements in technologies and natural language processing have enhanced the feature and allow more intent-based targeting.

Sentiment Analysis tools like Critical Mention, Repustate, or Lexalytics reveal what people really think about ur brand. You can then use that data to fine-tune not just your products, but also your strategies for sales, marketing, and content.

Alternative and niche social media channels:

Although Facebook is a major social media channel and will be for 2020 and beyond, it has started to see a decline and so is twitter so alternative social media channels are coming into the field. In particular Snapchat, Pinterest, medium, and Reddit are becoming new favorites for marketers lately.

Programmatic Advertising:

Just like sentiment analysis, let bots do everything, AI and machine learning algorithms are programmed to optimize online ad campaigns. Ad placement, media buying, performance tracking, and customer tracking can all be handled by software. Not all do the results tend to be better, but you can save a lot of time for other important tasks. Its automation at its best.

Software like Adobe Marketing Cloud or Smarty Ads navigates the landscape of online advertising for you.

Optimizing for Featured Content:

Google's algorithm is ever-changing and each change can affect our ranking and we need to optimize our website for featured snippets. As search engines evolve and become smarter, marketers need to adjust. When creating digital marketing content we need to optimize each piece of content for featured snippets using clear and well-structured content.

Vlogging:

Vlogging is rising as the new trend in digital marketing, as opposed to branded vlogs, vloggers provide a more personal and direct interaction obviously a great boon to marketers trying to forge stronger relationships with their customers.


Talking to Gen Z on their own terms:

Generation Z is the latest consumer group in 2020, they make up to 40% of all consumers in 2020. Those born after the turn of the century has turned up 18 and entering the workforce en masse.

If Gen Z is one of your top markets here is the quick list of their general values to keep in:

Authenticity: Gen Z is very sensitive to authenticity and they hate over promotional approaches and opt for transparency instead.

Privacy: Concern for privacy ranks higher among the Gen Z, so respecting their data will earn you more.

Diversity: The latest generation loves the diversity reflected in the videos and images they see online.

Sense of Humour: Gen Z humor sense has been absurd and if u don't know to create absurdness better to hire someone.

These are the top 10 digital marketing trends that I feel are relevant in 2020.