Showing posts with label instagram. Show all posts
Showing posts with label instagram. Show all posts

Thursday, August 11, 2016

The Starting Point for Small Business Marketing

When you decide to start a business, one thing is immediately obvious: you are your own boss. This is usually symbolic of the unshackling from the demands of workplace discourse, but every new business owner quickly falls off of their high horse into a pit of demands to which they are solely accountable for.  All of a sudden you are in charge of the product, promotions, advertising, payroll, and most importantly, marketing. Fortunately, marketing has transformed how business is done thanks to social media. In fact, even the most successful businesses are becoming increasingly reliable on the marketing power of resources such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to name a few.  Small business owners and first-time entrepreneurs must become familiar with this newly popular outlet if they want to get in the game, stay in the game, and be competitive. So what’s the big deal with this seemingly impersonal marketing tool? Here’s our big three!

Traffic! Traffic! Traffic!

Traffic is to business what location is to real estate. It is imperative that your business drives traffic. If you are not interacting with your potential customers, clients, and consumers regularly you are doing a disservice to your business. Social media provides the perfect platform to engage. Whether you are posting once a day or multiple times a day, posting is what will spark interest. The more interesting content you post, the more likely you are to drive people to your website and find out more about your business and what services you have to offer. 

Hashtags are particularly important to expanding your reach beyond the set number of people who are following you. Don’t know what a hashtag is? Hashtags are keywords relevant to the corresponding image, text, or information that you post on a social media outlet. It is always preceded by the “pound” or “number” sign. For example, if you are starting a real estate business and you posted a home for sale on Instagram, you can hashtag words like #realestate #buying #selling to allow your image to populate on those pages. The idea is, if someone is looking for home, they can search the hashtag and browse your social media page. This method is quick, easy, free, and effective. Hashtags aren’t the only way to drive traffic to your page and subsequently your website. You can team up with other business owners and agree to promote each other. These tactics are likely to increase traffic to your business pages and website and are quite interactive.

Engagement

Equally important to any business is feedback. If you want to know if your business model is working, you ask. Social media puts you in direct contact with the people you intend to serve. Post questionnaires and ask for product feedback to find out how your product is doing or why the service your offering is helpful to some people and not others. Having an interactive platform is beneficial to molding your business for success. It is one thing to have input from shareholders and investors, but when consumers are telling you what they like or don’t like, there is a lot more weight in their words.

Engagement does not only help you to evaluate and shape your business, it also helps to gain it. This can be accomplished by interacting with your followers. People want to know they are being heard. If someone comments, make an effort to respond. If you are consistent you will gain customers and clients. The key to mastering engagement on social media is creativity and consistency, so be sure to run trials. Be observant to what posts garner the most “likes” and what posts are less popular. Use these statistics to guide your posts.

Branding

One of the primary goals of marketing is to be recognizable and  stand out among your competitors. Social media facilitates branding goals such as recognition and loyalty. Any opportunity you have to post your logo or assert your brand, you should use it. In doing so, you will increase your visibility and enforce familiarity with your audience. Using social media to promote your brand will also keep existing customers engaged. As previously mentioned, the more you engage with your audience, the more likely they are to remain customers and fans.

Social media marketing may not be the hot topic forever, but it is the hot topic now. Don’t let your business fall through the cracks. It may take some time to get acquainted with social media discourse, but once you master it your business will flourish. 

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The Video Marketing Advantage

Content marketers are claiming 2016 to be the year of the video. As marketing strategies continue to embrace the hot new trends in the online community, video marketing has risen above the fray in terms of reach and impact on target markets.  Videos can be used in a multitude of ways – from comedy to educational, to reach customers at critical points along the buying life cycle and build ongoing relationships with users. In addition to this, there are many other reasons why video marketing can be beneficial to your business.

The Age of Information Overload

These days, most people who frequent the internet are bombarded with information from social media, and mixed in with it is advertisers trying to cut through the noise to get their products and
services noticed. With the rise of 140 character tweets and 10 second Snap Chats, it’s hard to get users to pay attention to anything for any length of time. Videos are way to get your information out there in short bursts so that users get relevant information without too much effort on their part. It’s easier for brains to consume and process visual content rather than taking in a wall of text, so making a video visually appealing with audio enhancements will take your message to the next level. Your videos can range from customer testimonials and product demonstrations, to funny and creative ads that showcase your business.

Social Media Reach

Most internet users have at least one social media account that they check regularly, so social media is the best place to be for advertisers online.  While YouTube is the most well-known website for video watchers, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have enhanced the way videos are watched on their apps and websites to keep up with the video trend by enabling videos to be played directly in news feeds so users can easily watch without being directed away from the platform.

Posting videos on social media pages can reach thousands, and potentially millions, of people and it costs nothing to do so. If you’re a small business with only a small social media following, paid social media campaigns can broaden your reach very inexpensively. You’ll get more people watching your videos, which can translate into more followers and, potentially, more business.

The Viral Potential

We’ve all seen the work of viral videos – they appear seemingly out of the blue on your Facebook timeline and subsequently get continuously shared across all social media platforms. There’s no magic potion in making a video go viral, most times it’s just a mix of creativity, engaging content, and luck. But the potential is there for anyone to make a video that catches on and becomes a trending topic and, even if it only lasts for a day, a viral video can do wonders for your business. Users are more likely to share a video over any other content on social media, so it’s a great tool to get your business noticed.

While you may have to invest some time and money into video production, the result are videos that highlight your business and can be shared across social media, and have a permanent place on YouTube and your website as a way for users to get quick insight into what makes your business special.