How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy step by step?

Have you ever wondered why social media has gained so much importance? It initially got popular as a communication channel or interaction platform. The paradigm has changed a lot and at the moment, it is one of the strongest marketing modes. Brands and corporate organizations spend the largest portion of their product promotion budget on social media channels. These days, even sellers operating on a very small scale have Updated pages on Facebook. They add fresh posts and pictures to attract the audience. The success of a product/brand is determined by the number of followers and positive comments it has.

Developing a strategy

Every social media campaign does not attract a storm of people. A fact is that a good chunk fails because the right tips are not followed. Therefore, following the right practices is important. Here is how you can design a productive marketing process in a stepwise sequential manner.

1. Provision of quality enriched content regularly

The popularity of a social media campaign depends a lot on the quality of content that readers get to read. To start with, it should be well researched and properly compiled. Other than that, it is quite important to use a synonym changer so that rewriting is up to the mark. Always remember that publishing copied information can be the immediate burial of your brand.

Using a dependable rewriting tool means that you would not have to spend any time on it. Secondly, it would be easy to operate with tight deadlines and produce top-notch content without delays. Each post published should be catchy and provide key insights into the brand. If you are about to launch a product sale, make sure that it is promoted through all social media channels. At times, we see that some posts are stuffed with facts. This practice causes severe boredom and people lose interest. Hence, the goal is to provide unique content in a unique catchy manner.

2. Constant competitor analysis

If you are an online brand, always keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Even one mistake can place you right at the bottom. Have a check on the traffic rate they are getting. Secondly, when making sure that you are not missing on any of the important keywords. The traffic rate can drop immediately if commonly used search phrases are not a part of the content. Websites lose their ranks because they do not include the correct keywords. Keeping an eye on rival brands can help you in strengthening your own position.

3. Who is your target audience?

Every product/set of services is not purchased by everyone. People have preferences on the basis of age group, gender, need and other factors. It is important to have a clear insight into potential customers. If your product is coffee, most working people would be interested in it. Hence, captions and post titles will have to be created accordingly

• An integral part of any social media marketing strategy is communication with buyers. If you know who would buy your product, it will be easier to interact in an effective manner. Some brands have a good financial budget if they have established a market position. At times, sellers do not have clarity about the intended audience. In such cases, you can create personas and see which people are showing interest. Go through their comments and analyze their needs. This would help you in creating the right marketing tactics.

4. Imposter accounts can ruin you forever

It is a fact that well-known brands have more customers than newer ones. This difference is not created without years of endless hard work. The journey to survive competition, reach to the top and stay there requires immense dedication. It is good if you have reached that level but be aware of imposters who want a bite of your reputation.

• Imposter accounts are mostly made by cheap sellers who want to attract people by using your name. They may be selling copied versions of your products at very cheap rates. For them, this is a winning situation because they are able to earn profits without any hard work. However, for any legitimate brand, this can result in a complete shutdown as well. People considering the counterfeiters may think that the original brand is behind the selling campaign. When people begin facing quality problems, the actual buyers would start vanishing.

• Keep an eye on how visitors are responding on social media. If you see that suddenly people have started complaining about low quality or showing happiness due to low prices, start looking for counterfeiters. A good prevention technique is providing social media links on your website. In this way, buyers would not trust the wrong sellers unintentionally.

5. Choosing the channels that will work for you

A smart mindset is needed to select the right social media channels for a brand marketing campaign. It is not necessary to be active on all modes including Facebook, Insta, YouTube and Twitter. To begin with, check the requirements that your product has. If you only have to post photos and text content is not needed, Instagram would suit you more than Facebook. Similarly, you also need to consider what the targeted audience is using. As a brand, you should be active on the same channel.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that social media is the most powerful platform for product promotion these days. This does not mean that you can achieve the needed success without having the right strategy. There are several factors which you should focus on so that the correct strategy is implemented. To begin with, be aware of the audience you are targeting. This is not something you would be able to figure out instantly. Other than that, keeping an eye on the present competition is important as well.

At times, brands suffer because they do not keep a check on how their rivals are progressing. To prevent them from going ahead, it is important to analyze their performance at all times.

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Top 5 Benefits of Social Media Marketing in 2020

The business world has taken a turn with the advent of social media. Because of social media, many businesses have over performed. Social media became the most powerful tool for marketers, bloggers, and businesses. However, some people believe that social media is just for the short term. But the fact is that they don’t know the real benefits of social media marketing. This article focuses on the advantages of social media marketing for business.

If you don’t know how to effectively use social media marketing for your business then you can take the help of social media marketing services. However, if you are just starting out you can learn it on your own. A number of resources are available on the internet. Now let us know the top 5 benefits of social media marketing 

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Have you ever tried social media marketing for your business? And if you're not sure whether it can be helpful or even worth spending your time and money on social media, then stick with me until the end. In this post, I will be showing you the top 5 benefits of social media marketing in 2020.

1. Easier and Efficient

The best thing about social media marketing is you don’t need any professional training or education to be a social media marketer. If you have a passion for learning you can easily learn social media marketing online. You can use it to apply in your business, and you can also make a career out of it. However, you need to be consistent and up to date with the latest social media tools and trends regularly. Social media marketing is very effective because you can plan and control your marketing strategies with advanced tools offered by social networks. 

2.  Cost-effective Marketing

There is no question of comparing social media marketing with any other type of marketing in terms of cost. Because almost all social media networks do not charge a single penny to register and use most marketing tools. The premium versions and the paid tools are also very less. That why most marketers, bloggers, and businesses are adopting social media marketing as their primary means of marketing in 2020.  If you have never tried social media marketing, then try and measure the result you are getting from it. But, many people struggle in social media marketing because they don't know how to do it, you need to be careful and use a good strategy.

3.  Increases Brand Awareness

Due to the vast number of users, social media became the prime means of marketing for marketers, businesses, and brands for promotion. As a marketer, your goal is to spread your brand across a large audience and social media offers that platform. It provides the opportunity to interact with a wide number of viewers from various parts of the world and to find potential leads. People easily get to know your brand because of social media marketing. 

4. Improves Customer Engagement

Social media has the highest rate of customer engagement due to its attractive user interface. Various forms of content can be uploaded on the web within very less time. The most important thing is that you get a feeling of talking and connecting with people from different parts of the world. And this scope attracted a number of people to spend their time on social media. 

The reach has a lot of advantages for your business. Because you can easily study consumer behavior and deliver relevant content to your audience. The more engagement the consumer has, the higher the rate of return. You can also collect feedback on your products through social media, which is another benefit.

5. Higher Search Engine Ranking

One more advantage of social media marketing is that it can increase the search engine ranking of your site. If you know how to use SEO keywords in your content, you can attract more organic traffic to your website. However, it is a bit difficult to write SEO friendly article in the beginning but you can learn it easily. Learning about keyword research can make it easier to write SEO content. However, social media posts cannot solve all your search engine goals, but it will definitely add a positive impact on your search engine ranking.

Conclusion

Now you know the advantages of social media marketing and how it affects your business growth. Start learning, prepare a good social media marketing strategy and apply it to your business. Note that the goal is to keep up to date with the new trends in social media, so be consistent and follow trends. When you're looking for social media marketing strategies, you can opt for paid social media marketing services, or you can learn online on your own. Please feel free to ask your questions about social media marketing in the comments section.

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Author Bio

Mashum Mollah is the Founder at ‘Blogstellar’. A passionate blogger by heart and an entrepreneur by profession, the ‘Blogging Engineer’ is on a mission to help people passionate about blogging transform their passion into full-time businesses.

Implementing an Agile Approach to Social Media Marketing

With the social media marketing trend growing stronger than ever, the need for better marketing strategies is also increasing. Nowadays, marketing companies are trying to find innovative means of handling social media marketing. And if you are looking for ways to improve your marketing team’s productivity and success, you might want to consider implementing an agile marketing approach.

What is Agile Marketing?

A growing trend in the marketing industry, the agile methodology refers to the process of using a collection of tools and processes to improve a team’s focus and overall productivity. An agile marketing approach empowers your team to collaborate and communicate better and to perform tasks more efficiently even in rapid iterations.

The Agile process also aims to improve decision making by using verified data for guidance and to enable your team to respond to changes quickly. By implementing an agile approach, you can enable your team to work more efficiently and accomplish more tasks in a shorter span of time.

Why Go Agile for Social Media Marketing

Implementing agile marketing offers a variety of benefits. If you are thinking about ramping up your social media marketing efforts, the Agile methodology is possibly the best way for you to streamline your process. Here are some of the advantages of implementing an Agile social media marketing approach:

• Improves your team’s efficiency and response time, thus increasing overall productivity.

• Encourages teams to collaborate better and communicate effectively.

• Enhances your team’s flexibility and adaptability.

• Allows you to measure your team’s performance.

• Makes it easy to improve your processes and stay competitive as a marketing team.

How to Jumpstart an Agile Social Media Marketing Strategy

If you want to set up an effective agile marketing strategy for your team, here are some of the things you should take into account.

1. Set clear marketing goals.

To give your team a clearer direction, it’s essential that you set up clear marketing goals. Whether you want to get more website visitors or increase your sales, it’s important that you specify your goals and see to it that your whole team understands them. This way, they can all pitch in to accomplish all of your tasks when it comes to marketing your brand on social media. You can start by scheduling a meeting with your team to plan your whole strategy and establish your goals.

2. Break down tasks into smaller, more manageable functions.

Once you have set up your marketing goals, you can now start assigning responsibilities to your team members. Marketing is a huge undertaking. So to make it more manageable for your whole team, it’s better that you divide the tasks into smaller activities that you can easily assign to your team members.

For example, if you want to promote your brand through various social media platforms, you can form different micro teams to handle marketing through each of your selected platforms. Then each member of your micro team can handle more specific tasks, such as preparing images, copywriting, scheduling, tracking and more.

3. Delegate tasks wisely.

When it comes to delegating work, it’s important that you consider the skills required to accomplish each task. An agile team should always see to it that they are making the most of their available resources. And for an agile marketing team, taking advantage of your team’s individual skills can help boost your team’s overall productivity. For you to decide wisely on how to delegate your tasks, you should first know what their strengths are.

Ideally, your team should be made up of professionals who are familiar with the ins and outs of the marketing industry. Your team should have a copywriter, graphic designer, SEO and ads specialists, as well as analytics experts. With an all-star team, you can easily delegate tasks and see to it that they are performed properly to the best of their abilities.

4. Use tools to monitor your progress.

Technology has made it easy for workers to achieve optimal efficiency by taking advantage of various productivity tools. When it comes to implementing an agile social media marketing campaign, a team manager should also have the right set of tools to monitor the progress of their efforts. Each task should be laid out using a visual project management tool such as a Scrum or Kanban board. This way, it will be easier for you to keep track of your team’s individual and overall performance. To be an effective agile marketing team, you and your team should see to it that all tasks are processed in rapid iteration to avoid wasting time and other resources.

5. Measure and analyze results.

Another important factor to consider when going agile is your team’s ability to measure your social media marketing performance. How are your efforts paying off? Are you gaining more followers? Is your return of investment (ROI) rate improving? Are you able to convert more followers into sales? These are some of the things that you should take into account. This is also where the marketing goals you have set comes into play.

Depending on the goals you have initially set, you should see to it that you are using analytics tools to measure your marketing performance from the get-go. This will allow you to better understand the trends in your market and to continuously improve your methods. The data you’ve gathered can also help you determine which methods and platforms work better for you when it comes to promoting your brand on social media.

6. Scale and repeat based on outcome.

Once you have gathered enough data from your current marketing strategies, you will now be able to determine which techniques and platforms are delivering better results for you. Once you have identified what works best for the brand you are promoting, you can now ramp up your efforts and switch your team’s focus towards the strategies that work better. You can continue the iteration in rapid succession as part of your agile marketing approach. And with a visual project management board, you can efficiently repeat tasks more efficiently.

Conclusion

No matter what social media platforms you decide to use, an agile marketing approach can definitely boost your team’s productivity. With your preparation, along with your business tools and data-guided decisions, can easily ramp up your marketing efforts and achieve your marketing goals faster and more efficiently.

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About the Author

Christine Joy Leal is an experienced freelance writer and content manager, wife and mother-of-two. She loves keeping things in order and enjoys using the Kanban and Agile methodologies to manage all her writing projects, daily tasks, and other personal matters that require efficient organization. Apart from managing her busy content writing career, she also enjoys books, movies, TV series, online games, music, and crocheting. She also writes blogs for Kanban Zone and for her personal website.

5 Ways to Use Social Proof to Boost Conversions

There’s been a lot of talk about social proof in the marketing world in the past couple of decades, ever since the online flood gates were opened and the business world expanded into the digital realm. This oversaturation of content kind of made it difficult for customers to figure out who they should trust, and it made it even more difficult for them to establish meaningful relationships with their favorite brands anymore. Simply put, there are too many players in this digital marketing game nowadays, and people need a way to figure out which brands deserve their attention and trust.

In essence, this is social proof, a psychological phenomenon that you can use to your advantage in order to incentivize new customers to adopt the behaviors of others, and thus inspire them to buy from your site, or engage with your brand in any way. By building social proof, you will become more trustworthy, and thus generate quality leads and even inspire conversions on the spot. Here’s how you can do just that.

Add User Ratings and Reviews to Your Site

The first solution that might come to mind is to add user ratings and 1st party reviews to your site. The former is a type of visual feedback that your existing customers give to your potential leads and future customers, while the latter is more descriptive and allows the potential customers to delve deeper into the subject matter before making the decision to buy. You can start by adding simple user ratings (typically in the form of stars, but it can be unicorns if you’re feeling unique) to your products to give visitors a clear indication of the popularity of every product in your offer.

Next, be sure to add customer reviews to your site, but instead of copying 3rd party reviews from other sites such as Google or Yelp, be sure to focus on 1st party (native) feedback. The 1st party review is a unique type of content, in a sense that you own it, and that you post it only on your website. While 3rd party reviews can sometimes be unreliable, 1st party reviews are posted only by your real customers, which will help you build social proof more easily.

Emphasize Trending and Popular Product

People who are just now coming into contact with your brand or website for the first time probably have no idea what’s hot and what’s not, but they would love to. It’s up to you to guide them on their browsing journey and help them navigate your site easily without getting confused or thinking that you might not have what they’re looking for. To do this, you should proudly display your “hot” or “trending” products in each product category, which will also build social proof by showing new visitors what your existing customers love the most.

After all, if the majority of your customers are buying one product, then chances are that potential customers will follow in their footsteps. Once you have converted those customers, it will be easier to get them back to your site and inspire them to buy your less-popular items simply because they know that they can trust your brand.

Leverage Website Notification Tools

One of the best ways to build social proof in real-time and as your potential customers are browsing through your website is to use cues and notifications. By leveraging a feature-rich social proof tool such as Cue to create website notifications that will tell people who are shopping on your site, what they bought, when they bought it, and provide other valuable information about other customers, there is a much higher chance that your potential customers will feel more inclined to buy.

Because if other people trust your site enough to make a purchase, so can they. Simply integrate a cue tool into your website, choose the customer information you want the notifications to show, and use the cues to build your brand’s authority and trust. This can also be a valuable tool when you’re trying to prevent people from leaving your website prematurely.

Add Relevant Certifications and Badges

Another great way to build social proof is to add all of the badges and certifications that are relevant to your industry, niche, and business. People love certifications and badges, not because they look good, but because they provide them with a sense of security and ease when buying from brands they’re seeing for the first time in their life. Consider adding data security badges, antivirus and antimalware badges, shipping and satisfaction guarantees, money-back guarantees, and more.

Capitalize on User-Generated Content

And finally, always remember that people trust other people more than they trust you. So, for all the reviews and certifications you put on your site, you should double the amount of user-generated content.

Yes, reviews are user-generated, but beyond that, aim to build social proof on social media by communicating with your followers, engaging them in meaningful conversation, and incentivizing them to make their own photos and videos to showcase your products and just tell the world what they think of your brand. To put the icing on the cake, make all of your images on social media shoppable by linking the products directly to the corresponding product page on your site in order to boost traffic and conversions.

Wrapping up

Social proof is one of the most important elements of long-term success in the modern business world, and it’s easy to see why. With these tips in mind, go ahead and optimize your online presence to build social proof and thus generate new leads and incentivize conversions.

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Intelligent conversions: Understanding the Impact of AI in Digital Marketing

Did you know that 40% of the marketing and sales teams believe that artificial intelligence(AI) and machine learning(ML) will contribute significantly to their department’s success? Does this mean AI digital transformation will revolutionize the marketing world?

Artificial intelligence has already made its way in every major industry, ranging from automobiles to technology. It is already dominating the customer service segment through chatbots. But how is it affecting the digital marketing services world? Will AI transform online marketing as we see it today?

Today, a significant portion of digital marketing revolves around data. Whether it is social media marketing or inbound lead generation, better data insights imply better sales. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning help to make sense of this data.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning support the creation of micro-moments in digital marketing that enable personalizing the customer experience and understanding market requirements in real-time.

Customer analysis is a massive factor in personalizing experience. Netflix and Amazon heavily utilize AI to understand preferences and provide relevant suggestions to customers. AI-based tools enable a comprehensive study of the audience and help in determining what type of content to create.

Digital marketers are working hard to reap the potential of AI. They are trying to leverage AI for campaign management, budget, strategy execution, and ROI estimation. These are significant factors in determining the success of any activity. By delegating these activities to AI systems, marketers can find more time for productive decision-making and creating a better digital marketing strategy.

The influence of Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

IBM’s Watson is one marketing automation tool that has helped marketers work at a centralized platform with all their customer data.

While automation and AI are two different aspects of technology, they can work wonders for marketers when combined together.

Online digital marketers are still studying the influence of AI on digital marketing, but its role in digital success is growing with each day.

Let’s have a look at some aspects of digital marketing where AI and ML are playing a massive role to augment enterprise profitability and growth.

Data Collection and Analysis

AI helps digital marketers to collect audience data and create campaigns that target specific touchpoints. AI systems, with the help of Big Data and CRM, bring this data to a centralized platform and present patterns that have worked previously for the target audience.

Website Creation

A prime example of AI-based website creation is the Wix’s ADI. Digital marketers often need a dedicated website or landing page for specific campaigns. The Wix ADI creates a fully-functional website based on a few questions. It learns the requirements and works with a template that suitably matches it.

Strategic Advertising

Planning the advertising budget is a principal challenge for digital marketers. AI predicts customer behavior based on the data collected. The insights from this data are then used to create better ads that match the user’s preference. Combined with A/B testing and market research, marketers can almost accurately determine their online ads budget with the best ROI option.

Accurate Evaluation

With the help of AI-based tools, digital marketers can now eliminate the guesswork from their campaign analysis. While earlier, they had to create the next strategy based on the closest pattern - now, AI can provide accurate insights into the performance of a campaign.

Today, there are more customer touchpoints to target than ever. On average, it takes targeting 5 to 7 touch points before a customer is converted.  AI and ML enable making data-based decisions to actively target these touchpoints and prepare a strategy that influences the customer at every stage of their journey.

How To Use Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

There are a myriad of AI and ML use cases in digital marketing. Most of them are directed towards improving the customer experience, predicting the target audience’s behavior, and generating real-time insights. It is helping businesses succeed in the digital world in areas where human personnel is not particularly efficient.

Marketers working in $500M to $1B companies are the dominant adopters of AI, particularly conversational AI systems for customer service.

However, AI and ML systems can only work in digital marketing when combined with human efforts and creative ideas.

Here are a few ways in which digital marketers can leverage these technologies to generate maximum revenue for enterprises:- 

Content Creation

When it comes to inbound lead generation, content is still the king. However, producing more content doesn’t work anymore. Google’s algorithm and the customer’s mind - both are hungry for relevant content that makes sense to their requirements.

With AI-based tools, content marketers can easily identify their best performing content. They can get insights on what is working for their customers and create more content around that. There are AI and ML tools that help to plan content and suggest which channels work best for different audiences. Companies are also using AI to generate content for specific touchpoints in their customer journey. (Tool: Concured)

Grammar is an important aspect that determines the quality of your content. AI tools like Grammarly help to frame content with proper grammar and eliminate any spelling errors. It also helps in proper sentence framing to help eliminate the “sales-y-ness” from the content.

Customer Behaviour Prediction

Today, digital marketers know that targeting everyone in your niche is a waste of resources, time, and effort. But how do they tackle this problem? AI systems enable them to identify prospects that are most likely to respond to their offer.

AdWords professionals require better analysis to identify prospects that can be converted from expensive advertising on Google. By determining the campaign objectives and analyzing previous data, AI can provide an effective strategy for AdWords.

AI and ML models used to identify customer behavior help in identifying patterns and creating digital marketing strategies according to them. These models are based on the goals you want to achieve from your marketing activity, including website traffic, specific action, or generating leads. Through predicting customer behavior, AI enables digital marketers to use fewer resources and target the right prospects at the right place and at the right time.

Customer Experience Enhancement

Customer trust is solely based on the experience they get from a brand. AI and ML can help personalize the content for users based on their history, location, and preferences. It leads to the impression that the brand is taking care of their specific needs and enhances their experience.

Retailers like Amazon, Warby Parker, and several others allow customers to take a free “try-on” of a product. It is a result of combining AR and VR with AI. The result is an increase in sales and customer loyalty as they can now understand whether they want to purchase a product or not.

Ask any digital marketing agency and they will say that improving the customer’s online experience is their first priority. A significant driver in this could be voice-enabled AI searches to give the user a better experience of a brand’s website. It will amplify the user’s visit on the website and provide an augmented version of the brand using voice-based algorithms. 

Online Advertising

Digital Marketing AI will certainly benefit marketers to target audiences better with online advertising. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have already incorporated AI and ML to understand the audience that any brand is going to advertise to.

Artificial intelligence tools help to augment online advertising by showing marketers what’s important to their target audience. They help to develop a comprehensive understanding of how ads need to be created and what people they should target for maximum conversion.

Advertising online isn’t for everyone these days. But combined with the right AI tools, it can increase the ROI twofold. How? By helping marketers plan an advertising budget based on proper analysis of their customer’s data and developing campaigns specific to their target audience’s requirements. With AI, rapid decision-making during a campaign is possible to avoid underutilization of money spent on ads.

Real-time Tracking and Insights

Measuring digital marketing efforts is crucial to understanding what worked and what went wrong. This is important because customer acquisition costs are much higher than customer retention costs. Tracking each campaign using AI will provide better insights into which customer segment marketers should target.

Through AI and ML, digital marketers can track their audience’s behavior and communicate better with them. They can analyze customer conversations in real-time and identify why people are talking about them (There are tools to track customer conversations on Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This helps to target customers better using the activities that work for each audience.

AI tools also provide insights by comparing past customers and new customers. This data is invaluable as marketers can learn how they can retain new customers. It also equips them with the capability to target their past customers better and improve their experience. AI provides relevant information on what each customer wants and how they should be targeted.

The AI Digital Marketing Transformation is Here

Whether marketers believe it or stay skeptical,  the future of AI in digital marketing is brighter than ever. As RPA continues to work its miracles, combined with AI and ML, digital marketers will drive quickly towards intelligent marketing.

We are looking at a digital marketing world where marketers will be monitoring the activities executed by AI digital marketing tools and come up with better and creative ideas to serve their customers.

Artificial Intelligence will not only save money and time but most importantly, assist humans to target customers in an intelligent manner. Using data and analytics, AI will revolutionize how digital campaigns are executed and measured. 

Many marketers, however, also hope that AI will integrate sales and marketing for creating a centralized environment where customers experience intelligence marketing from the stage of prospecting to after-sale services.

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About: Harsh Sahu

Harsh Sahu works as a Content Strategist at BoTree Digital and has been a Content Marketing Professional for nearly 4 years now. He is all about innovations and how to capitalize on the latest trends in content marketing.

Ten things you should know before digging into Instagram Marketing

Instagram was launched in 2010, and since then, it has taken the social media world by storm. A regular user of Instagram may have intimately experienced the growth of this social media platform from a simple photo-sharing app to one of the most prominent social media platform. Since Instagram has grown into a powerful platform and now it is more than just a photo-sharing app. If you are looking to boost up your Instagram marketing, then it will be better to know about some Instagram marketing tips. A lot of people and businesses are moving into Instagram and growing like the biggest social media platform, Facebook. If you are willing to show your product in front of millions of people, then you need to focus on social media networking rather than SEO.

A social media enthusiast and senior SMO services expert at Tangensys said - there are more than 500 million people across the world are using Instagram every day and use it for sharing content. You can sell your products by posting photographs, videos, or sharing stories. In case you are a novice in designing and creating content, you can easily display some beautiful stories for the audience. But before digging into Instagram marketing, you must know some essential things that will help you to grow your business in Instagram. What are those? Let's check it out.

Switch to a business account

The main thing you must know and execute is to switch your regular Instagram account to a business account. It's quite an easy job to turn a regular account into a business account. Just go to your settings and click on the "Switch to Business Profile" to get the job done. There are so many benefits of having a business profile. For example, followers can quickly get in touch with you by just clicking the contact button right from your Instagram page. A business account always lets you create and circulate Instagram ads without using Facebook's advertising tools. You can also use Instagram analytics tools named insight, which provides all the stats about the impression and reaches of your post.

Always try to use free Instagram tools

The Instagram business account is not more different from the Facebook business account. By using the analytics tools of Instagram, you will get to see impressions, data engagement, and many more. You will also be able to get so much information about the follower like their age, gender, location, and activity. These tools are free to use because you can use them to realize precisely how users are interacting with your posted content, the more you can understand about this fact, the better you can arrange your post to improve attention.

Post some teaser of your product to attract people

Instagram may be the best place to promote your product, and you will be able to boost the promotion by posting a teaser of the product. And if you could do that well enough, then more and more customers will attract towards your product. When you post a treasure of any product that people are interested in, you don't have to do anything to let them purchase your product they will automatically buy it. If not, then at least they will like and comment on your product or share it with a friend.

Creating sponsored ads

Instagram ads have become a crucial part of increasing marketing, the best part of creating sponsored ads is you can control precisely how much you have to spend on them by establishing an ad budget. You can showcase one or more sponsored ads by using the carousel feature. For sponsoring ads, you have to select an engaging content while also disputing to the target demographic, in front of whom you want to post the ad. Try to run several posts to different customers simultaneously for engaging more. Remember, there are several forms of sponsored ads to post photos, stories, videos, and carousel, etc.

Use Instagram stories for advertising the product

If you want to boost up your marketing, then Instagram stories are there to help you. Instagram stories are slightly different from a regular post because they are in the slideshow format and live only for 24 hours, but it can be saved to any of your devices to use it later. The benefit of using Instagram stories for marketing purpose is it displays at the top of the follower timelines where users can see your story. Instagram stories can only be viewed through the mobile Instagram app, and you can't send any Instagram Stories as a direct message.

Make any influencer as a partner

Do you want to obtain a conceivable buyer on Instagram? Then probably an influencer can help you to do this job quickly because they have already composed an audience with a vast number of followers. People are buying those products more, what they see in their feed from the influencer they follow and they trust them. The thing you have to do is to try and identify a few influencers that have an audience that is appropriate for your product or services.

Make a collection of the user-submitted images

There is a simple method to create great content for your Instagram page without doing any hard work, and that is through user-submitted photos. Since you already have an audience of hundreds or maybe thousand to generate useful content for you. You might be thinking about how to do it? It's so simple, indeed. Just let them know that you are going to tag them in your post, then they will have a reason to post user-generated content on a steady purpose.

Make an engaging branded hashtag

If you are facing any problem in creating instant engagement, then, a branded hashtag is a great way to overcome this problem. Customers can use your tag to post user-generated content that allows any user to search through all posts communicating to your product. It also allows you to search easily using images that you might want to assess posting again on your page. And if you already have any famous brand slogan or phrase, use it as your hashtag.

Try to post at the perfect time and prevent over-posting

Over-posting on Instagram may decrease the number of your followers. If they only get to see only your post on their feed then, there is a strong possibility of following you. All you have to do is to post consistently so that they won't get irritated from your post and you stay in their news feed regularly.

Be sure to track the perfect metrics

You will not be able to boost your Instagram marketing performance unless you know how your post and page are performing. When you get the perfect result, then only you will get to know precisely what is working and what's not.

Conclusion

There you have ten important tips to know before digging into an Instagram marketing, and I am quite sure that following these steps can help you a lot in boosting your Instagram marketing. Finally, I want to say that Instagram is a massive platform for marketing and if you're going to put your feet in this field

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About : Manish Kumar

Manish Kumar is a digital marketer by profession and an avid blogger in free time. Currently, he is working with a digital marketing agency- Tangensys. In his 6 years digital marketing career, he had helped many brands to grow digitally.

Photography and Branding: How to Leverage Your Lifestyle Portraits

Many brands may not realize the importance of images for capturing their vision or mission statement.

Today, David and John discussed why brands should take photography seriously.

John DeMato is a lifestyle portrait photographer. He has worked with entrepreneurs and thought leaders, by capturing high-quality images that present inspiring, entertaining, and informational elements which entice people to follow a brand.

But it’s not as easy as picking up a camera and snapping a photo.

John is much more than just a photographer – he goes above and beyond.

John sets his clients up for success by educating them on how to effectively leverage their image content for blogs, social channels, publications, websites, advertisements, and other platforms.

The Importance of Building a Connection

With amazing credentials and a stellar reputation, you’d think it’s easy for clients to trust John immediately upon meeting him.

However, trust and comfort are two very different things.

John believes that in order to get amazing shots, it’s important to build a connection and healthy rapport with clients.

Photography isn’t magic – great shots don’t just happen.

As a subject, if you’re working with a photographer that doesn’t make you feel comfortable, the images will reflect that.

John likes to build a nice conversation with lots of back-and-forths to make clients feel as comfortable with him as possible.

This helps with branding as well because it helps give photos a deeper vibe. John mentions that many photographers might be able to capture the right lighting, angle, and create a perfect image, but they lack depth, emotion, and mood.

They don’t accurately represent a brand – they're just great photos.

John says that photography for branding should visually tell your story. Lifestyle photography for a brand should accomplish two goals. It should:

1.       Establish your expertise.

2.       Provide value to potential prospects because you solve their pain points.

According to John, it’s so important to find the right photographer who can capture a wide range of emotion: everything from rage-filled rants to celebrating wins.

John’s Unique Approach that Helps Him Deliver Top Results

John points out that every entrepreneur is in a different place and has different needs.

Far too many entrepreneurs and thought leaders select a lifestyle portrait photographer based on their price tag and portfolio. While the photographer’s work should speak for itself, it’s also important to get along with one another.

A lot of times, a client may not realize what they want until they’re sitting at home looking at the photos later. John’s job as a photographer is to really get to know his clients and ask a lot of questions to figure out where they’re at with their business.

From there, he can maximize the effectiveness of every session.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly which questions John might ask to get to know a person because it varies so much. Every entrepreneur has a different vision for their brand, a different personality, and their business is at a different place.

John spends a lot of time getting to know his clients before he even picks up any equipment. In fact, sometimes, his interactions with clients last for two and a half hours. This gives John time to identify the different emotions he’ll need to capture and the types of images he will need to shoot.

It’s therefore crucial for a lifestyle portrait photographer to understand how and where entrepreneurs and thought leaders will use these images on social media or other platforms.

John assesses all of this to deliver the best results possible. That’s how he creates lifestyle portraits that visually punctuate for brands.

The Importance of Being Yourself and Not Striving for Perfection

John says that although it sounds trite, it’s important to be yourself and feel comfortable in your own skin.

Yes, we hear this all the time but here’s what it means.

By being himself, John was able to open himself up because he wasn’t afraid to say what’s on his mind. This allows him to produce the best results possible for clients.

Don’t forget to get your back-end strategy in order.

The last thing you need to do is fumble around with your camera because your client will notice. This will kill any momentum you’ve created while building a rapport.

When you treat your equipment like an extension of yourself – and feel comfortable with yourself – your client will feel comfortable too.

In that scenario, everyone wins.

Retouch Your Images – But Strategically

John also points out that his mental health is more important than reaching an unattainable goal. That’s why he abandoned perfection a long time ago – there's no such thing.

So, does John retouch and edit his images?

Yes, but very strategically.

It’s important to remember the entire purpose behind lifestyle portraits for your brand: you want to appear authentic and professional.

In some cases, this might mean erasing a pimple or lightly brushing a wrinkle – but you still want to look like yourself.

The entire goal is to help build trust with your prospects.

You can’t do this if you look a certain way on LinkedIn but a client can’t recognize you when you meet in-person. Because whether or not people realize it on a conscious level, this does diminish trust.

How to Properly Leverage Lifestyle Portrait Photography

John says that lifestyle portraits are gold because they add social proof that you’re a thought leader. As you can imagine, the uses for these photos are endless.

Yes, they make great social media photos, print magazines, blog posts, and website headers, but they can do so much more.

John has shot countless photos of Ted Rubin at speaking engagements and other events. He’ll often see Ted throw some inspirational text over an incredible image where Ted’s body language is also telling a story.

That’s the lifestyle aspect of it – portraying yourself as you are in a professional manner.

How you leverage these photos to really get your vision and message out there is completely your call.

You can follow John DeMato on Instagram @DeMatoPhoto or visit his website.

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About John DeMato

John is a branded content creator who works with high-level, business leaders, thought leaders and various other change agents to produce high-volume, image libraries that present informational, entertaining and inspiring aspects of their brand to their followers.

Getting a Handle on Facebook: 4 Steps to Optimize Your Facebook Ads

Facebook is one of the main social media platforms for business marketing.

Others are quickly catching up, but Facebook has set the bar as far as what businesses can achieve through social media outlets.

Have you tried Facebook marketing?

A lot of people are somewhat confused as to how to do this properly. They wonder how often they should post, what they should post about, and whether they should invest in Facebook ads.

The latter is what we’re going to delve into today.

Recently, I had a discussion with Facebook marketing master Azriel Ratz about this topic. He explained why this type of marketing is so important and provided four steps to help businesses optimize their Facebook ads.

We Can’t Ignore Facebook – Why It’s so Valuable to Your Business

Some people wonder whether Facebook ads are a waste of time and money.

Here’s the thing – most people are really into Facebook. We’re talking millions of potential customers who are on Facebook every single day.

E-commerce is getting bigger and bigger. It gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to build their business in ways they never thought possible. And Facebook is a big part of that because it provides a worldwide platform for brand exposure.

Facebook is an amazing way to get your content out there to your target audience.

Azriel has years of online marketing experience and has perfected his strategy, allowing him to help companies find their ideal audiences and create ads that are relevant for their company and their audience. He’s even wrote a book about it to help business owners like you!

On average, Azriel’s ad campaigns on Facebook return up to five times the original cost of the ad. He wants everyone to know that, with the right optimization, they too can have similar success.  

How to Optimize Your Facebook Ads in 4 Straightforward Steps

Azriel likens most people’s Facebook ad campaigns to throwing things at the wall and hoping they stick. The problem is that if something does stick they don’t understand why. They won’t understand why an ad made money, which means it will be really difficult to repeat the process.

Here are four tips that can help you optimize your Facebook ads to reach your goals.

1. To Achieve Your Goals You Must Know What Your Goals Are

Start everything off with a business goal.

Let’s say you want to grow more high quality leads. You want to choose an ad campaign that reflects that goal appropriately – maybe one that is conversion-based or you can even choose a Facebook lead ad.

Get very clear on your business goals so that you know what kind of campaign to invest in.

2. Find the Best High Quality People to Run Your Ads To

You want to purchase ads that will appeal to the best high quality people.

One single ad won’t appeal to everyone because each person is at a different phase of the purchasing journey.

Ultimately, you want to target those who want to buy your products.

In order to find the right audience, you need to do some sleuthing. This usually involves campaigns that target certain groups of people within your audience.

Separate your different audiences and target them with different campaigns. After a few ads go out, you can look at your results and see which audience is more inclined to buy. Then, you can shift most, if not all, of your ad budget to this audience.

3. Ad Content Creation: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Instead of creating completely different content for every single ad, Azriel has a strategy that helps him work smarter, not harder.

He starts by creating three lines of copy: Sentences A, B, and C.

Then, he duplicates the ad set and switches around the positioning of the text. So, the first ad will be sentences ABC. The second ad will be ACB. The third will be BAC. He ends up with six different versions of the ad.

Then, he chooses four different images or videos, which gives him 24 different versions of the ad.

Finally, he makes three new sentences (DEF) that are a little different than his original ABC sentences and changes sentences DEF around to end up with six versions of those sentences.

Again, he adds four different images and the end result is a total of 48 different yet similar ads. Facebook will run each ad and he’s able to see which one gets the best ROI.

4. Optimization: Analytics You Need to Keep Your Eye On

There are two clues that will give you insight into whether your ads are effective or not.

Facebook charges you based on impression. You can tell what Facebook thinks of your ad by looking at your cost per impression.

If your costs are high, it means Facebook isn’t happy. And there are two reasons for this: You’re not targeting the right audience or you’re not running the right ad.

To find out which it is, all you need to do is go to the ad set level and see which ones have high impression costs.

If all of them are high, the ads are the problem. If only some of them are high you’re targeting the wrong audience.

Now you know what you need to do: Create new copy for your next set of ads or target different audiences.

You Don’t Have to Spend a Lot for Facebook Ads to Be Effective

A lot of business owners hold themselves back because they don’t have a big marketing budget. They think they have to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for Facebook advertising to be effective.

Azriel pointed out that spending about $50 a day on ads can be sufficient. But even if you don’t have that much – even if you only have $5 a day to spend – you can effectively market.

That is, of course, as long as you target the right audience and optimize your ads to appeal to them. Only then can you garner the best ROI.

How would you like more ad marketing tips from the Facebook Master? All you have to do is like his Facebook page: Ratz Pack Media. Azriel posts three to five videos there every single week. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.

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About Azriel Ratz

Through his years of experience in online marketing Azriel Ratz has perfected his strategy for companies to find their ideal audiences and create the most relevant ads for their businesses.

Azriel's Facebook ad process is FEO (Find, Engage, Optimize). Begin by find the right audience, then engage that audience with the best possible ads, then optimize the ads to get the best possible results. To learn more about this process go to FEO.talkaboutads.com