YouTube presents such an enormous opportunity for businesses to dive into video marketing. And why won’t it? Statistics show that 54% of users prefer to see more video content and 87% of marketers use video as a marketing tool because it’s effective as far as ROI is concerned. It’s for such reasons that video marketing is on the rise and YouTube SEO ranking is a very important thing if you want to create an impact. If you are just starting YouTube SEO for beginners comes in handy.
And while the main social media platforms in an attempt to keep up with this new trend have incorporated video features in their platforms, none of them can beat YouTube because it’s the second largest search engine with over 2 billion users each month and over one billion hours spent on videos each day.
What this means is that every other person or business is doing something on this platform. So, for you to stand out, video SEO is the next monster you may have to fight with and conquer.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be such an uphill task because it’s not too different from any content optimization you have been doing in the past.
YouTube search engine optimization may sound like some complex thing and may intimidate you quite a bit. But it’s not that complicated. All it requires is to catch up with the learning curve of all the new strategies and tactics that seem to be coming up every other day. To help this learning endeavor and make catching up easy, here are a few core fundamentals that you can start with.
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The main goal of optimizing your site is to help it rank higher in search engine results to improve your relevance and hence authority. Relevance can be appreciated as a measure of how suitable your content is in solving a certain problem and can be achieved through the use of a selected keyword combination. Authority is the measure of how much trust you’re worth.
b. Keyword Research
Specific keywords by themselves may not do most for you because Google search is driven by both semantic and contextual considerations. The important thing that will help you stand out is to be able to identify the lead or head keyword; this includes equally the short and high-volume keywords as well as the longer and more conversational but low-volume keywords.
c. Measurement plus Analysis
As with any work you do, unless you know how to measure and interpret your results, you may not get so far. One of the best tools you can use to measure and interpret is Google Analytics. It will help you (even if you’re a newbie) to experiment with various metrics to see the ones that perform best.
With these three core fundamentals of SEO, you’re in a better place at understanding why you need YouTube SEO tips for beginners and how to best approach it.
How YouTube’s Algorithm Works
Let’s speak some history.
In 2012 YouTube ranked videos according to view count. Between that time and 2016, it was all about the length of the views your videos got. In 2017 it was more about the quality of your video, just last year, in 2018, it was more about monetization.
But in 2019 they announced that they will not be recommending content that seemed to reach borderline to protect its viewers from being harmed or misinformed. With that said, they’re into assisting their viewers to locate the videos they want to watch while maximizing the length of time spent engaged on the platform.
So, the YouTube algorithm will rank your videos based on how appropriately your video’s title, keywords, or description (metadata) fits the user’s quest and how well it engages your users, i.e. comments or likes. In short, it’s all about the session time and engagement.
How then, can you ace the reach as well as the engagement time for your videos with more ease?
There are three main areas of YouTube video SEO that you should put your focus on in order to maximize your visibility. So, this article will look deeper into these three elements:
Keyword Search
Optimization of Content
Engagement
1. Keyword Research
Keyword research simply means looking for words and phrases that users use to search for different video content on YouTube. So, when you optimize your video content through the use of the right keywords, you have a better shot of getting a significant number of views as well as engagement.
So, how can you find the right keywords to boost your video SEO?
How to Search for Keywords for Your YouTube Content and YouTube SEO Tools
a. YouTube Autocomplete
Assuming you are a frequent YouTube user, you have perhaps noticed that when you search for an item on YouTube, you get suggestions that kind of complete your quest. This is called autocomplete. It’s a feature that suggests the most popular keywords that most other people use to find videos when they do a YouTube search.
What this means is that autocomplete gives you the most popular keywords that you can use to optimize your content. But it also goes beyond keywords; it often goes all the way to give you the key phrases that are most popular. This is one of the easiest ways to search for keywords.
b. Top Competitor Videos
It’s always a good idea to see what’s working for fellow YouTubers. How do you do this? Identify the channels in the same niche as you; find their most viewed videos and then check the video titles and descriptions.
c. Video Result Keywords from Google
It’s possible for your videos to not only rank on YouTube Top results, but also on Google. You need to be able to identify specific keywords that can make this happen since Google won’t show video results for just any keywords. These specific keywords that Google can pick are what are called Video Result Keywords.
So, before finalizing the keywords you’ll use for your YouTube SEO checklist, search for them on Google to see which one gets picked up, and then use it more.
d. Your YouTube Analytics
This is another keyword search goldmine since you get to see the very keywords that viewers use to find your content. You can get this by going to YouTube Studio, clicking on “analytics” then “reach viewers”. You may be surprised to find keywords other than the ones you’ve been using. And this will enrich your keywords list and eventually rank you even higher on YouTube search results.
So, besides using your keywords on titles or descriptions and tags, you can maximize your video SEO by mentioning these keywords throughout your speech. This is possible because YouTube transcribes (but you have to correct this) your videos and each time you mention a keyword you help it understand your content’s background relevance in relation to your keywords.
2. YouTube SEO for Beginners – Optimization of Your Content
The next important step to optimize is your content. There are several ways to improve the optimization, and here are the main ones.
i. Optimize the Title of Your Video
Ensure your video’s title includes the keywords you are targeting and at the same time the exact words that users choose when searching for your content.
ii. Optimize the Meta Description
The definite way to make your content visible encapsulates the use of optimized descriptions. The use of keywords in your description helps you get the searchers’ attention as well as YouTube’s rankings. A meta description will determine whether the searcher will want to click on your video result or not. A meta description is any additional text that appears in your search results that lets the reader know what the link is all about.
Your meta descriptions must:
Include the main keywords
Must be catchy with the use of verbs like “Check out”, “Discover” etc.
Must be relevant, as compelling as possible, matching the content on your video
Must be between 135 to 155 characters and no longer
Have unique meta descriptions
And because these descriptions are an introduction to what you’re about to talk about, they will woo the user to click for more information.
Do not forget to optimize the title of the video file, and the tags, make a thumbnail, and include closed captions.
iii. Transcripts
A transcript is simply a textual illustration of your spoken content in the video files. And because search engines are not able to watch your video, they instead will index the text, this is how transcripts enable them to take in your content and index it as required.
How does this help SEO? Well, content marketers get a lot of derivative data with the help of transcripts and this helps build an authoritative presence in the search results. Transcripts are also great for UX, remember as earlier indicated, YouTube is now more concerned about the user’s satisfaction, so transcripts are a reliable way to optimize the user experience and improve your page rank.
iv. Location
Targeting is everything. If you wish to tap only into your local area, then it’s ideal to include your location in your video. It will boost your video SEO within your target area and maximize visibility.
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3. YouTube SEO for Beginners – Boost Engagement
Video marketing SEO thrives on engagement. Gaining many views is no longer enough for your video SEO. Your viewers need to engage with your content because this is how search engines understand how useful your content is to your viewers and this is how YouTube SEO ranking occurs.
The metrics to put your finger on are:
Likes, shares, and comments – Tracking the number of likes, shares, and comments on your videos is a great guide as to whether your content is relevant or popular or not. The shares and comments especially can boost your engagement and views of your other videos. At this point, it’s important to say that it’s actually ok to encourage your viewers to comment and share your content. Just make it more natural and less salesy.
Click Through Rate – CTR is the clicks your video gets based on impressions. You can improve your CTR with a great title and a great thumbnail (read on for more on this).
Subscribers – If the number of your subscribers keeps going higher then it means you’re gaining popularity. This is a good sign of high engagement.
Audience Retention – this is the amount of time people spend watching your videos. The longer people keep watching your video (ideally to the end) the higher your video will be ranked by YouTube. Why? YouTube wants people to spend more time on their platform for the ads, and if you can help them achieve that, then they return the favor by ranking your content higher.
Here are a few ways to make high-retention videos:
Start with a summary of your content
Jump into the main content of your video without being too wordy
Use open loops – hint at what’s coming
Video length – longer videos tend to perform better, if you can, make it at least 20 minutes or more.
Thumbs up and thumbs down
As far as viewer engagement is concerned, always remember that you’re addressing people. Treat the whole conversation (including the ones in the comments) like you would a real-life conversation. This means making your points simple and very clear, emphasizing the key steps, and providing humor while at it, everyone needs a bit of that at some point. And is a sure way to keep your channel engaged and YouTube happy.
Source: Youtube
Bonus Tips on YouTube SEO Basics
Use Eye-catching Thumbnails
This is the first thing that a viewer will see when searching through YouTube. It’s the first impression that will tell the viewer what your video is all about. So, you need to arrest their attention and make them want to watch, or they’ll scroll on.
So, how do you create an impressionable thumbnail?
Use the right size- YouTube has guidelines for the dimensions. So, don’t make it too small.
Contrast – Pick a perfect contrast for your photo and your title.
A great thumbnail is not only good for your video SEO, but for branding purposes as well.
Embed Your Videos
Besides getting video SEO on the platform itself, it’s possible to achieve this by embedding your video on social media sites and the web in general. This is made easy by the fact that YouTube is very strong in hosting video content on these other platforms on the web.
The sharing and embedding buttons are already present in the default options so your work has pretty much been done. The advantage of embedding videos in other places is that it grows your engagement in great ways; in any case, someone who may not know about your channel on YouTube may be able to see your content on a blog or on social media. There is no end to the benefits of embedding videos because people generally love video content more.
Promote and Link Your Channel
Within the first week of posting your video, you’ll see it featured on YouTube’s new content. So, how do you promote it for maximum visibility?
The first thing is to know the best time to post the video. You can identify the peak periods by checking your real-time reports.
You can also promote your video by linking it to your email or embedding it as indicated earlier, in your newsletter, blog, or wherever your existing audience may be spending their time.
Stellar Content
While this is a YouTube SEO tutorial, no matter how brilliant video SEO will not guarantee success without quality content because the quality of your content is what carries the day. The degree of optimization is important of course, but people will not try to find you again unless you give them a reason to.
Keep it relevant, useful, and engaging. Build it around authenticity and it will sell itself. As far as SEO is concerned, be specific as much as possible with your keywords and the intent of the topic.
Be consistent and frequent with your content to keep the viewers engaged and for you to stay relevant in their lives.
In Summary
YouTube SEO is more than just keywords, it is a combination of various YouTube SEO tools put together for effective results. It’s about ranking your video search results to improve your relevance and your authority by understanding how the algorithm values session time as well as engagement and knowing how to leverage these two requirements through optimization.
Other factors of great importance include the delivery of quality and relevant content on a regular basis to build a relationship with your viewers and consequently build lasting engagement. Video SEO has improved due to the availability of measurable metrics that help keep track of the work in progress. And YouTube SEO basics are rather digestible. Plus, there are tools and features on YouTube to help. So, don’t stop trying until you master this art while keeping yourself updated with the ever-changing ranking algorithm of YouTube.
When starting your business or blog your hope is to grow and thrive and be known by your relevant target audience. As this happens, you capture some good attention locally and perhaps even globally. Your market suddenly requires key facts and any other relevant information about your business, and this is where a media kit comes into play.
This ultimate guide will offer you a knowledgeable step-by-step solution on how to make a media kit that’s effective and helps you gain more clients.
What’s a Media Kit?
Also known as a press kit, a media kit is a page, package, or folder with information about your brand or blog that you can send to journalists, investors, potential clients, or anyone requiring quick and relevant information about your business or blog.
The content of this package needs to be able to give a clear picture of who you are. With thousands of pitches thrown at journalists or potential clients each day, you have to compile the right facts, figures, and videos or images that will quickly but effectively tell your story.
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Well, are you running a business? Then the answer is yes. Here’s why, when setting up your business, one of the foundational building blocks you put in place should be a media kit.
A media kit is more than just a collection of key information about your products or services; it’s actually a gold mine where journalists, potential investors, or potential customers find factual information about your business.
Why Does Having a Media Kit Add Value to Your Business?
For Gaining Potential Clients
It’s easy to imagine that because it’s called a press kit or a media kit, it’s only meant for the media, but a well-compiled media kit does a great job attracting clients and even investors. Knowing your brand’s growth journey will give the clients insight into whether a collaboration with you may help their business.
A media kit is also essential in offering the potential client further insights about your past successful collaborations.
Another reason why they will be interested in your media kit is to find out the kind of awareness your brand has received, this helps them determine whether a potential collaboration will get any returns. Creating a smart template for a media kit will enable you to embody your brand’s tone and voice, this attention to detail may just be what you need to close a deal.
The key thing is to alter your media kit for bloggers if you’re a blogger by including your KPIs and so on or alter it for other types of businesses by inserting your earnings and other financial statistics, all truly depending on your business type.
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Having a media kit ready will help the journalists understand your brand voice quite easily. It will assist them to shape your story and guide them on the best questions to ask during an interview. And knowing how busy a journalist can be, they often prefer to connect to a story that already has a press kit; this means you’re available and ready for any opportunity that comes up. It then goes without saying that your content must always be up-to-date and in an easy-to-read format.
Remember to only give the information that you want the public to have. Don’t put in their classified content and then get in trouble when the information gets out to the public.
Here are some interesting media kit examples for inspiration:
So, having understood the worthiness of having a media kit, how then, do you create one?
Step One – What You Need to Understand
What Should Be Included in a Media Kit?
Usually, this will vary from business to business depending on a few factors. That said, you should note that a media kit is not an advertisement, so do make it vague, instead, you’re supposed to offer clear information, and clear facts about your business such as the products or services you offer, their prices, metrics, and so on. This also applies to the media kits for bloggers.
There are many media kit examples out there, but without the following key assets, they would be a waste of time.
These are:
i. Business/Blog Overview
Give brief background information about your business for instance:
· Launch date
· Current location with current address
· Mission statement
· Current status in terms of team members
In this overview, you can also include data that will help tell your business journey e.g. the number of customers you currently serve and statistics of where you started. This may seem like a lot of information but remember people reading it has very limited time, so you need to be succinct and present the key details.
If you’re building a media kit for bloggers you can mention your niche and a few key statistics like your social media following, page views, rank, and so on, just remember not to be too salesy.
Source: A Beautiful Mess
ii. Your Contact Details
Depending on the nature of your business, here you’re supposed to give a relevant contact that would be able to sit in an interview and properly represent the brand, for instance, a PR person or even the person behind the brand. If you’re a blogger and are creating your media kit blogger, just include your contacts in this section.
The key thing is that the contact you give must be current and useable, could be an email or phone number or both.
iii. Your Business, Brand, or Product Information
What’s your product about? Does it have an interesting backstory? Give a simplified but interesting description of what it’s all about. Include details (again, succinct) of what solutions your business is offering. If you offer many services, list the packages and what each entails.
It should mention the unique key features that make you stand out, what is your competitive advantage in your niche or field.
This information must be reviewed often to ensure it’s accurate at all times, especially where pricing is concerned.
These include each and every useful material that may come in handy for the journalists or the investor or whomever else it could be for.
These resources are what build a compelling story about your brand. They include:
Company Logos: Different websites have various requirements, therefore have variations of your logo; you can for instance have one that offers transparent or shapes options in order to make the work of the users of your media kit easier. What you’re looking for here is to ensure that they use your logo exactly as it is without having to resize or possibly alter it.
Publications and Previous Press Mentions: If you’ve been featured in the media before, include it in this section. Write the title of the post, the author, the publication, and a link.
Photos and Video Assets: Use only high-resolution pictures of your product or services. Ensure you have the legal ground to use these images, especially if they’re not originally yours. Your video footage too must be of the best quality. Ensure that you label each picture as well as the footage separately and very clearly, with your brand name rather than some random camera numbering.
v. Other Components
Depending on your brand, there could be other items that may work well in your media kit. These could be:
Testimonials – Your happy customers or clients can boost your image; pick the best testimonials and include them in this section.
Awards – This especially works very well in the media kit for bloggers, a blogging award is definitely something to be proud of, include it there.
An Annual Report- Your business may be the kind that requires annual reports for measurement purposes, attach the latest reports for ease of reference.
Product Samples – You may want to let the users of your media kit to sample some of your products, if it’s for journalists, well and good, if it’s for your potential clients then this is a great way to pick up a conversation.
Are There Specific Tools You Can Use to Create a Media Kit?
Having gathered all you need for the media kit, how do you then put it together? If you know your way around Adobe Photoshop like a pro and are able to give professional results, then you’re good to go, however, there’s a better tool you can rely on and that’s Canva.
Canva is a graphic design tool website that offers a collection of the best curated high-quality templates all for free! With over 50k high-quality templates to choose from, you’re truly spoilt for choice.
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You Have Created Your Media Kit. Now What?
a. Having learned how to make a media kit, your next step will be to put together a media list containing the contact details for media agencies within your niche. Here you can go for both traditional and non-traditional media houses. Generally what you need to do is to identify the most relevant media outlets (meaning they have your desired audience) and a contact person, who is likely to feature your content.
· Traditional Media Houses: These are typically TV stations, newspapers, or radio stations. You may start with your local houses as you eventually consider spreading out geographically.
· Non – Traditional Media Houses: This definitely includes social media as well as blogs. These are today considered more effective in spreading the word compared to traditional media sources. Thanks to Google, you can easily find the most relevant brands to work with, within your niche and the local area. This is however subject to your product or service as well as your target audience.
b. The second step will be to do some research on submission guidelines or requirements for every specific media outlet you listed on one above. You can go through their websites’ submission pages to see their requirements. Usually, such requirements may include something like the type of content they’re interested in and the format they prefer.
c. When this is done, you can then send it to these media agencies, media kit for bloggers can also be sent to brands you would like to collaborate with; as a kind of a pitch, this kind of introduction presented in such a professional manner creates an outstanding first impression, and this is something you want.
d. Finally the last step will be to put it up on your blog or website; you will achieve better results when you insert a link on your navigation bar to help interested parties find it easily rather than have to dig through your website or blog.
This tutorial for the media kit would not be complete if it didn’t include how to finally submit it. So, here is ideally how your email should be conceived:
1. Subject header: This will make or break all your efforts, by all means, avoid saying “media kit” at this level, instead use a phrase like “Important details about the grand launch of xyz on 1st January 2023”
2. Salutations: Remember you gathered the contact person and his/her details; this is where those come into play. Greet them by addressing them by their name.
3. The first paragraph: Introduce (or re-introduce yourself if you’ve met before) and introduce your business as well, for instance; “My name is Tom, and I work for Swan Marketing Agency”.
4. Body paragraph: Here you explain the purpose of your email without beating about the bush. E.g. “I’m writing to inform you about the launch of our agency that is scheduled for xx dates, I’ve attached a media kit with further details”.
5. The third paragraph: This will be your call to action. Request the journalist or client to take some action, e.g. “Would you consider doing a feature about this on your business section?” or “Would you welcome a collaboration on a project like x?”
6. Closing: Thank them and remain available for further details. Leave your phone number as well in case they need to reach you.
Are There Any Don’ts You Should Be Aware of?
Yes, don’t lie or misrepresent yourself or your brand by giving false information. Let your statistics be honest about who you are, this is going to be the basis of what will be expected from you.
Finally
The most effective media kit examples must contain all that has been included in this guide. You must act on your strengths by showcasing your best work. You must give an honest and appealing summary of what your blog or brand is all about, it’s also good to share information on whom you’ve previously collaborated with.
You must share your key statistics and KPIs as well as high-quality images and footage of your work; this will be reflected by the aesthetics of your media kit, and generally of your business as a whole.
Take advantage of existing free templates for a media kit or create your own and go make some great impact.
As 2023 gains momentum, new technologies are coming out while existing ones are getting smarter. The targeted customers are not being left behind either; they’re getting savvier even as they get bombarded with more marketing each day. And as these changes continue, the goal of a digital marketing strategy framework remains the same, to continue gaining and keeping the audience’s attention.
It’s for these reasons that businesses are considering new competitive advantages and ways to keep the audience connected by strengthening their digital marketing campaign efforts. This not only involves improved ways of creating ads but now also involves creating an impact on the way people buy products, by reaching where your consumers are, having in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean a physical place.
So, What’s a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a sequence of activities aimed at supporting your company’s goals through carefully selected relevant marketing channels. These activities are guided by the fact that nowadays people trust other consumers more than they trust advertised brands, they prefer buying items that are not necessarily displayed as products. So, companies must strategize new ways of making people feel like they need their products.
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Research conducted by ODM Group found that over 70% of consumers consult social media before making a purchase, in order to get reviews of what others are saying. It’s no longer just about ads.
According to a Smart Insights research “Managing Digital marketing research report,” no less than 45% of companies have no coherent, detailed planned digital marketing strategy to respond to these new challenges.
Why Is It Compulsory to Have a Digital Marketing Strategy Framework?
In order to remain relevant, you must have a clear understanding of what you’re doing and where this positions you in terms of achieving your goals. It also gives you a picture of what you require to do next.
Here are a few reasons why you should put in place a digital marketing strategy right away:
a. It gives you a sense of direction and focus
You need a proper strategy to achieve your goals. It guides you to know whether you’re headed in the right direction and whether you’re executing your goals in a timely manner.
b. You get to understand your customers better
You’re able to track your customers’ behavior and sentiments by measuring all your qualitative and quantitative data. This allows you to address all their pain points while allowing you to know them better, eventually; you can discover insights that allow you to make better decisions.
c. You stand out from the crowd
You gain better online standing compared to your competition when you differentiate yourself. How do you do this? Encouraging interaction with both your new visitors and returning customers that keeps them interested guarantees more click-through rates.
d. Better budget planning
You may have all the resources you require, but without proper planning, you may fail flat. A digital marketing strategy framework enables you to outline all your activities along with the required or available budgets. It ensures each vision is aligned with each department, offering clarity and focus. This way, you can develop the governance needed to pilot new technologies, share important data across the organization and manage all other processes.
e. Continuous optimization
A well-outlined digital marketing strategy gives your brand a sense of direction through its constant optimization and therefore creates a continuous environment for improvement. It’s critical to constantly track the new efforts you’re implementing.
f. You win on ROI
As said above, when you’re able to measure each of your digital marketing actions, you’re guaranteed cost-effectiveness. This means you can create the possibility to boost other digital marketing operations. When done correctly, you will without doubt obtain your ROI.
Challenges in Creating a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy Framework
i. Defining Success
It may be difficult to know if your brand’s digital marketing strategies are working. So, what’s the solution to this? First, take time to identify and determine your goals then secondly identify your key performance indicators that will drive these goals.
Establishing these two factors before starting the day-to-day activities of implementing the strategies will be essential in defining your success.
ii. Tight Budget and Resources
You may experience financial scale back and may be required to work with a very small budget. What most companies fail to understand is that marketing is a means of profit for an organization. So, what you may do in this regard is find creative ways to use what you have.
Digital marketing achieves more when you’re focused on adding value to your customers, by offering them solutions to their problems. Create strategic content that will offer these solutions to them while positioning you at the top of search engines and social media trending topics.
Resources here may mean manpower or staff to come up with a strategy. In this case, you can incorporate influencers to boost the credibility of your already existing content.
This way you’ll earn trust and capture the attention at a budget.
iii. Time
If you haven’t figured out a way to add more hours into your 24-hour day, don’t worry, no one has. Struggling to create enough time and resources to feed into your marketing activities is a common problem for most marketers.
One solution for this is finding someone else to run this entire project for you if budget is not one of your problems. The outsourced party must be very well-versed in your brand and your goals. On the other hand, if outsourcing is not tenable, then you may have to break down your targets into stages of smaller responsibilities and allocate each task a specific achievable time. This will definitely help.
iv. Innovation
Every other day, brands come up with new excellent ideas that seem to create a buzz all over the internet. If you’re not in this group you can get quite frustrated and may feel stuck. In such a situation, search for your own inspiration by thinking of all ideas and writing them down, even the ones that feel outside the norm, and listing them all.
Sometimes the crazy ideas are the ones that turn out to be the most effective. Be different, but with a clear message of what you want your customers to know.
So, while you may not be able to be in control of each and every situation that you may encounter, it’s important to know challenges will come, and watching for them as you progress with your strategy is the best approach.
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Steps to Drafting a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy Framework
1. Identify Your Buyer Personas
The very first step should be to get a solid understanding of who your ideal customer is. This is very important because it will direct you on which marketing platforms you can find them on, how they interact, and their expectations from you as a brand.
Through conducting interviews, research, and surveys from your target audience as well as prospects, you can get real data that will enable you to create your buyer personas.
The typical type of information that you should collect will largely vary depending on your business. However, here is a couple of basic information that you will need:
The demographic information such as location, age, and income of your customers or prospective customers.
Qualitative or psychographic information such as the customers’ objectives that they hope to achieve, their hobbies and interests, and the challenges they face.
The digital sales funnel involves several different steps that buyers move through before they finally get to the purchase stage. And because businesses are different, these stages may vary, that said here are the general steps that they may move through:
Discovery – This is when they hear about your brand and product for the first time.
Consideration/Exploration – The potential customer is looking into your product to learn more about it and possibly check out the market to see similar products.
Purchase – They are convinced and do make the purchase now.
Loyalty/Brand Advocacy – Satisfied, they become loyal and may recommend your brand to others.
What you must understand about the digital funnel is that the customers at each level don’t respond the same way. The one at the discovery stage will respond differently from the one at the purchase or loyalty stage. This means that your digital marketing strategy needs to be tailored in such a way that it will cater to customers individually at each level.
3. Set Your Objectives
It’s always difficult to chart a course if you haven’t chosen your destination, having objectives is only half the battle, yet very important. You should be able to define your strategy objectives, which should be pegged to your brand’s mission and overall goal.
You will need to measure your key performance indicators by identifying the figures you plan to achieve. The best approach here is to look at your previous digital marketing targets and achievements; you can base your current KPIs on these previous efforts to guide you on realistic targets.
4. Establish Your Digital Avenues
What avenues are you currently using? Do you dispose of your own media or do you currently pay for it? It’s important to have in perspective your current and possible future avenues for your digital marketing.
Owned media means that you own your digital assets (content stored digitally in the form of images, videos, spreadsheets, etc.) either on your website, blog content, social media profiles, or other such platforms.
Paid media on the other hand means just that. You have to pay for your visibility through various types of channels such as Google AdWords, Facebook ads, native advertising, or paid social media posts.
Earned media refers to visibility or exposure you have earned. It could come through customer reviews from successful deliveries, content you may have shared on other websites through guest posting or backlinks, or social media shares among other channels.
Depending on your business, it’s possible to successfully incorporate all the above in your digital marketing strategy framework. This is also a good time to perform an audit of your current digital channels and decide whether you will outsource specific sections of your digital marketing campaign and whether you’ll have to have a budget to hire manpower.
5. Asses Your Budget, Realistically
Having established your objectives, personas, and avenues aren’t going to take you anywhere until you ascertain your budget. This is what is actually going to guide your marketing strategy plan because it will dictate how much you are going to allocate to what.
You can look at your previous data to see what worked before and consider allocating more to it, at the same time if certain elements of your current strategy are not performing as anticipated, you can re-invest the allocated budgets to the elements that are performing well.
This is not meant to restrict you though, simply because whichever way you choose to look at it, digital marketing will always be cheaper than the old conventional ways. This means your kick-ass content can gain much more for you if distributed in a smart and strategic manner.
6. Execute and Launch Your Digital Marketing Plan
Implementation of your strategy may take days or even weeks to properly launch. You must ensure that each of your digital assets goes live at the most appropriate time in regard to your target audience’s peak time, the platform you’re using, and the mode (image, video, etc.)
Be keen and realistic about the time needed to set up the whole campaign launch and about the mechanism you’ll need to have in place to deal with the calls, emails, or inquiries that may come up as a result of the campaign.
During this time, get as much feedback as possible from your new and existing customers, incorporating surveys in your digital assets can also contribute largely to measuring the effectiveness of your campaign.
7. Measure Using Data from Analytics, Identify Any Loop Holes
How to do digital marketing successfully goes beyond launching, you need to follow that with constant measures to check for any weak links as well as see how successful it is rolling out. This is done through the data from web analytics.
Many good digital marketing strategy examples that exist today have gone through tens of small changes and optimizations that have contributed to their success. Measure the evolution of your campaign by having a dedicated and constant evaluation of your data and adjusting the plan where necessary. Google Analytics comes in very handy, it can show you how your customer leads are interacting with your campaign efforts and how that is translating into your ultimate goal.
Bonus Tips
In order to be more effective in your campaign, here are a few bonus tips that you should include in your strategy to really capture your audience’s interest:
a. Tell stories
Sharing experiences or real-life scenarios that are interesting, extraordinary, or emotionally captivating is a great way to create engagement with your customers, the best example of this is Nike. Therefore when creating your digital marketing strategy framework, incorporate empowering stories that will boost your brand’s emotional connection with your audience.
b. Leverage on Your Reviews
A survey conducted by BrightLocal in 2018 showed that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. This tells you how important a role, reviews can play. You should therefore establish a channel for reviews on your social media platforms or blogs, this authenticity is what consumers are constantly looking for. And it explains why influencers are quite popular right now.
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Quick Tips on the Digital Marketing Trends That Will Matter in 2023
For good measure, here are the main trends to look out for as you prepare your B2C or B2B digital marketing strategy.
Live Videos Refined More for SEO
As search engines are constantly updating to ensure that user-friendly sites are being shown to users first, businesses will have to adopt the ever-changing algorithms to keep rankings high. According to a survey, 72% of businesses say that videos have increased their conversion rates. It’s therefore obvious that businesses will be more focused on optimizing video content to boost SEO rankings. This will include optimizing keywords on video titles, descriptions, and URLs’. Therefore optimize your videos accordingly.
With that said, there is still something greater than video content marketing, and that is live video. If you were a customer, what would you yearn to experience from your brand? Well here is where behind-the-scenes tours of your company come to play. Other live video ideas include product demos, live product releases, Q&As, etc.
There are several platforms you can use for live videos including Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram Live, or Periscope.
Social Media Will Get More Conversational
It’s 2023, and by now you must have noticed that social media posts are no longer one-way conversations. This is the best place for brands to engage with their audience and find out what their needs are. Social media will help your brand know what type of content is performing best and this will only work if you develop a personal relationship with the audience. How can you achieve this?
By answering all their questions, creating relevant content that they can respond to, and responding to their queries within 24 hours. This will boost brand awareness and strengthen loyalty.
Artificial Intelligence
Before you start thinking about robots, here is a brief explanation of how AI can boost your digital marketing strategy. Consider a bunch of computers that can quickly analyze your data to get a better understanding of your customers’ behaviors and patterns.
This is how AI can help you. It can assist you in finding prospects that have the same characteristics as your existing customers while giving you real-time Intel on relevant conversations going on about your brand.
Finally, after it’s all said and done, the role of digital marketing is to help you bring more and better clients to like and use your products. Not once, but repeatedly. Understanding the steps to build a great digital marketing strategy includes being prepared for any possible challenges and forging ways to work around them.
You must make informed decisions based on your past results to be able to identify the best possible route to take. Keep measuring your efforts to know what’s working and change what’s not.
This is the content consumer era. We are all consuming more and more content, in various forms. Researches confirm that US adults consume about 10h of media content daily and millennials can reach 18h a day consuming content. Hence, the need for high-quality, engaging content rises sharply. Content creators are striving to conceive helpful, attention-grabbing, and delightful pieces. And, of course, all content creators dream of producing viral content.
But finally, what is viral content?
Is there a recipe or a procedure that can guarantee virality?
Well, not quite.
I subscribe to Lori Taylor’s opinion “Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanities.” We can make all the efforts to influence and help a piece of content go viral, but we, the writers, cannot control it. It’s the public decision, whether they will share it or not. Whether they will make it viral or not.
We can just prepare the premises and push somehow a piece of content to become viral, but guaranteeing virality is beyond our powers. Anyway, we can certainly try.
Let’s dive in and decode the share-worthy content features.
First, let’s depict what viral means. Millions of shares, hundreds of thousands?
It highly depends on your industry and niche. You cannot expect to have share scores like the Kardashians or like large interest niches as weight loss if you are in a highly specialized niche such as mechanical engineering.
So, chill out and breathe!
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At first glance, a viral content definition is having millions of views or shares.
Thus, depending on niche and industry the variation is quite large.
The global viral refers to millions of shares. In this category, viral content examples are the most famous songs or books. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is such an example. Celine Dion’s “My heart will go on” or more recently Adele’s “Hello”.
The niche-specific viral is more mundane and relates to a much smaller, specific niche. In general, several hundred shares mean viral in this context.
Most probably you find yourself acting in a niche, so it doesn’t make sense to report to a global audience, but to a targeted one.
Hence the purpose of becoming viral is to obtain more than 500-700 shares for your niched blogs, articles, etc. And that’s the purpose of this article.
So, how do you achieve that?
Keep reading.
Now, that we have established the definition of viral content in your case, let’ ‘s fix the other details:
Who Are the Persons That Should Share Your Content?
Obviously, your target audience and buyer personas. That’s indeed your first goal.
In the algorithm of content sharing besides your target audience, a primary role will be played by influencers in your niche.
Besides starting to promote your content from the very first moment, counting on influencers’ help can offer your content a significant boost.
As you probably know, great content is 20% creation and 80% promotion, so virality relies heavily on promotion. Don’t be passive, spread the word yourself from the beginning and get help!
To get the attention and the benevolence of influencers your need to offer them a strong reason to share your content, except great quality content.
The equation of the viral content starts with a solid base – excellent quality combined with emotional triggers. Emotions are the driving factor that makes a piece of content likable and shareable.
So, infuse your content with emotions, if possible.
Consider executing some of the following elements, if not all of them, if you want to insure your content has the premises to go viral:
Chase for Viral Topics
To improve your chances of virality, do your homework and search for trending topics at the moment you are creating your content.
BuzzSumo is usually a first stop to find trending topics and the engagement they are receiving. Insert keywords for your niche and check up on results.
You can start from these ideas and create your own potentially viral content.
Another tool that can guide you in finding topics that have high virality potential is Google Trends. It also helps you discover supplementary insights like which keywords related to your niche are trending and shows you related terms to support idea generation.
For viral topics, you can also check Reddit since upvotes of the community can show trending topics that may become viral. Verify subreddits of your niche, if there are, and see which subjects get votes.
Even if actual trending topics do not relate to your niche, you can search for creative ways to leverage their popularity. Think of business articles published to teach some tricks based on popular TV shows.
Take Into Consideration Content Types That Proved to Be Successful – Viral Content
Among successful content types, we count how-tos, lists, infographics, comparisons, case studies, interviews, and reviews.
Using a popular content type is just a detail, not a guarantee of success. What will go a long way to a viral post is approaching a subject from a unique angle, a different point of view, and infusing relevant supplementary information. The differentiation element in an extremely crowded blogosphere is a must.
Even if it is proved with numbers that long-format content pieces perform better it is not, the length of the format that will make a piece of content stand out, it’s the outcome. It’s the value delivered, extra insights, better tips, and different approach that generates engagement.
And engagement is the trigger of virality and activates shares, likes, links, traffic, and revenue.
Write Valuable Content That Teaches
Content pieces that passed the time test, and that got tons of views, shares, and likes are those that provide intrinsic value to the reader.
Most of the time they are comprehensive, long articles that deliver a sort of knowledge to the reader and teach him something. How-to, tutorials, and DIY articles, that the reader finds useful for his purposes.
Find Gaps, Improve and Go Viral with Your Content
Let’s be honest, no matter what topic you want to write about is already fully covered by other dozens or even hundreds of similar posts. Trying to find virgin territories to explore is clearly a dead end.
Ok, and now what?
The only solution is to come up with a different point of view and create more comprehensive content or an upgraded type of content that’s more attractive to outperform existing sources.
Backlinko’s founder Brian Dean used such an approach by creating the Skyscraper method. This technique means identifying viral content in your niche, conceiving a better version, and outreaching sites that were linked to other less complete articles to backlink to your new, more comprehensive article.
Most of the time people are looking for solutions to their current problems, and offering solutions gets their attention. So, offer solutions to your buyer persona’s problems. Provide relevant solutions and you will become relevant in your audiences’ eyes.
Search and find out which are the struggles of your audience. They are your opportunity to create great content that is useful and in demand.
Help your readers realize that you were just like them, you are one of them, you passed through the same problems and you succeeded to overcome them. You provide proven solutions from your own experience.
Show empathy for your audience and share your knowledge with those that are still struggling with those types of issues.
Viral Content – The Power Is in the Story
Stories are an integral part of our lives, as Jonathan Gottschall said: “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories”.
Since humanity is literally in love with storytelling, use it in your content. Convey a story, from a nagging issue to a reliable solution. Take readers on a journey, use substantial examples, and create anticipation to make them enjoy your content.
Use your personal stories and struggles to differentiate yourself. Be authentic and you will resonate better with your audience.
Jonah Berger, after studying 7000 articles in The Wall Street Journal, concluded that the leading driver of viral content is emotions. It’s not the topics that impact virality, but the extreme emotions.
Articles that provoked anger were shared more than articles that provoked sadness. Articles that generated astonishment received more shares than those generating contentment.
When crafting content, take into consideration infusing extreme emotions, if applicable. The above-mentioned article of Jon Morrow telling his story is such an example. A guy suffered a terrible accident, he is paralyzed and tied in a wheelchair and succeeds to be one of the best bloggers in the world. Wow!
Even if your niche is not exactly an emotional one, you can get creative and invent some emotional activities, like the blend manufacturer Blendtec did with blending a human skeleton. And it generated millions of views on YouTube. Well done!
Use the Tone of a Personal Conversation
Your interlocutor, while writing an article, is your ideal buyer persona. Even if we are speaking about visitors, readers, and audiences, our target is in fact our ideal customer.
Strive to conceive your writing as a personal conversation, a one-to-one discussion with your ideal buyer persona. It’s the best way to connect with your reader if you speak directly to him and relate to his particular problems and struggles.
Hence, while crafting your content, target one persona and one problem in your “virtual conversation”.
Most of us are visual creatures and visual learners, that’s no secret. People remember up to 65% of the visual content they consumed, after three days. 41,5% of marketers sustain infographics and original designs perform best.
In conclusion, using high-quality imagery and original visuals in your content is an absolute must.
Anyway, you may choose to use infographics or not. The idea is you have to make efforts and conceive top-quality photos and imagery for your content. Not all of us are experts in photography, so read tutorials and use editing software like Photoshop, Canva, LightRoom, or PicMonkey to improve image quality.
Also, there are thousands of options proposing high-quality stock images, free and paid, you just have to pick. Pixabay, Unsplash, Shutterstock, or small stylish collections like BizStyledStock.
Indeed, you create content for your audience, not for search engines. But, in order for your audience to find your content, a search engine will be used. Thus, you have to ensure your content is search-engine friendly.
A key ingredient that cannot be missed, if you want your post to go viral is optimization. Follow the rules of current SEO best practices.
Make sure your keywords are placed in your title, in the URL, in the first 100 words of the post, and in other places inside the post, including synonyms.
The headline makes and brakes the virality of a piece of content. I doubt I am wrong in saying that. It’s the foundation that plays in your favor or against you. Pay great attention to your title for shareability and virality. Make it self-explanatory and attention-grabbing and as interesting as you can. Test your title with a tool like CoSchedule Analyzer to help you improve the enticement of your title.
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Format for Readability
With everyone being extremely busy nowadays, time is a rare resource, so make your content as easy as possible to digest.
Take care with formatting, font type, size, content spacing, and use small paragraphs. Include photos, screenshots, and images to split large blocks of text, bullets, and lists. Stick to a common language and simple phrase syntax.
Pay attention to the colours you choose in order to maintain text readability, and use contrasting colours to avoid difficulties while reading.
Create Content Upgrades
To give your content a supplementary boost towards virality offer your readers content upgrades. Content upgrades are those “extras” offered to visitors that provide supplementary value and can be downloaded instantly.
Content upgrades are great “hooks” that make your post shareable and visitors return.
Of course, your upgrade should be related to your topic and might take the form of a checklist, cheatsheet, workbook, ebook, course, template, case study, guide, worksheet, etc.
Content upgrades are important not only because of the added value they provide but because they give you a hand with building your list of subscribers.
Make Sharing a Breeze
Having many other persons sharing your content is a huge step to virality. To help this happen you should have social buttons displayed in visible places to encourage readers to click on them.
There are tens of apps and plug-ins available to accomplish this job. Test and use the one you find most appropriate.
I think Bloom is a great option (it is responsible for the sidebar sharing buttons you can observe on your left). TweetDis can add an extra to your site helping you to convert interesting phrases into tweets.
Viral Content Tips – Promote Aggressively
Remember the first rule of success is promotion. Creating great content is just 20% of the work, the rest is spreading the word. Sharing your content on social media, with your email list, and attracting influencers to promote you, are the key ingredients.
Social Media is a powerful pillar of your promotion strategy and will have a heavy impact on helping your content go viral. Identify the social media networks where your audience hangs out and use them intensively: Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.
Be consistent and share your posts continuously, sharing them just once and hoping for the best will simply not work. Use social media management tools to schedule your social media posts and minimize the time spent on this kind of task.
Applications like Broadbooster, Tailwind (for Pinterest), Later (Instagram) and Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial (various channels) will make social media sharing and publishing a breeze.
To make your posts viral on social channels make sure your related Pinterest pins respect the best practices for Pinterest, Twitter tweets also, Instagram posts likewise, etc.
Encourage Influencers to Share Your Content
You write content for your ideal buyer persona, but also for influencers. And more than sure you are already doing this, whether you are aware of it or not.
You include outbound links in your content, you incorporate other resources and influencers’ content in your posts. So, you have already involved influencers in this process.
In general, influencers like their multipliers and people that share their content, and sometimes they may return the favor. And that’s how you gain huge exposure.
To help your content go viral you must network with influencers and create connections. Connect with them on social media, follow them, share their masterpieces, comment on their posts, backlink to their content, and give them credit for their valuable advice.
Write posts where you explain how successful your actions were while using influencers’ strategies, tips, and tricks. Interview your favorite influencers or make round-ups with experts on certain topics of interest.
For supplementary insights on how to make influencers share your content check “How to Find Influencers Who Already Want to Share and Link to Your Content“
Now you have the draft to help you craft viral content and your skills will improve with practice.
Keep practising and testing new things! Be inventive and innovative if possible.
Mastering virality and viral content is an art, sometimes works better, and sometimes it simply doesn’t work at all. But do not renounce!
Social Media Marketing is not nice to have anymore, it’s an absolute must in any marketing strategy and there is no company in this world that can afford to ignore it. Knowing the best social media marketing tips for small businesses and best practices that work at this very moment is a must.
We all have personal accounts on social media networks, nowadays if you don’t have such an account you do not exist, the same is valid for companies, they should have a social media presence. This is not just a transitory tendency, social media has lately become a valuable marketing tool and is here to stay.
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As Social Media Examiner in its Industry Report for 2018 highlights: 87% of marketers consider that social media helped them grow their exposure, 78% saw a rise in their traffic, and 53 % sustain their sales were improvedthrough social media marketing activities.
Taking advantage of social media to grow a business is not exactly the easiest of tasks, but more and more companies are doing it, and some even brilliantly. If you are planning to manage social media marketing for your clients or for your own company, here is a list of important tips you need to be acknowledged of and these will guide you toward the next level:
1. Your Marketing Strategy Should Include a Social Media Strategy
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Having a business strategy, a marketing strategy, and furthermore, a social media strategy seems to be still an alien concept for some entrepreneurs and business-involved persons. It happens more often than expected to ask a business owner “Do you have a marketing strategy?” and receive an answer like “Yes, of course, it is in my head, I just have to put it together…”. Uh, splendid, just that there is some news… having a sort of idea about the strategy in “your head” does not qualify as a strategy. Full stop! End of discussion!
The importance of a clearly written marketing strategy is not the subject of this article, but since we have to start from the foundation, this is the starting point: a coherent marketing strategy that includes the social media strategy, with SMART goals and media channels to be considered.
Use social media statistics to tailor your social media strategy according to your business needs. Select and target the channels where your audience is present and just those that have the best ROI for you. Concentrate your efforts on 3-4 channels and do it consistently, don’t try to be present on each and every social media network as there are great chances of being counterproductive.
2. Audit Your Social Media Presence
Before updating your strategy yearly, an audit of the social media presence is needed. Take the effort to investigate how your profiles are standing according to the latest social media best practices. Research your industry performers and verify their online social presence and see what performing elements they use.
Social Media Audit is the foundation of a successful strategy so, don’t skip it.
3. Draw a Strategy and an Implementation Plan for Each Social Media Channel
Maybe continuously emphasizing the importance of strategy and plan seems useless to you, but the reality is that each business needs to know what are its objectives and how its limited resources are to be used in order to generate the best results. A plan and strategy are useful as they indicate the steps and actions to be executed, and they give you direction.
It’s not an option to blindly immerse yourself into the social media game, just to find yourself busy, without objectives and return on investment activities. You should be able to answer questions like why your business uses social media (just because everyone does is not the answer). Why is your business present on a certain channel like Facebook or Pinterest? Why did you choose Pinterest or Facebook? What type of content do you want to publish? How often? The strategy offers answers to these questions.
Having a strategy, implementation plan, and calendars will ease the tasks of execution and increase your chances of reaching your goals faster and cheaper.
4. Be Present on the Social Networks Where Your Audience Is
Being present on already famous social networks is not an issue anymore. You just need to adjust your presence in the function of your audience and be present where she is present. If your audience moves on new, less-known networks you should consider installing your presence there also.
Give a chance to less-known social networks like Snapchat, Medium, etc. since and when they fit your goals and those of your audience.
5. Optimize Your Social Media Accounts and Posts
Like all your online presence, your social media accounts and posts should be optimized, as their algorithms are almost similar to that of search engines.
For your social media posts use common keywords and relevant words that your audience use in her searches related to your niche. This tactic will make your content more searchable and easier to find. Do yourself a favor and facilitate the task of search engines. This social media marketing tip is worth its weight in gold, so don’t ignore it.
6. On the Social Media Channels You Choose, Have a Bold Presence, Post Consistently
“Work hard, work smart and work consistently” is a dictum that applies greatly to social media marketing. Sending a Pin or a Tweet once in a while, equals zero, if you want results, traffic increased, and expanding the number of followers, likes, shares, etc. you have to post several times a day and be consequent. Being constantly in front of your audience is a must, otherwise, you will likely lose her attention.
This is a very strong social media marketing tip for small businesses even if it sounds somewhat daunting.
7. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Tailor Your Social Media Posts for Your Buyer Personas
Your audience is composed of multiple segments and thus buyer personas. Consequently, you should create content for each of your buyer personas. If you have consultants, bloggers, and small and medium enterprises as your clients, it’s pretty obvious they will have different interests and will engage with different content.
A good tactic to raise engagement is to filter your social media audience function of demographics, interests, and domain of activity, and deliver targeted posts. For example, a post like “How to double your consultancy rate in two months” would be out of place on the blog of a start-up that sells yoga mats on Amazon.
8. Post and Share Only Top-Quality Content
Even if quantity is required on social media, under the form of consistency, the quality of the shared material is even more important and this is among the social media marketing tips to remember. Your audience will share, tweet, pin, etc. only content that appeals to her, and that she considers relevant and interesting. The audience will appreciate primarily just the content that has intrinsic value, from her own point of view.
Publish only the content that provides the best value you can offer, not everything you produce. Share valuable content published by influencers and reputable sources in your industry, not just your own.
9. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Answer, Engage and Interact with Your Audience
It’s simply not enough to share links all day long on social media. As the name states, you have to be social and socialize and interact regularly with other users. It’s a chance to literally speak with your clients and get insights of which are their problems with your products/services and how to solve them. Get in conversations, reply to other posts, link to other posts, answer questions, invite your audience to interact, and encourage a two ways communication.
That’s the much-preached engagement – provoke reactions and respond, ask for feedback and opinions.
The old diction “an image makes more than 1000 words” is more valid than ever and particularly for social media. Visual content statistics come to support the idea that visual content is gaining momentum and is considered far more entertaining. 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, with video claiming 63%. Also, Cisco sustains that by 2021, 82% of global traffic will be referred by video content.
That visuals and images are extremely powerful in social media there is no doubt, Pinterest, a visual search engine is obvious evidence. Instagram and Pinterest generate the highest rate of engagement, primarily thanks to visual content.
The explosion of high-quality visuals is due to technology and user-friendly applications like Canva, Adobe Spark, Pixlr, or PicMonkey. A collection of graphic apps that can support your social media design efforts can be consulted in this blog.
11. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Test Social Media Headlines
Split testing or A/B testing is the norm for sales pages, landing pages, and even content headlines. In social media, it is also important, because headlines are the first trigger to capture your audience’s attention. Schedule for publishing the same piece of content with different headlines and see which title generates more response.
If your content doesn’t get enough attention in general, there are two obvious reasons either the headline is not catchy enough, or the content is not high quality enough. The first to investigate and test is the headline.
Social Media Management Tools. Source: SproutSocial
Publishing and interacting on social media channels can be a great resource consumer in terms of time and effort. Entering on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, several times a day to publish content for one or more accounts takes time and it’s not very productive.
To improve efficiency, there are two options either outsourcing social media marketing to a specialized company or implementing a social media management tool. For example, scheduling your posts on Instagram and on Pinterest in advance is a great time saver.
Outsourcing might be a solution when you want to focus on your core business and don’t have the capabilities to manage social media marketing internally. Like any option, it has its pros and cons but depends on how this fits the reality of your company.
The second option refers to using a software application to manage your social media channels. These days there are several applications that promise to make your social media marketing a breeze. Meaning they have capabilities like publishing simultaneously content on multiple platforms, scheduling publishing in advance, providing analytics, present the feed in one dashboard.
Since your purpose is to attract as many interested followers as you can, a good tactic is to start following persons that are interested in topics related to your niche. Filter and follow users that are involved in conversations about your industry, and use often related keywords or hashtags. Encourage them through interaction to join your audience.
14. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Build Relationships with Influencers
When you are just starting up a company, acquiring the initial followers is the most difficult, but every company started somewhere. And, of course, competing with already established brands with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers seems a lost battle and overwhelming at least.
But, with step-by-step actions, each goal can be accomplished. A sort of shortcut can be a partnership with industry influencers if you can convince them to partner with you. This is a proven method that can catapult your following from zero to thousands in a couple of days, but since and when you can convince influencers to support you?
Influencers already have a large number of followers and once they “warrant” or recommend you, you will get in front of their audiences, which will be more likely to trust and follow you also.
Developing a relationship with influencers takes time and effort, but is very helpful. You can first follow the influencer, share his content, then approach directly with some piece of content that you think his audience will find useful.
15. Take Advantage of Contests
When you are a new brand, besides contacting influencers as indicated above to grow your social media following, another successful tactic is to organize contests. This is a pleasant way to encourage users to interact with your brand.
Instagram and Twitter are among the social networks that encourage contests, and thus engagement. You can set up a voting contest – ask opinions about a piece of content, image, or video; a photo contest – invite users to send some sort of photo related to your niche; a caption contest; like to win; sweepstakes.
Before organizing a social media contest, take a look at the most successful contests organized by renowned brands and study the available tips.
16. Increase Your Authority by Curating Content
Promoting uniquely your content is not exactly the best tactic to attract your audience. In order to become an authority, a go-to resource, you need to share and forward various quality content, from trustful sources that may interest your audience.
To help you streamline the content-curating task, some interesting curating tools are available. Take advantage of their facilities and impress your audience.
17. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Study Social Media Analytics and Measure Your Success
One of the greatest advantages that came with digital marketing is analytics and the possibility to measure the effective results of your actions. Since social media is an important pillar of your marketing strategy, measuring the results that social media in general, and each channel in particular generates, is compulsory.
It’s a no-brainer that if 80% of your traffic, for example, comes from Pinterest and just 10% from Facebook, you should concentrate your effort on Pinterest, not on Facebook. But you have to be acquainted with this information. So, study your social media analytics and monitor them periodically: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly to observe progress.
18. Pick Carefully the Corresponding Metrics for Your Social Media ROI
There are quite many metrics you need to measure for all your social media channels, but pay attention to consider particularly those that are relevant to your goals and ROI. If your goal is to increase the number of leads you get from social networks to your site, the number of likes your company has is not exactly significant.
19. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Consider Social Media Advertising, If It Serves Your Objectives
If you plan to boost your traffic rapidly and have a budget for that, you can opt for social media advertising. Be aware that this boost will be sustained as long as the ads campaign is active, not more. Since social media networks are also very interested in paid advertising, they privilege their paying clients and the organic visibility will be reduced.
Anyway, the costs for social media advertising are lower than other media buying or Google AdWords and thus affordable for small and medium enterprises.
A real advantage of social media advertising is the possibility to target in detail your audience upon different criteria like demographics, core interests, geolocation, etc. Social media advertising is a powerful tool that most companies should use but is also true that implementation plays a huge role and can easily turn into a loss, if not properly approached.
Each social network has its own groups and communities like Twitter Chats, Facebook Groups, or LinkedIn Groups. Join the groups related to your industry and niche and participate actively. It’s a valuable opportunity to get in contact with influencers and companies from your domain. And you can profit from establishing yourself as an authority in your area.
21. Offer a Strong Motive to Be Followed on Social Media Channels
There is a myriad of options on media channels from which to choose. So, you have to differentiate yourself and offer users a motif to follow you on a specific channel. Create and offer some valuable assets for your followers on a certain channel. For example, discount coupons exclusive for your Twitter followers, real-time customer support on Facebook, or exclusive offers for Instagram.
Conceive some unique advantages for each of your social media channels, that are not available anywhere else and add some sort of value.
22. Use Hashtags in Your Advantage
The hashtag is a tactic you cannot ignore if you want to multiply impressions for your posts. Since organic reach has decreased significantly, an alternative way to boost reach is by incorporating hashtags.
Identify the popular and trending hashtags for your niche and insert them into your posts on Instagram and Twitter and increasing your chance of popping up in search results. Take advantage of Google Trends or Facebook Trending Topics to find current events that may help you reach new audiences.
Use analytics to detect the most successful hashtags that drive engagement.
23. Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses: Study Your Competition and Its Best Practices
Keep an eye on your competitors and check which activities bring them the most social media success. Are you implementing those activities? Or not?
Verify what type of content your competitors are posting, what headlines they use, which are their most popular posts, on which channels, how often they post, which are their followers, who they follow, and which communities they use.
The aim is not to copy your competitors, but to see what’s working for them, improve and apply in an original manner.
You can take advantage of some online tools that can help you depict your competitors’ successful activities on social media like Ahrefs, Marketing Grader, SocialMention.
Some other tools to “spy” on your competition are listed in this article.
24. LinkedIn Presence Is a Must
A LinkedIn profile for your business, besides being an opportunity provider, is compulsory. Being a business platform, LinkedIn offers the occasion to strengthen your credibility, get in touch with an extended network of professionals, and various marketing and sales opportunities. Study some LinkedIn best practices that can enhance your business.
25. Keep Yourself Up to Date
The ever-changing rules of the online medium are referring to social media too. So, constructing good profiles, posting consistently, and engaging is not enough. You should also be always up to date with the latest modifications and releases of social media and with the ultimate best practices and social media marketing tips for small businesses. Social media platforms can change anytime the rules of the game, and knowing them in due time is an advantage you should certainly use.
Put some of these tips or all of them to work and see which of them brings the best results for you.
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