If there is a marketing concept that has proven itself in a very short time, it’s influencer marketing. It has consistently continued to evolve from an art method of working with social personalities in various social circles to one of intense strategic marketing of larger social audiences with more accurate targeting such as the one happening through the top Instagram influencers in various niches.
A study done in 2018 showed that 39% of marketers consider increasing their budget on influencer marketing. The ad spend according to Business Insider’s Intelligence Report shows that it could get to between $ 5 billion to $ 10 billion by 2022. To better understand this huge growth, here are some details.
This is simply devoting more marketing effort and time to people that have a significant impact on your potential audiences’ decisions and opinions. They most likely may not be very popular, they, however, have this ability to influence how your target audience views and feels about your product or service. So, instead of targeting a general audience, these influencers offer specific targeted audiences that are interested in a particular niche.
For the purpose of this article, an Instagram influencer is a user with the right tools and the authenticity to captivate a consistent (and growing) number of viewers and can easily persuade them through recommendations. Most top Instagram influencers are not even celebrities, but rather ordinary people that have built a great following in specific niches, be it business advice, food, inspiration, or travel, there is such a wide range of influencers on Instagram that offer their followers unique aspects of various things with top-notch content.
Why Is Instagram Influencer Marketing Such a Success?
First of all, it’s because Instagram is the influencers’ platform of choice. A study by Klear showed that 1 out of 3 Instagram ads was a story, this is boosted by the swipe-up feature that allows users to link out from Insta-stories making shareability even easier. With this said, hitting success as an Instagram influencer needs a fierce approach, you have to run your account as part of a larger social media strategy, it involves effectively using all the Instagram tools as you keep up with the trends to retain a robust presence. As an Instagrammer, your efforts go beyond garnering a huge following; it’s about engagement and authenticity.
Another study by Social Tradia shows that many influencers want to sell their Instagram accounts to earn money. This is another sign of fierce competition in influencer marketing on Instagram.
Here is why Instagram Influencer Marketing is a huge deal:
a. Credibility and Trust
Did you know that over 47% of people use ad-blockers today? Well they do, this is mainly because ads are now considered untrue, irrelevant, annoying, and even intrusive. And it’s for this reason that users prefer something that they can believe, something credible like a review from someone who has used whatever product or service they’re looking for. They believe each other more.
b. Greater Reach With More Relevant Content
When you find influencers in the right niches, you’re effectively able to reach your target audience better. When a user’s own desire takes them to Instagram, they meet your content so naturally without feeling like it is being forced onto them. When this content is done right, it will help them reach out to your product. The key thing is to identify the right influencer for your business.
c. Quality Lead Generation
As indicated above, when an influencer successfully leads a user to your site, it means they have already created interest and a positive outlook about your business. Converting here becomes truly easier since these people have already been won over, halfway.
With such benefits, it’s no wonder Instagram influencer marketing is where the real action is. So, before looking at some of the top Instagram influencers in various niches, it’s important to understand that these people have back stories of inspiration, stories that led them to where they are and the enormous efforts they all put individually to amass such huge influence and followings.
Some major niches where Instagram influencer marketing thrives include:
Perhaps when she was majoring in Finance at the University of Michigan- Dearborn, Huda never imagined she would rise to such fame in the beauty industry. But this Iraqi-American mogul in the beauty industry started with a blog on WordPress called “Hudah Beauty” where she posted makeup tutorials and tips; this would later translate into the famous cosmetics line with the same name that went forth to be worn even by celebrities.
She has over 35 million followers on Instagram (2019) and was ranked number 1 in the influencer Instagram rich list in 2017, earning about $18,000 for each post of sponsored content.
Huda has been recognized by Forbes as part of “ten most powerful influencers in the world of beauty”, while Time magazine chose her as one of the “25 most influential people on the internet”, both happening in 2017. She continues to soar especially considering Instagram and beauty are a perfect match made in heaven.
Are you a wanderlust? Do you love adventure touring different parts of the world? Then the influencer to follow on Instagram is Murad Osmann. He is a Russian that is best known for the “Follow Me” project that he started in 2011, in Barcelona, Spain.
Though he has a degree in civil engineering, Osmann loves photography and as indicated earlier, each influencer has an inspiration and a story behind his journey, Osmann’s story began when he was dating his girlfriend Nataly (now his wife) and she would always get impatient each time he had to stop to take a picture, she would always pull him but he would take the picture anyway and that is what inspired the “follow me” series. Today he’s a great Instagram influencer in the travel industry along with his wife Nataly.
He has over 4.1 million Instagram followers. And here is some inspiration; his first photos were done on an iPhone, meaning one can start with just what they have.
MKBHD is his professional name both on YouTube and Instagram (from his initials). Marques is a 25-year-old American tech guru who rose to fame when Vic Gundotra, former senior VP of Social for Google termed him the “best tech reviewer on the planet” in 2013.
Marques’ journey started while in high school, he would upload videos of products that he already owned or products that were just new in the market, he would eventually be approached by companies to review their products and get paid for them, and he would pick the hardware or software that was relevant to his audience and review them. He is known to have a very high engagement rate with his viewers and has over 8.8 million subscribers on YouTube and over 2 million on Instagram.
Top Instagram Influencer in Health and Fitness Niche – Jen Selter
Jen is an American with an inborn passion for everything health and fitness. She debuted on Instagram in 2012 but got the spotlight in 2014 due to her super-inspiring transformation photos. She particularly showed the changes in her derrière and this is how “belfie” was born.
Jen has over 12.8 million followers on Instagram and from this fame, she now offers her own fitness classes and collaborates with health brands, and charges an estimated 80,000 dollars for a single sponsored post.
Top Instagram Influencer in Food Niche – Jamie Oliver
The best chefs come from Europe. Is that up for discussion? Well, the first position in the top Instagram Influencers for the food industry is this British gentleman called Jamie Oliver. You may have heard of him because he’s an OG in the culinary industry. Oliver has been a chef most of his life, he has popular TV shows such as the “naked chef” and “Jamie’s Kitchen”.
He’s very popular for his garden-fresh approach where he devotes himself to using organic ingredients. He has over 7.3 million followers on Instagram and is known to take advantage of IGTV Insta-stories to constantly whet the appetite of his viewers and share his content with folks all over the world.
Brandon Zingale rose to fame in vine long before vine died. He had over 700,000 followers then. Later he migrated to Instagram and even though this meant starting from zero again, he has so far reached close to half a million followers on Instagram due to his authentic and funny approach to sports.
Brandon is special because the sports influencer market is filled to the brim with celebrity sportsmen and women who have millions and millions of followers, but with just his marketing and sports journalism education background and a passion for comedy, he has mastered a way to capture his followers’ eye-balls and engage them in such an effective way that some brands would rather partner with him than the A-list celebrities.
A famous quote by Lyman Beecher says no great advance has been made in science, politics, or religion without controversy. Then Miley Cyrus put a cap on it when she said people like controversy because that’s what sells, and for Felix Kjellberg, this is so relatable. He is one of the biggest gaming influencers both on YouTube and Instagram; the anti-Semitic comments that saw him lose partnerships with big brands like Google and Disney, notwithstanding.
And as he works on restoring his reputation, Pewdiepie keeps gaining followers and new collaborations.
It would have been great to find one influencer that covers all automobiles in general, but again, this is the beauty of social media targeting, people classify themselves in very specific niches, and this is why under automobile you may have to spread the search wider for sport bikes, off-roaders, sports cars and so on. But meet Alejandro Salomondrin, a Mexican car enthusiast with the largest following on Instagram and the top Instagram influencer for this niche.
Before following his passion, Salomondrin was a filmmaker. But later he ditched that and started his own YouTube channel called Salmondrin where he talks about everything cars, especially sports cars, this is how he worked his way up and later got into Instagram where he has over 2 million followers.
He is most loved because of his high engagement rate.
Simon Hooper without a doubt has won the internet with the chronicles of his extra chaotic life of raising daughters. He was motivated by the feeling that men’s hard work behind the scenes was not appreciated or recognized enough. He thought the best way to include the much-needed man’s voice in the parenting conversations was to show his own side of the story.
With close to a million followers on Instagram, the FOD as sometimes referred has become a great Instagram influencer and they love him.
Aimee started her journey over a decade ago as an interior design blogger, but her fans got more intrigued by her sense of style and fashion taste, and this is how she got into the fashion industry with over 5 million followers on Instagram, it’s clear she indeed has some major influence.
This self-made fashion queen also has her own jewelry brand and partners with big companies such as Lacoste.
With over 220k followers on Instagram and the founder of The Points Guy, Brian has dedicated his time to offering his followers great information on traveling. If you’re wanderlust, he’s the Instagram influencer to follow.
His website produces quality content on travel, points and miles, aviation, and such information. Brian has partnered with companies such as Capital One.
Sophie is a popular influencer that started her journey as a fitness guru where she earned close to half a million followers due to the six-pack and healthy lifestyle she portrayed. The reality, however, was that she was a very unhappy human being on the inside. She felt insecure and only depended on Instagram likes to feel validated. One day she got tired of the unhappy girl that she was and stopped showing off her bikini body. This lost her close to a hundred thousand followers.
Today Sophie remains a popular influencer with over 320k followers but with a sunnier side and is out to inspire real-ness in the lives of her followers. She no longer posts the six-pack but she posts inspirational and motivational aspects of staying healthy and fit even as you’re able to enjoy delicious meals at the same time.
Manny’s humble beginning is the kind of inspiration that fuels the engine of motivation. He moved to America from Iran with his family at the age of 14 and for the first few months, they lived in a Datsun station wagon while they waited for their dad to get a job after which he rented a two-bedroom apartment.
Today after many years of hard work, he’s a top mogul in real estate and is also in the business of collecting luxury cars. As an Instagram influencer, he has close to a million followers and he encourages his followers to never give up on the American dream.
One major reason that Instagram is creating such stars is that it’s been shown to give the highest engagement rates compared to all the other social media platforms. Brands are running more successful campaigns with fewer risks, this explains the surge in Instagram influencer marketing. Check out these top ten marketing Instagram influencers.
Top Marketing Instagram Influencers
Remember this list may not necessarily have the crazy million number of followers like celebrity accounts, but these influencers in marketing are recognized for the work they do in the marketing space.
Gary started creating marketing content way back in 2006 on YouTube, coupled with his marketing skills, he grew his family business from just $3M to a whopping 60M in just 6 years. In 2011 with the rise of social media, Gary left the family company and started Vaynermedia, a social media digital agency.
Gary keeps growing strong and has over 6 million followers on Instagram, even though his advice to people is to not focus too much on follower count, but rather on the quality and value of what you’re offering them.
When you first look at his Instagram page, you’re automatically set on a motivational roll. But Steven is more than that; he runs a social media agency called Social Chain. He brings on board clients who want to improve their social media campaigns. He has over half a million followers on Instagram.
If there is a marketer whose influence has been recognized for his great work, it’s Neil. Obama recognized him as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 30, WSJ refers to him as the topmost influencer on the internet, the UN has recognized him as well and this list doesn’t end here.
Advice Monkey was Neil’s first online venture in his early teens, and when this gave him a bit of a struggle to pick up, he started learning better ways to draw traffic to his site and this is how his marketing career began.
Neil co-founded Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Hello Bar, besides these he partners with big names such as Amazon, HP, Viacom, GM, and even NBC. So, as said earlier, sometimes influence goes beyond the number of followers on Instagram.
People love authenticity and this is something Jasmine uses to inspire and motivate her 300k-plus followers. She’s a professional photographer and a business strategist, her mission as per her bio, is to support entrepreneurs to grow their social platforms through branding and marketing on Instagram by leveraging what the platform offers.
She may have dropped out of law school, but Jasmine’s career took a turn for the best when she picked up her camera and used IG TV to influence her followers, she’s been featured on Forbes and had been listed under the top ten best wedding photographers in the world.
This top marketing Instagram influencer has over 3.2 million followers and has partnered with Mercedes Benz, Samsung, and even Nike. But he wasn’t always at the top, even though dropped out of high school, Casey started as a restaurant worker before he got into filming which is how he got his first break with his first film “IPod’s Dirty Secret” in 2003.
Today he remains big on YouTube and other social media platforms such as Instagram where he offers technical advice for digital marketers.
Lilach may not have millions of followers on Instagram, but as a marketer, she’d curved her own status as one of the leading influencers in digital marketing. She’s been listed on Forbes as one of the top 20 female social media influencers.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re just a regular Instagram user or trying to find influencers on Instagram as a brand or business, the truth is that Instagram has changed our lives and revolutionized how business is done. No better app has been as useful in identifying and understanding the client base the way Instagram has done it.
The second largest search engine across the globe, YouTube prides itself on over 500 hours of video content uploaded on its infrastructure each minute.
Whichever site you are on, it only takes seconds to come across a YouTube video. The video content-sharing bandwagon is growing day by day as more marketers hop in, hence the desire to know how to grow a YouTube channel fast and keep up with YouTube’s best practices for business.
It is the most popular video search engine worldwide just behind Google, its parent company. And reached 2.2 billion monthly registered users and over 2.4 billion users.
YouTube ranks second at the top of most popular social media networks.
While using videos, your audience, followers, and customers get to experience your brand in a way that graphics and texts cannot compete with. Starting a YouTube channel is a bit overwhelming and you need all the help you can get to grow a YouTube channel fast. It takes time and effort to create a successful YouTube channel.
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YouTube Best Practices: Principal Characteristics of a Premium YouTube Video
Video content has to be great to keep people hooked and to entice them to watch the video till the end. The quality of your video content affects the performance of your channel. A great video has to score high on the points below:
1. Top Quality Sound
There is nothing that makes you turn off a video faster than poor sound quality. Nobody has the patience and time to struggle trying to understand what you intend to communicate. Most people will just hit the back button and move to a similar video rather than waste time on one with crappy sound.
With the comments session open, viewers are now free to vent and will leave very annoying comments on your videos if the sound quality does not comply with the expected standards. This affects the general performance of your channel, so pay maximum attention.
This is a no-brainer since we are speaking about video content. But since there are still tons of poor-quality videos out there, it worth mentioning it again. Great visuals keep people glued to a video, thus this is of capital importance.
3. Awesome Theme or Message
All videos are targeted to a specific audience and your message needs to be engaging, educative, clear, and entertaining to that specific segment of the audience. Your theme should resonate with this audience. The first 15 seconds – the preview should have them hooked up and looking forward to seeing more of your content.
Check what an expert says:
How to Grow YouTube Channel Fast – Best Practices for Business
Here are some relevant tips to help you organize and create higher-quality videos with magnificent visuals and amazing messages.
Plan in Advance Your Videos
Use Stable Lighting
Edit Your Videos
Optimize Your Videos for Search
Plan in Advance Your Videos
It is a notorious fact that ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’. This is so true when it comes to YouTube videos. Take your time, prepare a short script that is action-packed, enjoyable, and informative in order to be more efficient while recording. Planning will keep you from rambling and re-shooting a video over and over until it makes sense, or you get the desired quality of the registered material.
Use Stable Lighting
If one is using natural lighting and the sun keeps going behind the clouds and then coming back out, your video ends up having dark and bright shadows. Hence the need for consistent lighting to produce top-notch quality videos.
You can get a set of lighting equipment and the time or day of the video shoot will not matter as you will have consistent lighting available. If one cannot afford this, then it is advisable to pick a day that is completely gloomy or overcast or a day with a clear sky to have stable lighting in your video shoots.
Edit Your Videos
Editing offers you the possibility to obtain top quality for your video recording. It refers to the improvements you can bring to your visuals like removing background noises and other unwanted distortion. You have several options at your disposal while editing:
1. Add some effects
Despite cropping the frame of your video, you can correct the colours or insert grading, adjust the speed of your clip, apply transitions, or add background music or other audio. You can edit your footage when you want the viewers to pay extra attention to you, by cropping close or zooming in slowly until you achieve the desired outcome. This way you keep viewers interested and engaged in what you are saying.
2. Add text
Text can be added to emphasize something, present additional information, or when transition in a video. When tastefully done it creates an effect capturing the viewers’ interest.
3. Cut the breaks from your shoot
Most viewers like videos that go straight to the point. The time you take to check your notes or think of what to say next can be cropped out and leave just the core part.
Nowadays you have at your disposal a plethora of video editing software that can ease your task and help you achieve great results. Give them a try and you will not regret it!
Grow a YouTube Channel Fast – Ranking High
YouTube’s marketing ecosystem is poised for exponential growth forcing companies and brands to venture into this space. Content saturation is omnipresent; hence it is more than difficult for you to get noticed and stand out.
As a business marketer, finding your niche audience is critical and should be your number one priority and the focus of your marketing efforts. Viewers’ expectations of video content standards, quality, and production are dynamic and can change overnight.
As a visual search engine, YouTube has an algorithm, and optimization for search is a must if you aim to see your videos ranking high on search engine results pages. Consequently, focusing on minor details to attract followers and viewers is a sure path to success and growing a YouTube channel fast.
The most important factors that affect YouTube’s ranking
· Length of the video – The longer the video the higher the ranking possibilities as it is considered it provides more relevant content on the topic.
· Subscribers – The authority of a channel expands with the increase in the number of subscribers
· Dwelling time – The longer the period spent by users on a video page, the higher that video ranks.
· Video interaction – Subscribing, commenting, sharing, and linking all contribute to the overall ranking of a channel.
All these factors should be considered while working towards enhancing the authority of your YouTube channel.
YouTube Best Practices: YouTube Search Optimization
To make your video content search-friendly for your targeted audience and grow your YouTube channel fast, you should pay attention to the following details:
Title of the Video
As you may have noticed that the core pillar of YouTube SEO is the title, the title makes or breaks the success of a video. An eye-popping title lures people to click and view the content even when the video is average. A clear and concise title is imperative as it determines whether or not a viewer will click on the video.
Inserting keyword phrases in the title is vital for increased video visibility. Titles should be as close as possible to keyword searches in different niches. Take advantage of Google Trends to identify strong keywords to rank for. You have at your disposal an online estate of approximately 70 characters for a title before cutting off. If there is any keyword you are targeting, ensure it is displayed in your title.
Video Description
The description should include your keywords and a straight-to-the-point message. 1000 characters are allowed for the description, but only about 100 characters are viewed on search. Thus, try to deliver your message in the first 100 characters and have a detailed enough description so that YouTube understands what is the topic of your video.
Tags are used to inform viewers and YouTube about the topic of your videos. They give a general description of the content inside the video. Tags come in handy to help YouTube extend your video’s reach and associate you with similar videos.
Keep them minimal and avoid having irrelevant taglines. Insert the target keyword among tags.
Thumbnail
A video thumbnail and a title are the first interaction your viewers have with your video. It directly influences the number of clicks you will get. They have brought a whole different game change when it comes to YouTube SERPs. Thumbnails have moved from being static to being automatically animated once a cursor hovers over the video. Customized thumbnails appear to be trustworthy, professional, and polished.
They are responsible for the first impression, hence the need to customize them. Ensure the color schemes are appealing and the design patterns are eye-catching. You can run a call-to-action with a thumbnail to get the most optimized thumbnail. However, only verified YouTube channels can run customized video thumbnails. Visit YouTube verify to have your account verified.
End Screens and Video Cards
Video cards are notifications that you can set up to promote your channel videos and your brand. It is a small white circle with (i) or a translucent bar that requests you to subscribe to the channel. A maximum of 5 cards can be inserted into a video. There are channel cards, donation cards, link cards, poll cards, playlist cards, and fan funding cards. They are used to entice people to vote, go to another channel, donate funds, etc.
End Screens are similar to cards but they are only visible once the video is done viewing. Sometimes YouTube makes a decision for you between end screens and video cards and it is important to take these factors into consideration. Google has directions on how to insert an End Screen.
Subtitles and Closed Captions
You can use subtitles and captions to optimize your YouTube channel by using the targeted keywords in them. Timed subtitle files or uploading supported text transcript files are used to add closed captions or subtitles to a video. Google has the step by step outline of how to do it.
Category
Choosing a category for your YouTube video ensures you are grouped with similar content on YouTube. Under ‘Advanced settings’ you can choose a category under which to classify your video.
Your Target Keywords Need to Be Said in the Video
Google algorithms are very dynamic and currently, what you say in your videos has an impact on your ranking. A great way to let search engines know what your videos are about is by matching the title keywords with the message in your videos. It is also a good way to signal that your message and title match and that you are not spamming your viewers.
But do not overuse the keywords.
Encourage User Engagement
User interactions on your channel signal your perceived authority in a specific niche. After creating and posting awesome content, you must encourage viewers to share, subscribe, comment, and link to your videos. This will increase your organic search presence.
Create Playlists
Playlists ensure your viewers can keep watching the video content on your feed in a raw, one after another. This way they spend quality time on your channel. You have their attention moved from video to video hence creating an opportunity to encourage people subscriptions and comments.
Optimize Videos for Mobile Viewing
Mobile app usage has grown tremendously over the past 3 years. Most YouTube videos are viewed on mobile phones hence the need to create videos that are optimized for mobile devices.
One of the most significant YouTube channel best practices is consistency. You should ensure you have high-quality content production and that it delivers according to a constant schedule, not once in a while.
YouTube analytics can help you track the performance of your channel. It also helps you better identify your audience and her level of engagement. You get to know which video types work best for you.
YouTube Creators Academy was created to offer you further insights on branding, channel development and to provide you with the highest odds of success. Chances of being discovered on YouTube expand if you have optimized your video content.
Producing a lasting and powerful impression on your viewers can make your channel brilliant quite easily. You can easily outrank your competitors if you have an established YouTube optimization strategy in place.
Being a visual powerhouse, YouTube has the ability to grow your network and generate new leads for your business, if properly used. All these tips will help you grow your YouTube channel fast, build a community around it and expand your brand awareness.
The content strategy started to become popular in the early 1990s thanks to web development. The pioneer content strategists focused on creating quality content in a consistent manner. They were also keen on ensuring the content made sense to the audience. And this is really what a content strategist is concerned about even today.
Most small businesses do not have a good grasp on what is a content strategist, what they do, or how to execute the roles effectively. With that said, statistics have shown that 78% of brands have between one to three content specialists to help them with their content. No need to say that in the last few years, huge amounts of content were created and it is more and more difficult to differentiate your business in this crowded world.
Collaborating with an expert content marketing strategist offers your brand an edge as he/she provides a high-caliber strategy aiming to turn more browsers into future buyers in the digital space. As such, your brand has the opportunity to employ a proven expert in order to capture and retain the interest of your target customer, by deploying the right information at the right stage of their journey.
This article is created to help you understand everything about the role of a content strategist.
What Is a Content Strategist?
A content strategist is an experienced marketer whose responsibility is to build and maintain a brands’ content strategy.
Or you can define a content strategist (or content consultant) to be an inbound marketing specialist with years of experience in the area and an array of skills that include identification of audience personas, content audit, SEO, content planning, editing, and promotion, social media management, and so forth. And uses all these skills to develop a brand’s content strategy.
A content strategist is most often a customer-centric marketer because, unlike traditional marketers, a digital content strategist uses a targeted content strategy to attract more customers.
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The role of a content strategist ( or content consultant) may vary across brands and organizations. Some duties may stay consistent while others will vary from brand to brand. However, the primary responsibility of a content marketing strategist is to plan an effective content strategy that will deliver the required traffic back home to the brand and thereby increase ROI and profits.
The roles tasked include but are not limited to:
Creating relevant and specific content for the targeted audience
Improving content delivery and strategizing on effective content promotion
Establishing the style, voice, and tone of the brand’s content
Measuring and analyzing the strategies that are working and dropping the ones that are not
With that said, it’s important to note that a content strategist can be any of these two types. A front-end content strategist or a back-end strategist. As a business, you can either opt to hire a specialist who understands either type or you can use someone in-house.
What Does a Content Strategy Team Do?
A content strategy team executes in general the same tasks as a content strategist. The team executes the above-mentioned tasks in various proportions and other supplementary ones in function of the needs. Such examples are site redesign, website migration, marketing automation, tool integration, etc.
But for medium and large companies strategies increase in complexity and one person or a few persons are not enough. In such cases, a team or multiple teams are needed.
The Specialist VS the In-house
In 2022 a report found that almost 50% of B2B marketers outsource or hire specialists for their content writing and marketing.
Why does this happen?
To be able to compete with the big dogs in your niche, your website and content need clear marketing based on relevant, error-free, and high-quality search-engine-optimized content.
As a start-up or well-established brand, you may need more than good luck juggling all the above besides the other responsibilities of running a business. The best option remains to outsource a professional brand content strategist to focus on these while you focus your attention on your core business.
Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing:
Frees Up Your Time – Regular, relevant, stellar content most often takes an important amount of time to create. Delegating it to someone else who is a professional can free up your time for other important tasks to push the business forward.
It’s Cost Effective for the Business – hiring an in-house content marketing strategist might end up being costly for your business as opposed to hiring freelance content strategists because, for the previous, you have to pay their taxes as well as other benefits.
Offers Your Business Flexibility and Fresh POV – It allows your business to test with different tones, voices, and approaches with different content writers. And offers the business a chance to try out different perspectives and ideas to attract and retain new customers.
For either of the above options, the business must lean towards a model that is scalable and futuristic in terms of content generation to be able to make the best of innovative tools. A good brand content strategist must be able to leverage both the back-end and front-end approaches.
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What Do the Front End and Back End Content Strategists Do?
The Front End
These will mainly focus on your brand’s content and customer experience. They plan ahead on what will work for the brand at a certain specified time. Some of their roles may include:
Identifying the brand’s target audience
The purpose of the content
Type of content that will be created on a daily/weekly/monthly basis
How to coordinate content requirements with other efforts
The Back End
These on the other hand lean towards creating a structure on how to scale the content created. They focus on technology to be used in order to achieve the best possible results. Examples of what they do include:
Channeling ways to structure the content in a manner that will meet the audience’s demands.
Establishing methods to organize and store data in such a way that it’ll be easier to retrieve and use on various channels accordingly.
Figuring out ways to maximize and improve the marketing processes using the same resources for the best results.
Guiding on ways to reuse the content in a valuable way for the buyer persona.
Offer ways to future-proof your brand’s content for future trends.
What’s the Importance of Content Strategists in Your Business’s Marketing Activity?
An effective content marketing strategy should be able to improve your ROI thanks to a better understanding of the type of content to use, your audiences, etc. Here is why it’s important for the business:
They Facilitate the Content Creation Process
Content creation can be difficult. A business owner may have great business acumen but fails at content creation, or still be a great writer but have writer’s block. This goes beyond the ability to write itself; it’s about having knowledge of the right content to create, and this is why a content strategist is paramount.
They know why and what content is needed. It’s easier for them to come up with topics and ideas. They will know what content to use for brand awareness, and which one to use to boost conversion rates. A content strategist knows the goals and purposes and therefore he makes it easier for the business to keep flowing.
Keeps the Brands’ Consistency
You can confuse and lose your audience when you have unconnected pieces of content on different platforms. Having a content marketing strategist will keep the same tone while meeting your audiences’ expectations. They ensure consistency in quality, type of content, and tone of voice across all platforms, i.e. the brand’s website, blog as well as social media platforms. Cohesiveness supports better the content’s distribution.
Your Business Targets Better Its Audience
Each business has a unique buyer persona. And your business is no different. There is a specific set of people who are more likely to buy your product or service. The role of a content marketing strategist is to support your business in targeting the ideal audience.
A content strategist goes through the trouble of understanding your audience, your content marketing data, and creating content strategies that are relevant to their needs. They will also use the right channels, and social media networks – meaning the right content reaching the right people on the best platform. A comprehensive approach that delivers the ROI.
Improves Your Branding
How people perceive your brand impacts heavily your business. Content strategists can help you define, tell and spread the right story for your brand, the kind of stories that would be strategic for your brand’s growth.
Content Strategists Save Your Time and Energy
Creating and distributing content can consume more time and effort than what you have available. Things get worse for someone who has no or limited content marketing experience because it will mean lots of trial and error.
Now, think about how smooth and effective this process would be when tackled by a professional. They will know where to start and they would use their strategic planning to efficiently reach your audience with the right type of content.
Creates Connection
A content marketing strategist will help build a connection between your target audience and your brand. Such a desideratum is achieved when they are able to reach the audience’s emotional side through the right content.
Emotions have been found to have a heavy impact on purchase decisions. And therefore, based on the level of emotion your brand reaches; you can easily turn your potential customers into loyal customers. Besides winning customers and boosting ROI, using a content strategist will help create tailor-made content that makes your brand stand out from the competition.
Helps Educate Your Target Audience
You enhance your influence over your target audience when you engage the services of a professional content marketing strategist because they will put in place coherent, educative, and informative content strategies. With the use of the right content process, you can help the audience be more aware of their pain points while offering the optimum solutions. From here will surge your power.
A Content Strategist Is the Foundation for Your Entire Marketing Activity
A content strategy is the basis of all your business’s marketing efforts. A digital content strategist ensures you have the right substance in terms of value offered to your customers and other targeted audiences. A coherent content strategy builds a solid foundation for your overall marketing strategy, and this is a winning recipe.
Enhances the Business Results
The most evident output of using a content strategist will be to enhance your business’s brand power and shape your target audience’s buying behavior. This is a gradual process that cannot be achieved overnight by managing content marketing campaigns and promotions alone. It’s a process that happens organically with the guidance and help of the right content strategies.
Having seen the importance of hiring a brand content strategist, what benefits does a business stand to gain?
They Will Help Your Business with Search Engine Optimization
Why is search engine optimization (SEO) important? Because it allows your audience to find quickly the right answers and solutions to their issues. This is obtained by the use of properly linked, consistently updated keyword-focused content.
You Offer Value Even Before a Purchase
This is the new paradigm shift in marketing brought to you by the inbound approach. It’s about providing and proving your value to your target audience before you earn their money.
Such an approach ends up getting you, loyal customers. It’s like gifting a person something they didn’t even expect. They will always tend to want to give back. And in the case of your brand, they will buy what you’re offering.
Positions Your Brand as the Best
When you offer quality content with relevant solutions to your customers, they will consider you the authority or leader in your domain. Content strategists use sales figures or real customer testimonials among other methods to achieve this.
They Build Loyalty More Than Traditional Media
One of the benefits of digital content strategists is that they help a business create and develop a relationship with the target audience. And sometimes it ends up building lasting “evangelical” relationships. Meaning these customers will spread the word about your business on their own, based on a great experience.
This is simply because content marketing is focused on identifying the audience’s problems and offering the right solutions using the ideal channels. The content is the first solution that’s almost as valuable as the product or service you’re offering.
Eventually, You End Up Owning the Market
As said in point three above, you will become a thought leader thanks to the quality and relevant content. Consequently, your brand identity is poised to grow, and you will own your market since you will be perceived as an established brand.
Thus, this is another major benefit of having a content strategist. Because they guide the brand in delivering the most relevant and needed content, infused with value, and know-how that stands out from the crowd.
Conclusion
Marketing is one of the toughest aspects of a business, but one that every business, young or established must overcome. Marketing can be considered an investment, but it only returns the highest benefits when an expert like a content marketing strategist is involved to guide the business through all the stages of growth.
The right content served to the right audience through the right platforms and at the right time is something a content strategist can achieve in a flawless way. When a business owner attempts to add all these to their already busy schedule of activities, they might fail somewhere.
Thus, as a business, why should you fail when you can use the specialized services of content strategists?
In our visual era, we all marketers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs are chasing for high-quality photography to accompany our content marketing. Searching for elegant, styled stock photos that tell a story is most often a chore.
What Are Styled Stock Photos and Why Are They Important?
Styled stock photos are high-end photos, the compelling ingredient on a mission to visually back your content strategy and empower it to generate sustainable results for your business.
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There are tonnes of free stock photos all over the internet, for instance, Pixabay and Unsplash are some of the most popular sites for free stock photos. There also are sites that offer free-styled stock images or at least some sample bundles. But here are some great reasons why subscribing to a membership for styled stock photos is a brilliant idea.
Why Invest in Styled Stock Photography?
First of all, free styled stock photography is often overused. It’s possible that the free image that attracted you attracted another 100 brand owners. So, all those 100 will end up with the same image across all their platforms. This is something you can easily avoid with paid styled stock photography.
Secondly, the terms and conditions of using free styled stock photos from free websites aren’t always very elaborate. Different sites will state different terms, but for paid custom styled stock photos the terms are very straightforward and are often meant to support your business.
Thirdly when you compare the quality of free styled stock photos to paid styled photos; the difference is like day and night. The free photos aren’t often of top quality. For paid styled stocks, on the other hand, quality is guaranteed and this will enable you to do much more with them. And it’s unlikely some direct competitor of yours will use the same styled photography library. Thus, you have a higher chance of being perceived as original by your audience.
With these three valuable reasons, you would understand why paid styled stock images is superior for your business at whatever stage you’re in.
Where Can You Buy Stock Photos?
There are several options you can run with. For instance, you can get premium styled stock photos from marketplaces such as the Creative Market or you can opt to sign up for a more dedicated website that specifically has curated styled stock photography created with business in mind.
From both sources, you have the option of purchasing single photos from the marketplace or shop section of the dedicated stock sites or you can opt for bundles or memberships, whatever suits your purpose. You can kick off your campaign using the right custom stock image for as low as $5.
With dedicated websites that offer paid custom styled stock photos, you will have the entire library at your disposal and absolute value for your money.
So, what do we do if we want beautifully styled stock images?
Look!
There are quite many small, niche sites that offer great stylish photos, most of them provide some free bundle photos and have subscriptions from which to choose.
I hand-picked some of the best feminine, dazzling, styled stock photos available online. Here is a list that I am very sure you will find very interesting and useful:
1. BizStyledStock – A Professional Photos Library Built for Businesses Aiming for an Aesthetic Brand
If you’ve been searching for custom styled stock photos that are fresh and not cliché or stereotypical, then welcome to BizStyledStock. A rich styled stock photos resource and digital space for elegant, high-resolution professional photos and stock imagery designed particularly for women entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. Plus, you have the possibility of personalizing them further to suit your brand and goals.
Biz Styled stock photos
You don’t have to go through the wearisome experience of searching through thousands of outdated style-lacking images anymore. With BizStyledStock you access straight-to-the-point, passion-filled resources to make your business instantly stand out.
I have passionately used my marketing expertise to create and shoot a styled stock image database that will provide you with the kind of online presence that your brand needs. So, if you don’t know how to use styled stock photography, I have created a large variety of stock images for business, to fit your marketing visuals and to guide your sustained marketing initiatives. Plus mockups, that allow further personalization, social media templates for Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, abstract photos, quotes, and more.
It’s obvious that starting up your brand can be the most challenging task yet. You have everything to figure out and often, a minimal budget. To give you a hand while establishing your online presence, get started with this free stock photos bundle of 20 photos and 2 mockups to ease your work. Plus some more each month if you join the mailing list.
These include light background photos that you can use as a hero image for websites, professional background images for LinkedIn, Zoom, social media campaigns, converting ads or sales campaigns, or simply background images for editing. They are also ideal for blog covers.
All you need is to download them and personalize them to fit better with your brand.
These free styled stock photos include professional images for business. They have high resolution to enable you to customize them further.
BizStyledStock is your ticket to building a stellar online presence. It offers graphic elements aiming to infuse an original vibe into your visuals. Empower your world-class content with some styled imagery and designs to entertain and keep your readers coming back for more. Make use of backgrounds, layers, patterns, and supplementary graphic elements to make your visuals look original and fancy.
Offers: Free bundle and paid memberships (The Silver Plan (Quarterly), The Gold Plan (Annual))
Elle Drouin’s style and elegance are more than obvious in her visuals. A sharp aesthetic sense that you will appreciate for sure. I have to confess that I am a great fan of her posh images.
If you sign up to her email list you get instant access to 20 free photos plus monthly free bundles to download.
Offers: Free bundle and paid memberships (Quarterly, Annual, and Lifetime Membership Plans)
A collection of feminine photos. A small treasure counting some thousands of items, a collection of beautiful images. And some totally free!! Pleasantly surprised to see that. Browse the library and for sure you will find photos to fit your taste and brand.
Lady Boss in action! A styled and chic stock library that includes lifestyle images, social media premade quotes, styled desktop images, mockups, exclusive graphics, and seasonal visuals.
Rachel, as a stylist and photographer obsessed with brand and beauty, aims to give a hand to women entrepreneurs and creative professionals.
Styled Stock Images for Instagram and Social Media
A comprehensive library with several collections among which desktop, stationery, screens, beauty, florals, frames, etc. You have the possibility to sort your brand color or preferred color.
You get instantly 20 photos when you subscribe and on different occasions, like Valentine’s Day or Christmas other free bundles.
Colorful, bold, shining, and outstanding photos. A world in a photo! Jasmine does a great job with the visuals she creates. Sure, it’s a matter of taste.
Some tens of bundles to pick from Lifestyle Stock Photo Bundle (Minimalist), 25 Motivational Social Media Quote Package, Pink and White desktop bundle, etc.
Grab 20 free style photos when subscribing. And every other month you get new images.
Offers: Free bundle and Monthly and Quarterly Membership Plans
I simply fell in love with Alicia’s photos, as she refers to them as “Stunning, ready-to-use content to grow your business online”. A true demonstration of elegance and finesse.
She has a stock photo subscription that provides thousands of stock photos, Canva templates for social media, content calendar plans, and LightRoom presets. Over 5000 businesses use her images.
Offers: Paid Membership
9. Her Creative Studio
Created to help creative entrepreneurs stand out from the crowd, Her Creative Studio has an elegant offer, with a couple of subscription options. Their library enriches periodically, they currently have over 2000 photos in their library.
And you receive monthly a free styled item if you subscribe to the mail.
This is another well-curated collection of over 5000 high-quality custom styled stock photos for your social media, website, email, newsletter, or wherever you might want to do in your marketing.
Social Square is also a membership by Shay Cochran who owns SC Stock Shop, so you have the benefit of getting access to unlimited square photos when you subscribe to this service. This catalog is ideal for Instagram or social media campaigns but can easily be used for other marketing activities across the digital space.
Moyo Studio is the catalog created with graphic designers and creatives in mind to allow infinite possibilities of customization. And present your work in a unique, personal way.
These effortlessly stylish themes allow you to showcase your personal preference because they’re fully customizable, meaning you can make the mockups your very own to give the exact aesthetic that you need your brand to have. They have a great mix of themed image collections and mockups ranging from masculine as well as a feminine workspace to lifestyle all put together in such chicness.
If you’re looking for an authentic and absolutely real representation of female entrepreneurs, then this is the place to search. It’s a custom styled stock photos collection featuring real women in their real everyday life.
Stocks by Jewel are vibrant and colorful styled stock photos that communicate emotion and real feelings. So if you want to tell a story that your audience can resonate with, then this highly curated stock collection offers just the right stock photos to give them a real sense of who you are and what your brand is really about. Here you will find custom styled stock for every stage of your business.
Offers: Membership and photo/Canva template bundles
As the name suggests, this workshop for designers is truly their happy place, creatives, and bloggers looking to create a visual branding that has consistency across all channels have a home here. Ingrid, the brain behind Atelier, has created an incredible collection of darker to neutral-toned styled photography to serve people that are tired of pink!
Inspired by real life, she has used a variety of locations and color themes for some fresh variety and you get all these in two types of membership. You can sign up for individual use or as a designer, where you get the benefit of using custom styled stock photos for your clients!
You also get access to a variety of mockups and exclusive collections that are added monthly.
Offers: Membership and Photo/Canva Template Bundles
If you have been on a search for styled stock photos that features black women, then your search is over. Neosha fused her love for design and photography with the need for authentic high-quality images for black women. And created an amazing “digital pantry” for authentic custom photography for melanated women.
You can use this custom styled stock library for business, lifestyle, or regular blog content creation. It’s not enough to use just any images that your audience can relate to, it’s more important to use unique high quality and deeply authentic art-level styled images. And that’s what you get when you sign up for a membership or subscribe to their email list.
Offers: Membership plans for Bloggers, Influencers, Brands, and Tribe
Katie offers free styled stock photography and templates to help you style your digital brand in a unique way. She offers Pinterest management services to go along with the well-curated styled stock imagery to ensure you focus on other important aspects of your business.
The stock photos and templates are great for enhancing your social media presence and building a cohesive brand in general. Get over 50 styled stock photography free with membership.
Offers: Membership and photo/Canva template bundles
Here is another styled stock photography website that’s dedicated to serving the need for diversity and representation. They promote diversity and inclusivity in their photography by using the most diverse models of all skin tones and body types.
Color Joy Stock is a celebration and collaboration of diverse work and lifestyles in an authentic manner that makes your work in the digital marketing space much easier. Besides the custom-styled images, they help you with your content strategy and offer free educational tools that you can use in your brand marketing.
To get all these and more value for your unique brand, you can sign up for a membership.
Are you in the wedding industry? Well, you’re not left behind. This site is dedicated to you. They offer styled imagery that’s modern, minimalist, and very affordable.
Created by a team of experienced wedding professionals, you’re fully covered in terms of creative wedding-styled stock photography and videos you need to elevate your brand. This team sets the trend in the industry way ahead of time and thus gives you a leg up.
They target wedding planners, wedding invite designers, wedding photographers, stylists, and even stationery designers.
When you subscribe, you’re allowed into a robust library of elegant photography and graphics professionally created to take your brand to the next level.
Offers: Monthly or Annual Membership for the wedding industry
My personal favorite for mockups and infographics. And even if it doesn’t exactly belong to this list I will not refrain to insert it. 😊
It is not free, but worth giving them a try if you want gorgeous unique visuals for your site, courses, or stylish content upgrades, that go beyond photography.
Some Issues to Consider When Using Styled Stock Images
Now that the quest for the best styled stock images library is over, how now do you decide which option to work with? Here are some tips to guide you:
Membership vs. Single Image Purchase
Signing up for membership is a much cheaper option compared to going for single images. First of all, you get access to the entire catalog. Secondly, you get to work with a variety of images for your various needs. Thirdly, you get to enjoy newly released offers that are issued either weekly or monthly depending on different sites.
You also get unlimited image downloads, and, on some sites, access is allowed to more than one user. This makes it easy for you to get help from other team members, saving you time and effort. You can’t get all these benefits on a single purchase.
How Do You Ensure the Images Match Your Brand?
For you to stand out, you surely must have a style of your own. To test whether a certain site offers your kind of visuals, you can always start with the free styled photography pack offered through an email sign-up.
If it works for you, then you can sign up for the membership to get more and better images. If not, then you can keep trying until you find the right ones. Just ensure to use images that represent your brand in the best possible way.
I hope you will find this list helpful. And that it will save you some time while searching for new elegant and chic photos.
All these styled stock photo libraries are great in their own way. Choose the best that fits your brand, personal preferences, and style. You have by far more chances of creating an eye-catching online presence for your business than using the large databases used by millions of other businesses worldwide.
Over the past few years, growth marketing has risen particularly with the advent of social media and overall advancement in technology. And although the concept itself is new and the term has become a buzzword in the recent past, the principles behind growth marketing are ancient.
Unlike the old days, technology has allowed access to data and tools that allow marketers to evaluate and make decisions in exceptional ways. Decision-making is more informed than ever before and is mainly data-oriented and geared toward growth.
Growth marketing is about focusing on long-term success by operating across the whole customer life cycle from a potential target audience to becoming a full brand champion.
What Is Growth Marketing?
It is the data-driven and most intelligent part of marketing evolution which is all about incorporating the traditional marketing model with enhanced approaches such as data-driven content, A/B testing, SEO optimization, email marketing, copywriting, viral content, and content marketing, social media, ad-copy, and so forth.
Growth marketing can be defined as a relentless use of experimentation on ways through which to attract, engage and retain customers by focusing on their unique and ever-changing preferences. And using this data to deliver bespoke individualized content that’s relevant to their needs and thereby, optimizing your brand’s consistent growth.
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In traditional marketing, brands typically take a simplistic methodology for getting their products or services in front of their target audience. The most typical methods in traditional marketing include print advertising, radio, and TV. These methods mainly focused on converting the potential customer into a buyer as soon as possible, and it ended there.
Growth marketing on the other hand takes a more optimal approach because it’s largely driven by a limited budget. For this reason, marketers have had to find more economical but rather unconventional methods of relevantly reaching their customers by considering each and every step of the marketing funnel.
Growth marketing agencies try to achieve a higher ROI by retaining their customers for longer.
Growth Marketing vs. Growth Hacking
Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking” back in 2010 in an effort to describe a marketer whose single job was to scout for opportunities a brand can leverage on. Growth hacker marketing is about exploring underutilized avenues and strategies for gaining at a low cost per acquisition.
Growth marketing on the other hand takes a team-wide approach using innovative methods that are well blended into traditional marketing techniques for a more holistic consistent growth aimed at both short- and long-term gains.
Growth marketing is more of a sustainable method.
Is Growth Marketing Different from Inbound Marketing?
First of all, it’s important to understand that growth marketing and inbound marketing aren’t competing for approaches, in fact, inbound marketing can be very helpful in growth marketing.
Inbound marketing is mostly about the acquisition of new clients or customers while growth marketing goes beyond that and focuses on retaining them in order to get much more from them through more purchases, word of mouth, and so forth.
Why Is Growth Marketing Important?
Unlike other marketing approaches, growth marketing goes beyond customer acquisition and focuses on its lifetime value through continuous and frequent purchases in the future.
An existing consumer has a higher possibility of trying out new products as compared to a new customer. This is not to say that growth marketing doesn’t consider new customer acquisition important. Rather, it sees value in making the most out of already existing consumers.
As a business, you have already established trust and confidence with these consumers and therefore it’s simpler to upsell them to motivate fresh prospects and begin the acquisition journey all over again. This increases profits with lowers costs.
There are several components used in growth hacker marketing and they are established around customer metrics. These metrics can be effective in brick-and-mortar as well as the e-commerce space:
Customer Life Cycle
A customer life cycle can be defined as the path taken by a customer as they get to learn about your product or service, as they get to interact with it, buy it, and even come back for more. It involves three stages of customer experience that a growth marketing agency can focus on.
These are the activation of the client or customer, their nurture, and their continual reactivation.
Activation stage – This initial stage of growth marketing involves seeking the customer’s attention and piquing their interest. Growth marketers focus on creating awareness, building trust and familiarity through welcoming content and campaigns, trails and onboarding.
Nurture stage – Growth marketing agencies focus on strengthening relationships with newly acquired customers through engagement. It involves cross-channel marketing through promotions, sales, brand updates, and so forth.
Reactivation stage – This stage of the customer life cycle is about re-engaging your customers to retain their loyalty. This is done through campaigns such as post-purchase deals, discounts, etc.
It’s important to understand that all these stages are necessary, and a customer or client progresses from stage to stage at their own pace but it’s the work of the growth marketing agency to proactively meet their changing desires using need-specific solutions.
Another central component of a powerful growth marketing strategy is A/B testing. This is simply about testing various aspects of your content to ensure it engages your customers or audience in a manner that can lead to conversions. It can be done on emails, social media content, landing pages, blogs, and so forth.
The various aspects that can be tested include graphics, content design, copy, and other such customizations. The variation that leads to the highest performance in terms of conversion can then be used in subsequent campaigns.
With that said, growth marketers know that if B proved to be effective on a certain audience segment, it’s not given that it’s the ultimate best. Another test between B/C might prove that C is in fact a better option.
The key thing is to keep testing because customer preferences are ever-changing and to be able to keep enhancing performance, you need to be as relevant as possible and this is why testing is a regular thing in growth marketing.
Cross-Channel Marketing
This is one of the areas where A/B testing comes in handy. Cross-channel marketing is about knowing the exact channels your customers use the most. The channels they prefer and using these channels to communicate the relevant content to them. Growth marketing uses A/B testing to identify these channels.
Cross-channel growth marketing builds strategic and effective avenues to reach customers through email marketing, in-app messages, SMS, and so forth. Effective cross-channel marketing means that as a marketer you understand how your customers respond on different channels and you can leverage this to make the best of all the customer life-cycle stages.
Cross-channel marketing also involves having a holistic integration of multiple channels that will effectively deliver your content to your customers wherever they are while giving you insights into their behavior on these varying channels.
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Conditions Necessary for Growth Marketing to Work
Growth marketing rides on the following three conditions.
A Solid Business Strategy
What is growth marketing without a sense of direction? Well, a business strategy gives your business the direction that it should take. It defines what you are selling, to whom, and where. It will guide the business positioning and offer insights as to where potential growth will come from (new or existing customers).
These decisions are what will guide your growth marketing strategy.
The Agility of Your Working Culture
Within your business’ working culture there must be as little bureaucracy as possible and a less centralized type of decision-making. This is to ensure a quick and easy flow of information and it also encourages ideas from all around the team.
This type of open culture is a winning approach particularly in growth marketing because all the product information, customer stage, and so forth require quick thinking and action.
Access to the Right Data
Growth marketing cannot work without access to metrics. This data is what shows where there are issues affecting your business growth and what channels, content type,s and other such aspects are creating the best response that is bringing the kind of growth required.
The Most Effective Growth Marketing Channels and Strategies
The right channels and strategies will vary from business to business. However, there are some common basic growth marketing strategies and channels that apply in most businesses no matter their level.
Customer Retention Is as Crucial as Customer Acquisition
Growth marketing is all about growing your business. And one sure way to grow your business is by getting more out of what already exists. Bringing in new customers is great but keeping your already existing customers interested in more of what you have to offer is even greater.
It is therefore enough to say that delivering promised value to your already existing consumers is crucial for their retention as is gaining new customers.
For Lead Generation, Organic Is Greater Than Paid
Organic lead generation means leveraging what’s already trending on SEO. You can use this to offer relevant, useful, and valuable content and product to your customers which can in return drive organic leads back to your business.
Consequently, you will not incur costs via paid advertising. And even when marketers do so; it’s only as a boost to the already strategized content marketing efforts.
Persuasion Is Better Than a Salesy Approach
Today, customers can quickly tell the difference between genuine persuasion and a frank sales speech. And they will always move away from the latter because, unlike in older days, today consumers have absolute control over their purchases.
Persuasion on the other hand is a strategy that involves their desires and needs. And this is why it works. It’s about offering them the information they need, and gaining their trust and eventually, they will walk the buying journey to the end and purchase.
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Growth Marketing Is About Data, Not Instinct
Unlike traditional methods of guessing and using instinct, today data is everywhere. And it’s what growth marketing strategists use to enhance the performance of the business in real-time. When used effectively, you can get accurate customer personas and consequently, curate content easier that’s just perfect for them.
The Entire Brand Is More Than Just the Offering
People buy stories and experiences. Sometimes these are what actually form the foundation of business revenue. It’s not just your amazing product or service that brings the revenue home.
Therefore, this growth marketing strategy is about moving past your product into a larger offer of value and worth and satisfaction to your customers. Offer them something creative to positively disrupt their lives. It’s the key factor that will bring them back for more.
Tips on How to Implement Growth Marketing
Growth marketing can be applied through pirate metrics or the acronym AAARRR. What does this mean?
Awareness
This simply is the art of informing prospective buyers about your product or service through various channels such as social media and through SEO content. A growth marketing agency may test out various strategies to establish the one with the most engagement as well as traffic.
It answers the question: how many people did you reach?
Acquisition
After creating awareness, the next step is about generating leads and acquiring new customers. There are several avenues a growth marketer can use to do this for example marketing campaigns, SEO, social media platforms, apps and widgets, and so on.
The question answered here is how many visitors did your page/ blog or website get?
Activation
This step of implementing growth marketing is about getting customers to take the desired action or step after their initial encounter with your business, content, or product. If it’s your landing page, do they visit any additional pages? Do they download the app? Sign up for the email list? etc.
The question to be answered here is how many customers took that step.
Retention Metrics
This step is about monitoring how your activated customers are continuing to show interest in what your business, content, or service is offering. Growth marketers observe this by checking returning consumers over a certain period of time, revisits to your blog or website, opening emails, and so forth.
Growth marketing here ensures customers are delighted and satisfied and they also look out for more opportunities to improve user experiences such as personalized support and any similar moves that would retain them.
The question to be answered here is how many of your customers came back for a “second helping”?
Referral Metrics
If your customers came back for more, they most likely have told a friend about your product. This is what this step is about. Growth marketers have the task of tracking this metric because there isn’t a standard measurable method through which customers can refer your offering to their friends.
However, they can create their own referral programs for ease of tracking and an incentive. For instance, they can use referral competitions, emails with referral offers, and the like.
The question here is how many people have referred your product to their friends?
Revenue
Now this involves all the activities that earn your business income. This growth marketing implementation stage involves identifying all these revenue targets and weighing whether your previous efforts of awareness, acquisition, activation, and retention have led to any profitable growth.
A growth marketing agency here will look out for customer personas with the least or minimum revenue and those that just break even and finally those that exceed the cost of customer acquisition.
Marketers can also experiment with different pricing strategies such as how it’s displayed on the website and so on.
Tracking and Analyzing the AAARRR Pirate Metrics
Implementation of the above stages isn’t the end of the story. Growth marketing will be successful if you identify the type of data to use at the various stages and how to track them. There are several tools you can use to get this information. For instance, Google Analytics is one of them.
At this point as a growth marketer, you have to ask yourself: what is the marketing objective for the growth stage of the product life cycle?
The growth stage of the product life cycle refers to the point at which your sales, revenues as well as profits for your product or offer start to grow as your brand or product becomes more and more popular, accepted, and trusted by your customers. All these aspects work together to push the growth of your business.
How to Determine the Type of Experiment to Run in Growth Marketing?
A growth marketing agency can easily identify areas of testing and how to go about them. However, for rookie marketers, they can simply identify for what areas of the business they want growth in and specifically experiment in those areas. When this has been done then the next area of interest can be tested.
But irrespective of the experiments being carried out, best practices indicate that the sample being tested should be large enough to give conclusive results. This means if you’re for instance testing the number of views of a certain sample, you may have to allow it a long period of time to be able to get a large enough number to get relevant results.
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Set clear performance goals and objectives in order to actually know what you are doing and where you are headed. Without this clarity, you just might waste time and resources.
Spread Your Risk
If you put all your eggs in one basket, you will be risking too much. In other words, don’t focus too much on one strategy. In growth marketing, you need to diversify your options by assigning smaller portions of the entire cost to various growth marketing strategies.
Know Your Sources of Retention
As seen above, customer retention is a big deal in growth marketing.
As a best practice, you must have data on where your business is retaining in order to extend this particular model that has proven successful to other areas of your growth marketing strategy. Plus, it delivers clues to a general change in your growth marketing strategy in a way that will instantly transform results. And you can repeat it for as long as it will keep bringing positive results.
Gather Data from Current and Potential Users
Thanks to technology today, you can access data from anywhere in real-time. It’s a treasure to exploit because it’s very easy to engage your customers as well as potential customers digitally.
You can leverage social media platforms and email to grab their attention and you can use this data in your growth marketing strategy. Remember data is everything in growth marketing. It can give you important insights that you can use to tweak your content for more relevance.
Stay Up to Date
Growth hacker marketing cannot be effective unless you stay up to date by capturing and understanding the ever-changing trends. Keeping at speed with these trends is like sharpening your tools frequently to make your work easier and more effective.
What might have worked yesterday may not work today. Plus, it is the simplest way to discover new channels for ROI improvement.
Engage Your Creativity
Creativity in growth marketing is a best practice and a good growth marketing agency knows this because every business has its own unique nuances. Therefore, one strategy may not work across all stages of growth or across all businesses.
Thus, your creativity comes in handy as you need to pick the most suitable approach for a certain situation. And the best tactics to delight your different customers in their different life cycle stages. Here, creative thinking and smart thinking must go hand in hand.
Create Stellar Content
The quality of the content you share with your customers or potential customers will give the first impression of what to expect even in your product or service offering. If you want to retain customers’ interest in your business, great and quality content is a prerequisite.
There is a shift in the role of a marketer that has been caused by the changing times. Growth marketers are now becoming more popular and for good reason. These marketers don’t just do regular marketing: they are equipped with a distinct set of skills for their unique work as compared to traditional marketers.
Here are some key competencies and the work they do:
Analytical – Growth marketing is largely scientific. It involves experimenting with numbers and testing hypotheses. A growth marketer must know how to glean and analyze the data they see and use it to optimize or turn that data into actionable steps that be executed.
Solution-centered – This skill involves the ability to target specific areas of your marketing strategy and see the best tactics to improve on them. It involves centering your actions toward solutions and this is the difference between a traditional marketer and a successful growth marketer.
Creative – Growth marketing thrives on creativity. Being smart alone won’t cut it here. Growth itself is all about thinking outside the box. It’s about having unconventional approaches and growth hacker marketing techniques that create successful business transformations. A growth marketer uses their creativity in their everyday decision-making.
Conclusion
Growth marketing and growth hacker marketing are techniques for uplifting your business market share using smart tactics that are outside the traditional marketing range. Marketing growth includes all the pillars of an effective marketing strategy and involves goal setting, formation of a hypothesis, gleaning and analyzing of all relevant data while considering your customer’s entire journey from awareness to retention.
Growth marketing is an eye-opening and sustainable model of constantly growing your business at the lowest cost possible.
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