The thought of making money online, specifically on Facebook should seem like a pleasurable hustle. And why won’t it? Facebook is fun and successful right? So, it can get truly exciting with hopes all over the place, but the truth is it may not be a walk in the park. It will take you time and lots of effort to put in place the best ways to monetize your Facebook page. With that said though, it’s really not a dream pipe.
The human mind is not wired to pick pain as the first option, so what people often do is quit anything that gives the semblance of a struggle as a survival instinct, but this article is bespoke for you to show you that like any other business venture, you just need grit to stick to the process even if it may start slow or take time to grow.
The trick is to think about the long-term results, every dime worth having is worth working for, so here are some basic things to understand and ways on how to make money on Facebook.
Ways to Monetizing Facebook
This is all about making money on Facebook by leveraging what the platform offers, by offering value to your audience. This giant platform has over 2.79 billion monthly active users. It’s the top marketing platform that B2B and B2C businesses use. About 30 % of marketers report that Facebook gives the highest digital advertising ROI. With these kinds of statistics, it’s a no-brainer why everyone is turning to Facebook for marketing and hence, a platform to make money.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
Why Use Facebook to Earn Money? How to Make Money on Facebook?
When it started, Facebook was just a social media platform where people would reconnect or connect, but a short time after, it became a marketing medium for many businesses. This was made possible by the fact that many people spent more and more time here to catch up, learn new stuff and share ideas. Eventually, Facebook started tweaking itself into a place where people could make money.
Today, it reigns supreme among social media platforms as far as the business front is concerned. So here are some key advantages.
5 Reasons Why Monetizing Your Facebook Page May Seem Easy
a. Cheaper Marketing Costs
Whether you’re an already existing business or you are just starting, Facebook advertising is quite cheap in terms of marketing. You barely need to worry about your budget limits.
This involves not having to worry about having a website, through the use of a Facebook business page where it’s possible to include all your business information as well as upload any content that you may want, all for free.
When it comes to advertising, Facebook helps you select the right audience for your business based on whether you want to be shown based on location, behavior of your potential customer, their demographics, connections or interests, all it takes is a click of what will work for you.
When it comes to paying for the ads, you can choose among many budget-friendly options to pay per click (CPC), per million (CPM). It’s also important to mention that you can at this point set your daily limit over the amount you’d like to spend.
b. Increased Brand Recognition
With Facebook being the third most visited website in the world and the biggest social media platform, it means that the hardest work has already been taken care of, you have over a billion potential clients in one place. This is the place they hang out, so what this means for you is that you can simultaneously access new customers, make yourself more familiar to the already existing customers and also, attract a nonchalant customer when they frequently recognize your brand.
c. Improves Brand Loyalty
Due to the nature of the platform, Facebook has made it easy for businesses and clients to interact. This means responding to customers is swift. This goes a long way in morphing customers into becoming loyal customers because information sharing, interaction and customer support are instant.
With each post you share on Facebook, comes an opportunity to convert. With the right audience, you can simultaneously leverage new customers, current or recent customers as well as old customers by interacting with them at the same time. These interactions may not all result in a purchase; however, they eventually increase the likelihood of one.
This constant interaction leads to the humanization of brands, they stop being an entity and become more like people, and people love to do business with fellow people rather than entities.
e. Traffic Due to Brand Authority
If you have a website, then you may already know that your inbound traffic may be limited only to people who know of your existence. But with Facebook, your profile and the content that you post will be a path that leads visitors to your website. The better the quality, the more your audience will talk about you (shares) and the higher authority your brand will command.
f. Better Customer Insights
Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool that’s designed to enable you to learn more about your target audience. This includes the geographical, demographic as well as purchase behavior of your target audience among many more insights. You can also keep a finger on comments to see what is being said about your brand or product.
You are also able to view your content to see the one that has generated the most interest and replicate similar content for continuous results.
So, with all these benefits, you now have more reasons to learn how to make money on Facebook ads or any other option you may pick, besides, your competition is already doing it, meaning the field is ripe for you to get in. The sooner you get started the sooner you’ll start reaping these great benefits.
What’s the Difference Between Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Shop?
Facebook marketplace is like a listing of personal ads in a common place where interested customers can see, and then get in touch with the seller or owner for purchase. The marketplace doesn’t have any payment processor support or a shopping cart. It’s basically meant for users and not businesses.
Facebook Shop on the other hand is ideal for businesses because it supports transactions. Your call to action button can be attached to your Shopify store, your Amazon shop and so forth. So, it’s coherent to say that it’s more appropriate for B2C.
Who Can Make Money on Facebook?
Anybody can. True story.
What Can You Sell on Facebook?
A simpler question would be what can’t you sell on Facebook because you can sell anything except:
Non-existent items
Animals
Healthcare related things
Firearms
Where Do You Start?
The first step would be to create a Facebook account if you don’t have an existing one. Depending on whether you want it as a personal account or a business account, you must have one and you can learn how to go about it here.
The next thing would be to build your audience. This will involve identifying your area of expertise or interest and posting unique and relevant and outstanding content that will make you recognized as an expert or someone people can relate to a certain niche. It will help you build authority, and whether you will approach this s an influencer or as a product, you will require some respect in your area to gain and retain some attention. You can go here to learn more.
Best Ways to Monetize Your Facebook Page in 2023
Option 1 on Ways to Monetize with Facebook – Sell Products and Services
The great thing about Facebook is that it offers you an array of options that you can use to sell your products or services. Facebook Marketplace is one of the most popular places and the first place you may want to try.
Marketplace is a feature that enables you to conveniently buy or sell a range of items from furniture, clothing, household and even cars. And because Facebook already knows the location from which you’re logged in, it will automatically tailor a listing of buyers from your local area.
Facebook marketplace also allows you to manage messages, comments as well as questions and offers that may come from your potential buyers. To have an easier time, here are a few quick tips:
Respond to any communication from your buyers swiftly
Keep the titles of your posts optimized, elaborately descriptive and catchy
Let your description be inviting, talk about the history of the product and (based on your market research) tell your customers what they want to hear
So, while Marketplace may be the most popular method of earning money on Facebook, it definitely isn’t the only method, have you heard about Facebook Groups?
These are groups that can have as many members as thousands or tens of thousands, committed to buying or selling items. These groups may be formed according to interests, where you find groups dedicated to something specific. The only difference between Marketplace and Groups is that Groups may not be as localized, which means your buyer may come from your local area or overseas.
So, you may require organizing for shipping. The advantage Groups have over the marketplace is that the buyers in this section are already interested in what you’re selling.
Facebook Groups may be private or public, if they’re public then you’re good to go, however, if they’re private you may first request to join. Some quick tips to help you when selling on Facebook Groups would be to include your location since this group may be very diverse.
Another way to sell on Facebook would be through Facebook Shop. This comes with its unique features such as the ability to add an unlimited number of items, categorize your ware, view stats of your sales, and still get to appear on Facebook Marketplace.
So, you really are spoilt for choice as to which method you may want to use to sell your products. Remember to set up payment methods such as PayPal.
Ways to Monetize on Facebook – Option 2 – Become an Influencer
There are 7.7 billion people on Earth today, 4 billion of them are using the internet and 3.2 billion of them are active on social media. This means about 42% of the entire population is active on social media. Out of these, 72% of social media users are likely to make purchases guided by social media referrals.
So, out of 4 buyers, 3 of them will search social sites to see what others are saying about the products before spending their hard-earned money. And this explains why social media influencers are playing a more and more significant role in digital marketing.
A social media influencer is an individual with a reasonable and relevant following on social media and uses this platform to express their opinions on various brands or products or services. Consequently, these opinions influence their followers.
They act as a representative of the ordinary general public and this relationship is built over time through honest reviews and discussions that are authentic.
So, How Can You Become a Facebook Influencer?
The first place you can start is by finding your niche that will form your brand. An area that you may be passionate about or skilled at, the lesser crowded it is, the better it will be for you. After finding your voice, the next step is to build the brand that represents you. This involves doing some research and finding out who the main influencers in your chosen niche are and what kind of content is getting the most engagement.
The next step would be to create stellar content and publish it regularly, remember to optimize it using the proper keywords and hashtags in order for you to be found.
How Do You Make Money on Facebook as an Influencer?
Once you’ve built your following and your brand, you can partner with brands to spread their messages in unique ways that will impact their goal. You can be a:
i. Brand Ambassador
Become a brand ambassador where you get to represent a certain brand. You may be paid a certain fee for all the content you create for them or may be paid a certain fixed amount of money for each conversion you drive.
ii. Affiliate Marketer
This is another great way how to earn money on Facebook page likes, by leveraging affiliate marketing. Here, you can approach businesses or brands that work with affiliate marketers. How this works is simple, once you’re accepted as an affiliate marketer, you’re given a unique link code that can be used to track your conversions. You then earn a commission based on how much sales you’ve been able to rake in.
What you need to do is to create quality and unique content that will be reviewing or promote the products you’re marketing. Some brands will offer you the products for free while a few others may require you to purchase with your own money.
A Facebook page will work best for affiliate marketing because it’ll offer you more compared to a profile page in terms of insights. The Facebook page insights will allow you to track how your page is performing. You can track the engagement, likes and post reach, page views and video statistics as well.
iii. Sponsored Posts
Sponsored content is another sure way to monetizeon Facebook by posting links. As an influencer, your large following and popularity is what will pay off here. A business or a brand will pay you to promote their product or message or even a campaign to your followers.
The main difference between affiliate marketing and sponsored posts is that with affiliate, you’ll get paid for the sales you’ll bring in but for sponsorship, you’re paid a flat rate for reach and awareness, as long as you have participated in creating awareness through your content, you’re good to get a cheque. The big advantage of sponsorship over affiliate is that you get paid for all the time you’ve spent working for the brand, not only for the clicks or sales.
iv. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are created for various reasons. There are two types of groups, the Open and the Closed groups. An open group means anyone can join anytime, a closed group means the membership is solely through invitation or application.
When you create your own group, you’ll be able to work as an influencer for the particular niche you’ll have picked. It could be a make-up group where people discuss everything and anything about make-up, it could be a Keto diet group, a political group or even an automobile group, whatever it is, as the group admin, you own the authority and have influence over these members.
Once you reach a certain membership let’s say like 10, 000 members, you can close this group and be the main voice of influence. Here you can earn money by selling products, reviewing products or getting paid to work in partnership with different brands in that specific niche.
Option 3 on Facebook Monetization – Make Money Through Lead Generation/ Gaining More Traffic
For most businesses, being on Facebook is not for mere pleasure. Rather, it’s for the purpose of expanding the customers’ database and your entire enterprise as a whole. Traditionally, inbound marketing required you to cast your net wider to capture more traffic; in translation meant more content more frequently.
But the ever-changing Facebook algorithm now requires a different approach, offer quality more than quantity and stand out by offering super-specific content that will resonate with your audience.
When you offer this detailed specificity, Facebook will help you target by allowing you to segment your content to different audiences.
How does this work?
Facebook’s algorithm marks the places you visit, the clicks you make, the videos you play and so forth. Then consequentially it shows you similar types of content, this is how it connects like minds even for businesses.
How will this help you earn money?
This will work best if you already have a website or an e-commerce site that’s linked to your business. The great quality content that you created earlier should lead people to click for more of that, which will lead them to your landing page where they can make a purchase or even sign up on your mailing list.
Your content may include product launches, offers such as discounts, insider reveals, “how it’s made” videos and such unique but authentic content. It’s also ok to pay for ads if you have the budget; remember, Facebook is the largest social media platform and the third most visited site in the world, people are already here! So, when you use ads, you can segment your target into their interests and demographics and your message will land to people who are already showing some interest in what you have to offer.
Once you’ve gotten the attention you wanted, keep them interested and give them reasons to come back for more. The discounts, the offers, free e-books etc. will help you keep selling. And getting more leads.
Make Money on Facebook – Option 4 – Offer Facebook Management or Consultation Services
You have probably heard the terms social media manager or marketer or consultant, basically, they all do the same job. This approach of earning money on Facebook requires you to be flexible enough to fit into your client’s requirements. That said, the overall goal of a Facebook consultant or manager is to create brand awareness for your client and get paid for it.
This involves sharing relevant content with their target audience and engaging them with helpful wholesome conversations to build and maintain their following.
Some of the responsibilities that you may be required to perform include
Day-to-day management of your client’s Facebook account, blog and landing pages
Content creation that will help grow and maintain the social network
Come up with strategies and campaigns that will help build a brand’s awareness
Drive engagement with Facebook influencers
Review the success of marketing strategies and campaigns and come up with ways to improve them
Being a Facebook consultant may require you to be savvy with other social media platforms as well, this is because most businesses run more than one social media account and they may need you to manage all of them. It’s an interesting way to monetize your Facebook page in 2023 and the best part is that you may do it part-time, or full-time if you are able to get several brands to work with.
Option 5 on Ways to Monetize Facebook – Make Money on Facebook Videos
For a long time, only YouTube videos could be monetized. But Facebook has since changed that narrative and the question now is not whether you can monetize Facebook videos, but how to make money from Facebook videos, because it’s now possible. And it’s through the Facebook Ad Breaks.
If you’re a passionate creator, then this is for you. Facebook, however, requires you to pass the following eligibility standards:
You must have a Facebook Page with at least 10,000 followers
You must pass their monetization eligibility standards that you can review here
Have been creating over 3-minute-long videos with over 30,000 one-minute views
These requirements may seem quite like some hard work but worry not, you can do it.
So, the way you earn money is that ads are placed in breaks within your video, you can choose where to break for the ad. But the ads are added automatically on any new video that you post with the provision that you can pick where you want the break to be. And you get paid for each ad. So, besides the eligibility standards that may be a bit of a task for a beginner, it’s really a great way to earn from Facebook.
Conclusion
There are many effective and legitimate ways to monetize your Facebook page by posting links or getting likes. The trick is to offer authentic quality and unique content that will build your organic reach that will eventually lead to your goal, be it conversions or awareness.
Facebook offers a myriad of options to use such as Marketplace, Facebook groups, Facebook Shop and Ad Breaks for videos. Whether you want to be an influencer, a consultant or just a trader, you have many ways to track your efforts and know how well or not you’re doing. So, go ahead and start earning.
What makes you consider marketing creative? Is it the artistic approach of the marketer or their level of imagination and their innovative methods? Creativity has gone beyond images in ad campaigns. Creative marketing is a rigorous approach that’s more complex than just images and visuals.
Creative marketing ideas range from customer experience, data analytics to your product design and beyond. So, this means the work of a creative marketer has taken a paradigm shift from the traditional image creator to roles whose purpose is directly linked to the effectiveness of the marketing process.
It is not to say that creative marketing ideas don’t still play around with artistic talents or outstanding visuals. The real substance of creative marketing is in finding a balance between these elements that draw attention and leveraging them to increase sales.
What Is Creative Marketing?
Creative marketing is the process of providing multiple ignitions to your customers’ desires, concerns and aspirations by offering them satisfying experiences and solutions through power-punch executions that have a lasting effect on them. This means as a creative marketer you must thoroughly understand your brand and your audiences’ needs. Then couple that with the best channels you can use to connect to their emotions.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
Creative marketing comes in various forms all of which are meant to prove your uniqueness and allure to your customers. For you to build that connection you need to use the following three types of creative marketing that are guaranteed to work:
Emotional Creative Marketing
Creative Storytelling
Authentic Imagery
Emotional Creative Marketing
An effective creative marketing strategy must be able to elicit the right emotion from the targeted audience. There are several emotions that can help prospective customers make the final decision to convert. Emotions such as fear (of missing out), anticipation, trust, joy, excitement, and so on.
Your creative marketing strategy must be able to harness all these emotions as the specific moment will require. Your images and copy text should be able to bring out those smiles or create that anxiety that will encourage your target audience to take the call to action step.
Emotional creative marketing is a strategy that has been proven to increase customer loyalty as well as retention. Because it builds that connection between your brand and your customers, it exhibits your trustworthiness and genuineness. Creativity allows you to communicate your values, benefits, and all your brand’s positive traits to them.
It relates to how you make your potential buyers feel about your brand as they part with their hard-earned money. Do you make them laugh, excited, cry or make them feel good about themselves? Whatever you make them feel, always know that they will remember how you made them feel. Creative marketing is about tapping into how you make your potential buyers feel.
Creative Storytelling
There is something authentic about being honest about how your brand came to be. And creative storytelling is a compelling way to communicate your journey to your audience. The creative aspect of storytelling involves entertaining them with a memorable and inspiring narrative about your business. And knowing when and how to use it at different marketing levels.
It’s about explaining why you’re unique and what makes your brand stand out. Small businesses have a special advantage because they can leverage this as the foundation of their creative marketing.
Marketers use various methods to tell and reinforce their narrative in order for it to be as effective as possible. They use fitting images to illustrate their stories and tap into the emotions mentioned earlier.
For this to be effective you need to have a clear knowledge of:
what your audience can relate to,
what is relevant to them,
which solutions are they looking for,
then use this information to show them what you can offer them while using storytelling of how you as a brand came to this point. And they will find you can relate to and understand them, and this is how a connection is built.
So, how can you present your solutions to them using storytelling?
You can use your blog. Leverage video and live stream feature on social media. Use Instagram stories, etc. You may have to try a few methods before landing on the one that drives the most engagement.
In telling your story, you can include such issues as how you started, how your product or service is crafted, some behind the scenes to prove that human aspect, your employees, and so forth.
Authentic Creative Imagery
What is a creative strategy in marketing without authentic visuals? Today’s world is more visual than ever. There are over 3.5 million images that are shared every minute and that proves just how powerful images are as a form of communication in marketing. Plus, over 5 billion videos are watched daily on YouTube. all these statistics prove that the rate of visual consumption is very high.
So, in this ocean of imagery, how do you stand out to get noticed? Creative use of imagery in marketing is the answer.
The answer is not in high-quality perfect imagery, everyone has that, and they no longer mean much. The answer lies in their authenticity.
You have seen images and visuals so perfect and meticulously polished that they stop being real. If you can do that, then that’s ok, but what sells is not the images and visuals themselves, rather it’s the candid and un-retouched moments that have been captured. This is what authentic imagery in creative marketing is all about.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
People are tired of the deception and dishonesty that are often sold to them in ads all over. But the shift that was brought about by social media, meant that real people including celebrities and other influential people can share their real lives. And real moments. This believable approach to marketing is what makes your brand believable, genuine and authentic.
A creative marketing organization must find a way to make use of this imperfect yet real, normal, and natural aspect in their imagery in order to reach and engage their prospective audience.
The use of authentic imagery in creative marketing means incorporating all media such as live streams, reels, stories, flyers, in your website and blog, and pretty much wherever your content goes.
What’s the Importance of Creative Marketing?
Creative Marketing simply cuts through the noise. Remember there are more people using social media sites to buy products each day. Meaning most marketers are also selling through these platforms and this also means that electronic device use is steadily going high. This amplified use of technology means more exposure to millions of ads.
As such, it calls for creative marketing techniques that will enable your brand’s voice to be heard above all the others that are after your target customer’s attention. An approach effective for both big and small brands.
Creative marketing is important because it will guide you in creating the exact kind of content that will be relevant, needed, and remembered by your audience.
Creative marketing focuses on all types of content from written to imagery and visual concepts. And uses them to tell compelling and inspirational stories that will help your brand stand out from the rest of the competition. Creative marketing adds originality, evokes the right emotions, establishes your brand identity, and is a much cheaper and more effective marketing method.
Creative Marketing Strategies That Are Effective
A good creative marketing strategy delivers tangible value to both the brand and the customer. Here are some simple creative strategies you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.
Craft your Content Marketing Strategy in no-time!
Spear your efforts and grab my Simplified Template to transform your content planning and creation into a breeze.
You have Successfully Subscribed!
Don’t Create for the Customer, Create with the Customer
This goes beyond being customer-centric. Creative marketing is more than just targeting your campaign to the customer. It’s about involving them as you develop your content or brand ideas. It’s about experiencing their pains along with them and joining together to come up with solutions that will satisfy their needs.
An approach that will help you stay relevant, and they will end up being your brand ambassadors.
Get Everyone to Advocate for You
Make everyone your brand ambassador, this is cheaper and more effective (authenticity) than using the old paid media and public relations. Regular people make for a great free channel to amplify your impact on your users. Ask your content strategists to be creative and think out of the box to reach this goal.
How you get them to advocate for you is by inspiring creativity in them. Remember the first step is to involve them in your solution creation process. Here you can make them feel like an extension of your brand. Include your employees, customers, and partners in this process so that they will automatically turn into your advocates.
Give End-to-End Experience
Most marketers only focus on the customer experience that’s under their domain, this mostly being how the customer experiences the brand during the purchase stage.
But creative marketing strategies consider the customers’ experience from the start to the end.
They think about the customer during the creation or production stage. The buying process experience is considered, plus the after-sale service or support. And the entire relationship with the customer even after, as a way to retain them.
Another thing to pay attention to is a well-designed website that makes the buying process seamless. Especially if your buyers can begin tasting your efficiency even before they get to your home page.
Use spectacular graphic designs and a mobile-friendly web design that helps your site stand out. Use striking visuals to capture their attention then retain it with a stellar copy.
This end-to-end experience helps in building customer loyalty and advocacy for your brand. All for free.
Giveaways
Few things capture the attention of people the way giveaways and contests do. This is another creative marketing strategy that’s most effective when it’s focused on the process of getting people to participate, then on the giveaway itself.
Giveaways are excellent at driving engagement and traffic to your pages and can be a great lead to sales when done right. The critical bit is to gain more than you’re giving away, e.g. a long-running engagement that lasts beyond the contest.
When using giveaways and contests as a creative marketing strategy, avoid giving your audience too much work to do in order to stand a chance to win. As it will put them off way before they try. The prize that you give them should also be relevant to them, it should align with the purpose and value that you’re offering them.
Always Measure Your Creative Strategies
The digital age has really made things simple even for creative marketing. When trying your creative strategy, you should ensure to measure and test the new methods to see how effective they are. So you don’t keep pouring money and time into dead ends. It also means you can keep improving the methods that are working in order to gain maximum benefits from your campaigns.
It’s very easy to measure data in real-time with a chance to quickly tweak whenever needed. This can be done across various digital platforms such as social media or emails or specific pieces of content and so on. Your creative marketing strategy should be specific, measurable, attainable, and time-based.
Use Startup Techniques
Changes in consumer behavior that are being fueled by digital technology and media are seriously affecting how a creative marketer thinks and operates. Like entrepreneurs that are constantly adjusting their game to better fit into the market.
For example, the rise of microcontent. Think about Instagram Reels or TikTok. These have changed the way consumers digest content. Creative marketers must therefore adapt to new ways to get their brands in front of this audience in an infotainment manner.
Today the success of marketing is no longer measured by how much you do to attract your customers. Be it great campaigns or ads or the content you create, it’s measured by how much engagement, revenue, or loyalty you gain from the marketing efforts you use.
For this reason, you need to look at the overall picture and see things from your customer’s perspectives. Give them the kind of experience they would value. Keep measuring for effectiveness and use the ever-present data when making decisions.
There would be no point in any kind of marketing if there was no return on investment. So, how can you know whether your creative marketing efforts are bearing any fruit? The strategies mentioned above are able to deliver great results but they must also be guided by your brand goals and objectives.
Then you should be aware of what key performance indicators to look out for. These are what you will use to measure the success of your creative marketing efforts. Hence, what are your KPIs? They must be quantifiable and measurable.
Here are the relevant KPIs in creative marketing:
Social media engagement and reach Did any of your content go viral or at least get a reaction from your target audience? Did you get people talking?
Revenue Did you get a return on your investment?
Organic search and site visits Was there an increase in organic traffic?
Shares Were there more shares or fewer?
Conversions Did your creative marketing campaign lead to more conversions?
There may be other KPIs you can look into. They will likely vary from business to business.
How to Run an Effective and Successful Creative Marketing
Which of the following is true of building a creative marketing organization? All of it is true!
A few elements must be in place to effectively use creative marketing. These elements will definitely vary from business to business. But here are a few basic ones:
Creative Marketing Brief
What is a creative brief in marketing?
This is simply an outline that will guide the creative team on the approach and manner of delivery of the creative marketing campaigns. A brief will connect each creative approach to the broader goal of your business by listing out each strategy of the campaign. It will be used by the whole team working on the campaign, whether they are an internal team or an outsourced team.
A Team with a Structure
Having a structure is key to attaining your creative marketing goals. There must be a smooth liaison creative marketing structure with team members that have the right skills for the right task. Without it, you run the risk of confusion and failure.
Leverage on Tech Tools
Your team can utilize the countless digital tools available to help them bring out the best. Inspire their creative juices and present their most original work in the trendiest manner in order to reach the right target audience. Using tech tools also means utilizing data to easily adapt or tweak as may be necessary. Tech simply streamlines your entire creative marketing process and ensures efficiency.
Conclusion
Creative marketing is not a re-invention of the wheel. It’s a practice of divergent thinking that’s necessary with the changing markets. It’s the ability to come up with many approaches to solving one problem and then pick the best out of all of those.
Creative marketing ideas are about finding the most authentic ways to reach your target audience with the best solutions that get to them via the easiest process. How does this translate to your brand?
As a business, increasing your traffic and growing your following and readership are among the most challenging endeavours. Having a profitable business is usually a primary goal for every economic activity. So, deciphering the best marketing tools for business that will help you in your mission is of paramount importance.
Counting on the best selection of marketing tools for business including a toolkit of the best blog writing tools, the most helpful scheduling tools, and the easiest-to-use design tools will lighten your life as a business owner or marketer. And finally, help increase your monthly revenue.
Below is a comprehensive list of applications and tools that will help you reach the success you need and want.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
Squarespace is a site builder, and web hosting tool and includes a set of marketing features to help you design, create and manage your site, engage with your audience and grow your traffic. It provides an easy manner to build your site and brand without the necessity of hiring a web designer or a coder.
Squarespace allows you to create your site without knowing to code. You have various optimized layouts at your disposal to help you in your endeavors and intuitive builders to help you achieve your goals. You have at your disposal analytics, landing pages, e-commerce options and highly responsive customer service to support you. This is a paid tool with a free trial period.
WordPress
WordPress.org is the option you need if you want a self-hosted site that you plan to monetize and transform into a profitable business. It is highly customizable, you can literally create your site the way you want, but you will have to deal with code. You own your site and your content, and you can use all the plugins you want, free and paid, and also you can choose from thousands of themes, no matter your budget. It will cost you the hostage of the site (see BlueHost below).
Bluehost
It is a popular web hosting service that gives you a free domain, free site builder, and a WordPress installation. Their customer service chat is 24/7 and their pricing rates are very affordable. Bluehost comes highly recommended for beginners as they have low rates and practice a 30-day money-back guarantee.
HRank
HRank is a great tool when you need to choose or change your web hosting provider. This web hosting rating system analyzes more than 300 providers particularly shared web hosting providers, aims to be always updated and free. It is based on analysis, research, and experience, and takes into consideration criteria such as response time, uptime, support level, company’s history and experience, website usability, etc.
Best Marketing Tools for Business: SEO and Analytics Tools
Ahrefs
There is no such blogger or content creator who doesn’t want to see his work ranking as high as possible on search engine results. Ahrefs offers you an edge for high-ranking success through competitor analysis, keyword search, technical site, and SEO auditing, content analysis, niche monitoring, and rank tracking. It provides you with a competitive advantage by monitoring your competitors’ activity and niche and availing tools to grow your traffic. Ahrefs might not be a very affordable blogging tool for beginners, but it provides a strong pillar for future success.
Yoast
Yoast is a famous by now SEO Plugin tool. Available for free or on premium options. Getting more traffic and visitors, increasing your readers’ engagement, and making their return is a high desideratum of bloggers. Using Yoast facilities, you are sure of getting keyword optimization for your content, previews of your social media pages, readability verified, and categories control, among other technical background stuff. You have the possibility to edit your title tags, slugs, and meta descriptions as it provides a solution to anything that hinders your SEO ranking.
Google Keywords Planner
Keyword research is crucial to any blogger and in this highly competitive blogging era, counting on excellent keyword research and a strategic tool is key. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a reliable tool to help you find the right words to target and to keep remaining relevant. It gives you a comparative analysis of the keyword trends for your niche, therefore, narrowing down your keyword list to just the most important keywords.
Google Analytics
Bloggers need to be aware of what strategy, what content marketing is working and what is not working for them, and their established goals. Measuring your content metrics is the way to go if you want to be a result-driven blogger. Google Analytics is a free tool that makes you aware of your traffic volume, sources and conversion rates, audience characteristics, most visited sections of your site, most visited articles of the blog, referral sources, and many more detailed insights. You gain the knowledge of what exactly is increasing your traffic and conversion rate thus turning your insights into adjusted strategies and a profitable business.
Best Marketing Tools for Business: Social Media Scheduling Tools
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a paid social media marketing scheduling tool coupled with an editorial calendar tool. In short, with CoSchedule you can manage your team and their workflow, schedule social media posts on various platforms, manage communication campaigns, etc. This is a one-stop-shop for many marketing operations. Be it content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and automation, analytics, workflow management, headline analyzer, email title analyzer, you name it CoSchedule has a reliable solution.
For blog traffic increase, efficient email campaigns, social media calendar management, and optimizing all your headlines, email subjects, and social media posts, CoSchedule is your multipurpose tool. They have a free 14-day trial period, so why not investigate what can happen in those 14 days.
Tailwind
Pinterest is a visual search engine whose capabilities are untapped completely yet. It is a pure gold mine for most niches and for bloggers, businesses, and entrepreneurs in search of alternative ways to grow their blogs and sites. It has the capacity to be your highest traffic driver, better than any organic search engine or social media channel be it Facebook or Instagram.
However, to be successful on Pinterest, you have to pin more than 10 times a day and that’s time-consuming. This is where Tailwind interferes and saves the day. Tailwind helps to schedule your pins for an entire week in an organized manner and in advance according to an optimized calendar. They have a very user-friendly dashboard that provides you with detailed analytics.
It is a paid tool whose benefits outweigh the costs and it’s a must-have if you want to make Pinterest a primary source of traffic for your site.
Later
There is numerous software that has made it possible to deal with social media content automation. Blogging requires you to constantly connect with your audience through various social media platforms which can be tedious. Later is an Instagram scheduling app that helps you plan, schedule, and auto-publish your Instagram posts. Being a visual planner, you can see the aesthetics of your feed before you post and make the necessary changes. There is a free and paid option which is affordable.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare plugin creates beautifully crafted social media icons that make sharing content on social media pages a breeze. It simplifies the button setup process and works exceptionally well for WordPress platforms. The buttons are light so as not to interfere with the page loading speed. It is a paid tool on a yearly subscription basis.
Hootsuite
This is a social media management tool that helps you keep track of all your social media activities through a properly structured dashboard. You are able to schedule, manage and report all social media activities carried out by you or by your team members. Hootsuite also measures and reports the impact of your social media campaigns hence giving you an accurate overview of ROI. It is a paid tool with a 30-day trial period.
Top Marketing Tools for Business: Email Marketing Tools
Convertkit
“Money is in the list” is a cliché but reveals the truth. The best-performing way to monetize your blog is via your email list and Convertkit is one of the best tools to grow quickly and manage your mailing list and mail campaigns. Convertkit was expressly conceived for creators and their needs. Convertkit helps you design, test email content, measure the performance of your campaigns, and automate them. And finally, grow your audience.
You do not have to be a tech genius to use Convertkit as the interface is intuitive and user-friendly and is designed to make your tasks easier. You are able to manage thousands of blog subscribers in a relaxed and convenient manner. In addition, it provides you with the option to effortlessly switch from all the other email marketing apps.
Mailerlite
When starting your blogging journey, Mailerlite offers a free email marketing platform for up to 1000 subscribers. It empowers you with a drag-and-drop email builder, automated landing page creation, beautifully crafted popups, and an email automation platform. This gives you the luxury of creating refined campaigns and growing your following with ease for free till you reach 1000 subscribers.
MailChimp
One of the most if not the most popular email marketing tool, free for the first 2000 subscribers with a limit of 12,000 emails monthly. MailChimp allows you to create a campaign that will suit best your communication goals. It also provides many customization options for the design of your mail if you want images or videos in your mail messages.
The design of the opt-in series is very rigid for the free account and the reason why I renounced on MailChimp after the first two months. Transferring your subscribers to another email marketing app is a painful and tedious process if you have thousands of subscribers to move.
As for the design of the opt-in forms, Converkit is by far the best option. So, if you are seeking convenience, and ease and are a serious blogger with thousands of followers, Converkit is what you should choose.
Traffic and List-Building Apps
Sumo
This is a comprehensive suite of tools that help grow your site’s traffic. Sumo is free for accounts with under 200 subscribers. For around $25 a month, you get an open option of 10 tools to work with what best suits your needs. With Sumo, you are able to track your success as you continue to build a following. Tools like list builder, scroll box, welcome mat, and sharing buttons among others increase your shares and subscriptions.
Milotree
It is a cost-effective tool due to its affordable pricing. This is the quickest way to grow your social media following and email list, and subscribers. Milotree provides you with an easy way to convert your site visitors into followers. It cuts across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest among others. It is a mobile-configured pop-up that auto-converts your current traffic to subscribers. It has analytics, therefore, enabling you to track and monitor growth and results.
This is a free blogging tool that is useful even for the best and most experienced bloggers. It ensures your blogs have a zero error rate when it comes to typos and grammatical errors. As we all, bloggers and writers need to verify our work from this point of view. Grammarly is one of the best grammar and spelling checking tools, compatible with all web browsers, and extremely easy to download and install.
Google Drive
Drive is a free Google blogger tool accessible to anyone with a Gmail account. Drafting and writing content on Google drive is the safest way to back up your material, make it accessible to anyone you want to share it with and collaborate during content creation. Being a secured cloud storage system, it is perfect for files, photos, and video back up.
We are all visual creatures, there is no doubt about that. Thus, the visual appeal of your content is what attracts your followers to you. It goes without saying that poorly designed content is a sure way to disaster. Canva allows you to create layouts from millions of templates available and has a huge photos and design elements database.
You can customize layouts for all social media channels, for various presentations, for ebooks, you name it. It simply empowers you to go wild with your creativity hence standing out; it is easy to use and less complicated than dedicated design apps. Its editing and resizing features are efficient. Canva has a free option that you can use with confidence and a superior paid option.
PhotoShop
PhotoShop is a powerful Adobe product that gives you the ability to create your images the way you want, with lots of advanced design features at your disposal. Photos creation, enhancement, editing, simulation and 3D artwork are made possible via PhotoShop. Additionally, you can design layouts for websites, mobile applications, logos, banners, just about any work of art. It is a paid tool with either yearly or monthly subscriptions.
Blogstomb
Images have the ability to make your website slow and this is such a turn-off to your web visitors. In an age of instant gratification, no one waits for a site that takes ages to load. Photographers use Blogstomb to resize and edit photos to give them the perfect look they are after. It is a one-off purchased application.
Screencastomatic
Video editing and recording are made to look like they cost a fortune. The best blog sites have now transitioned from images to videos. Screencastomatic is a free tool that helps create videos, add narrations, edit videos, and share them. The content produced is clear and of high quality. It is a tool creating a revolution in screen recording.
Marketing Tools for Business: Sales Generating Tools
Leadpages
Your target audience needs to be driven from just being readers to being part of your sales funnel and becoming paying customers. Landing pages are the vehicle to do that. Statistics sustain and even guarantee a more than 55% increase in sales with the effective use of landing pages. Leadpages is a land page builder tool that will help you create a conversational-driven and effective landing page.
It is a paid tool that gives you multiple and vast selections of drag-and-drop templates to create your lead gen campaigns on.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is one of the most commonly used sales funnel tools to drive sales. It helps you build pages easily inside sales funnels that are built for conversion. You do not need to be a tech wizard as most of your task is reduced to drag and drop. It is a paid tool (14-day free trial) that every internet marketer need. Putting your information out in the best way possible is how your customers get to connect with you and purchase your product or service. Clickfunnels grow your business through result-driven sales funnels.
BeaconStac
This is a fancy tool that can help expand your business via a QR code generator. Start to create branded digital experiences and your business will stand out. Customized QR codes are a way to do that while inserting your logo, frames, CTAs, personalized backgrounds, and data patterns. Try a new way to manage digital campaigns and customer behavior.
Team Management Tools
Slack
Slack is a team and project management platform. It allows proper, real-time communication between teams that work together. There are over 1000 applications that can be integrated with the platform, thus saving time to get feedback and manually reviewing work.
Trello
Content campaigns entail so much work and keeping everyone on track and up to speed can take a lot of time. Trello ensures there is less stress and more productivity during the campaign duration. It reduces email strings, keeps timelines, and monitors productivity. It is a free tool that is fun, flexible with organized boards to make your work faster and easier.
Marketing Tools for Business: Income-Generating Platforms
SendOwl
This is a digital selling platform whereas a blogger, you can sell your products and services. It is easy to create a product you want to sell and get clients to buy it directly from you. It is an important blogging tool for beginners as it is difficult to make sales and monetize your site when you are just starting up. Sendowl is mobile-optimized, and secure and provides a huge network of people for you to reach out to and benefit. Their payment plan is affordable as they start monthly charges at $9.
Teachable
It is an amazing and go-to platform to create and sell online courses. They offer both free and paid plans to cater for all necessities and budgets. If you are good at creating excellent course content, Teachable provides the network of students you need to profit from your work.
Every blogger driven by success aims to be the best blogger, if possible, in his area of expertise. Having the correct resources makes it easy to produce high-quality, interesting and thought-provoking articles. Planning, organizing, managing and analyzing the content and all communication campaigns and continually improving the results are what make the best blog sites and consequently, you need the best blogging tools to support your marketing activity.
It’s 2023 and Email marketing continues to stay on top of the list of lead-generating strategies despite the fulminate rise of social media platforms. It remains effective and cost-efficient. And for these reasons, great email marketing tools keep coming up or reinventing themselves. And thus, comparisons such as the one between MailerLite vs MailChimp vs ConvertKit seem inevitable in a bid to get yourself the platform that best suits your business needs.
Disclosure: This article may contain sponsored or affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase using one of these links, I’ll make a small commission without impacting the price that you will pay. I recommend just services or products I find useful and that I have tested or currently use.
There are plenty of other email marketing platforms besides MailerLite, MailChimp, and ConvertKit. However, finding a perfect fit for your business involves evaluating various solutions and this process can either be a harrowing experience or a complete delight.
So, to make it easier for you, this article lists a broad comparison between these 3 main platforms MailerLite vs. MailChimp vs. ConvertKit. This is a comprehensive comparison that aims to help you make an informed decision.
Craft your Content Marketing Strategy in no-time!
Spear your efforts and grab my Simplified Template to transform your content planning and creation into a breeze.
You have Successfully Subscribed!
1. Customer Satisfaction Thanks to a 24/7 Customer Support
MailerLite wins on this very important feature because they have very responsive and efficient round-the-clock customer support even on the free plan. It gets even better, when you miss their chat response they send it straight to your email, this helps you find solutions to any questions fast enough rather than waste time on Google searches or troubleshooting. Particularly when you are a beginner using this type of platform.
ConvertKit too has 24/7 customer support that responds to your questions in real time. On top of this, they’re also great at community-based support.
MailChimp has customer support available only to their paying subscribers. But even then, you have to mine through a myriad of answers and this can take time and crush your patience.
A recent survey on email marketing software ranked MailerLite at the top (97%) and ConvertKit followed right next (96%) while MailChimp (93%) ranked fifth in customer satisfaction.
MailerLite landing page wins again here. Even on the free plan, they provide you with customizable independent landing page features that allow you to edit it according to your specific requirements. What this means is that you don’t have to run parallel accounts to capture emails or create landing pages or web forms. And they are good-looking too!
ConvertKit and MailChimp on the other hand integrate their landing pages with Instapage on plans that start at $29 per month. They are mainly not as customizable as MailerLite.
3. MailerLite vs MailChimp vs ConvertKit: Pricing
MailerLite allows you only 1K free subscribers and after you surpass this you start to pay. That said though, it’s still cheaper compared to MailChimp because even after going beyond the 1K threshold you get unlimited emails with access to all features and it gets even cheaper as your subscribers increase.
MailChimp allows you to have up to 2K subscribers absolutely free with a maximum of 12K emails per month. However, once you surpass the limit the payment is quite high compared to MailerLite pricing.
ConvertKit has no free plan and their cheapest package starts at $29.
MailerLite offers you an opportunity to create workflows that are guided by your campaign’s target for instance clicks or opens or segmentation. You don’t need the technical know-how or a “how to use MailerLite” manual, as the platform is highly intuitive. The tagging and segmentation allow you to create tailored campaigns for your specific target group. They offer this feature even on the free plan.
MailChimp also offers automation including follow-up emails. It, however, offers no workflow, therefore doesn’t give you a smooth ride and from my point of view complicates your efforts to find alternative solutions.
The ConvertKit also doesn’t offer workflows, but recently they added a visual automatic builder that is way easier and faster to use compared to any feature on either MailerLite or MailChimp.
5. Template and Welcome Mail
MailerLite offers you an array of templates and welcome emails to work with, all free even in the forever free plan. And they are very user-friendly, so you do not need any guidance or some sort of MailerLite tutorial.
MailChimp on the other hand offers some features under the paid plan, including welcome mail.
ConvertKit fails in this aspect because they don’t give you much to work with and this doesn’t help you get a direction in terms of your email design or customization.
6. MailerLite vs MailChimp vs ConvertKit: A/B Testing
If you’re running a large email campaign and you depend on split testing to determine the results of your efforts. Both MailerLite and MailChimp offer you testing options. MailChimp offers up to three variables while MailerLite allows for both A and B choices.
ConvertKit lately offers testing for email content or to find out what makes your subscribers click.
7. File Organization/Manager
Both MailerLite and MailChimp have this great tool to help you organize your content into folders or files. MailerLite has a file manager while MailChimp has a content manager. These features are very handy especially if you handle huge content e.g. images.
The better of the two, however, is MailerLite because they have made it easier to create groups or segments. MailChimp is not very organized and thus leaves you with quite some work and ends up consuming your time because it’s not user-friendly.
8. MailerLite vs MailChimp vs ConvertKit: Customization
By personalizing your campaign and making it less promotional, you’re guaranteed to gain more interest and clicks. This is what MailerLite has over MailChimp. It allows you to redesign your emails to a more personalized tone, you can customize:
Customizable unsubscribe pages (it’s ok to make a great last impression, might change someone’s opinion)
Customizable buttons that you can directly add to your email
And much more.
MailChimp does not allow for any redesigning. It’s rigid on inserting your purpose at the top and your address at the bottom. There’s no readjusting the widgets and this eventually has an effect on how your email will be received. Not to mention that the layouts are far from being pleasant to the eye and it’s among the first reasons that made me renounce Mailchimp the next day I started to use it.
ConvertKit also is limited in customization options.
9. Integration
Integrating with various third-party apps can truly be helpful on so many levels thus simplifying your workflow and increasing efficiency.
MailChimp integrates with many sites including PayPal and Shopify. Why this is great teamwork? Because with every new purchase on your site, the new customer email is automatically added to your list and you’re also able to track the links and find out how much revenue your email has made (well caution to GDPR for European customers if you use it that way). It is also integrated with WordPress, Facebook, Hootsuite, Eventbrite, Google Analytics, and many more.
MailerLite API isn’t too bad though there’s plenty of room for improvement; it integrates with Bookfunnel which is especially great if you’re dealing with eBooks. It also integrates with Shopify and MailerLite WordPress plugins, Facebook, and several others. And as with MailChimp, new purchases mean new contact added to your list automatically.
ConvertKit has the least integrations except that it’s supported by Zapier, which gives it great potential for more integrations.
10. Reporting
All three ESPs have, of course, some form of reporting. The difference is in how detailed you want your report to be. If you’re just interested in a quick view of your email list growth, ConvertKit does that brilliantly. But that’s all you’re going to get.
MailerLite and MailChimp are more detailed and will allow you to track everything including unsubscribes, link activity, open rates, clicks, bounces, and even location.
The big difference that makes MailerLite win is that you can map out your data and get a visual report.
Imagine spending all your efforts and skills getting new subscribers and creating winning email campaigns only for them to land in the spam/ promotional folder! Then eventually your subscribers will not hear from you and gradually forget about you. This is what’s likely to happen to you when you use MailChimp.
With MailerLite your emails land straight in the primary box, most of the time, and this is why they have higher open rates. It’s important to note here that MailerLite GDPR compliance means there’s the transparency of consent by new subscribers. And this is a good thing for your campaign because you rest assured you are reaching the right audience (you’re not a spammer) and do not need on your list persons that are not interested in your products or services.
ConvertKit also has a higher open rate compared to MailChimp.
12. Auto-resend
All three ESPs allow for auto resend of follow-up messages to subscribers that didn’t open the email or never clicked the links.
The difference is that MailerLite allows you to do more than just resend, it allows you to make any of the following edits:
Change your email subject
You can also add a new or different message above the body of the original email to give it a more personal touch
You can change both the content and subject of the content and resend
Of course, these changes may just be what’s needed to get more clicks.
13. MailerLite vs MailChimp vs ConvertKit: Drag and Drop
As social media seems to have a great impact on marketing trends, it’s obvious that today people are more visual than ever. Therefore text only campaigns are not enough and so, you need to include some visual elements in your emails to be able to capture the customer’s attention and consequentially be able to communicate your ideas better.
In this area, all three platforms have this amazing drag-and-drop feature. But again, as seems to be the trend now, MailerLite is better than MailChimp and ConvertKit, at least in my view.
Their drag-and-drop builder makes it so easy even for beginners to design great emails like pros. You’re able to choose from an array of newsletter templates that you can edit or tweak to suit your needs. And you can also use these same templates to create your bespoke design without having to start from scratch.
14. Tagging and Segmentation
One simple strategy to use to get more clicks is to segment and tag your subscribers to create a campaign that’s very specific and relevant to them. All three platforms have these features. ConvertKit seems more inclined to bloggers and so they have a ConvertKit WordPress Plug-in that tracks visitors on your website and tags them.
MailerLite and MailChimp also have this segmentation and you can segment by:
Sign-up source
Geographical data
Customer journey
Email engagement
Purchase activity and many more
On both platforms, you can also combine the segments to target a specific audience and build strong relationships bespoke for them. MailerLite uses the Subscriber management tool. So, basically, the 2 ESPs seem to level it out here.
15. Mobile Friendly
Over 55% of emails are opened on phones and tablets. It’s therefore important that your emails appeal on any device. MailerLite automatically fits your newsletters into any size to make sure the layout remains unbroken. With MailChimp you may have to do some additional coding work by yourself to edit the mobile templates.
ConvertKit doesn’t have a mobile app.
16. MailerLite vs MailChimp vs ConvertKit – Unlimited Image Hosting, Absolutely Free!
There’s no limit to the number of images (or amount of data) that you can store on MailerLite, and it’s all free.
MailChimp also offers unlimited storage on both data and images; the only difference is that the images must be below 10MB in size, each.
ConvertKit, on the other hand, is also unlimited but has no specific media database to manage your uploaded files. This can be quite a headache.
17. Other Features
MailerLite has the following features that the other two don’t have;
Unsubscribe page builder
RSS to Email
Available in 8 languages (5 Support languages)
Common misses
They all lack spam and design testing features.
They all don’t have a backlist.
Final Tips
MailerLite
When it comes to customer experience and satisfaction, MailerLite really takes the cup home because it’s equipped with features and tools that most small businesses will require.
It’s a perfect platform for you if:
You’re a newbie who requires a simple interface with a user-friendly email editor.
You’re a freelancer, small startup, or solopreneur working on a budget. But still in need of elaborate quality automation tools that can still run sophisticated campaigns.
You’re a creative or a blogger; you’re spoilt for choice with tailor-made features to help with your campaign that includes WordPress integration.
You’re just in need of an all-inclusive email marketing platform that has great features even on the free plan.
Or you simply need a platform that offers your language.
MailChimp
This old platform is great if budget is your major problem. It offers powerful tools with useful integrations such as WordPress, Shopify, and Zapier.
MailChimp is not recommended for you:
If you’re looking for automation that is user-friendly and easy to manage. They lack a workflow editor, and MailerLite automation might be better for you.
If you’re an affiliate marketer, MailChimp also works with a super strict policy on affiliate marketing; you may want to avoid such a rigid working environment.
ConvertKit
Some strong key areas of this platform might include the ability of the landing page to collect subscribers including those without websites. This is a plus for social media campaigns.
ConvertKit may be best for you if you need very specifically targeted campaigns. This is because of their tagging and segmentation system that helps you identify a specific group that you want to target.
It’s not recommended for you if you have a low budget. If you compare the features they offer you and the price with other platforms like MailerLite, you will realize they’re quite expensive.
It’s also not very recommended if you are a newbie and have no knowledge of HTML. Again, MailerLite offers you more variety and is user-friendly even for beginners. It’s better for persons knowing to code.
Overall, even on MailerLite free, you clearly get offered premium features at no cost or at a very affordable cost, depending on the number of your subscribers. Obviously, any MailerLite review sums it all up to that fact. They’re also constantly upgrading to meet their clients’ needs. These are the reasons why everyone is migrating to find their best option.
Chances are that you already follow one or more social media influencers, or even, you already could be an influencer. The advent of modern forms of communication such as social media has created new channels for advertisers and marketers to share their brand stories in the most authentic and distinctive voices yet. And influencers are the individuals bringing credibility to this industry. Similar to word of mouth, becoming an influencer means selling in a less explicit method.
As much as there is no specific definition of an influencer, they can be considered as a third party individual that uses their popularity on social media platforms to influence purchasing decisions of their followers; therefore it’s needless to say that a successful influencer needs to have good access to an active and engaged audience whom they will influence.
With traditional advertising methods making consumers natural skeptics when it comes to purchasing, marketers have had to use tactics that seem more trustworthy. Consumers prefer to buy a product that’s recommended not advertised. These recommendations can come from a family member or a friend or a trusted influencer.
Invest In Your Business
Your Content Strategy Doesn’t Deliver the Expected Results?
Influencers create real value for marketers and advertisers by shedding the cynicism that every consumer has toward the average advertisement. Thus, when recommended by someone they trust, they usually let their guard down and are more receptive towards these products and services.
In your quest on how to become a social media influencer in 2023, it’s important to observe that strategizing to maintain a good reach without losing authenticity while staying compliant, are the growth goals that should guide you. The influencer marketing budget has been rising in the past years sharply and it won’t be slowing down any time in this new decade.
The Numbers
The influencer marketing industry was valued at over $16.4 billion in 2022. 61% of consumers said that they had made a purchase based on an influencer’s post. On average a business gains $5.2 for each dollar spent on influencer marketing.
Another statistic worth noting is that the Nano-influencers (of less than 1000 followers) on Instagram have the highest engagement rate (5%) compared to mass influencers with over 100,000 followers. Micro-influencers have a market share of 91% in 2021. This is encouraging news, especially if you’re just starting the journey of how to become an influencer in 2023.
Going forward, this highly lucrative marketing trend of influencer marketing is only likely to grow more popular. So, with this knowledge, how then do you become a paid influencer with the kind of audience brands want to connect with? How do you become the go-to influencer that gives value to both his audience and the brand?
· The influencer becomes the conveyor of pleasant branded narratives.
· The audience trusts the influencer to be true, original, and interesting in their niches; this builds confidence in the audience and creates a ripple effect of shares and likes.
· This is how an influencer builds and increases the authenticity of the brand they work with. In return, the audience develops a strong credibility for the brand and a great relationship with the influencer. As a consequence, when recommendations for products or services are done, the impact is quite observable.
When you become a paid influencer, there are several ways in which your influence can be measured:
· The number of followers is probably the most common and basic way of measurement
· The number of likes and shares indicates your audience’s appreciation as well as interest in your content
· The quality of comments also offers insights into the commitment and audience’s potential desire to support the influencer.
In the end, as an influencer, if you’re able to maintain meaningful and deep connections with your audience, they’ll end up considering you more of a friend and a pillar of influence in their whole buying process. This is the ultimate goal.
Types of Influencers
As you learn how to become an influencer, it’s important to know the types of influencer profiles in the market. They can be in various categories either by following, by content type, or by industry.
i. By following
a. Mega Influencer
These are also called Celebrity Influencers. They are super influencers with a substantial followership and reach of over a million. Their posts often go viral and often get many likes. However, their relationship or engagement with their individual audience is weak, and partnering with them comes at a hefty cost. Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez are such influencers.
Source: Instagram
b. Macro Influencer
These are often self-made internet sensations with between 100k to 1 million followers. They could be vloggers or social media content creators that create content resonating with their audience. This followership is based on the originality of their content. But just like the celebrity influencer, the macro influencer’s engagement with each member of their audience is weak and they too can be expensive. Jamila Cuisine is such an influencer.
These influencers have between 1000-100k followers. They are very specific in their niche and are considered industry experts by their followers. They create very authentic content that resonates with their followers. They also have very strong bonds with them even on a personal level and their influence has a high impact.
d. Nano-Influencer
The Nano-influencers don’t necessarily have a huge following, they are relatively regular everyday folk, but this lot is the most engaged of all the other influencers. Their followers are complete die-hards and thus the Nano influencers have the most impact on their followers.
ii. By their content type.
a. YouTube Influencer
Many YouTubers continue to leverage this leading video-sharing platform to share their creativity. From tutorials to DIYs and general entertainment, these influencers are building a global subscriber base. A great example is MKBHD.
b. Bloggers
Bloggers are probably the oldest digital influencers. These are people that love to share their experiences, expertise, hobbies, or just fun activities with anyone who’d care to be interested. They use blogs as their platform to connect to this audience and can use these same blogs to lead to certain websites as recommendations. Jenna Kutcher and Melissa Griffin are such influencers.
c. Podcast Influencers
Lately, people have been diversifying ways through which they can reach their audience as technology keeps advancing. Podcasts are getting even more popular because of their nature, they’re an easy “as you go” kind of thing. You don’t need to sit down to watch or even stop what you’re doing. The influencers here just need to deliver creative, fun, inspiring, or educative content and are able to get lots of listeners.
d. Style and Beauty
If you want to know how to become an Instagram-style influencer, then you’re in this category. This is the most popular niche for influencers, whether as their own entrepreneurs or through collaboration with other brands, they are a social force that’s creating quite an impact globally. It’s a wide niche that deals with clothing, styling, perfumes, make-up, hair products, shoes and so much more.
This is another popular niche for influencers. These foodies whet their followers’ appetites with colorful food pictures taken from all angles. This is one sweet avenue for how to become an Instagram influencer.
f. Travel Influencers
These must be the most enviable of all influencers. They travel all over the world for free and in return, they give reviews and recommendations about their experience, activities, adventures, and amenities.
So, you see there are many ways for how to become a social media influencer as you’re spoilt for choice on the type of niche you can explore.
What Do You Expect to Gain As an Influencer?
Here are some major perks of being an influencer.
i. Flexibility
As an influencer, you’re not fixed to a full-time schedule or tied to a specific location. You’re free to work from the point of convenience whether in terms of time or location. This flexibility also extends to the niche that you want as well as the platform that you pick.
ii. Creating a Like-minded Community
When you become an influencer, you’re slowly able to build a community of people with the same interests as you. Once you’re able to establish strong connections with these people, you put yourself in a good position of landing deals with businesses where you become a paid influencer and the process keeps getting better.
iii. Authenticity
The ability to be authentic and realistic is one of the reasons influencers are highly successful. Being truthful and open about your journey as an influencer can give an emotional appeal to your followers. It’s just not enough to show the successes and the happy side, once in a while it’s good to throw in the struggles for your audience to see that you’re a regular human just like them.
iv. Gifts
One way brands like to collaborate with influencers is by offering their services, products, or promotional items for free for them to get a promotion or a review, or a recommendation. These freebies might go the extra mile into something like an experience such as a meet-up with fellow influencers in your niche and others even offer free training and workshops. Such benefits build up your influencing career as well.
With all these perks of being an influencer, it’s important to note that this is not an easy path. Your level of integrity must never be doubted, so it’s good to always be as honest as possible, do some research before offering your opinion because what you say to your followers will often be considered an expert review. You will also be required to be consistent and relevant at all times. Finally, keep engaging your audience to maintain their interest, even as you work to gain others.
So, with all these said, how do you become an influencer?
How to Become an Influencer
1. Identify Your Niche
Remember the passions and expertise mentioned above? This is where they come into play. People need to be able to link your name to a specific niche; this is good for your image alignment. Picking a niche can start by identifying what you’re passionate about, you can also evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as well as what you’re an expert in. All these will be critical when identifying who your audience is going to be as this will dictate a lot of what your work will be. Some popular niches include:
· Food
· Fashion
· Lifestyle
· Gaming
· Beauty
· Sport
· Tech
· Entertainment
· Health & Fitness
It’s also possible to combine 2 or more related niches, for instance, you can be a fashion, beauty, and lifestyle influencer, or a food and travel influencer, the deal is to give your own unique perspective to your audience. Be different from the rest of your competition, a unique voice is what makes the difference between the influencers that thrive and those that don’t.
2. Create a Business Profile
Make a great first impression. What’s the first perception that someone will get when they look at your bio? You must be able to capture and engage your audience’s attention at that first instant.
Your profile picture and your cover photo need to be able to really represent you as a brand. It’s therefore important to select visible images of high quality that people will easily recognize and relate to you with.
If you have an existing personal profile, you may want to convert it into a business profile. Why? There are a lot of good reasons such as the ability to get insights or analytical tools that can help you grow your platform. But it’s also ok to start with a personal profile because you can always convert it to business and it’s free. The important thing is to ensure that your profile gives the potential brand partners the quick information that they may want to know, such as your location, email address, website if you have and who you are/ what you do (expertise).
3. Choose Your Preferred Platform
As you prepare for how to become a social media influencer, it’s important to know that the type of platform you pick shall be dictated by the type of content you create and the kind of audience you will be targeting.
Instagram for instance is an excellent platform if your niche is lifestyle, beauty and fashion, travel, food, and alike. YouTube on the other hand is a great platform for tech and motor kinds of stuff and also food. LinkedIn is another platform great for professionals and business executives and so on. So, the question here is who is your target audience?
Understanding Your Target Audience
The thing that makes influencers very successful is the fact that they only cater to people with similar interests as them. This is why building connections with these people is quite easy. It is therefore very important for you as you learn how to become an influencer to know who you’ll be targeting.
How then do you understand your audience? You can start by searching content about your niche; this will guide you on 2 things. What is being talked about and who is talking about it? Once you search deeper into who is carrying out these conversations, you will be able to get clear demographics. Another way to identify your audience is to use the built-in analytical tools provided by most social media platforms.
For example, Twitter Analytics will give you insights about your current followers’ locations, interests, gender, and similar elements.
With this understanding of who your audience is, you will now be able to pick the platform to use.
Here’s an example, if your niche is lifestyle, then most of your target audience will be found on Instagram. Statistics have shown that most social media influencers would rather use Instagram than any other social media platform because it delivers. If your niche is décor and DIYs, then your platform shall most definitely be Pinterest. If you prefer creating videos and vlogging then YouTube is your ideal platform.
This knowledge of your niche and audience is crucial because it’s what will help you reach out to the right people, it’s the reason why your content will be relevant and it’s highly beneficial in your growth.
It’s also possible to have more than one social media platform. Just pick the ones that can complement each other better.
Once the platform/s of choice has been identified, the next important thing is to create a content strategy. This involves the unique voice mentioned above, something to help you stand out from fellow influencers in your niche. This uniqueness should be incorporated into your content because it’s what your audience will know you by.
The format that you pick must be one that will effectively deliver your message to your audience while allowing you to effectively express this unique voice and personality. What does this mean?
It means relevance.
For you to be able to engage and influence your audiences’ opinions, you have to communicate in a way they can understand and offer them content they can relate to. So, now that you know who your audiences are, what do you think is their preferred type of content? Do they prefer all work and no play? Or do they enjoy a little play?
One strategy that always wins in most cases is a perfect balance of both worlds. Share all your quality expertise but at the same time, give them a bit of your personal content that they can relate to, this builds authenticity. For instance, if you’re a pet influencer and your posts are mainly on pets, it would be refreshing if once in a while you show your followers a day in your life. This builds and strengthens connections with them. Other influencers even invite one follower to spend their day with them; this too is a winning strategy.
Another strategy is the use of unique weekly features such as reviews. If done consistently, your audience will always make sure not to miss a review or any feature that may be relevant to them. You can also engage them and ask them if there is a particular thing they may want to see, this will make them feel like a part of your brand.
Content strategy can also incorporate sharing of content done by fellow influencers within your niche. What this does is capture the attention of these influencers, builds your profile, and help you discover other topic ideas.
In the future, it will encourage these influencers and businesses to partner or collaborate with you since you already have a segment for reviews and are not a new face. The key thing is to keep your strategy focused within your niche.
5. Distribute Your Content
To share out your content is more than just posting it on your social sites. It goes without saying that high-quality content is a gift that keeps giving. It leads to a great retention rate for your followers; it encourages sharing and attracts new followers.
But with that said, even stellar content requires an effective distribution strategy. If you’re preparing for how to become a LinkedIn influencer, then you already know that it’s a career-centric site, this means that posts containing consumer-based content may not thrive here at all, instead, it’s the business-to-business content that will do well. Therefore, because by now you have already identified your ideal platforms that will work for your content, the next thing is a schedule of when to do it.
Different social media sites perform best at different times, you can find out about your preferred platform here. It’s therefore of paramount importance that you know the times that will best work for your content. Because that means you know the best time to reach your audience, to be able to pique their interest and interact with them.
If you want to become a Facebook influencer, for example, the statistics have shown that the best days to post are Tuesday to Thursday, and the best hours for these days are between 8:00 am to 3:00 pm. And the worst time to post on Facebook is every day before 7:00 am and after 5:00 pm, such clues can help you organize your content in order to be effective.
Other factors to incorporate in your distribution strategy include observing the basic best practices for sharing content with your audience. And even though all platforms have their own set of best practices, there are a few basic ones such as customizing your content.
Content customization is simply personalizing your content to fit different audiences on your various platforms even though the content is the same. You should not use the same liner on all platforms. What’s seen on Twitter should be different from the one posted on Instagram and so on. This shows you took some time to consider your followers and therefore are not just spamming them.
Another customization that you should consider is for mobile views. 80% of social media time is spent on mobile devices, and because all your efforts are for these people, then why not make it easy for them to view your content? Most platforms have this feature and you only need to enable it.
Finally, keep testing various methods on different channels to see which captures your audience most.
6. Show Your Expertise
As you’re prepping on how to become an influencer in 2023, all the effort you will put into your work may not go far if you lack authority, this is an important part of the puzzle. To show this authority you need to have the knowledge and expertise in your industry that is fresh and factual.
This expertise is what will establish a name for yourself; it’s what will help you stand out. So, this requires you to research and study more on your niche, you need to demonstrate that your brand has the knowledge and expertise for the solutions your followers seek.
Remember, authority is the power to influence your followers based on your expertise on matters that concern them, it’s established on trust. For you to be able to convert followers or your audience into paying customers, you need them to trust you. Therefore, share all your expertise, offer credible fresh content often and watch them support you even with their wallets.
One way to grow your audience, as well as your network, is through collaborations with fellow bigger influencers who’ve been around longer. This can be through offering your support on something they’re doing such as allowing them to promote their content on your page. To build this conversational space, begin by commenting on their posts or mentioning them in yours, gradually, they will take notice of you and when you offer space for their content, you’ll not be a stranger at all.
You can also be keen to know what events are happening within your niche/s. Could be workshops, conferences, or talks, whatever is it, attend and get a chance to meet and mingle with fellow influencers and experts within your niche.
Another way to network is through direct pitching. Create great outreach content that shows potential businesses what you can offer. This template should bespeak for each potential client, don’t do a one size fits all kind of pitch, you won’t be taken seriously.
Finally, another simpler way to call for collaborations is by tagging specific brands in your post on a topic that’s relevant to their products or services.
All these moves may at first seem tough and may not bear immediate fruits, but in the long run, they do pay.
8. Listen and Engage with Your Audience
Your audience is the reason you’re called an influencer, therefore they must know that you value them. As you keep sharing your content, they keep growing in number and their interest keeps growing as well, they start leaving feedback and comments. You must create time to respond or react to these comments or feedback in order for them to actually feel validated and this simply boosts their trust in you.
If you get any questions from your audience, try to respond to them as much as possible. It will make them see that you genuinely care about them and can also give you ideas on what they want to see more and you can incorporate it in your future content pieces.
On top of these, you can give a shout-out to a couple of your followers or audiences that have left some exceptional feedback. This is such a motivator for them.
And since you’re going to be receiving tons of these comments, it may not be possible for you to respond to all of them, in such a situation you can just like them to show that you noticed their effort and appreciate it. In scenarios where the comments are not positive, you can address them professionally without losing your calm.
Another method you can use to personally connect with your audience is by going live. Most social media platforms today have features that allow users to share real-time events. Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and others are features you can leverage to bring you closer to your followers.
Finally, another fantastic way to connect with your followers is to ask them relevant questions that relate to their issues. This will spark a great conversation between you and them. It helps them feel like part of a great solution to their daily lives.
9. Evaluate the Metrics that Matter
Every task executed should have a scorecard to see if your efforts are paying off or not. Your focus should not stop at the number of followers, you should consider engagement rate and return on your investment.
You must stay above average as far as the number of followers engaging with your post is concerned, that is the indicator that you’re relevant to them.
Are brands returning for more collaboration? If yes then it means you’re delivering their expectations, if not, check where you went wrong.
The good news is that most social media platforms will give you valuable insights and analytics that can help you track your progress as far as reach, demographics, engagement rate, and even the content format with the most engagement rate, this will inform you what your followers like to see and you can create more of that.
10. Keep Updating!
The networks keep changing their algorithms frequently. It’s therefore of absolute importance that you keep yourself updated about all these modifications to avoid being penalized. If you’re honing your skills on how to become an influencer on YouTube then familiarize yourself with all the posting conditions laid down by YouTube before you get slapped with suspensions or other such penalizations.
You should also know brand marketing regulations before using them in your posts to avoid jeopardizing your influencing career. This should be a continuous process.
Extra Tips on How to Become an Influencer in 2023
i. Consistency
Posting regularly builds a great connection and boosts trust with your followers. You can create a calendar to help you manage this process. You can include some evergreen content to be useful at any time in case you’re not able to create content at a particular time.
ii. Show Some Vulnerability, Be Smart About It
Relatability is one of the factors that make influencers succeed. People will need to see your struggles or fears at some point. It makes you more human. You can therefore show a bit of this side without going to the extreme.
For example, if you don’t want to show that you hate your career, this won’t work well for your brand. Instead, you can share about your struggle to wake up early in the morning, but then show them the tricks you use to eventually maneuver this. Just be smart about it.
iii. Avoid Shortcuts
You’ve probably heard about buying followers to quickly reach a certain number. Don’t be fooled though, the ever-changing algorithms used by most social sites can easily detect it. Brands to know this trick and now check the legitimacy of your account. Therefore be transparent and allow your growth and influence to be organic.
iv. Don’t Jeopardize Your Reputation
Your reputation is built upon the trust you’ve built with your followers over a long period of time. So, sustain this trust by being honest and realistic about your reviews and opinions. Don’t support a questionable product or service simply for the sake of a few dollars, once your reputation is ruined, you may never recover.
v. Promote – Leverage Hashtags
Ever heard of the principle of 20% effort for the creation of content and 80% for its promotion? Yes, it’s not enough to create and just post your work, one way you can achieve this is through the use of hashtags. Hashtags boost your visibility especially if you’re a new influencer.
What you need to do is find the most relevant trending hashtags within your niche and ride on them. Relevant is the norm. This will allow other viewers, who may not necessarily be following you, to get a chance to see you.
You can also host giveaways on your platform. This is another way to become popular because it not only boosts engagement, it also encourages shares and likes.
Your quest on how to become an influencer in 2023 may imply loads of work in the beginning. It is. But if you start with all this expert advice and tips, it will only get better sooner rather than later. The important things to keep in mind can be summed up in 3 words. Relatability, Credibility, and Sustainability. Build your influence and authenticity around these.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
