digital marketing – Shared Knowledge

February 28, 2019

Social Media Secrets

The secret to social media success is actually to use it as the start of your sales funnel. However, Social Media isn’t a place for hard selling. Social channels were designed for casual conversation and spontaneous interaction. That’s the main reason why you should pay a lot of attention to your website’s content and focus on your brand storytelling while engaging with your customers.

Network on social media like you’re at a social event

Here’s another piece of advice for a small business entrepreneurs. If you start a conversation on social media by telling people, ‘Hey, go to my website,’ you’re probably not the best networker.
You would never walk up to someone at a networking event and hand them your business card without first striking up a conversation. Social media works the same way.

Social media allows you to connect with people one-on-one without paying for advertising. So connect! Once a follower is confident that there’s a real person on the other side of the keyboard, they’ll respond to your special offers, event invitations, or inquiries about their specific needs. Remember, it takes time to develop these relationships.

Create a landing page to capture contact information

Once you’ve developed a relationship on social media, it’s time to direct your potential customer to a landing page. Think of the most important action a customer can make once they arrive at your website. Is it signing up for your email newsletter? Downloading a free ebook? Registering for an event?

Ask for that one important action on a landing page. It might be the very first page a visitor sees when they arrive at your website, or it could be a prompt that pops up once a visitor has clicked around your site. A prominent landing page keeps your visitor on task and moves them into the sales phase of your funnel.

You don’t need advanced software to create a landing page. Google Forms are free, and services like Wufoo and Jotform offer free starter levels of service. These tools can help you set up a system to capture the most critical information about your leads, like their email addresses or phone numbers.

Remember to keep your landing page simple. Add your landing page URL to your social media profiles to make it easy for people to get more information about your business.

Engage first, sell later

Once you’ve forged connections on social media and captured lead contact information, you can start to think about selling to that potential customer. Thank your customer for their interest and provide value, whether it be in the form of an educational email newsletter, free product download, or consultation offer. Continue to build relationships with consistent communication that will get your customers excited about doing business with you.

Your initial social media interactions can impact how smoothly your entire sales process goes. Don’t ignore these powerful, free tools — use them to your small business advantage!

Social Media and SEO

Social media is one of the main players in the game of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s the seven of the top 10 SEO ranking factors. People are talking about what you do on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks. And, if they are linking to an amazing content on your small business website, it works wonders at getting your business listed on search results. That’s why the best small business websites integrate social elements.

How to add social media to your website to help grow your business?

Create shareable content

Keep this question in mind when you create content for your website: Will my visitors want to share this information? Every successful website has a great content – unique, relevant, trustworthy content. Text, video and images of your website and your website pages should exceed the expectations of your visitors. Infographics. White papers. Stuff they can’t find anywhere else and, that they feel compelled to share.

Make social sharing simple

Add a Click to Tweet button to pull quotes and other “tweetables” on a web page.
Embed Pinterest-worthy images.
Add Facebook “Like” and “Share” buttons.

Every small business website can benefit from at least adding a Facebook widget to the home page. But why stop there? You’ve probably seen product “shares” in your feed. That’s because people love to share images of things they think are cool on their favorite social platforms. Make sharing your cool stuff simple by placing social buttons on your product pages.

Showcase social feeds

If you use social networks like Twitter or Facebook to build your business, showcase your social activity on your website by incorporating social feeds. They can give viewers a glimpse of your business’s personality and entice them to connect with you. Embed Twitter timelines and Facebook activity feeds. It will boost your, more integrated, online business presence.

Offer social sign-in and commenting

Make it easy for visitors to sign in and comment on your website. They can simply select to log in via their Facebook account. They might need to enter an email address or similar – but they’ll likely find the more simplified sign-in process appealing. You can also enable visitors to leave comments on your site through social-based comment tools like Disqus and Facebook Comments (it allows users to comment on your content using their Facebook profile and show their comments to their friends in their news feed). If you’d like to learn more – Social Media Examiner provides a helpful overview of how social login works.

Install social media widgets on your website

It’s important to place your contact information in a prominent location on your website. However, you can make it even easier for people to find and follow your social media accounts. Social media widgets and embedded feeds pull your most recent Instagram, Facebook or other social media posts and present them in an area you choose on your website. Visitors can then preview your recent social activity and also like or follow your account right from their browser. These widgets allow you to connect with a potential customer on a second platform (your website plus a social media channel) without directing them away from your business website.

If you use a website host like Squarespace, Wix, or some WordPress setups, adding a social media widget may only require a few clicks. Otherwise, you may need to do some research to determine what HTML code you’ll need and where to place it.

If you’ve got a WordPress website, they have a great social media plugins available. Easy Social Icons plugin are a good option. Here’s a strong Top 20 list to start checking out.

Keep engaging

By adding these social media elements to your small business website, you’ll be well on your way to leveraging the power of social networking to share your awesomeness with the people who matter most – your customers and prospects. Schedule a manageable amount of time each day for meaningful social engagement, be authentic, be creative, and watch your business grow.

January 23, 2019

SEO Tools for Small Businesses

Want to increase your ranking on Google Search and other search engines? Here’s how you can do it!

SEO is the process of optimizing your website to get organic, free traffic from the search engine results page. SEO is important because pople are searching for your product online and when they do, your website should show up offering your products. However, that only happens when you rank better in a search engine. You can position your business to rank goood on search engines like Google, Bing and similar by a utilizing successful SEO. Better search engine ranking will bring you free organic traffic, i.e. leads and customers to your business. Online search has become the primary way for potential customers to find local businesses. A whopping 87% of people used a search engine to find a local product or service in the past month, the Local Search Association reports.

How to improve ranking on Google and other search engines with SEO?

The goal of SEO is to increase organic rankings, traffic and conversions. In order to implement SEO in the right way, you’ll need to:

Definine your customer avatar (know your targeted clientele – determine clearly their demographics – age, location, income, profession, education and similar, as well as their goals, values, their pain points, their objections by buying…). Make a list of products or services that your customers are mostly searching for and their pain points – problems that you might solve with your product/service.
Perform keyword research to identify the best keywords. Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner or SEMRush for free. Advices: avoid general keywords – be specific; analyze competition; Keyword Value – optimize your website with keywords that your customers mainly use in their searches. When analyzing your competitors, analyze their traffic (from where they get traffic), rankings (what keywords are they ranking for), how is their website structured for the keywords they rank for) and what type of content they produce and how frequently (blog or other channel). When it comes to your website, you should check how much traffic are you receiving from organic search, how many indexed pages you have on your website (if you have more pages with more content, the higher possibility to rank better on a serach engine), website speed (you’ll rank better if your website is fast), mobile responsiveness of your website, website bounce rate (how long are people staying on your website), website sitemap (submitting all your website pages to Google so that they can crawl it and understand it, backlink analysis (what other websites are linking to your website to increase your website’s authority), tag opmitimization (optimizing your meta tags, title tags with the keywords you want to rank for), image optimization (naming your images with your keywords).
On-page website optimization. In order to rank better, you’ll need to optimize your website coding, meta description, HTML tags/title tags, keyword density (how often are your keywords used in your website), sitemap. One of the convient ways to do that is to install YoastSEO plugin which will literally walk you through the process of optimizing your website for SEO.
Increasing your ranking with SEO link-building – search engines like that. Now, let’s assume that you can be found on Google but maybe on the page 50. Well, the news is that noone will look at the page 50 on Google search. You have to be on page one or two. In order to rank better – you should use link-building i.e. creating backlinks. What’s a backlink? It’s simply a link to the external website. Google likes backlinks because more backlinks you have, you are more exposed to the internet, which in return shows that your website is relevant. So, advice is to have as many backlinks as you can but of a quality content. SEO link-building tips: guest blogging – write a blog post for free on a blog or website of a relevant party; if you sponsor an event – ask the website master to link to your website, create a link-worthy content (write what people like to read about). Other way to increase your ranking is also to write a blog around your customer searches and around your primary keywords.

Learn more SEO tips in one of my next blog posts. Stayed tuned.

December 31, 2018January 24, 2019

Digital Media? Social Media? What’s your Online Presence?

Shared Knowledge

Want to learn Digital Marketing but feeling overwhelmed by so many sources, tools and new tech’s?

Hello there! Are you struggling to keep up with constant progress and innovation of the Digital Marketing and IT field? If that’s a comfort for you, the rest of us are struggling too. Well, what can I say. We definitely need to have some focus and learn from the best sources. My God, but what are the best sources to learn from? How to choose from so many of them? Well, this is the world we are living in now and we definitely need to adapt to it. You are in a bit better position than small businesses who are just switching from traditional to digital. There’s a long way to go, but with a help of an expert from this field you’ll definitely skip so many long steps in this process.

In order to help you, at least a bit, in choosing the right sources to gain knowledge in this field, I’ll share some suggestions with you. It might help some of you out there. I know how it feels to be stuck and overwhelmed by different sources of information, not knowing what’s your next move. Sometimes, all we need is a little support and some guidance.

So, here we go. First of all, remember – there is no other way to learn but by “step by step” method. Unfortunately, it really takes a lot of time, effort and patience to learn a new skill. Especially, when something you are learning keeps changing, almost on a daily basis.

Now, it all depends where are you starting at. Are you already knowledgeable in this field or you are just starting. Let’s assume you have a start-up company and you have no idea about how to market your product or service. If you did everything right, then you already have a marketing plan as a part of your business plan, and marketing strategy, as a part of your marketing plan. Now, digital marketing should be definitely incorporated in your marketing strategy. If you’re still not aware of it, your customers are searching for your product or service online and they will choose to visit and buy from those who have online presence, who are close to their homes or have some kind of special offers.

A study at MIT found that companies that have embraced digital transformation are 26% more profitable than their peers! Therefore, you should be definitely taking advantage of this huge opportunity by digitally transforming your business!

Now that you are aware of it, you may want to learn more about it and once you enter the digital world, you’ll definitely feel overwhelmed by information from so many different sources and kind of stuck in defining your next move. Here’s a piece of advice for you. As a new business, you must have already chosen a name for your business. Let’s hope that you checked whether there’s a domain for your website available under your business name. Domain is the name you choose for your website and it’s either free or you need to pay for it. Now, there are a lot of providers of a web hosting service, but I would recommend as a reliable one, with acceptable price and 24/7 support – Bluehost. You can order your free domain through Bluehost and their affordable web hosting services by clicking here.

Remember, your website is a business card for your business. Next thing is your logo and slogan. If you already don’t have one, you should engage a graphic designer to create one or you can try to create it yourself. You can do that by downloading a free mobile app for Logo design. There are many of them available, like: Logo Maker, Logo Maker Plus, Logo Maker Pro, etc. Logo is a symbol made up of text and images that represents your company, your brand. It makes you recognizable on the market, makes you stand out from the competition and identifies key information about your business. A logo builds brand recognition. If you think of any famous brand, let’s say Nike or Amazon, their logos are instantly recognizable even if the name of the company isn’t attached to it. Now, there is so much to be told about logo. Let’s just touch one aspect of it – its color. Behind every color stands a psychological meaning. Colors impact our emotions and our feelings. If you choose the right colors for your logo, you can attract customers and vice versa. Colors can make us happy or sad. For example, yellow is cheerful, green is calming, it also symbolizes health, wealth and it relaxes us, blue is calm and spiritual, purple is associated with creativity etc. However, color is not completely agreed on universally and can appeal differently to individual countries. In brief, there’s a whole science behind it. Slogan is a catchy phrase or a motto that describes your company’s mission. For example, Nike’s slogan is “Just do it!”, BMW – “The Ultimate Driving Machine”… At the end, why do you need a logo and slogan, well, it’s because you want to build a brand – to be recognizable on the market and to keep building your company’s value on it.

You can also read:DigitalMedia – Social Media – what’s your online presence?

Already have website, logo, slogan, brand?

Should you promote your products on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat or Pinterest?

Now that you’ve established your company, with a chosen business name, logo and slogan, you can slowly enter the digital world. Next step is to create a website for your business. As already said, it’s your business card. Nowadays, it’s unimaginable not be present online. Customers are searching for your online presence in order to check for your credentials. Your website is their first impression about you. Next step is to create social media accounts. Now, it also depends on a type of your business which social media you’ll use for promotion. For example, if you are focused on an end user of your products, you’ll use Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter. It depends on your customers profile, their demographics, such as their age and similar. According to the eMarketer, Millennials (age range from 18 to 35) and GenX (38-53) are using more Facebook than Teens (age 12 to 17). Besides Facebook, GenX are using Instagram as well. On the other side, Teens number one social media platform is Snapchat while Instagram is on the second place. If you are a business to business oriented company (B2B) then you will most likely use LinkedIn etc. Baby Boomers (54-62) favor Facebook and Pinterest.

All set, now you have your website and social media accounts. Next step is to promote your business in the way that each of your social media platforms is serving as a lead generator for your business and can land your customers to your company’s website. More followers equals more prospects i.e. customers. You should, of course, pay attention on a period of day when you are posting on social platforms as well. I’ll write more about it in one of my next blog posts. You know what I think about when should you start your online presence? The answer is simple – YESTERDAY! If you’re already not there – you should definitely have a feeling of urgency to act now.

Useful links:

Get a domain for your new website