Brian Meert's Blog, page 64

Users Can Finally View Stories Anonymously — On LinkedIn

OCT. 01, 2020

The Stories feature, originated by Snapchat, has been such a hit with users across social media platforms that many companies have appropriated it. Both Facebook and Instagram have their own versions, and even Pinterest is trying it out. The next platform to adopt Stories may come as a surprise: LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn Stories appears on top of the app, right under the search bar. 

 

Unlike many of the other platforms with this feature, LinkedIn has a capability that is attractive to users: an option to view anonymously. 

By default, views in LinkedIn Stories are visible to the person posting the Story, but users do have the option to change their visibility by going to their settings and clicking the “Visibility” section. 

From there, they can click “Story viewing options” and choose how they would like to appear. Users can choose to show their profile picture, full name, and headline; their profile characteristics only, or they can also choose to appear in complete private mode. 

Will other platforms adopt anonymous viewing to remain competitive against LinkedIn? Many users probably hope so. 

By Anne Felicitas

Tips for Creating a High-Converting Social Media Landing Page

SEPT. 30, 2020

Campaign Creators / Unsplash

Social media is now a significant part of people’s lives. According to Emarsys, there are 3.5 billion social media users, or about 45 percent of the entire global population. Review42 reported that people spend an average of three hours per day on social media networks. 

It’s no wonder, then, that businesses are using social media to reach their target audiences. This also means that more and more companies are making use of social media landing pages. 

This article explains the purpose of social media landing pages and the ways to create a great one.

Social Media Landing Pages Defined

A social media landing page is a specific web page where you send people after they’ve clicked on a link you’ve shared on a social media post. Landing pages can be used for both paid and organic social media marketing campaigns. 

Why not just send someone to your website’s home page? A phenomenon known as choice overload states that when consumers are overwhelmed with too many options, they often end up taking no action at all. This can easily happen if you send them to your home page. 

Landing pages are designed to prompt specific actions. If you send visitors to a landing page as opposed to your home page, there’s a much better chance they’ll take the action you want them to take. That action might be giving you their email addresses, signing up for a free trial, registering for a webinar, or even making a purchase. 

Now that you know the purpose of a social media landing page and why you need one, how do you create it? 

Tips For Creating a Social Media Landing Page

Social media landing pages are not particularly difficult to create. You can use landing page software to build one yourself without any coding knowledge required. If you’d rather outsource the work, you can ask your web designer to do it for you.  

This section contains the steps you need to take to create a brilliant landing page. Let’s get started! 

1. Determine the goal of your social media landing page.

Before you can start, you need to be clear on what you want to accomplish. In other words, what is your goal? This must be specific and clearly defined if you want to achieve it. 

Here are only some of the things you might want your social media landing page to do:

Increase brand awareness . This might involve directing site visitors to your blog posts or sharing a piece of news such as a new release. 
Increase subscribers to your email list. Once you have someone’s email address, you can market to them. You can offer a lead magnet, such as a discount, coupon, or access to a downloadable resource to increase the number of people who will sign up. You can use an email finder to validate the email addresses you receive, reducing your bounce rate and keeping your deliverability score high. 
Sell a product or service. Businesses usually first warm leads before trying to make them purchase a product or service. However, in some cases, landing pages are designed to inspire an immediate purchase. 
Get visitors to try out your product or service. You can offer a demo or a free trial to show new prospects the benefit of your product or service. 
Get visitors to sign up for an event. If you’re holding a virtual event such as a webinar or online conference, you can use your social media landing page as your registration page. 

It’s best to have just one goal for each page. Mixed messaging will only confuse your audience, leading to choice paralysis. Once you’ve determined your goal, you can design your social media landing page around that.

2. Make sure your landing page mirrors your social media content.

Coherence in branding and messaging is essential. Therefore, ensure that the content and tone of your social media posts are reflected on your landing page. Use the same or similar color scheme, font, images, and language. This is important because you want to maintain a good customer experience.

Your call to action in your social media ad or post should also be the same as the CTA on your landing page.  Check out these examples from BigCommerce:  

BigCommerce

 

BigCommerce

Notice that both use the CTA “start free trial.” 

Consistent messaging is key to getting your visitors to take your desired action. If your messaging and branding are consistent, you provide that seamless customer journey from the social media post to the landing page and beyond. 

3. Include a clear call to action.

Your call to action, or CTA, is where you tell visitors what to do. It must be clear and concise. If your final instruction on your social media landing page is unclear or hard to follow (or worse, completely absent), your visitors will simply leave your page and not come back. 

Your CTA should have the following characteristics: 

It should be action-oriented. Use action words such as “click,” “get,” “stay” and “join.”
It should stand out. To make your CTA stand out, use a bigger font or a different color. 
It should be prominently located. Don’t hide your CTA. Make sure it’s one of the first things visitors see when they arrive on your landing page. 

Check out this example from Snickers:

Snickers / Twitter

The CTA uses a clear and simple instruction. It is also right in the middle of the page, in a bigger font, and in a bright color that contrasts with the red background. In other words, it’s very hard to miss. 

4. Add eye-catching visuals.

Humans are visual creatures. The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than purely written information. In marketing, images grab and hold consumers’ attention, and holding someone’s attention gives you the best chance of converting them. 

Visuals on your landing page can increase conversions by a whopping 80 percent. This is because visitors will stay on the page for longer, making them more likely to take the desired action. Therefore, make sure you utilize images such as photographs or infographics. You can also use video content for an even high conversion rate. 

Here’s an example from Designrr, a software that helps users create ebooks: 

Designrr

This landing page includes a video demo of the company’s product. That video supports Designrr’s goal of getting visitors to purchase the heavily discounted lifetime product license. 

Of course, the video and visuals you use must be directly relevant to your offer and your CTA. 

5. Leverage testimonials.

It’s always a good idea to include customer reviews on your social media landing page. Testimonials serve as a kind of social proof. If your visitors see that your customers believe in your product, they will be more likely to want it as well. Social proof is the best way to convince website visitors to trust you when they are unfamiliar with your company or product. 

Here’s an example from Elementor, a page builder tool. This is where visitors are directed when they click on Elementor’s Facebook ad:

Elementor

Right after its CTA “Choose your plan,” Elementor includes testimonials from previous clients. This helps visitors see that it’s a high-quality product from a trustworthy company. Using a picture of each person who has given a testimonial also makes them more credible. 

Make sure you include positive customer reviews or testimonials on your landing page. This gives your website visitors reason to believe your product or service is as great as you say it is. For maximum results, locate the testimonials very close to your CTA button. 

6. Keep it simple.

Aim for a simple social media landing page. A site that is too busy or has too many elements looks untidy and makes it more likely that visitors will get distracted. 

Therefore, use short snippets of text and just the right amount of supporting visuals. Look at every element with a critical eye. Does it add to the page and make it more likely to achieve its purpose? If not, get rid of it. 

Here’s an example from BambooHR:

BambooHR / Twitter

This is the landing page customers see after clicking a promotional Tweet. Its goal is to get visitors to sign up for a virtual event. All the elements are aligned with that goal and strongly tied to the company’s brand. The page is visually engaging and appealing and well laid out, containing only the most essential information. 

Wrapping Up

If you’re doing social media marketing, landing pages are a critical aspect of a successful campaign. Getting people to click on your ad is only half the battle. The right social media landing page can help you drive visitors to take your desired action, bringing you closer to achieving your goals. 

It’s not too hard to create a great social media landing page as long as you follow a few basic best-practice tips. It might take a bit of trial and error, but you’ll soon master it. 

Hopefully this guide will help you as you. Good luck with your campaign! 

How to Tell a Brand Story for Effective Online Advertising

SEPT. 28, 2020

Ian Schneider / Unsplash

Once upon a time, a startup owner needed to advertise her brand effectively but had exhausted all the organic possibilities — or so she thought.

Little did the startup owner know that there was one avenue that she hadn’t yet tried. It was effective, and it didn’t require a massive investment of time or skill. Best of all, it was free.

That avenue was brand storytelling.

Storytelling sounds like a pleasant, fun, creative way to spend some time. Storytelling in terms of branding and advertising can be a great way to make more connections with your clients and customers, and it can, likewise, be pleasant, fun, and creative.

With more focus on startups and homegrown, grassroots small businesses these days, storytelling for brand development has hit the roof, and it’s effective. One study found  that, across the board, people spent more on products that were paired with a story.

Especially in these times, we tend to crave connections with everything that comes our way, including the brands we buy from and the products they sell. How do you craft a compelling, catchy brand story? Here are six important steps to take.

1. Know Your History

To tell a good brand story, you can follow one popular piece of writing advice from Lewis Carroll: Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop. Begin at the beginning. For a brand, that isn’t just the launch or the first time that a curious browser turned into an avid consumer. Brands usually start well before the time that they reach the public eye.

Whether you’re crafting the story on behalf of someone else or you’re writing from your own past history, it’s important to get at the root of what inspired the brand. We all love an inspirational tale. It gives us something to connect with. Even if that original root was, “Do something to make a living,” that’s still a connective link with your audience. Entrepreneurship for the sake of paying the bills is not shameful; your audience will understand it.

But go deeper than that. If you started your company because you were out of a job and wanted to do something different, “do something different” is the key to unlock your audience’s sympathies. Go deep. Write down the facts of how the brand first got started and the values that it’s based on. That’s your story’s foundation.

2. Know Your Audience

A key aspect to successful storytelling, whether it’s an advertisement for a company or a stand-up comedian on a stage, is knowing who is listening. That’s important. Not so you can change your history to appeal to the audience or so you can make up parts that don’t seem to fit. No, it’s important because you want to communicate on a level that they will understand.

That doesn’t mean restricting your vocabulary, although you might have to do that at times. It means knowing what details from your brand story they are already aware of. What do they value about the brand? What should you highlight? How likely are they to respond to a story that highlights emotion versus one that stresses practicality?

Again, this doesn’t mean that you change the details to give the audience what you think they want. It’s actually a great opportunity to surprise them, to throw in details that they may not have been expecting. You’re like a good cook who knows that his guests love blueberries and chooses to use them in their salad as an unusual ingredient. Use your knowledge of your audience to enhance the story.

3. Find the Details That Resonate

The entire purpose of telling your brand story is to create a connection with your audience. That connection leads to deeper engagement and involvement, which leads to investment and often to brand loyalty. It all adds up to a heightened brand reputation with those who matter the most.

The key here lies in the details you include in the brand story. Don’t just include details at random — that’s a quick way to turn a great brand story into a major sleeper. Cherry-pick your details to appeal to the audience, the ones that will draw them in.

What details should you include? Again, it depends on the story and on the audience you’re writing for. Details such as the exact moment of inspiration, when the brand was born in the creator’s mind, are very effective for setting the mood. Details of challenges that were overcome build up sympathy in the audience, too. Everyone loves an underdog, and it’s a rare company that doesn’t have to fight to survive at some point in its timeline.

Connecting with your audience on an emotional level is a great way to sell the brand to them without resorting to traditional marketing techniques.

4. Be True to the Brand Personality

“Authenticity” is a buzzword that gets a lot of air time in branding these days. Your potential clients and customers can tell if you’re not being authentic. It’s easy to get caught up in mismatched branding. If your brand personality says “quirky and grassroots” but your marketing says “cold, sleek, and corporate,” it’s inevitable that the juxtaposition will be pointed out, and you’ll lose potential interest because of it.

Authenticity is especially important when it comes to telling the brand story because a lack of authenticity is easy to see. The brand story is a larger chunk of information, and it needs to harmonize with other branding and the personality that the public sees. Otherwise, it loses all its impact.

5. Don’t Be Long-Winded

Telling a good brand story means knowing what to include and what to leave out. Keep your story simple. Remember, cherry-pick your details. Everything that is included in the story should all work toward a common goal: building your brand by making connections.

Examples differ, but remember that your basic brand story should be a few-minutes read at the most. Consider working up a few variations. You can include one on a dedicated “About Us” or “Our Story” page on your website, have shorter and more concise versions to share on social media, and go into more depth on specific details in blog posts if necessary. Just remember not to over complicate your story.

6. Share Your Story

Once you’ve written all your content down and edited, spell-checked, and asked for feedback, it’s time to take the next important step in using your brand story for effective online advertising: sharing it with others. Your website is the first obvious place to post your brand story, but it should go further than that in order to be most effective.

Use shorter variations or quotes from your story and wrap them into visual content to post on your social media platforms. Choose quotes or passages that are intriguing, perhaps something that highlights the challenges you went through in creating your company. Include a link to the full story along with the quotes. In the process make sure you are branding your company’s story with effective visual designs that will help elicit emotions from your target audience. 

A valuable part of branding includes positioning yourself as an expert, and depending on your experience, portions of your brand story could actually serve that same function. Say, for example, you had a big challenge finding investment for your startup. Detailing your experience in a blog post, including “been there, done that” advice from the front lines, makes the post more shareable, makes your brand more appealing, and makes the most of your own history.

Your brand has a story — we all have a story. Our stories are what connect us to others, and your brand can make those same connections. Leveraging your brand story is one of the most effective ways of stealth advertising, and it can be true in your case, too!

Written by Zaheer Dodhia 

How to Tell a Brand Story for Effective Advertising Online

SEPT. 28, 2020

Ian Schneider / Unsplash

Once upon a time, a startup owner needed to advertise her brand effectively but had exhausted all the organic possibilities — or so she thought.

Little did the startup owner know that there was one avenue that she hadn’t yet tried. It was effective, and it didn’t require a massive investment of time or skill. Best of all, it was free.

That avenue was brand storytelling.

Storytelling sounds like a pleasant, fun, creative way to spend some time. Storytelling in terms of branding and advertising can be a great way to make more connections with your clients and customers, and it can, likewise, be pleasant, fun, and creative.

With more focus on startups and homegrown, grassroots small businesses these days, storytelling for brand development has hit the roof, and it’s effective. One study found  that, across the board, people spent more on products that were paired with a story.

Especially in these times, we tend to crave connections with everything that comes our way, including the brands we buy from and the products they sell. How do you craft a compelling, catchy brand story? Here are six important steps to take.

1. Know Your History

To tell a good brand story, you can follow one popular piece of writing advice from Lewis Carroll: Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop. Begin at the beginning. For a brand, that isn’t just the launch or the first time that a curious browser turned into an avid consumer. Brands usually start well before the time that they reach the public eye.

Whether you’re crafting the story on behalf of someone else or you’re writing from your own past history, it’s important to get at the root of what inspired the brand. We all love an inspirational tale. It gives us something to connect with. Even if that original root was, “Do something to make a living,” that’s still a connective link with your audience. Entrepreneurship for the sake of paying the bills is not shameful; your audience will understand it.

But go deeper than that. If you started your company because you were out of a job and wanted to do something different, “do something different” is the key to unlock your audience’s sympathies. Go deep. Write down the facts of how the brand first got started and the values that it’s based on. That’s your story’s foundation.

2. Know Your Audience

A key aspect to successful storytelling, whether it’s an advertisement for a company or a stand-up comedian on a stage, is knowing who is listening. That’s important. Not so you can change your history to appeal to the audience or so you can make up parts that don’t seem to fit. No, it’s important because you want to communicate on a level that they will understand.

That doesn’t mean restricting your vocabulary, although you might have to do that at times. It means knowing what details from your brand story they are already aware of. What do they value about the brand? What should you highlight? How likely are they to respond to a story that highlights emotion versus one that stresses practicality?

Again, this doesn’t mean that you change the details to give the audience what you think they want. It’s actually a great opportunity to surprise them, to throw in details that they may not have been expecting. You’re like a good cook who knows that his guests love blueberries and chooses to use them in their salad as an unusual ingredient. Use your knowledge of your audience to enhance the story.

3. Find the Details That Resonate

The entire purpose of telling your brand story is to create a connection with your audience. That connection leads to deeper engagement and involvement, which leads to investment and often to brand loyalty. It all adds up to a heightened brand reputation with those who matter the most.

The key here lies in the details you include in the brand story. Don’t just include details at random — that’s a quick way to turn a great brand story into a major sleeper. Cherry-pick your details to appeal to the audience, the ones that will draw them in.

What details should you include? Again, it depends on the story and on the audience you’re writing for. Details such as the exact moment of inspiration, when the brand was born in the creator’s mind, are very effective for setting the mood. Details of challenges that were overcome build up sympathy in the audience, too. Everyone loves an underdog, and it’s a rare company that doesn’t have to fight to survive at some point in its timeline.

Connecting with your audience on an emotional level is a great way to sell the brand to them without resorting to traditional marketing techniques.

4. Be True to the Brand Personality

“Authenticity” is a buzzword that gets a lot of air time in branding these days. Your potential clients and customers can tell if you’re not being authentic. It’s easy to get caught up in mismatched branding. If your brand personality says “quirky and grassroots” but your marketing says “cold, sleek, and corporate,” it’s inevitable that the juxtaposition will be pointed out, and you’ll lose potential interest because of it.

Authenticity is especially important when it comes to telling the brand story because a lack of authenticity is easy to see. The brand story is a larger chunk of information, and it needs to harmonize with other branding and the personality that the public sees. Otherwise, it loses all its impact.

5. Don’t Be Long-Winded

Telling a good brand story means knowing what to include and what to leave out. Keep your story simple. Remember, cherry-pick your details. Everything that is included in the story should all work toward a common goal: building your brand by making connections.

Examples differ, but remember that your basic brand story should be a few-minutes read at the most. Consider working up a few variations. You can include one on a dedicated “About Us” or “Our Story” page on your website, have shorter and more concise versions to share on social media, and go into more depth on specific details in blog posts if necessary. Just remember not to over complicate your story.

6. Share Your Story

Once you’ve written all your content down and edited, spell-checked, and asked for feedback, it’s time to take the next important step in using your brand story for effective online advertising: sharing it with others. Your website is the first obvious place to post your brand story, but it should go further than that in order to be most effective.

Use shorter variations or quotes from your story and wrap them into visual content to post on your social media platforms. Choose quotes or passages that are intriguing, perhaps something that highlights the challenges you went through in creating your company. Include a link to the full story along with the quotes. In the process make sure you are branding your company’s story with effective visual designs that will help elicit emotions from your target audience. 

A valuable part of branding includes positioning yourself as an expert, and depending on your experience, portions of your brand story could actually serve that same function. Say, for example, you had a big challenge finding investment for your startup. Detailing your experience in a blog post, including “been there, done that” advice from the front lines, makes the post more shareable, makes your brand more appealing, and makes the most of your own history.

Your brand has a story — we all have a story. Our stories are what connect us to others, and your brand can make those same connections. Leveraging your brand story is one of the most effective ways of stealth advertising, and it can be true in your case, too!

Written by Zaheer Dodhia 

10 Creative Ways for Affiliate Marketers to Make Money on Instagram

SEPT. 25, 2020

Social Cut / Unsplash

Affiliate marketing can be tremendously lucrative. As of this year, the industry is estimated to be worth more than $12 billion globally. More than 80% of brands currently operate some kind of affiliate program, and they exist in every niche you can think of. 

Affiliate marketing is a form of revenue sharing. You (the affiliate) share links to a third party’s products (the merchant). Each time a customer purchases using your affiliate links, you make a commission. Merchants use affiliate management technologies, such as Impact, to monitor and reward their affiliates while affiliate marketers use affiliate tracking software to track and optimize their campaigns. 

Unfortunately, affiliate marketing can suffer from an undeserved bad reputation. Due to the poor behavior of a minority of affiliates and merchants, many dismiss it as a get-rich-quick scheme. However, affiliate marketing is legitimate. At its best, it’s a way to share products you love with your audience and make money while doing so. Companies you’ll be familiar with that use affiliate marketing include Walmart, Amazon, Ebay, and TripAdvisor. Some of the top affiliate marketers include Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income and Jeff Rose of Good Financial Cents.  

Can Affiliate Marketers Make Sales Using Instagram? 

Yes!

Whether you’re an influencer, marketer, or expert in a particular niche, you can leverage your Instagram following to make money. Even better, you can do so without spamming your audience or turning them off. After all, chances are you occasionally share products or services you love with your followers. Most people do this on social media without even thinking about it. Affiliate marketing is simply a way to monetize these recommendations. 

Want to do affiliate marketing on Instagram the right way? Here are the core principles of how to do that: 

Promote products or services that you genuinely love and believe in. You should use them yourself and be knowledgeable about them — this will help you connect with your audience and provide valuable content. 
Partner with well-regarded, trustworthy companies. 
Always be honest with your audience.
Focus on providing great content and building your promotions into it organically. 

How to Make Money on Instagram through Affiliate Marketing

There are many ways to promote your affiliate links and make money, and using social media is just one of the most effective. With more than a billion active monthly users on the platform, if you still ignore Instagram, merchants are here to remind you of its true potential.  

Many affiliate marketers ignore Instagram due to its restrictions around linking. You cannot post a clickable link within a photo or video caption, and you can only include one link in your profile. Therefore, you’ll need to be a little more creative if you want to make the most of the platform. Instagram can be a great source of revenue if you use it well. 

Here are some of the best Instagram affiliate marketing strategies. 

1. Define your style.

Influencer marketing has a reputation of being overly curated to the point of being unrealistic.  Exotic locations, high-end camera equipment, and a team of image professionals all work to build an image that is not relatable to many people. 

In recent months, however, travel restrictions and social distancing have forced influencers to go for a more DIY approach. Instead of featuring beautiful scenery, Instagram users are now sharing photos taken at home, perhaps featuring their families or pets. 

It’s a cliché but a truism: The most powerful thing you can be is yourself. Defining your own style can be a struggle, but it’s what will set you apart. Make sure that everything, from the color scheme you choose to the copy to the choice of products you promote, speaks to who you are as an individual. 

Studies show that people tend to trust people they perceive as being like them. A perfect, filtered, Instagram-ready life simply isn’t relatable to most people, especially in the current challenging climate. By presenting a more real self on social media, you’ll allow your audience to feel more of a connection to you. In turn, this authenticity and connection means you’ll have more impact as you share products with your audience. 

Here’s an example from actor, blogger, and lifestyle influencer, Yenis Monterrey: 

@yenismonterrey / Instagram

In this post, Monterrey uses a natural and unfiltered photograph and addresses the reality of how shopping for food has changed in the wake of COVID-19. By sharing how the product she’s advertising has helped her family during this time, it comes across as more genuine. 

You also don’t need to be relentlessly positive at all times. In a world where there is currently a lot of negativity, positive social media posts can be a welcome respite from the harsh reality. However, excessive and relentless positivity can come across as disingenuous or out of touch. This will have an impact on your affiliate earnings in the immediate and long term, and it can do serious damage to your reputation. 

Strive to be empathetic and sensitive. Influencers should be aware of what’s going on around them and seek to use their influence and reach to address these problems. In other words, don’t be afraid to address the ways in which the world is a scary place right now. 

2. Run contests and giveaways.

Instagram contests are a great source of affiliate leads. They can drive traffic to your site, grow your following, increase your engagement, and make you more attractive to the best affiliate programs in your niche. 

The mechanics of your contest should reflect your goals. For example, if you want to get more followers, you should require participants to follow you in order to be eligible for entry. You can also ask your followers to tag a friend. Photo contests where participants must tag you and the brand or use a special hashtag are also hits among the Instagram community. Here’s an example of an Instagram giveaway: 

@ldbeauty_ / Instagram

Make sure your rules are clear. For example, if there is any geographical restriction, say so upfront. Following the best practices for Instagram contests will keep your followers and the company you’re promoting happy. It’s also recommended that you announce the winner publicly. This shows the contest was genuine and builds trust with your audience. 

The benefits of a well-run contest can last far beyond the immediate term. Ecommerce retailer Coconut Bowls ran an Instagram giveaway that generated more than 40,000 new email leads and more than 37,000 new social media followers. 

How did Coconut Bowls do it? Here are the core principles the company followed, which affiliate marketers can also use for their contests:

A thorough and robust understanding of its audience
A great prize that carried high value relevant to the company’s audience (in this case, a Vitamix blender, which retail for $350 to $600)
The use of bonus actions as an opportunity for participants to earn more entries
Utilizing video content to promote the giveaway
Kickstarting the giveaway with an announcement to its existing email subscribers
Asking brand partners and influencers to share the giveaway

Source: Vyper

If you think it has to be prohibitively expensive to generate this kind of engagement, you’d be mistaken — this campaign cost less than $1,000! This success story proves the power of giveaways in leveraging social sharing and rewarding engagement. 

3. Invest in sponsored posts.

A sponsored post is a type of paid advertising where you pay a fee to Instagram to put your content in front of more people. If your Instagram profile is attached to a Facebook Business page, you can easily advertise on Instagram through Facebook Ads Manager. Otherwise, you need a business profile to take advantage of Instagram’s promotional features.

If you don’t have much of a following or you have just started your Instagram profile, sponsored posting is a great way to boost your following and engagement. You can define who you would like to see your sponsored posts based on target demographics and interests. For example, if you promote a clothing line aimed at young people, you might target college students and 20-year-olds. If you promote a line of home gym equipment, you’d target fitness enthusiasts, and so on. 

Contrary to misconceptions, a sponsored Instagram post doesn’t have to be tremendously expensive. Since you get to set your own maximum spend, you’re in complete control, and you can boost a post for as little as $1 per day. Of course, the more you spend, the more people you can potentially reach. If you only have a small advertising budget, don’t be put off. You can still make sponsored posts work for you.

If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your sponsored ads, follow these tips:

Refine your audience to ensure you’re targeting the right people. What is your ideal customer’s age, gender, geographical location, and area of interest?
Be clear on your campaign’s objective. Are you looking to generate awareness, grow your following, or make immediate sales? 
Use an appealing, eye-catching, and relevant image. 
Make sure your ad copy is as good as it can be. You have only seconds to capture your audience’s attention, so make them count. 
Include a relevant and click-worthy call to action. 

Finally, make sure to use an affiliate tracking software that integrates with the Facebook Conversion API, so you can measure and optimize your campaigns according to real conversions as opposed to just engagement. That way, you can make tweaks to improve your results as you go along. 

4. Be smart with your hashtag game.

Hashtags are a great way to get your post noticed by the right people. They allow people who aren’t following you to find your content, and they help build a community around your posts. Hashtags allow you to be part of a wider conversation centered around a niche, an interest, a geographical location, or an event. 

Branded hashtags connected to the companies you work with identify you as an affiliate marketer promoting that brand, and it can help existing fans of the products or services find you. These hashtags allow you to run contests, collect user-generated content, and monitor how well your brand is doing in Instagram Insights. 

You can use up to 30 hashtags in an Instagram post. Unlike other social media platforms, the more the better. As long as they’re all genuinely relevant, use as many hashtags as you like. Do some research to see what other affiliate marketers and influencers in your niche are using. You should also take some time to see what’s trending and tie a promotion or product ad to a trending hashtag. 

Here’s how fashion influencer Ewelina Kanty does it: 

@ewelinakanty / Instagram

By using relevant fashion- and style-related hashtags, she increases the organic reach of her post, ensuring the right people will see it. 

As an affiliate marketer, hashtags can also keep you on the right side of advertising law and Instagram regulations. If your post contains any affiliate links, or you’re making money from it, the FTC requires this to be disclosed. A simple way to do this is to use hashtags like #aff, #affiliate, or #ad. Kanty does this in the screenshot above with the hashtag #affiliate. 

5. Include a coupon code in your photo description or Instagram Story.

Although you cannot post affiliate links directly in your Instagram captions, coupon codes are a great workaround. If you have an exclusive coupon code for a great discount or bonus, it’s a win-win for you and your audience. They’ll get a great deal, and you’ll become a preferred affiliate each time they shop. 

A coupon code works quite similarly to an affiliate link: When your followers go to your partner’s online store and type in the coupon code, the site recognizes it as a referral from you and credits your account with the commission.  Here’s an example of an Instagram post using an affiliate coupon:

 @gypsea_fer / Instagram

Include coupon codes in your bio, photo captions, or your Instagram Stories. You can even edit them directly into images so followers will see them as they scroll through their feed, if you wish. 

6. Use the “link in bio” workaround. 

Instagram only allows you to put one link in your bio and does not allow clickable links in photo captions at all. Fortunately, businesses and influencers have created a useful workaround. You may have noticed many Instagram users captioning photos with phrases like “link in my bio.” You can do this and change the bio link each time you have something new to promote. However, this is time consuming and inefficient. Instead, use an Instagram linking tool. These useful tools allow you to send your followers to a simple landing page where they can find all your relevant links. The most popular tools include lnk.bio and Linktree. 

Here’s an example of how it looks: 

Plann / Linktree

Just remember to use “link in bio” in your posts and add the relevant affiliate link to whichever linking tool you’re using. 

7. Send people to your blog from Instagram.

Do you have a blog or website where you promote your affiliate products? If so, you should share each new blog post or piece of content on Instagram, using the link-in-bio workaround mentioned above to send your followers to your blog. This strategy has a number of advantages: If your followers love your blog content, they’ll likely return again and again, and you’ll become their preferred affiliate when they need what you sell. In addition, more web traffic also boosts your search engine optimization (SEO), allowing your site to show up higher in search results. This leads to more organic traffic and — you guessed it — more sales.

Also, because none of the “link in bio” tools let you connect with the Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics, sending visitors to your blog lets you build up Custom Audiences. 

Pro tip: Sync your latest blog post with your current Instagram promotion so users always land on the right blog post when they click on your “Link in Bio.”

8. Use Instagram Insights to see how your posts are doing and inform your approach.

There’s a lot more to being a successful affiliate marketer than just posting and waiting. The highest-earning affiliates take a scientific approach and use data to make their affiliate marketing campaigns more effective. That’s where Instagram Insights comes in. 

Instagram Insights helps you determine which posts have the widest reach and where your traffic comes from. You can also see the best days and times for posting on Instagram. If you’re posting on a Sunday, the data shows that the best times are 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. EST, while on Mondays the best times are 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. 

Source: Later

Instagram users see new content first. Therefore, by paying attention to this data, you can maximize the number of people who will see your posts. 

Tracking your metrics is also essential for seeing how your posts are doing and where you could improve. Is one type of content getting much more engagement than another? That’s valuable information that will help you tweak your approach and maximize your sales. 

9. Collaborate with other influencers.

Marketing is more powerful when people work together. Therefore, why not team up with another influencer for a collaboration? You obviously don’t want to be competing for the same sales, so find someone who is promoting products in a different but related niche. For example, if you’re a beauty and fitness influencer, you might team up with a fashion influencer. 

Here are a few fun ways to collaborate: 

Agree to share each other’s links or coupon codes. This is a win-win for both of you and for your audiences.
Do story takeovers on each other’s accounts.
Use the “Go Live with a friend” function to host an Instagram Live video together or do a crossover Instagram Reel with another user.
Create a mutually beneficial bonus. For example, a discount code for your store for the other person’s existing customers, and vice versa. 

By working together, you can find new audiences and expand your reach. 

10. Use swipe-ups to promote affiliate deals through Instagram Stories.

Instagram Stories is a tremendously powerful way of boosting your affiliate earnings. More than 500 million people use Stories every day, and brands use it to interact directly with their followers and fans in real time. The Swipe Up feature allows you to post a link within an Instagram Story. Users can visit the link simply by swiping up on their smartphone screens. Here’s an example of how it can look:

@thesorrygirls / Instagram

Unfortunately, this feature requires that you have at least 10,000 followers, so it’s not available to every user. If you have a large following, you should definitely make use of it. 

Wrapping Up

There is no doubting the power of Instagram. With more than one billion active users and still growing, it’s one of the world’s biggest social networking platforms. For that reason, affiliate marketers and influencers cannot afford to ignore it as a source of revenue. 

You don’t have to use every idea on this list. Pick just one or two to start with. You can always scale your efforts later. As with any other marketing channel, approach Instagram marketing strategically and make sure you have a plan. If you do, you’ll boost your following, get more clicks on your affiliate links, and increase your earnings. 

Best of luck with your Instagram affiliate campaigns!

20 Best Digital Marketing Tools For Growing Your Business in 2020

SEPT. 23, 2020

Photo Mix / Pixabay

In business, you’ll need to stay on top of the latest trends to avoid falling down the pecking order. Digital marketing is the major and most effective method of giving your brand valuable exposure, thanks to the popularity and widespread reach of the internet. Multiple online platforms and software can aid you in creating and maintaining quality content that will drive your business engagement. These digital marketing tools will also help you identify and reach your target audience with ease. They range from social media advertising to email marketing apps, website analytics to content creation software, and more. 

1. Google Analytics 

Tech giant Google shows its commitment to helping startups and medium enterprises get ahead with its free analytical tool, Google Analytics. Despite its advanced appearance, it’s easy to learn, and it’s also invaluable for analyzing your audience’s interactions with your website. Google Analytics is best for tracking website performance. You can find, for example, your most visited web page, your number one traffic source, and specific metrics (views, page duration, bounce rates) related to your blog posts. 

2. HubSpot 

The allure of combining CRM and marketing in one place makes HubSpot one of the best digital marketing tools for growing your business in 2020. It helps you attract potential customers while also creating an avenue to close your deals. Here are some of the activities you can perform using this tool: 

Content curation
Website development
Analytics
Marketing automation
Social media management

3. Mailchimp 

When looking to keep in touch with customers or update them on new products or services, email marketing is often the perfect strategy for many enterprises. Mailchimp helps you contact potential customers through email campaigns. It offers a free package, great customer service support, and multiple integration options for business owners. Plus, you have the option to A/B test campaigns, create audience segments, and schedule emails in advance. Those are only a few of the activities you can do with Mailchimp. 

4. Hootsuite 

You’ll need to monitor the performance of your social media accounts to get the best out of it. Excellent knowledge of your post stats is one of the key criteria when looking to obtain certain social media goals, such as doubling your Instagram followers. Hootsuite helps you achieve that goal: It tracks your product or service mentions, ROI, content performance, and more. You can also use it to schedule and store posts across multiple platforms.

5. Slack 

If you want to ensure seamless and effective communication with members of your business, then Slack is just right for you. It offers multiple integrations, and it’s easy to set up. Slack users can easily switch between channels without having to go through multiple time checks. This tool is a better alternative to long email threads, sparing your inbox from too many unreads while also keeping communication fast.

6. Brand24 

It’s crucial to know what people are saying about your product or service, especially on social media. It’s impossible to monitor mentions yourself, given that about 3.6 billion people use social media. Brand24 helps you solve this dilemma. It keeps tabs on your brand mentions and ensures you stay in the loop on conversations about your business.

7. Trello 

When it comes to content management, few digital tools make the process seamless and organized as much as Trello. Members of your organization can keep tabs on post schedules, and you can easily assign tasks to your team of developers, marketers, or writers. This way, no team member gets confused, as everyone is aware of the task they’re supposed to handle. 

8. Google Adwords 

Google Adwords is a paid advertising platform for businesses looking to gain exposure to their target audience via Google’s search engine result page. The pay-per-click ads appear in search results depending on the keywords users place into search. These ads then direct them to your website. Payment is flexible here, as you can choose between the pay-per-call or pay-per-click option.

9. Buffer 

Social media accounts are excellent marketing platforms for brands looking to grow their businesses. You’ll need to have a strong presence on multiple major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Buffer helps you manage all of your social media accounts in one place. You’ll get to create and schedule your posts, engage with followers, and more.

10. Asana  

In the world of marketing, effectively communicating with members of your team is critical to success. Asana offers business owners a collaborative workflow management system. Team members can perform the following actions using this digital marketing tool:

Prioritize tasks and map out deadlines
Assign tasks
De-silo data with one another
Record projects

11. Databox 

Today, most businesses have their presence spread across several online platforms. This is an attempt to carry out improvement and analysis practices in all their sectors. As a business owner, being able to manage your presence from all these platforms with just one tool can help you save a lot of time and effort. This is something Databox can do, as its developers created it to pull all your data into one place. 

12. Twitter 

Aside from being a great social media platform for acquiring the latest news and trends, Twitter is a great digital marketing tool. The network offers a wide range of promotional features, including ads, retweets, and more, that allow businesses to carry out the marketing of their digital products with ease. To learn more about this, you can always check out some top twitter marketing tips and strategies from experts in the industry. 

13. Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook has an ads platform. A large number of businesses use this platform to target certain markets, and with the Facebook Ads Manager the whole process is a lot easier. Facebook created Ads Manager in an attempt to improve specific advertising campaigns. Today, it provides new targeting and budgeting features for users. 

14. SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the top digital marketing tools you can use for the growth of your business in 2020. It offers a platform for you to find solutions for content, SEO, PPC, social media, and competitive research. From its wide range of plans and prices, you can pick a valuable tool that supports your business. Many of the available tools include research tools for keywords, a backlinks checker, and more. 

15. Moz

Moz is a powerful tool for digital marketing strategies involving SEO. It comes as a software tool that has two separate versions for classic and local SEO practices. Through your business location, Moz can improve your presence across search engines. 

16. Infusionsoft 

Another one of the top digital marketing tools you can use for the growth of your business is Infusionsoft. It comes as a software tool that allows small business owners to store contact information and activity history of their leads, prospects, and their customers. It segments and analyzes the data to enable businesses to access them with efficiency. 

17. BuzzSumo 

As a growing business, there are several strategies you can apply to speed up the process. One includes writing content with popular trends that are relevant to your industry. There are several types of trends, including e-commerce trends, social media trends, advertising trends, and more. When it comes to finding these trends through research and monitoring, BuzzSumo is a great tool that can help you do that. It helps you find the most shared content across several social media channels. 

18. Canva 

Canva is one of the top tools that businesses can use for their digital marketing strategies that involve designs. The tool provides a wide range of features that allow businesses to create designs for newsletters, social media posts, logos, banners, and many more. 

19. Ahrefs 

Ahrefs is a website developed to help business owners find answers to their SEO questions. It features a set of SEO tools that allow them to run full website SEO audits, keyword research, competitor site analysis, and a lot more. 

20. Yoast

If your business has a WordPress website, then one tool you should start using is the Yoast SEO tool. It provides free and paid versions that come with a wide range of features to help you improve your SEO. A few benefits you get for using Yoast for your website are automatic generation of SEO files, website SEO audit, SEO solutions for your content, and many more.

Final Thoughts 

When looking at some of the largest industries in the world, marketing is never left out of the picture. Today, business owners are now adopting the use of several digital marketing strategies to drive their audience and improve sales. Luckily, several tools can make this a lot easier. The above article talks about the top 20 digital marketing tools that you can use for business growth. Good luck!

9 Facebook Retargeting Strategies for Better Ad Conversions

SEPT. 21, 2020

NESA by Makers / Unsplash

Advertising works best when shown to a targeted audience, which you can define by demographics, education levels, professions, and much more.

Other than these criteria, there is one more step to successful targeting: There is retargeting, the best performing audience filtering technique. Retargeting gives you another chance to close the sale.

What Is Retargeting?

Retargeting is showing your Facebook ads only to those who engaged with your website or products, made recent purchases from you, or browsed through your catalogue. It guarantees a better ROI because your ads will only be shown to an audience most likely to be interested in your products or services.

How Does Facebook Retargeting Work?

Facebook’s retargeting system is highly effective, all thanks to the Facebook Pixel, a tool that tracks visitors’ activity on your website after clicking on your ad. The data the Facebook Pixel provides answer the three who’s:

Who visited your website
Who purchased from you
Who looked at specific pages of your website

When you know who is doing what, it’s easy to target them.

Before you can retarget your Facebook ads, you must first set up the Facebook Pixel. Get the tracking code, add it to your website, define your audience, and go on with your campaigns.

9 Facebook Retargeting Strategies

Here are the nine Facebook retargeting strategies you can’t afford to miss.

1. Retarget users who visited a specific page.

It’s the simplest retargeting option, which shows your ads to people who visited specific pages that contain the Facebook Pixel retargeting code.

Setting this up is easy. Simply get the pixel code from Facebook Ads Manager and place it inside the header ( ) of your pages.

2. Retarget people searching for your products.

Facebook gives an option to show your ads to people who searched for specific products on your website. This means, for example, you can show your ad for elegant shirts to people who searched for them on your product catalog. You can do this by using Dynamic Product Ads.

To set up Dynamic Product Ads, you need to upload your catalog to Ads Manager then create an audience that has viewed specific products on your website. Make sure to exclude people who visited your order confirmation page because they already bought that product from you, and you want to show the ad to people who are looking for the product but haven’t bought yet.

3. Retarget people who want to learn more about you.

Customers like to know more about you before buying your products or services. You can retarget these customers and push them to purchase when creating your Custom Audience.

To set up this audience, filter according to those who visited your company’s “About Us” page. By doing this, you can show your ads to people who want to learn more about you. Remember to also include those who visited your products or services page because they are most likely your true prospects.

4. Retarget people who were about to sign up.

The Facebook Pixel is strong enough to detect any event on your website, and one of those events detects people who started filling out your lead form. You can filter according to those who started filling the form but didn’t complete the process.

Filter according to people who started filling the signup form then exclude people who completed the signup process. The remaining audience to retarget is those who wanted to sign up but didn’t sign up yet.

If you’re not successful in gathering leads from your signup form, you need to A/B test your landing page, copy, call to action, and other elements of your landing page. You can use landing page and marketing automation tools like Kartra to further optimize and improve landing page experience and conversion.

5. Retarget people who inquired about your pricing.

Anyone who wants to do business with you will surely look for your pricing. You can retarget people who visited your pricing page then show them ads to close the deal. 

To set up this audience, filter people who visited your pricing page. To get better results, also include those who looked for the features, services, or products you’re offering. These are the true customers looking to do business with you.

6. Retarget people who need to know the next step.

Sometimes, people leave a website when they’re not sure what to do next. By using Facebook remarketing, you can show people the next steps.

Setting up this audience is easy. All you have to do is install different pixel codes at every step on your website. People who reached a specific step will be targeted with ads created for that audience.

7. Retarget people who visited at specific time frames.

If you want to show ads to people who visited your website in the last 10 days but not in the last 5 days,  you can do so by setting time constraints.

Filter people by their actions within a time frame. For example, you can target people who visited your website 10 days ago. You can also filter more by excluding people who visited your website 5 days ago. Your final audience is people who visited your website 5 to 10 days ago.

8. Retarget existing customers.

Retaining existing customers is always more cost-friendly than attracting new ones. You can use retargeting to retain and even upsell to your existing customers.

Filter according to people who visited your order confirmation page. This option is only available when an order is complete. Also, filter according to people who haven’t visited your website in the last 90 or 180 days. This will help you target your lost customers, too.

9. Exclude people not in your funnel.

Not all website visitors can be your customers; for example, job seekers and students who are looking for internships with you are likely not interested in buying your products or services. You can easily exclude those people from your funnel if you have a dedicated career page on your website.

In your audiences, exclude people who visited your Career page. This will save you money by not displaying your ads to these people.

Conclusion

Avoid wasting your money on irrelevant people. Retarget your ads to improve overall campaign ROI.

By Bhargav Bavarva

Top 5 Proven and Effective Amazon Marketing Strategies That Turn Listings to Sales

SEPT. 18, 2020

Stokkete / Envato Elements

Let’s go straight to the facts:

55 percent of consumers go directly to Amazon to search for items instead of a search engine.
More than 200 million people visit Amazon every month.
Amazon sold $173 million worth of products on Amazon Prime Day 2019 alone.

These three facts are enough to prove Amazon’s powerful presence in the e-commerce industry.

With the opportunity brought by the e-commerce site for sellers, converting listings to sales is almost as good as a guarantee, but along with millions of people wanting to take advantage of this opportunity, how do you make sure your products stay ahead of the competition? Below are five proven and effective Amazon online marketing strategies that you should know.

1. Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

What is it? 

Pay-per-click (PPC) is Amazon’s internal marketing system, which allows you to promote your products and brand within a limited budget. As the term states, sellers will only have to pay the amount equivalent to each click’s worth that each advertisement received.

PPCs come in three types:

Sponsored Products are for individual items, which can be found below the search results or below the product descriptions.
Sponsored Brands are also known as Headline Search Ads. These allow you to feature your brand’s logo, along with three of your top products. Each click to these ads leads to the brand’s landing page.
Sponsored Display allows you to advertise on websites outside of Amazon.

How this works.

To start your PPC campaign, you must have at least one product listed under Amazon’s Brand Registry and be eligible for the Buy Box; meaning, you must be subscribed to FBA. Creating a PPC campaign comes in two steps: adjusting the campaign settings then creating an ad group.

 

For the first step, you must enter the campaign name, duration, and daily budget. The second step requires you to input the ad group name (if advertising more than one product), the specific products to be advertised, and your bid per keyword.

PPC is a bidding process. You determine the keywords you want to rank for and bid an amount that you’re willing to pay for each click that you get. Of course, the highest bidder will get the slot but will only have to pay the amount worth $0.01 more than the second-highest bidder’s bid.

How this can help you.

PPC helps your products get the most exposure. It guarantees that your products only appear on searches that use relevant keywords. This does not only increase the conversion rate of each click, but it is also relatively low cost, as you will only pay the amount worth the number of clicks.

2. Deals

What are deals? 

Deals are limited-time promotions where products are offered at discounted prices. This method is usually used to increase sales or reduce inventory. Amazon has an in-house deals system called Lightning Deals, but Amazon deals can also be offered in other deal sites.

How it works.

Through your seller account’s Deals Dashboard, create a lightning deal by providing the following information: deal name, eligible products with variation and quantity, deal price, and deal duration.

Note that Lightning Deals is only available for professional seller accounts. Deals also only last for 4 to 12 hours and can only be featured once every seven days. This is to ensure that buyers get fresh new deals every day.

How this can help you.

The Lightning Deals page is one of the most frequently visited pages on Amazon. Although it will require you to cut down your profit margin by offering discounted rates, this can increase your traffic and sales. This can be the most helpful for newly launched products. It can also assist you when it comes to brand recognition.

3. Amazon A+ Content

What this is.

Amazon A+ Content, a feature exclusive to registered brand owners, allows sellers to upload enhanced media for their listings. This includes introductory videos, HD photos, brand stories, and more.

How this works.

In your Seller Central homepage, click “A+ Content” under the “Advertising” tab. You can let Amazon do the building for you, or you can do the designing yourself. If you choose self-service, however, you still have to select from the existing modules. These modules are template layouts of the product page.

How this can help you.

Amazon A+ content makes it easier for sellers to offer premium-priced products because they have more opportunities to communicate the product’s value. With the help of enhanced content and the power of combined media and text, buyers are given a better user experience and a better understanding of how the product offers the best value for the buyer’s money.

4. SEO Optimization

What is it?

Aside from being an e-commerce site, Amazon also functions as a search engine. Buyers input keywords into the search bar, and Amazon generates the most relevant products based on the keywords and filters used. SEO optimization is simply making sure that your listings are visible and on top of search results.

How this works.

Amazon uses an algorithm called A9 to filter listings and provide a list of relevant results for each keyword search. The goal is to make your listings rank on the most relevant keywords or words that buyers will search for when looking for a product. To do this, listings must be optimized for both the Amazon algorithm and the buyers’ human eyes.

The Amazon algorithm changes from time to time, which can often be unannounced. For reference, here are the golden numbers from a 2018 study conducted by e-commerce solutions provider Skubana: 

60 to 80 characters for the title
5 bullet points
6 to 8 images
400 characters for the description

How this can help you.

A huge chunk of Amazon sales come from the first page of search results. The farther your product is in search results ranking, the lower your its chances of being clicked and making sales. To secure consistent sales, sellers must keep listings relevant enough to at least be on the first page of search results, if not on the top three.

5. Off-site Advertisements

What is it?

Amazon DSP (demand-side platform) is another form of Amazon’s internal advertising features that allow sellers to use display, audio, and video ads on and off Amazon’s website. You can choose to let Amazon generate the advertisements or run things on your own. Nevertheless, DSP generates insights to help measure campaign effectiveness and to help sellers better strategize their campaign.

How this works.

Sellers will have to design the product placement itself (photo, audio, or video) according to the creative guidelines and suggested size. These advertisements contain links that direct to whichever page you want to land (website, brand page, or product page).

How this can help you.

Off-site advertisements improve conversion rates and lower cart abandonment rates. With product placement all over the internet, buyers have higher chances of brand recall. Off-site advertisements expand your reach while still making sure that you are targeting the right audience.

Key Takeaways

With the rise of opportunities online also comes the rise of competitors. Although being on the market is an excellent first step, it is essential to make the most out of the given opportunity. Even though these marketing tools are widely available, there is still a strategy that works better for each specific situation. Consult your trusted solutions provider today to make sure you get the best tools for your business.

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Influencer Marketing

SEPT. 16, 2020

Mateus Campos Felipe / Unsplash

Influencer marketing has tremendously grown in the recent past. From big to small businesses, entrepreneurs are opening up to this form of marketing tactic. This could be because it leverages the ready audience of an influencer to drive quick results in brand awareness and business growth.

However, this seemingly very effective marketing strategy also has some downsides. That’s why it’s important to weigh both the pros and cons before plunging into it.

If you’re thinking of using an influencer to market your products, this article will help you make an informed decision.                               

Pros of Influencer Marketing

 

1. It centers on a relevant audience.

If you partner with an influencer who works in the same niche as you, you can reach a more relevant audience because the influencer’s followers are already interested in what he or she has to share. By working with an influencer, your message reaches people who are likely to be interested in your products or services without you lifting a hand to find them.

2. It builds trust quickly.

Building trust between an organization and its customers takes time and effort. However, the process is quicker when you use an influencer. You see, an influencer is an individual who is trusted in his or her niche by followers. The same people are bound to trust your message when you pass it through a person they trust.

3. It reaches a huge audience.

As said earlier, influencers command a large following in social media platforms. Take Kim Kardashian West, for example. At the time of writing, she has 188 million followers. Another influencer, Baby Ariel, although not as well known, has 9.7 million followers. When an influencer talks about your brand, she’s reaching a large audience, even to millions of people. Because this increases your reach, you are able to tap into new and larger markets that you could have otherwise not done on your own.

4. It doesn’t appear pushy.

It’s easy for people to ignore or even distrust a product if a marketing tactic appears pushy to them. A majority of internet users mostly use ad blockers to stop seeing annoying ads online and on social media. However, people following an influencer do so out of their own will. That’s why a post from an influencer can never be annoying or pushy to them. Plus, influencers usually promote brands in a very organic way. Here’s one example from influencer Toshi Shek, who casually promotes a brand of pots to her followers. 

Cons of Influencer Marketing

 

1. Mistakes can be costly.

If you are expanding your products to international markets, one of the best ways to reach people is to localize your marketing strategy. This might mean using an influencer from those countries. However, this calls for understanding the laws and regulations of those countries, including tax and labor laws. A single mistake can be very costly for your business.

To avoid making mistakes with the logistics, it’s better to use a partner from those countries. For instance, if you want to hire an influencer in China, consider using a China Employer of Record, such as NH Global Partners, to deal with influencers, and all your Chinese hires for that matter, on your behalf.

2. It’s not easy to find the right influencer.

As said earlier, for an influencer marketing strategy to drive results, you need to match with an influencer relevant to your niche. This is not an easy thing to do, and you might take months before you land one. The results of influencer marketing might be instant, but it takes a lot of time and effort before launching the campaign.

3. You risk your reputation.     

Influencer marketing is relatively new in the market, so it’s more of a trial and error for most brands. If you land the wrong influencer, your time, effort, and resources are highly likely to go to waste without any results to show for it.

In addition, the success of campaigns largely depends on how the audience perceives the collaboration. If the audience doesn’t resonate with it, it can badly damage your brand’s reputation and that of the influencer. Unfortunately, restoring a brand’s reputation with the public takes time and money.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, there lies a thin line between a successful influencer marketing strategy and one that is a failure. The secret, however, lies in landing a relevant influencer who is credible, who is trusted by his or her followers. It’s not an easy feat to do so. You might need to have a team in place to help you do the vetting. You also need to have a team monitoring the results and tracking progress.

Twitter Marketing Tips and Strategies for 2020

Moran / Unsplash

Companies across the globe market on Twitter to engage with their followers, all while building brand awareness, boosting leads and conversions, and so much more. Twitter is known to be an easy platform on which you can distribute your content, what with it having more than 330 million average monthly users globally. 

With every social media network, there are different strategies involved. Although your Facebook strategy might be giving you exceptional leads, the same strategy might not work for Twitter. How can you make sure Twitter users  interact with your content? Here are some helpful tips and strategies, so you can take Twitter by storm in 2020.

Customize Your Profile

Customize your Twitter profile to match your brand identity. You need to make sure that when people come across your profile, they’ll be able to identify your brand immediately. Make use of your company colors and logo when choosing a display photo. If your company has a slogan, you can place it in the bio, too.

For example, Dove uses its logo for its default photo and features its slogan on the cover image. When users come across this profile, they’ll know it’s representing Dove. 

 

Your Twitter handle should resemble your brand name. If you can’t fit the full name into your handle, try to abbreviate, but make sure it’s still recognizable. Your customers and fans need to be able to find you easily when searching for you on the platform. If your handle is abbreviated in any way, make sure your display name matches the brand’s full name. And of course, don’t forget to provide a link to your website in your bio. 

Run Twitter Ads

In recent years, more brands are opening up to the idea of promoting on Twitter as part of their social media marketing campaigns. Paid advertising on Twitter is a great way to reach your target audience. It makes your Tweets easy to be discovered by hundreds of people who aren’t already aware of your brand, and it allows you to increase your followers and customers. There are two ways to do this: promoted Tweets and Twitter ads.

Promoted Tweets, which are organic Tweets you pay to show to your target audience, appear in Twitter streams and in search results. They are perfect for companies looking to get users on one specific web page. To run promoted Tweets, you must pay a monthly fee.

Twitter ads are advertisements you create to reach specific goals. This method is ideal if you’re looking to build brand awareness or your follower base. With Twitter ads, you can choose between different objectives, including website conversions, video views, or app installs. 

Use Keyword Targeting in Twitter Ads

Keyword targeting allows you to engage users through different words or phrases that they searched for and that you may have included in your Tweets. Doing this enables you to reach a target audience that may be highly interested in your products or services. The two types of keyword targeting are search keyword targeting and timeline keyword targeting.

Search keyword targeting places your Tweets on the timelines of users who are searching for topics or discussions that are related to your business. If you sell energy drinks, you can target users who are searching for Tweets about going to the gym, staying fit, and exercising. 

With timeline keyword targeting, you can act on users’ specific feelings or actions that they’ve tweeted about. For example, if you run a baking equipment store, you can target keywords such as “stand mixers,” “spatulas,” or “piping bags.” 

Include Hashtags

Adding hashtags to your Tweets expands your reach. In fact, Tweets with hashtags are known to receive two times more engagement than Tweets without them. Although hashtags are extremely important on social media platforms, you also need to be aware of how many hashtags are too many. Twitter recommends using no more than two hashtags per tweet.

Make sure that you’re using hashtags that are unique to your brand so that your followers and your target audience can easily find you on the platform and engage with your content. Your hashtags need to be unique, relevant, and memorable. They must also be related to specific campaigns that you choose to run. If your hashtags are memorable enough, your followers might start using them, too! In the example below, Nike creates a unique hashtag, #YouCantStopUs, for its brand campaign. 

Keep Content Light and Personalized

Twitter users look for personal replies on the platform. They don’t want to see you replying to followers with the same templates. When engaging with users, don’t stick to one standard templated response. Do your best to make every reply a personal one so that you can better connect with your audience — this reassures them that you’re listening to their opinions or concerns. 

Don’t be afraid to use humor in Tweets! Brands make it big on Twitter when their Tweets are on the funny side because this makes them more relatable and approachable: Users aren’t afraid to engage with them because they don’t feel intimidated. McDonald’s funny Tweet below is a perfect example of incorporating humor.

Twitter is a great platform to connect with your target audience, but you won’t reap the benefits if you don’t do it right. Follow these tips and succeed in Twitter marketing for 2020.

By Umer Bilal