Tag: Businesses

Digital marketing has taken the advertising sector by storm. It has become an indispensable tool in the hands of a marketer to promote its brand’s objectives and lend it a visibility. As we are constantly witnessing advancements in the realms of social media, mobile marketing and user experience, the scope of digital marketing is reaching sky rocketing height. To help businesses stay cognizant of such opportunities, we have enlisted the top trends in digital advertising that will help them capture their online objectives effectively.

The Top Digital Marketing Trends

• Live video streaming
  Live video streaming gained a lot of momentum in 2016 and continues to see a rapid growth in the present time too. It is an effective tool for a marketer to engage and interact with the customers. The trend of live video streaming gained impetus with video streaming apps like Facebook Live and Periscope which enables users to streamline real time videos to push out messages across social media. This trend s highly prevalent in the digital marketing space and is likely to continue for long.
• Unique content still rules the digital space
  Every digital marketer will agree that unique and quality content is the ‘king’ in the online world and this tendency in the future as well. When the content stands out in terms of ideas and quality, it ensures that it engages and influences the readers completely.
• Social influencers are crucial assets for your business
  Social influencers and established bloggers play a very crucial role in building a loyal following and gaining awareness for your brand. With new social media platforms being introduced every now and then, it is not easy to reach the desired audience. However, influencers and bloggers enjoy dedicated followership that captures the community and engages them with their content. Thus, choosing the right people to promote your business can help you reach the target audience and as a result your business will drive towards success.
• Consumers are hooked to their Mobile phones
  Smart phones have revolutionised the way a consumer communicates and shares information with the world by providing on the go access to vital applications and social media platforms. Mobile phones and tablets have become our constant companions and their dependency continues to rise. It is crucial for the retailers to eye this fact and those who fail to do so will be left behind.
• Augmented reality is the next big thing
  The immense popularity of Pokemon Go gave the idea to marketers that augmented reality experiments can go a long run. Today, consumers are eager to experience such augmented reality concepts which means that there are plenty of potential wins here for marketers. Get ready to witness more AR related experiments in the times to come.

Are you digitally ready?

As digital technology is becoming more sophisticated with time, the extent to which brands and businesses can engage their consumers is seemingly endless and this is a great opportunity for every digital advertising agency to help their clients get their desired visibility and hold among their clientele.

Lyfeloop

Whether you have a startup or you inherit one, you cannot deny the fact that social media will now be an essential part of your marketing strategy.

However, it is very easy to go wrong on social media, and this can have a negative impact on your brand. So, we’re going to give you a quick rundown of the top five ways through which you can make your strategy work.

Here are 5 things that businesses can implement to maximize the effectiveness of their social media campaigns:

1. Plan Your Social Media Marketing Strategies

Many business owners think social media marketing basically means creating a new account and sharing a couple of updates. They apply the same theory on multiple social media channels and expect the same results. They think – “If you build it, they will come!” When they don’t get any foothold, they give up instantly thinking that social media doesn’t work. However, the harsh reality is that they did not formulate a real plan.

2. Schedule Your Social Time

Stability is the name of the game when it comes to social media marketing. The time and the frequency chosen for posting are crucial. You will have to keep an eagle’s eye on the current trends and alerts that are relevant to your business, and keep a track of what your customers are doing and saying. Interacting regularly and having conversations with your customers is necessary. Rule of thumb: Allocate at least two hours a week to every social networking site you are present on!

3. Engage With Your Customers

Focus on connecting and engaging with your customers. A business can engage with customers and prospects by promoting their updates, sharing what they are saying, mentioning them frequently, replying to their questions, asking them questions, inviting them to events, asking them for feedback or sending them a direct message. Frequently engaging with customers and regularly promoting what they share ultimately leads to more customer satisfaction and higher sales.

4. Content is Still King

Writing and sharing high-quality content with your audience and prospective customers should be one of your priorities because of the key role it can play in how you communicate with your readers and get your message across. A great write-up will attract people organically, and they will hang around much longer.

5. Be Fun

Last but not the least – your social channels should be useful; however, they also need to be relevant. Everyone loves to laugh and bond; so make time to engage your audience by playing with words or through jokes or fun images.

There is so much information available online; hence, hearing an advice from true and renowned expert will take you in the right direction. Focus on your goals, create high-quality content and keep up pace with the latest trends.

Lyfeloop

Google is adding more ways for businesses to highlight how they’re catering to changing customer needs and behaviors as a result of COVID-19, with new options for listings on your Google My Business profile related to pick-up options, service changes and more.

Google has been adding more ways for businesses to display updated options and service offerings, like ‘curbside pick-up’ in ads, and changes to business hours as a result of COVID impacts. It’s now providing more tags that can be added to business listings.

“You can now highlight dining service attributes like “Dine-in” and “Takeout.” Soon you’ll be able to feature retail service attributes, like “In-store shopping” and “Curbside pickup.” 

‘Curbside pickup’ in this respect relates to organic listings, not ads, where, as noted, the option was already available.

And these could be increasingly important – according to Google, searches for “curbside pick up” have grown globally by more than 3,000% year over year, while searches for “takeout restaurants” have grown globally by over 5,000% in the same time period.

That, of course, makes perfect sense, but if you’re not listing these options on your Google My Business profile, you could be missing out on web traffic. 

To implement these changes, you need to log into Google My Business and update the relevant fields in your business profile options.

Google also says that searches containing “available near me” have grown by more than 2x across regions and categories – and catering to these more specific shopping options, Google’s also adding “Pickup later” tags for local inventory ads (second screenshot above).

The listings are designed to reduce in-store shopping time, and tap into these rising consumer behaviors. 

As reflected in the search data above, these are important updates, and it’s worth ensuring that your Google My Business profile reflects the latest info and updates in order to tap into evolving consumer behaviors. 

Really, these are logical progressions, and the more you can align your digital listings with audience need, the better off you’ll be, in terms of maximizing response. 

Free Speech Social Media Platform

Social media has become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. Businesses of all size and shapes have started making the most of available mediums. Today we will try to anatomize tips on social media for small businesses. There are a plethora of small businesses eyeing social medium to promote their business/services. However, majorly these small businesses are failing or not being able to make optimum use of social media for their business growth. There are many theories and strategies on how to effectively use social media for established brands, but the topic social media for small businesses is seldom addressed. According to Digital state of eMarketing India 2017 Octane Research:

60% small businesses promote their business on social media. 50% focus on SEO and 35% use multichannel marketing funnel.

70% small businesses consider content strategy as their primary marketing activity.

52% business owners are using social media as to efficiently address customer engagement.

More than 20% of business owners said that they are making 50% plus profit using social media.

The primary reasons for the low turnout are uncertainty on an application of social media, calculating return on investment and persuade employees/stakeholders to clinch social media. Hence it is important to address the elephant in the room and analyze how beneficial is Social media for small businesses.

Social media for small businesses is a great way for emerging businesses to generate lead and build a reputation. If regularly updated, social media can deliver more results as compared to traditional mediums. Social media for small businesses gives brands an edge of control over the content that they want to post. Also, since social media is a two-way dialogue process, it helps businesses to instantly identify what is benefitting them. Social media for small businesses also helps generate Word of Mouth, which is one of the best tools for emerging businesses.

Social Media for small businesses | 10 Tips to effectively use Social Media

Define your Target Audience

The first and foremost important part that small businesses should focus on is to define their target audience. This helps small businesses to device their social media strategy accordingly. The target audience should be defined basis age group, sex, location, users’ online behaviors, their likes, interests, and preferences. For niche products, business owners can even target users based on their birthdays, anniversaries and important milestone. Audience targeting plays a very crucial role in the outcome of the results. For e.g.: a local shop selling footwear should not target users with interest in entertainment. The shop definitely won’t get the desired results.

Set achievable goals

Overnight success is a myth. Small businesses must understand this basic fact. Generally, when a new business starts selling on social media, there is palpable excitement is achieving more than set targeted sales. Businesses need to set goals which are upwards and forward. To achieve enormous goals, small businesses start updating social feed with multiple updates in shorter duration. This leads to user’s disinterest in the product/service. The set goals should be in sync with brand’s core capabilities and expertise. For e.g.: if a business is into selling shoes, they shouldn’t set a goal to repair maximum shoes in their area.

Choose the right medium

By now everyone knows, social media is for free. Even paid campaigns can be conducted at a relatively low cost as compared to traditional mediums. It is in this scenario, that we often see small businesses jumping the bandwagon and creating profiles on all the available platforms. Creating social profile doesn’t hamper brand image, but aggressively promoting a brand on wrong platforms can lead to brand losing its potential customers. Hence it is advisable for SME’s to first identify the right platform through which they can maximize their business. For e.g.: If a shoe selling brand tries to aggressively sell on LinkedIn, they won’t get a plausible response as compared to promotions on Facebook/Instagram.

Promote your core product/services

Since each and every business is riding in the social media wave, it is important for a them to promote their core product/services. Nowadays, we see a lot of businesses promoting their services as well as promoting peripheral products/services, which revolves around their core product/services. Majority of the times, this SME’s doesn’t have capabilities to fulfill a requirement, which can lead to a bad word of mouth for their business on social media platforms. Let us go back to our example; if a shoe seller is trying to aggressively promote socks instead of shoes, it is not going to benefit the business in the long run.

Create quality content

Now that we have covered the topics of identifying the target audience, setting achievable goals, choosing the right medium and promoting the right product/services let us now take a look at the type of content a business should promote on their social pages. A business should always focus on creating good quality content rather than not-good quantity content. Even if the business updates their page once in a day as long as it is relevant to their business, advocates about its core products send across a clear message it is considered as a good quality content. Antagonistically, if a business posts multiple updates which aren’t even relevant to the business’s products and services leads to users considering the business as fake/spam. Also, new businesses should try and refrain from promoting other businesses on their social platforms initially.

Create a content calendar

Making a small business successful on social platforms is no small task. It takes a lot of efforts for the businesses to keep up their conversion ratio. One such effort is to create a content calendar. Small businesses must anticipate important events and create a content calendar accordingly. Ideally, a content calendar must be planned a month in advance but an even weekly content calendar is highly recommended. This helps businesses to avoid any last minute hassles, strategize much more effectively and it also helps in creating curiosity amongst its loyal fans/customers.

Test and re-test

Social media is highly unpredictable. The content a business posts today, might not work for tomorrow. Hence, small businesses must always test their content before publishing it on their pages. Testing content also applies to the platform a small business chooses to promote. Small business owners must always don the consumer’s hat before posting about any product feature, updates, schemes or offers. A consumer’s perspective is the key when testing the content that has to be uploaded.

Look for inspiration

Small businesses must always look for inspiration from a competitor who is successful in the same category. Copy pasting competitors idea or content is not the answer. Small businesses must look for the kind of content its competitors are putting up and derive their own strategies subsequently. Inspiring content/stories always make a business to strive to create their own content that is appreciated by one and all. It helps in increasing brand consideration, brand visibility thereby increasing conversions for the business.

Calculate ROI

Even a small promotional budget is not justifiable if there is no mechanism to calculate its return on investment. It is more important in case of small businesses. It is very important for a small business to keep a tab on the budgets allocated to any promotions and the subsequent ROI related to it. If a certain promotion is not doing well or the business is not getting desired results, the brand custodian can always look for other platforms to generate quality conversions.

Analyze and Re-strategize

There can be umpteen instances where a particular campaign/promotion might not work for a business. That doesn’t mean that the promotion is wrong or the product/service is not good. Doing an analysis of the campaign is as important as setting the objective. This helps the business to formulate their upcoming strategies in more effective ways. At the end of every campaign, brands must note down the learning’s from that campaign and identify if the content/idea was appreciated by their fans or not. This helps businesses to skip the non-performing updates from future communications.

Final Thoughts

Social media for small businesses is definitely beneficial and fruitful. If followed correctly, small businesses can benefit tremendously from the power of social media promotions.

Lyfeloop