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Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Funnels

When you’re just starting a business, you need to work hard to gain traction. Over time, however, you may notice that you need to change your strategy to continue to grow your business.

One of the most effective ways to boost conversions and generate more revenue is with a marketing funnel. This funnel is basically a sequence of steps that prospective customers take in order to become purchasing customers. After your business gets off the ground, you need this structured approach to monitor your process and be sure that you’re keeping existing customers and gaining new ones.

In this post, we’ll discuss what a marketing funnel is and how you can build one for your business to gain more customers and revenue.

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is the path a prospective customer takes from start to finish. This includes the first time they hear of your product or service to the moment of purchase.

Once you have this structure in place, you can analyze each step of the process to look for areas of improvement to increase conversions.

These are the stages of the marketing funnel:

Awareness

The awareness stage is the top of the funnel and refers to the moment when a customer becomes aware of your product or service. Your marketing materials at this point include:

Tutorials

Guides

Blog posts.

Videos

Marketing strategies include:

Content marketing.

Inbound marketing.

Paid advertising.

Search Engine

The goal of marketing at this stage is to reach a broad audience and create awareness of your product or service.

Interest

The interest stage is when prospective customers are aware of your product and become interested in learning more about your product. Your marketing materials are geared toward education, such as:

E-books.

Webinars

Newsletters

Emails

White papers.

Case studies.

This is the stage in which you can encourage a customer buy.

Commitment

The commitment stage is when a prospective customer is committing to your product and making the decision to buy. Your marketing materials at this stage include:

Product demonstrations.

Trials

Sales calls.

These are the basic stages, but some businesses further break down their funnel into smaller stages according to what aspects they want to analyze. Regardless of how complex your funnel is, having a systematic funnel gives you data about the customer’s buying journey that you can optimize along the way.

For example, if you were to determine that you were losing a lot of customers between the interest stage and the commitment stage, you could adjust your content or marketing materials to optimize for conversions.

How to Build Your Own Marketing Funnel

Your own marketing funnel is as specific as your business itself, but here are the basic steps you need to begin building your own:

Awareness

The first step in your funnel is to get your product out in front of the widest possible audience. This is achieved through blogging, SEO, paid advertising, and the other marketing strategies we mentioned previously.

You should be specific in your targeting to reach a large audience, but still focus on an audience that is likely to need or want your product or service. Content marketing is a key tool in this stage, since it creates a lot of awareness about your business among users who are searching for solutions to their problems.

Interest

Once you have prospective customers in the awareness stage of your funnel, the next step is to increase interest and engagement to get them to return. This is best achieved with an email subscriber list.

For example, you could put an option at the end of your blog posts for users to subscribe to your email list. This will generate leads for your business while also giving you insight into the number of people interested in your business.

This is a systematic way to move customers from the awareness stage to the interest stage. If you start to notice high click-through rates but few conversions, you can work on improving the landing page or call-to-action to increase your conversions.

Commitment

When you have a lot of prospective customers interested in what your business has to offer, then it’s time to move them into the commitment stage. This is the stage in which your customers want to learn more about your product and are looking to purchase, which can be done with content.

At this point, you should already have an email list, so you can use autoresponder emails to guide them into the evaluation stage. Autoresponders offer high-quality content to your customers and help you build a business relationship with them to earn purchases in the future.

You can also earn the conversion by giving them a compelling reason to buy. This can be done a number of ways, such as:

Create urgency by suggesting that a product or offer is short-

Ensure that the checkout process is smooth and streamlined.

Offer a discount or special promotion.

The goal here is to create a pleasant buying experience to assure the prospective customer that buying is a good decision.

Fixing Problems Within the Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnels are known as funnels because you will lose customers along the way, so the funnel gets smaller. Some people simply won’t move through to buy, and that’s just part of the process. To a certain extent, you should expect to lose some prospects between awareness and conversion.

When you’re losing excessive numbers of prospective customers at some point through the funnel, that’s when you need to review your process and see where you could improve. Having a systematic funnel is the first step in correcting this problem, which you may not even fully realize otherwise.

As you build your funnel, you should assign metrics to each stage:

Awareness: Visitors to your site.

Interest: Subscribers to your email list.

Commitment: Number of people purchasing your products.

Without these metrics, it’s difficult to know what part of the funnel is losing customers.

You should compare these metrics on a regular basis to see if you’re improving or declining. If you’re declining, you can then look for reasons that may be occurring.

Regardless of what stage is losing customers, there are two strategies that apply at any point:

Retargeting

If you’re seeing a lot of paid traffic to a particular post but your prospects are simply reading the article and clicking away without subscribing, downloading, or purchasing, there’s still a chance to convert.

Retargeting is a form of online advertising that lets you target visitors who left your site before converting. It gives you a chance to persuade them to come back and reconsider purchasing. This ad should be focused on an offer from the next stage of the funnel.

For example, if you’re seeing a lot of traffic without conversion, retarget those customers with an offer to subscribe to your email list. This can take them to a landing page that offers a free download they may have missed out on the first time around.

Once you’re familiar with this process, you can devise retargeting campaigns that address each stage of the funnel with relevant offers.

Chat

If prospects visit your site but aren’t able to find adequate answers to the questions they may have, it can be enough to cause them to click away. They could be reading your content and need further clarification, or looking at your price page and have questions about purchasing.

In these cases, live chat is an excellent tool. Regardless of where they are in the marketing funnel, live chat gives you an opportunity to answer all their questions and guide them into the next stage.

Get Started

Now that you know what marketing funnels are and how they can be used to improve your business, it’s time to build one. Start with the simple structure of a basic funnel, identify problems, and work on optimizing them. As you learn and grow, you can expand your funnel to gain more customers and generate more revenue.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/beginners-guide-to-marketing-funnels/

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Soapbox for Creating Videos

A simple browser extension makes it easy for salespeople to create videos for prospects.

Videos are one of the most effective and powerful ways to communicate a message and add personalization to a salesperson’s follow up process.

But creating videos can be a challenge for a lot of people and we certainly don’t want to bog down our salespeople with video editing and too much administration. We’d rather have them talking to prospects.

Enter: Soapbox

A new Chrome browser extension, called Soapbox, created by Wistia, allows anyone to create really nice looking videos that have an easy transition between screen shares, talking head videos, and split screen.

Even if you’re not a video editor and even if you don’t have any real experience creating videos this app will work for you. It is designed, specifically, with salespeople in mind.

Some of the features that salespeople will find very attractive about this service are that you can easily add branding and messages specific to your prospect or client to video thumbnails, and landing pages that are automatically created to go with your video.

You can also easily edit the video without any video editing skills right within your browser. So you don’t have to download the video to any third-party application to do your editing.

Features

One of our favorite features is that as soon as you’re done with this video, it is immediately shareable via a link that’s generated by Soapbox.

So as soon as you’re done, you can take that link and send it to your prospect or customer to immediately deliver your message. And because this was created by Wistia, which is a very powerful video hosting platform that’s very popular with marketers and salespeople it also includes analytics that will show you if a video was watched, how many times, and for how long.

That way the salespeople are armed with the best information to continue following up with our prospects and closing deals.

Try it!

Soapbox is free for a single user, but it has many powerful upgrade features for individuals and teams that would like more powerful capabilities to go along with their videos. You can learn more at Wistia.com/Soapbox.

Give your salespeople the power of video to communicate with and see the prospect relationships move faster and see them close more deals. Or you can always contact Amrut Services for help.

  from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/soapbox-for-creating-videos/

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17 Engaging Social Media Posts to Elevate Your Brand

A creative block is one of the worst things to experience when you’re a marketer, especially if you’re working with a tight deadline. Drawing a blank for a creative campaign, or even a creative post, can be disheartening; but we’re here to help.

Everyone experiences a creative block from time to time and needs inspiration, so let’s take a look at these 17 engaging social media posts that are sure to elevate your brand.

Company Blog Posts

If your business has a blog, why not share to your target audience through your own business social media accounts? Your audience is already following you, so it’s relevant; and you may find that your content will be shared among them to generate even more leads.

Company Culture Posts

Internet users appreciate transparency and a more intimate experience when dealing with a business, which is why social media has become such a valuable tool for marketers. The best way to showcase your business is with an image or article that highlights your business, whether it’s recent news, an award, or just a behind-the-scenes shot of an office party, providing your audience with a glimpse into your company culture does wonders for your audience’s loyalty.

Industry News

News articles tend to be shared more than other types of posts, but most businesses are shifting their focus to in-depth, long-form content. While this is valuable for SEO, the occasional, topical story that relates to your industry can clue your audience in to trends and breaking news. To get started, make a list of news sources, trade publications or websites that relate to your industry, and follow them on social media. When they share industry news, share it with your followers on a different platform to stand out and to show your audience that you keep up with your own industry trends.

Curated Content

Curated content is just content from other industry professionals. If you want to share topics that have already been written numerous times or you want to fill in your social calendar without taking the time to craft the post, sharing the piece and giving the original poster credit can help you reach your audience and encourage others to share your content in the future.

Question Posts

It’s a common misconception that your entire social media account needs to be filled with in-depth articles and posts. Engagement is a benefit of social media that isn’t available with many other outlets, so take advantage of that by asking your audience a question to encourage interaction.

Taking a poll or asking a funny question for the purpose of engagement is good, but you can also take this opportunity to learn more about what your audience is looking for from you. Ask about content they’d like to see, current problems they’re encountering, or other questions about their needs, which not only gives you an idea for future posts, but also gives you insight about your audience’s pain points.

Product Videos

Videos get a lot of attention on social media and are more likely to be shared than other types of content, so you should be including product or company videos on occasion to showcase a new product or give you audience a peak into your daily operations.

Customer Reviews

If your business has a lot of good reviews and a dedicated customer base, let your social media followers see it. You can create a graphic with a review or testimonial to post, or share a customer’s post that mentioned your company to show your audience that you have a long list of satisfied customers.

Offer Advice

“How-to” posts and tutorials are helpful for your audience, but you can also condense this information into useful tips that are easily digested and quick to read. Make a list of the most important tips and tricks that you think your audience will enjoy, and post them periodically.

Memes and GIFs

In addition to other visual content, such as infographics, images, and videos, memes and GIFs can be used to put a fun twist on the same old post and catch your audience’s attention. This is not only on trend, but these types of fun, quirky content are becoming more and more popular among businesses. Just be sure to keep the message aligned with your brand identity and target audience.

Contests

Contests are nearly impossible to resist, so starting a social media contest that’s related to your business will boost engagement and participation among followers. You can also require people to like or follow your page to get involved, leading to more subscribers.

Before posting a contest, however, take care to be clear about your objectives, the rules and how you want your audience to participate. Social media contests are usually along the lines of liking, commenting or sharing a post for a discount or free gift, but the possibilities are virtually endless.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you receive many of the same questions over and over again, share a post that includes an answer to these questions on a regular basis. You can also “pin” these posts on your page so that they’re always quick and easy for your followers to find.

Infographics

Infographics are quick to catch your followers’ attention, thanks to their visual appeal and the wealth of information they can present. Whether you have a step-by-step guide, statistics, or other complex information, putting it in an infographic to post on social media encourages your audience to stop scrolling and start reading.

Links to Free Resources

If you have white papers, e-books or other downloadable content for your business, offer it for free in a social media post. This will not only show that you want to help your audience solve their problems, but everyone loves free stuff.

Podcasts

Internet users get tired of reading, which is why videos and podcasts are such popular forms of content. Share a podcast that’s relevant to your industry, or start your own and share it on your social media page.

Hiring Announcements

When you have new team members, take the time to introduce them to your audience on social media. Include photos and a little blurb about the new team members, then ask for everyone’s welcome and well wishes.

“On this Day” and National Day Posts

“On this day” posts or articles share information that happened on this day in history, which people love to read. You can choose to share these posts on a regular basis, or only share when you find an interesting fact or article that relates to your industry.

National Day posts work similarly to “on this day” posts. These include “holidays” like National Coffee Day, National Blueberry Day, National iPod Day, and much more, for each day of the year. Find the ones relevant to your industry and post them on your social media

Live Video

Live videos are popular on most media platforms, making it even easier to include video in your marketing campaign. Using the platform that works best for you and that has the largest following, create live videos each week with a theme that relates to your industry, such as weekly tips or fun facts, to encourage your audience to tune in.

Elevate Your Brand

We hope that this list of engaging social media posts gives you some ideas for how to tackle your creative block and connect with your audience more on social media. While not all may be appropriate for your business or industry, use these ideas to craft your own engaging social media posts that make your followers excited to see what you’ll post next!

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/17-engaging-social-media-posts-to-elevate-your-brand/

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Eight Ways You Should Be Marketing on LinkedIn in 2019

LinkedIn continues to be the strongest social media platform for B2B marketing. In addition to being the easiest social channel for finding targeted B2B audiences, LinkedIn has made an aggressive push over the last 12 months to turn itself into a more powerful content marketing platform. This gives you a lot of new options to use LinkedIn for effective marketing in just about any industry.

1. Write Native Blog Posts

The first strategy is to create native blog posts on the LinkedIn platform. When we say native, we’re referring to taking the content that you would normally post to a blog on your website and posting it directly inside of LinkedIn’s content editor so that the content actually lives within LinkedIn, rather than linking out to your blog post.

This is of course a preference for LinkedIn because it keeps their users inside of LinkedIn to consume your content rather than leaving the LinkedIn platform. That means that your content will get better distribution inside of LinkedIn.

2. Post Native Videos

The second strategy is to use native video. Again, in this case you’ll want to upload your video file directly into LinkedIn’s content editor rather than linking to a YouTube video outside of LinkedIn. Video has been given a much higher priority in LinkedIn in 2019 and gives you an opportunity to communicate with your audience in a way that’s more entertaining and engaging.

3. Use Hashtags with Your Content

Using hashtags is a great way to get your content found. Similar to other social media platforms, hashtags on LinkedIn create a way for users to search for content by keywords and topics. Use hashtags on all of your content to ensure that you’re showing up in searches.

4. Promote Your Content with Ads

Promote your content with ads. The LinkedIn ad platform doesn’t get much attention, but is actually quite powerful and very easy to use. When you create content inside of LinkedIn, use the ad platform to promote that content to your target audiences and make sure it gets the visibility that you desire.

5. Target Your Ads with Matched Audiences

Matched audiences are a way for you to find similar audiences to those that you’ve already had success with so you can expand the reach of your marketing beyond the audience that you’ve already built (very similar to Lookalike Audiences on the Facebook advertising platform). Matched Audiences are also a way to retarget visitors to your website and your list of prospects and customers, making it easy to retarget interested audiences with additional content and offers.

6. Start Your Own Group

Starting your own group within LinkedIn gives you a great opportunity to demonstrate leadership in your particular market and to create relationships with a large number of people in your market very quickly. It’s very easy to start a group in LinkedIn, and it can be a very powerful asset to your business and your personal brand.

7. Add Value to Other Groups

You don’t have to start your own group, and in some cases it may not be worth your time and effort if you feel like there are already really good well-established groups in your market in LinkedIn. In that case, be an active participant and demonstrate value to the group through your content and your comments, and you will extract a lot of attention from that group to your business and personal profile on LinkedIn like https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehul-dedhia/.

Don’t just selfishly post your content to the group (big, common mistake). Instead, look for opportunities to consume and share other people’s content and add some value with thoughtful comments.

8. Leverage Your Team

Finally, leverage your team. Every business should create a business profile in LinkedIn and post to it. But it’s also a very effective strategy to have everyone on your team share the content from your company on their personal LinkedIn profiles.

When they share on their personal profiles it will greatly increase the visibility of your content and also demonstrate that the members of your team are all on the same page.

Take Action on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most powerful B2B marketing platform in social media and doesn’t seem to be at risk of losing that title anytime soon. Make sure you’re investing effort and energy into these content marketing strategies for LinkedIn in 2019. Pick three and take action right away, then let us know how it goes for you!

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/eight-ways-you-should-be-marketing-on-linkedin-in-2019/

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Seven Ways to Generate Leads From Instagram

Instagram has been the fastest growing social media platform over the last several years, and now has hundreds of millions of daily users, making it an important place for all businesses to consider doing their marketing.

Until recently, it may have seemed like a platform that wasn’t necessarily ideal for generating leads, but that has definitely changed. Instagram now has several viable ways that businesses can use the platform to generate leads quickly and affordably.

Let’s cover seven of them.

Instagram Lead Generation Ads

First, Instagram lead generation ads are an obvious choice. If you’re comfortable running paid advertising, Instagram has an ad objective that is specifically designed for generating leads from the platform.

The format is simple. The ads are easy to create, and can be very effective. Particularly if you’re targeting a younger demographic, or creating content in the most popular content categories on Instagram, such as fashion, food, and travel.

Contests

Number two is to run a contest. Contests are very popular on Instagram. And they’re a great way to generate a lot of attention, and a lot of leads, very quickly. You don’t have to give away anything too valuable, or too extravagant. Just make sure that it’s closely matched to the interest of your audience.

Conversation Ads

Instagram now has a cool ad objective feature that is designed to get someone to message you on Instagram, starting a conversation directly in your messaging inbox. What a powerful way to create a more personal experience than just collecting an email address!

Inside of that conversation, you can then give them an opportunity to provide you contact information to keep in touch, creating a very personal experience that’s highly effective.

Link in Bio

Adding a link in your bio that directs people to an offer page has been the most common way of generating leads from Instagram from the start. In your Instagram profile you have the opportunity to place just one link, making it a very important link. Use this link to connect to an offer page where you capture their contact information, and can keep in touch.

Instagram Stories

Instagram stories have been growing in popularity at an absolutely astonishing rate. They’ve actually become the most popular part of Instagram in terms of the time spent consuming the content. One of the best things about stories is that you can add a link to them, making them a simple way to give you more options to generate leads from your content than just the one link in the bio.

Story Highlights

Related to using Instagram stories is using story highlights. When you create an Instagram story you can choose to save that story as a highlight on your profile, giving it a permanent placement, or at least a semi-permanent placement on your account. These highlights – just as their name suggest – are more prominently displayed on your account, making them more likely to be viewed. That makes them a good place to put stories that link off to specific offers.

Tag an Instagram Account In Your Story

This is a great lead generation and prospecting approach for those of you selling high value products or services where a conversation with the prospect is necessary.

When you create Instagram stories, you can tag other accounts. When you tag another account, it creates a message inside of that account’s messenger inbox on Instagram, making the content that you created very high profile for the person that you tag.

Since messages on Instagram get a very high response, it’s very likely that you’ll generate a response from them, creating a conversation in your private messaging inbox and giving you the opportunity to get them additional information and follow up with that person outside of Instagram.

Your Turn!

That’s seven great ways to generate leads from your Instagram account. If you had thought that Instagram was only a place for posting pretty pictures – think again! It is absolutely evolved into a much more sophisticated platform, and a great channel to market to your audience and generate leads.

Take a few of these strategies and give them a try and let me know how it goes!

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/seven-ways-to-generate-leads-from-instagram/

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Nine Videos Every Small Business Should Create And Use For Their Marketing

As we all know, video has become a very important format for marketing for all types of businesses and all types of marketing platforms. From YouTube to Facebook, to Instagram, video has become the most important format of content in today’s marketing world.

How can you take advantage of video at your business? There are nine videos that every small business should use that are simple to create, but have a big impact.

Here they are.

The Origin Story Video

First is an origin story video. This is a video about how your business came about, explaining to your customers the history of the business, the story behind why the founders created it in the first place, what motivated them, and what personal hurdles they had to overcome in the creation of the business.

The Purpose Story Video

The second is your purpose story. Today’s consumer, particularly millennials, love to buy from companies that have a reason for existence beyond just profit and loss. So creating a video that tells the story of the purpose behind your business – the reason why you operate your business that’s beyond just money – can give you a real competitive advantage in the marketplace and create more loyalty from customers.

The Positioning Story Video

Next is the positioning story. The positioning story is the story that you use to make it clear how you and your products and services compare to other products and services in the marketplace. You obviously want to make sure that your customers know why they should buy from you versus your competition, and the positioning story is your opportunity to make that clear.

The Transformation Story Video

Next is the transformation story. One of the most powerful videos that you can make is a video showing how your products or services transform something so that consumers can actually see that transformation.

A very common example of this is before and after pictures used by fitness and nutrition pros showing the dramatic weight loss and body image improvements in their clients. But it certainly doesn’t need to be limited to fitness transformations.

Every business has some sort of transformation story that they can capture. If you’re a painting company, maybe you show a before and after of a home that you’re painting whose paint originally was in very bad shape and now you’re bringing life back to that home. It could be that you’re a restaurant and you show a family sitting down and enjoying a night together at your restaurant. That is a transformation of connection, and love, and joy in that family.

So don’t take this too literally. Look for opportunities to show your products and services impact other people’s lives.

The Testimonial Video

Next is a testimonial video. A testimonial video is getting your customers to share their experiences with your products or services so that other potential customers can get that sense of security and social proof from knowing that somebody else has had success with your products. It’s good to have as many of these as possible!

The Founder Profile Video

Next is a founder profile video. Again, consumers love to know about the why behind a business. They also love to know the people behind a business. The founder’s story of achievement and struggle that they went through to create your business are all very, very impactful pieces of marketing. So get the founder in front of the camera and have them tell all.

The Team Video

Next is a team video. Showing the people and personalities on your team and why they’ve decided to work for your company, and the pride and joy that they get from creating products or services and taking care of customers, is a very powerful way to create a human connection to your business.

This is particularly valuable if you have a business where the team may not normally be so visible and customers don’t often get that much interaction with the human side of your business – such as companies that manufacture a product that’s ordered online and shipped across the country. Capturing and sharing the personalities and team behind your business on video can be a very powerful marketing experience that creates an entirely different and more meaningful connection to your products.

The Behind the Scenes Video

Next is a behind the scenes video. It’s a lot of fun for prospects and customers to see behind the scenes at your business and see how your products and services are created, or the hustle that you bring to making sure that you’re providing the best possible service. So capture a video that shows behind the scenes, whether that’s in the kitchen, in the manufacturing plant, or inside of the office. Just show people a little authentic glimpse into your world.

The Product Demonstration Video

Finally is a product demonstration video. Product demonstration videos are some of the most popular videos on YouTube, so why not create them yourself rather than leaving it to other people? You can demonstrate your products, using the video as an opportunity to demonstrate your most powerful features and benefits compared to the competition, and have a good time

doing it. This is your opportunity to make sure that your products get showcased in the best possible light!

Get Started!

There you go, that’s nine ways that every small business should use videos in their marketing. They’re all very easy to create and don’t need to be professionally done or expensive to be impactful. Get out your camera on your phone and start creating these nine videos today.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/nine-videos-every-small-business-should-create-and-use-for-their-marketing/

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The Six-Step Process For Creating Marketing Content Even When You Are Very Busy

We’ve all heard that we should be creating more content for our business. Blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media content have all become a requirement of marketing and growth in just about every industry.

But creating content is definitely time consuming, and can be the last thing on your list of things to get done on an already busy day. So here’s a six step process for creating more content even when you’re really busy.

1. Create an Outline

The first step is to create an outline. Simply outline the core ideas for your content on a notepad. You don’t want or need a ton of detail, just enough to give structure to your thinking as you do your content creation.

2. Record a Video

Step number two is to then record a video. I know you may not be comfortable on video – many people aren’t – but it’s something that you’ll get used to over time, and the value of video in marketing today is tremendous. So record a video of you speaking to the outline that you just put down on the notepad. You’ve got your first piece of content!

3. Create a Podcast

The third step is to then have the audio exported and edited as a podcast. \Podcasts are one of the fastest growing forms of content in terms of consumer consumption because they can be listened to while doing other things, like driving, working out, walking on the treadmill, or running on the beach.

For these reasons, podcasts are experiencing incredible growth, and many people consider them to be the most important form of marketing now. So you definitely want to make sure that you’re getting your podcast created. A simple way to do that is to record your video first, and then export the audio content.

4. Transcribe the Audio into a Blog Post

Next you’re going to take that audio content and have it transcribed into a post. I like to use an app called Rev for this. You simply upload your audio file or- even a video file – and the app will extract the audio and transcribe it for approximately $1 per minute of audio. I found that a typical blog post is five to 10 minutes long, so I can get the transcription done for $5 to $10.

The service is fantastic and creates a transcript that is very easy for me to put some final editing polish on, and use it as a blog post or use it as content for my social media posts and my YouTube video.

5. Have a Designer Create Images

Next is to have a graphic designer create images for every place that you want to post your content. Images are very important to go along with your content, regardless of whether it’s going up on YouTube, a podcast, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform.

Images help sell the content and get the attention of your audience in the first place. Hire graphic designers from affordable services like UpWork or Design Pickle and you can quickly get custom-designed image – often within 24 hours.

6. Let Outsourced Editors Put a Finishing Touch on Things

Finally, a very effective and affordable way to save time in your content creation process is to hire outsourced video, podcast, and blog editors to put the finishing touches on your content. Our favorite place to find really qualified talent at very affordable rates is a site called Upwork.

You’ll see that you can find really high-quality talent on Upwork that is globally sourced, giving you access to much, much more affordable hourly costs than you may expect. You can use the platform to create your own virtual Content Marketing team that doesn’t have the expectation of a salary or even monthly commitment, so that your costs are completely variable and you only get charged when you create new pieces of content.

Your Turn!

There you go, that’s six steps for creating content for marketing even when you’re really busy. Use this process for creating content quickly and affordably, and getting it to market fast!

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/six-step-process-for-creating-marketing-content-even-when-you-are-very-busy/

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Digital Marketing Trends Leading into 2019

A savvy marketer will be looking ahead to the upcoming year and developing a digital marketing strategy to stay ahead of the competition and boost brand awareness.

With so many changes that occurred at the end of 2018, it’s important to revamp your strategy and account for current trends, strategies, and technologies to maximize your efforts.

Here are the biggest digital marketing trends leading into 2019:

Topic Clusters

Search engines are now favoring clusters of content that surround a particular topic, as opposed to keywords. If you want to stay at the top of the search rankings, you need to develop these content clusters that link to one another.

To do this effectively, you need a broad topic outline that covers the most pertinent subcategories. Then, the surrounding content should have specific, long-tail keywords that connect back to the original outline with the same keyword.

This boosts your overall performance since any page performing well will result in the entire cluster performing well. This moves you further and further up the rankings.

In addition, choosing topics in which you have proven subject matter expertise or knowledge will give you an even better ranking, since search engines are now prioritizing the value and relevance to the user.

Shorter Video Ads

Internet users have much shorter attention spans than they once did, so it’s possible to lose a viewer with a long video that would’ve worked a few years ago. Audiences tend to engage with shorter ads, such as under 10 seconds, so you’re also getting more for your efforts. Businesses are more likely to use shorter video ads in the coming year, so you want to work these into your strategy to ensure you stay with the current trends.

Chatbots

Chatbots are becoming more popular, due to their ability to address basic customer service needs and help businesses interact with more customers. Chatbots also create two-way communication between your audience and your business, which improves your customer satisfaction and your response time to messages. Both of these aspects will boost your search engine ranking.

Chatbots have a reputation for providing negative user experience, leading many businesses to hesitate to include them in their marketing strategy. Overall, however, customers are pleased with the use of chatbots and the ability to access information 24/7, so there’s no reason to hold back on this trend.

Chatbots also operate in Facebook messenger often, which has a click-through rate of 80 percent. This offers incredible potential for how a chatbot can lead to more sales for your business.

Blockchain

Blockchain is quickly becoming a necessity for most industries, but one of its most overlooked potentials is in marketing.

With the poor attention span of many internet users, it’s more difficult to draw attention from content and keep your audience engaged. Blockchain can be used to incentivize customers to watch advertisements and engage in some way, whether it’s sharing, tagging, liking or commenting, through a Basic Attention Token (BAT). This technology breaks up the monopoly of digital ads to trade on the value of online attention and engagement and reward the audience that’s willing to interact.

Influencer Marketing

Social media influencers are achieving more influence in recent years, gaining significant followings on multiple social media platforms. Social media isn’t new, of course, but its reach is continuing to grow. Positioning yourself with the right social media influencer can make all the difference.

In the past, businesses were able to have influencer endorse products openly, but consumers are becoming more aware and are less receptive to this marketing tactic. Because of this, a subtle approach is needed to gain the benefits of a social media influencer.

Businesses with successful social media influence develop mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with influencers, so both receive more organic endorsements. These relationships not only provide you with a steady outlet for your promotions, but it also makes influencers less likely to abandon your brand.

Transparency

Fields like advertising, marketing and sales have a negative connotation, with the belief that these representatives are only out for their own interests, using deceptive and aggressive tactics to get sales.

As a result, consumers are more skeptical and reluctant, as well as being more difficult to impress. The easy access to reviews and testimonials also gives them more information about a product or service’s strengths, and more importantly, its weaknesses.

Now, businesses are addressing this issue with transparency, openly admitting its own shortcomings, faults and negative feedback to show loyalty and dedication to customers. They’re also encouraging two-way communication on a public forum to not only build more trust with a specific customer but also to show their efforts to other potential customers.

Mobile Optimization

Though it may seem obvious, mobile optimization is one of the most important aspects of your digital marketing strategy to address in 2019. Though many businesses already work toward mobile-friendly sites, more and more users are switching to mobile. Google is even prioritizing mobile-friendly sites in search rankings.

With so many users going mobile, you can’t afford to lose a follower because of poor optimization. Small issues, such as links too close together, a poor zoom function or text that’s too small can be all it takes for a customer to abandon your site and move on to the next.

Be sure to check your site’s mobile user experience and make any adjustments you need to create a flawless user experience.

Voice Search

Voice search is on the rise, thanks to personal assistance devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Nearly one-third of the 3.5 billion searches performed each day are voice searches, which use natural human speech patterns to determine the searcher’s intent.

If you think you can use the same strategy for voice search, however, think again. Voice search differs from a desktop or mobile search in that you get fewer results. If you want to be one of the sites that comes up, you need to tailor your SEO strategy for voice search.

Voice recognition technology is only expected to improve and become more popular as well, which has the potential to disrupt marketing altogether. User experience and SEO have been the main focus of most marketing campaigns, but these aspects become irrelevant with a short search and no search results screen.

While there’s no clear answer to tailoring your strategy for voice search, a bit of brainstorming to understand the nuances of the human voice. How users tend to phrase voice searches and what types of phrases are prioritized is worth your effort.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic in marketing recently, and though many are still unsure of its applications and limitations, it’s starting to find its place in marketing campaigns.

A widely implemented form of AI is chatbots, which improve customer service with lower costs and fewer resources. They’re also quicker than humans and offer targeted, personalized services to any customer at any time.

On a larger scale, the same capabilities of AI that make chatbots so effective can be applied to many aspects of marketing, such as forecasting, personalization, segmentation, and data analysis. The possibilities are truly endless, so it’s best to get on board before AI takes the marketing world by storm.

Final Thoughts

Marketing trends come and go, some of which reshape the industry and others that may just fade into the background. If you want to be successful in your marketing efforts year after year, it’s important to be able to identify the upcoming digital marketing trends and stay ahead of the competition.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/digital-marketing-trends-leading-into-2019/

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How to Use Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, transformed the digital landscape in more ways than one. Image-recognition software, semi-autonomous vehicles, medical robots and other AI-enabled technology are all possible with this revolutionary technology.

For marketers, AI also presents opportunities we never could’ve dreamed of. With AI marketing, digital markets can improve personalization and generate better performance and profits, adding to an already strong data-driven focus.

With AI, the consumer experience can be personalized in a way that’s easier and more cost-effective. This allows brands to achieve incredible gains through a deeper understanding of the customer base.

Learn more about the applications for AI in marketing and see how it can revolutionize your marketing campaigns.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial Intelligence is simulated intelligence in machines that are programmed to “think” like humans and mimic human behavior. At its best, AI can rationalize and take action to achieve a specific goal, which has virtually limitless real-world applications.

AI automates repetitive learning and discovery through data and adapts through progressive learning algorithms. By finding structure and patterns in data, these algorithms become a predictor and the machine can optimize itself.

AI works on a much larger scale than the human mind, however, which gives it the ability to analyze larger data sets and more detailed data. On top of that, the more data AI has to work with, the better it learns and the more accurate the predictions will be. Because of this, AI gives you a competitive advantage, since the one with the best data has the edge.

Targeted Searches

Search engines have come a long way from the days when you needed to know the exact product name to find what you were looking for. Search engines with AI are getting smarter and more capable of discerning your intent behind a search, so it’s able to provide you with more relevant results.

By using the techniques employed by AI-enabled search engines, businesses can help customers find the product or service they’re looking for, regardless of how jumbled the search term became.

As an example, searching for a product on a massive e-commerce platform, such as Amazon, only requires a general term. Like Google, it will finish your search term and correct any typos in an effort to give you the most relevant results. It also provides an advanced search feature, which offers more targeted searches.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling ads. Advertisers and publishers connect to an ad inventory, through which they can exchange advertisements. AI helps this process by using algorithms that analyze user behavior and optimize the campaign for more relevant results.

Like other sales platforms, this is achieved by targeting consumers with a high chance of converting. Basically, it’s targeting the consumers searching with the express intent to purchase. Cookies also provide insights to help AI tailor the campaign.

For example, AI and programmatic advertising can be used to target apprehensive buyers by analyzing internet trends and identifying preferences for better targeting. Matching the subscriber, cookie data, and other data sets offer a clearer picture of consumer behavior. This allows marketers to create better segments and duplicate audiences as well.

Market Forecasting

The customer experience is an important part of successful marketing, and it’s receiving more and more attention with the recent changes to the Google algorithm. Marketers want to meet or exceed customer expectations as much as possible, as well as determine if engagement will ultimately lead to the sale.

With AI, marketers can make better predictions about market demand, giving them the information needed to nurture a prospect or move on to the next opportunity.

For example, if you can gain an accurate prediction of how much inventory you’re likely to sell, you know when to boost your marketing efforts to get the sales. You can also double down on the inventory you have in anticipation of higher-than-average sales.

Though it may seem outlandish, AI can also analyze the conversations you have with a customer to identify your successes and failures. It can then advise you on whether to continue with the prospect.

Content Curation

AI systems can find, compile and present valuable content to your target audience by pulling information from different data sets. This is a complement to your content marketing strategy, because you now have relevant, highly targeted, curated content ideal for your audience.

Marketers can use AI to come up with marketing strategies based on this data as well. If the content curation is targeting the ideal customers with this insight, those insights can prove invaluable to developing a strategy to communicate with your audience.

A similar technique can also be used to gather information on prospects and send marketing messages to them. Over time, the prospect is likely to subscribe or buy, since the offer is exactly what they’re looking for.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a vital part of modern digital marketing. AI-enabled chatbots provide responses to customer inquiries and engage customers, leading to greater customer retention.

For example, a large business will struggle to keep up with millions of customers, even with a full team dedicated to customer service alone. Chatbots are available to address the minor needs of the customer, engaging them and freeing up a representative to handle the more involved questions and concerns. Chatbots are also available any time, day or night, which is more practical than having a full team around the clock.

Ad Performance

The only way to tell if your marketing campaign is performing well is with analytics, giving you insight into what is and isn’t working. AI and machine learning provide detailed analyses and insights into which advertising efforts are succeeding. This allows you to make more informed decisions about where to direct your future campaign efforts.

AI shows you how many clicks an ad received, which country or region they came from, what platform they came from, and other valuable data. Using this data to inform your advertising campaign will give you a higher ROI.

These same insights can also be used for future predictions. Instead of focusing on right now, AI gives marketers a better picture of overall trends to tailor the strategy for future goals and continue to increase conversions along the way.

Dynamic Pricing

Predicting future market trends is one thing, but being able to apply accurate dynamic pricing strategy is another. This allows you to optimize sales when the demand is high and find out when to offer discounts to increase sales. AI is able to keep up with the imperceptible shifts on a much larger scale than we can, giving you accurate predictions to keep with the dynamic pricing trends.

Bottom Line

With marketing enhanced by AI, marketers can rely on AI to determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and learn where to invest for the best ROI. AI also improves the customer experience and offers better opportunities for engagement, building a more loyal audience.

Regardless of industry, all modern marketing efforts benefit from the capabilities of AI. It not only simplifies the process and provides more cost-effective solutions, but it’s also more accurate and effective.

With so many businesses getting on board with AI-enabled marketing, you can’t afford to let your business fall behind.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/how-to-use-artificial-intelligence-in-marketing/

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8 Effective Content Types and How to Use Them

Content has become the currency of the internet, giving you limitless options to promote your brand, engage with your audience, hit new target markets and provide value to your customers.

That said, content is about more than blog posts. There are many types of content out there to keep your message fresh and your audience interested.

Take a look at these eight effective content types and learn how you can use them to drive growth for your business.

Infographics

Info + graphic, or infographic, uses graphics and visuals to present information in an easily digestible way for your audience. At a quick glance, a reader can often get all the same pertinent information as they would from a longer blog post, making infographics a popular content type.

Infographics get more views, shares and likes than other content types, mostly because of how easy it is to absorb the information. They also have viral potential and are shared far more often than other content types, and they work particularly well for data, statistics and research.

If you have a graphic designer on your team, that’s the person to recruit to create infographics for you. These creative professionals are experts at creating compelling visuals and organizing information in a way that communicates effectively to an audience.

If you don’t have a graphic designer, you can outsource your infographics or create them yourself with plenty of services. This route can be pricey, but worth it for the engagement you’ll receive.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that simply having an infographic isn’t enough for viral content. To make an infographic that stands out, you still need to apply the same principles of effective content and craft a specific, compelling message.

Memes

If you’ve spent even a minute on any social media platform, you’re familiar with memes. By their very nature, memes encourage sharing and have the potential to go viral. They’re also quite funny, in most cases, which automatically gets more attention.

Unlike infographics, memes don’t require any special skills or graphic design talent. Many sites allow you to include your own text in a standard meme format. If you have a funny idea or the mood strikes, put it in a meme to share.

Memes may not be appropriate for your blog, however. Memes are a social media phenomenon, so it’s best to keep them on your social media pages. You also want to be sure that they still provide some value and aren’t overused.

Videos

Videos communicate valuable information in a concise, memorable way that is more likely to be viewed by a follower. From music videos to office tours to how-to videos, there are virtually limitless options for how you can use video to promote your brand and attract followers.

Videos are a more expensive content option, but you can start small to begin with and see how they perform. As you learn more about the role of video in your content marketing strategy, you can put more effort and expense into creating professional videos.

Guides

Guides are super-sized posts that go into detail about a topic, often far beyond the length of a normal blog post. They typically include advanced information for your readers that’s backed by research as well.

If you want to create guides, you’ll need a good writer, a graphic designer and the right topic. This content should be top tier and deliver the message in an effective, readable way, especially given the length of the post. The graphic designer will need to fine tune the layout and presentation to ensure the post is attractive and readable.

You can also present your guide as a free download for your followers in exchange for email addresses, which boosts your subscriber list.

Book Reviews

If your following reads books, a book review is a great way to connect with them and present yourself as a thought leader. A book review can be simple or in-depth, depending on how you choose to do it.

Keep in mind that book reviews aren’t suitable for all industries, so be sure you have the appropriate audience and that reviewing books makes sense for your brand.

Rants

A “rant” or opinion piece is a popular content option, mostly because of its light tone and humor. If most of your content is heavily researched and detailed, a rant or opinion piece gives you a chance to express yourself more.

For a business, a rant or opinion piece should be relevant to the industry, such as opinions on recent news or industry trends and changes. With this option, you’re not only addressing popular topics that are of interest to your audience, but you’ll also boost your SEO and shareability.

Keep in mind that a rant or opinion piece should be occasional, since constantly ranting about a various topics can come across as obnoxious. You should also avoid personal attacks or people-bashing, since a rant isn’t meant to be angry or rude. Also, welcome opposing viewpoints to prompt a discussion, rather than being guided by your ego.

Product Reviews

Product reviews can help you establish authority and thought leadership in your industry. When you engage manufacturers, developers, service providers and other industry professionals, you gain respect and recognition within your niche.

Product reviews should include brief information about a product, the creator, aspects you like, aspects you don’t like and your recommendation. Complete your review with a call to action.

How-To and Tutorials

A how-to guide is one of the most popular content types, especially in niches that are specialized or technical. With their long introductions, they also offer long-tail search potential.

To plan a how-to guide, you need to identify a problem that’s common in the industry, then draft a post that provides a solution. There’s no limit to the possibilities for a how-to guide, especially for certain industries.

Keep in mind that detailed explanations, diagrams, pictures and videos are all helpful in getting your message across and helping your audience better understand your guide.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Now that you have all these ideas for new and interesting content types, remember that you don’t need to try all of them. Not every type of content is suited to every brand, so if you don’t think that a certain type of content works well for your business, don’t worry about including it.

Still, don’t be afraid to experiment a little. Sometimes business owners will avoid different content types because they don’t know where to begin, they think it will take too long to create or they’re afraid to fail. Many tools are out there to help beginners create all types of content, so take a chance on something new and see how it performs.

Also, once you start learning how to create different types of content, don’t go crazy including something new every day. You’ll likely burn out and exhaust your ideas. Try a few new things each month to see how they perform, then commit to including the successful ones into your content calendar on a regular basis.

There are plenty of effective content types for you to choose from, and the more content you use, the more compelling your marketing strategy becomes. Content must always speak to the audience, however, so no matter what content type you choose, craft a message that the audience will share, listen to and learn from.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/8-effective-content-types-and-how-to-use-them/

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Let Your Customers Do the Talking: How to Use Reviews in Your Content Marketing

Your business can add credibility and complexity to its content when you regularly incorporate the positive feedback your customers leave. This practice has an added bonus of rewarding customers for their praise, strengthening your relationship with them and encouraging others to follow in their footsteps.

You may think that simply regurgitating customer acclaim can seem like a cheap or shallow tactic. When you go about using customer reviews incorrectly, that can absolutely be the case.

But when you can masterfully weave praise into your content marketing and collateral materials, it feels like a natural fit. Your content becomes richer, and your brand name becomes more credible.

According to eMarketer research, online reviews are by far the most trusted source of business information. In fact, 8 percent more people 18+ trust online reviews compared to their own friends, family and colleagues. Putting your reviews front and center in your content offers documented proof of peer approval, and no one has to go digging into third-party sites to find that proof.

So if you’re considering using customer reviews to obtain all of the above benefits and more, try putting the following strategies into action.

Pepper Website Pages, and Especially Landing Pages, With Embedded Reviews and Accolades

Businesses have a huge trust gap they must clear when a potential customer or client first arrives at their website. No matter how comforting or flashy the site is, customers are always on the lookout for signs that they could get burned. They may scrutinize your claims or look for fine print that reveals how your offers aren’t what they seem.

Oftentimes, they will look to outside resources before they can let down their guard. A study by Nielsen and the Better Business Bureau unveiled that over half (55 percent) of all U.S. adults online “always” or “often” used ratings and reviews to inform their purchase decisions. The trend deepens among those under 55, where only 7.5 percent of people say they “rarely” or “never” look at reviews.

Incorporating reviews right there on your web page immediately begins to chip away at their defenses. They can feel a tinge of relief knowing explicitly that your business has rewarded others for their trust. Evidence that people don’t regret spending their hard-earned money on your products or services can reduce the natural hesitation some people might feel.

You also potentially negate their need to go hunting for outside information on your brand. If they already see positive reviews or a live meter documenting your score aggregate for a site like Yelp, then they don’t need to go wading into all of the other reviews online. By extension, they are much less likely to encounter negative reviews that color your business in an unfavorable light.

Even if someone does do their own homework and encounters a mixture of positive and negative reviews, their first impressions are already fairly rosy. Each negative reviewer must then make their case for why this positive first impression is wrong.

When incorporating testimonials and feedback on your web pages, be sure to use the following best practices:

Take a second to re-read the third-party reviews site’s policy on sharing reviews. They may have limitations on how you use them.

Always ask the reviewer for permission. Nothing hurts worse than having someone who praised your business turn around and complain that their own words were used unethically.

Don’t take things out of context. Using an excerpt of a review is fine, but don’t cherry-pick statements that are actually out of color for the nature of the review as a whole. For instance, don’t take just the positive things someone conceded out a scathingly negative review.

Quote the person verbatim. Changing words around or using tricks like mashing two unrelated things together to make a sentence is absolutely deceptive and unethical. You may even be subject to FTC penalties.

Favor embedded reviews over text quotes. Most third-party sites actually demand that you use embedded features since these are more transparent. When you receive direct feedback, such as on a blog comment, try to embed the message itself when possible.

Share Interesting or Glowing Reviews to Social Media

Getting people to leave reviews is hard work! Unless, of course, they had a bad experience. According to one study of 2,000 U.S. consumers, over half of people say they’re likely to publicly complain about a bad experience with a business—often resulting in a bad review.

A second study found that most people only leave a positive review if they were overwhelmed with how great their experience was. “If instead you had a moderate view, you’re likely to have left no review at all, finding it not worth the time and effort,” say the researchers in the Harvard Business Review.

So how do you encourage people to leave a review if they aren’t angry with you and they weren’t absolutely blown away? Simple: reward them with a public mention!

By sharing someone’s positive review online, you reinforce the behavior. You also encourage others who want public recognition and attention to leave reviews of their own.

Again, follow the guidelines above. Certain platforms like Yelp forbid copying and pasting review text, for example. You also absolutely need to secure permission from the person before sharing, even if their praise was a public comment on one of your social media or blog posts.

Let Reviews Inspire Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content should solve audience needs and conclude with a gentle promotional nudge towards your company. Treading this narrow path between information and promotion is admittedly difficult for most businesses. Seventy-nine percent of editors say they have to turn down guest blog pitches because they’re overpromotional.

The problem is that most businesses can’t find an angle. “8 Reasons Our Food Is Amazing” is something no one would want to click on! But “10 Keys to Improving Customer Service” can work, especially if you’re able to point to specific best practices you can use.

When writing these types of articles, starting with positive features of your business or product as a jumping-off point can lead to a disconnect. In other words, your business could be proud of something that no one really notices.

Instead, take a look at your own reviews to get inspired. Take a look at this review below to see what we mean.

Here, you can see that the person cites six different positive reasons they love coming to the resort; it was clean, pet friendly, had great cabins, lots of site availability, a swimming beach and also a swimming pool.

Taking that list, you can simply write an article about the “6 Most Important Things to Look for in a Camping Resort.” Since you know people enjoy these things about your business, you can mention them honestly. You can also write while thinking about the perspective of a customer who has been to a campsite that is not clean or that regularly has overcrowded and overbooked sites.

Of course, you can also use negative criticism to inspire you. If you have had issues in the past with bad customer service, you can list “X Things We’ve Changed to Make Your Experience Better” to win people back.

Getting More Customer Reviews to Use in Your Content Marketing

All of the strategies listed above depend on a constant, fresh stream of customer feedback. If your most recent review was from 2014, you may have a problem!

To counteract this issue, make leaving a review as convenient as possible. You can use third-party software tools to automatically send an email to someone and ask them for their review on your preferred platform. You can also leave a convenient link on your home page so that everyone can easily find their way to your review pages.

Don’t just encourage people to go on sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp, either. You can ask for more detailed feedback in an email or through an online form submission. Reach out to some of your most loyal or satisfied guests to see if they would take the time to write a one to three paragraph testimonial on your behalf.

You can use these longer reviews (with their permission) as quotes or embedded reviews framing your content or occupying your most critical landing pages.

Another surefire method to jog people’s memory is to use marketing collateral offered by review platforms both online and in real life. Place window decals on your entrance, or include a ready-to-print plaque right by your cash register.

Train sales associates and customer-facing reps to ask for feedback at the end of every interaction. Be aware of specific platform policies, though. For instance, Yelp demands that you only use certain brand materials in certain ways. They also have a strict policy where you can’t ask people to “review our business on Yelp!”

With just a small amount of effort, your content quality and credibility can be dramatically improved by using customer reviews in clever ways. Customers’ trust absolutely thrives on documented proof, and they like to see that their words matter when they have something to say.

Sharing their reviews is the best way to tell them “thank you” and that their opinion is important. That’s customer service and content marketing rolled into one!

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/let-your-customers-do-the-talking-how-to-use-reviews-in-your-content-marketing/

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Outdated SEO Practices You Should Retire

The internet constantly evolves. As search engines become increasingly skilled at delivering targeted content to their customers, SEO best practices quickly become outdated and threaten to drop your site low in the rankings.

Fortunately, these outdated SEO practices are easy to avoid once you know them. Take a look at the SEO practices that once reigned supreme but now put your site at risk, and find out what you should do instead for long-lasting success.

Focusing Only on Keywords

Keywords aren’t the be-all-end-all of modern SEO as they once were. Sites used to be designed entirely around target keywords, but adapting to the new SEO tactics requires a different strategy.

Keywords listed in title tags, headers and meta descriptions aren’t readable, and worse, are now punished by Google algorithms. Instead, write enticing, interesting title tags, compelling copy for meta descriptions and intriguing headings that draw the reader further into the article. Not only is this content more readable, but it also ranks higher in Google, which searched for content quality and relevance more than anything else.

Prioritizing Rankings over Traffic

Many businesses put the number one organic ranking above all else, which doesn’t help ROI and does little for the increasingly popular voice search.

Instead, featured snippets, long-tail targeting and other SERP tactics should be the focus. These not only have a higher ROI per hour spent, but they also aren’t as competitive and often bring you around to the primary keyword anyway.

Creating Multiple Pages for Keyword Variants

In the past, it made sense for a site to create and optimize pages for each keyword variant to cast the widest possible net. This was mostly due to Google’s inability to differentiate between similar keywords and organize the search results accordingly.

Now, Google’s algorithms are capable of finding multiple pages that use similar content and keywords, and they penalize you for it. This doesn’t mean you need to simplify everything, but it does mean that you should eliminate multiple pages for every variant with the intent of keyword optimization. Instead, focus on the user experience with your site and the optimal funnel, which will get you high marks in search engine algorithms.

Link Building to Improve Rankings

Many businesses attempt to move up the search engine rankings with link building, but this outdated practice no longer works with modern SEO. Now, searcher task accomplishment, user experience and valuable content get the ranking.

As Neil Patel states, the golden rule of SEO, regardless of algorithm changes, is searcher task accomplishment. Google’s first and foremost concern is giving searchers exactly what they’re looking for, which can’t be accomplished with SEO shortcuts. Google wants to reward sites that help the searcher with what they searched for initially, uncover other possible needs and address them. Ultimately, the goal through this is to find the sites that lead to more action and engagement.

All of this can be accomplished through high-quality, relevant content and an optimized user experience. If Google’s main goal is to go above and beyond to serve the needs of searchers, your site experience should focus on that as well.

Obsessing on Keyword Placement

Spending a lot of time and energy putting keywords in the H1 and H2, the headline tags, as well as the URL or repeated multiple times throughout the content, works, but only to an extent. For example, you want to have your keyword in the title or headline, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be stuffed into every area.

Instead, focus on getting value out of the keywords and their related topics. Make sure that the content explains the subject, topics, words or phrases that Google is likely to associate with the keyword. You can scatter your keyword all over your site and links, but if you don’t have related content that Google may recognize, you won’t rank as well.

Ignoring Mobile Site Optimization

Designing for mobile sites isn’t new, but many businesses are still behind the times with sites that are far from mobile-friendly. Even if most of your audience uses a desktop to view your content, you could be missing out on loads of mobile traffic.

Fortunately, this is an easy fix. Software that isn’t supported or common on mobile devices, links that are too close together and cause accidental clicks and text that doesn’t have a readable zoom are enough to move a user away from your content, so that’s a great place to start. Google also offers a guide to mobile-friendly sites to ensure you’re on the right track.

Churning Out Low-Quality Copy

The old rule for SEO used to be quantity over quality, but now, Google will penalize you for it. Low-grade blog fillers, stuffed keywords and other tactics are a flag to Google that your writing has no relevance, so it will direct users elsewhere.

On top of the effects on SEO, low-quality copy just isn’t good for business or marketing. It’s less likely to draw visitors in, less likely to convert visitors and less likely to bring them back, actions which are much more valuable to a business than a ranking on a search engine.

Offering Non-Strategic, Shallow Content

Content strategy and content marketing have become a considerable investment for businesses in recent years, sometimes with the idea of drawing links to a site that aren’t relevant or helpful. We’ve all seen this with “clickbait” articles that include information that has nothing at all to do with the original site.

On the other hand, link bait that offers high-quality content that draws others to link to it and draws attention, as well as creates a positive brand association, is far more valuable for your site. This requires information that’s interesting and makes others naturally want to link to it, which is best accomplished through content that solves a problem effectively and enhances the value of another’s site.

Ignoring Other Search Engines

We’ve discussed these tactics at length in regard to Google, but that doesn’t mean other search engines should be left by the wayside. True, Google has the most comprehensive set of resources for SEO and is undoubtedly the most popular search engine, but if you’re forgetting about the likes of Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, you’re missing out.

These search engines are a major source of organic traffic, so don’t neglect their tools in your planning process. They can easily supplement your SEO efforts and often provide even more data to work with, giving you a thorough understanding of your total SEO picture.

The Best Way to Update Your Outdated SEO Practices

As discussed, Google is only concerned with solving the searcher’s problem. Whether that’s through related keywords, related topics or other tactics, all Google cares about is directing users to sites that are useful, valuable and relevant.

Because of this, the key to modern SEO is creating a website that people want to use by offering value and solving problems. This isn’t about shortcuts or cheating the system, which will only change tomorrow. It’s about caring for your customers and focusing on helping them, rather than artificially inflating rankings. Put a little effort into that, and you’ll start to see long-lasting results.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/outdated-seo-practices-you-should-retire/

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Starved for Content Ideas? Here’s How Original Research Can Keep You Blogging for Months

Wondering how you’re going to keep your content calendar full for the rest of the year? Thousands of business owners struggle when it comes to coming up with content ideas, and a simple strategy can help them: conduct a study or survey.

Original research provides tons of benefits for businesses seeking content marketing performance gains. They can accompany the release of the study with a recap series, for instance. After that, they can dive in-depth into some of the findings for unique takes or insightful real-world applications of the data. At the same time, they can introduce their study to online outlets that get mega traffic with guest posts.

The beauty of conducting original research is that you don’t even have to do all of the content writing yourself! In addition to the content topic possibilities listed above, there’s also a good chance that someone might cite your data or share your report on their own blog. Well-performed research that answers important questions in your field can receive references and citations for months. You may even get quoted as an expert as a result of your own analysis!

The possibilities are practically endless, and they all start from a single research idea. Here’s how to get your own research project off the ground—and how to spin it into content gold for months to come.

Start With a Burning Research Question

Research tells us something about the world we didn’t know yet. In other words, research answers a question through the data it gathers.

For that reason, all great studies have to start with a great research question. You can quantify something no one’s ever quantified before, such as the costs of never washing your car revealed through the corresponding damage to paint and mechanical components.

Or, you can give a more specific answer to a question that’s already been tackled. A lot of research involves bringing findings up to date, for example. You can also examine how a research question might be answered within a specific geographical location or within a specific demographic. Sure, you might know that a majority of Americans love hamburgers, but how do people in your hometown feel about grilled versus griddle-fired burgers? And would they take a bite out of a veggie burger if given the opportunity?

When devising a research question, keep in mind that it can’t just be something you find interesting. It should also satisfy a number of other criteria, such as:

Would my target audience find this interesting and informative?

Does my research align with my business goals or my unique brand story?

Will this research answer a question that hasn’t been covered yet?

With these criteria in mind, try to approach your research question from the perspective of the unique niche your business occupies. The more parallels the research has with your brand personality and how you approach your business, the better.

Learn Research Best Practices

Research can be hard, especially when it comes time to compile your results! You want your data to tell a story somehow, but you can’t get to that story if your research structure is a mess.

Start by determining what sort of research you’ll conduct. It can be a:

Simple survey

In-depth survey that includes qualitative responses

Review of existing research that combines two or more “knowns” to explain an unknown

Manual data gathering from raw data sources

Field research with data gathering at the source of information

Those study types are listed roughly in order of complexity and effort required. But don’t underestimate how even the simplest of surveys can turn into a difficult process when you neglect to follow best practices!

First, approach your data in layers. The “layers” of your data refer to different qualities of that data.

For instance, suppose you wanted to conduct a study of the types of restaurants in your hometown. “Chain/franchise restaurants vs. independent restaurants” serves as one layer. “Quick service vs. sit down” can act as another layer. You can also organize the restaurants by location, such as “downtown vs. just off the interstate”.

All of these qualities provide details that can be used later in your analysis. You can make observations like “chain restaurants are more common along busy stretches of road except in downtown.” Or, you can be able to say that “the ratio of chain restaurants to independent businesses has shrunk 50 percent in the past year.” Findings like these tell a story, but you need your data to be organized first.

When conducting surveys, you can make this process easier by including a demographics portion in the beginning of the survey. You can then use this information to discover trends among responses, such as “twice as many business owners worry about energy prices compared to non-business owners.”

Come Up with a Hypothesis That Uses Research Layers to Answer Questions

Research isn’t just about gathering data; it’s about using that data to prove or disprove assumptions called hypotheses.

Accordingly, you want to go ahead and come up with a few hypothesis ideas before you start assembling your data. Go ahead and predict your results based on your gut instincts or what you consider common knowledge. If your research aims to debunk a commonly believed fact, you can operate on the hypothesis that the fact will be wrong.

If you’re completely at a loss for hypotheses, you can predict that there will be no trends whatsoever among your data.

Use Your Hypotheses to Come Up With Pertinent Survey Questions or Data Sources

Your hypotheses guide your research in very concrete ways. If you’re conducting a survey, a hypothesis will help you determine questions to ask that can directly answer it.

For example, let’s say that your hypothesis is that “people are willing to spend more money at a local establishment compared to a franchise.” To prove or disprove that hypothesis, you can ask things like:

How often have you visited a franchise business in the past month?

On average, what do you spend within the following ranges: $5-$10, $10-$15, etc.

Do you try to support local businesses on purpose?

Which of the following reasons encourage you to support local businesses? I know the owner, I want the money to go back to the community, etc.

Assign Categories Early on Within Your Analysis

After gathering all the data you need, it’s time to process that data into something people can digest at a glance. One of the easiest ways to do so is to lump datasets into different categories.

Going back to the local vs. franchise question, maybe you think that people who have lived in the town all their lives are more likely to make a choice compared to newcomers. Or, maybe you think that people who make a certain amount in their yearly salary are more apt to make a certain decision?

Consider these assumptions as secondary hypotheses, and test them out as you compile your data. If your hypothesis is wrong, try approaching data from a new angle.

Of course, you should also leave yourself open to discovery! Sometimes just dropping data into bar graphs is enough to have findings jump out at you all on their own.

Use Your Findings to Brainstorm Different Uses for Your Study

Completing your study is just the beginning of a new phase: publishing your results and using those results for related content.

Examples of ways to use your results include:

A summary press release

An in-depth report

Sharable inforgraphics or slide shows

Blogs discussing specific trends you’ve seen

Editorial-style blogs combining your research findings with your own thoughts and other commentary

Promotional materials that use your findings to make a point

Guest posts presenting you as a subject authority where you get to assert your findings with data to back it up

E-books

Sort these ideas into priorities, including your “yeses,” “nos” and “maybes.” Then, work your way down the list!

With this method, you can keep chugging along with new content based off the same information for months. You can also always update your research later with a newer, more-current study.

In this way, original research is the gift that keeps on giving! It can help you make a name for yourself, drive engagement on your content, position you as a subject authority, and so much more. At the very least, you’ll never be lacking for new content ideas.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/starved-for-content-ideas-heres-how-original-research-can-keep-you-blogging-for-months/

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After the Reddit Redesign, Should Your Business Give the Social Channel a Look?

Many business owners overlook Reddit as a social media marketing channel, but recent changes to the platform should have them all reconsidering. A complete overhaul has modernized the look and feel of Reddit’s various niche-focused forums. As a result, community members are engaging even more frequently than ever—with both posts and ads.

According to Reddit’s Zubair Jandali, their VP of brand partnerships, the platform has been engaging users at a rate three to seven times higher compared to before the redesign. Interestingly, ad response rates have also been rising. “Advertising didn’t play a role in the redesign per se,” Jandali told Marketing Land, “but we’re seeing much stronger engagement on ads by virtue of the fact the core organic experience is more engaging.”

Businesses have opportunities to engage directly with community members in ways that build brand awareness and relationships. However, they have to use the right strategy. Reddit notoriously fights against forms of intrusive marketing, and especially accounts that fail to be transparent about their business affiliations.

If you can play your Reddit marketing cards right and treat the community with respect, you can improve your brand image, open new lead sources, and subtly promote your offerings to an audience of millions.

What Is Reddit, and How Does It Work?

Reddit is a social media platform with a dedicated community of 330 million monthly active users and over 542 million monthly visitors. That’s a bigger community than Twitter and enough traffic to make Reddit the No. 5 most-visited U.S. site as of August 2018.

The structure of Reddit combines an old-school forum format from the early 2000s with user-centric social media features of today. Posts are centered around text-based topics of conversation or links to popular content. Users have the option to “upvote” posts they like.

Upvoting increases the chances of a post making the front page for a particular niche forum, a “subreddit.” If a post gets enough traffic or upvotes within its subreddit, it can end up on Reddit’s homepage. The Reddit homepage aggregates posts across a staggering range of topics, which is why the company refers to it as the “Front Page of the Internet.”

After a post is made, anyone can reply with comments, and individual comments can be voted up or down to increase their visibility. Someone who says something clever or interesting, for example, might be upvoted to the top of a post. Someone who makes a bad joke or responds in a rude way to other users will get downvoted, burying their post and sometimes even leading to it getting hidden from view.

When users violate the rules repeatedly, they’re likely to catch the attention of moderators. Mods can ban users from specific subreddit forums or even have their DNS address blocked, preventing them from making new accounts. Each forum has its own set of moderation rules. Rules commonly discourage asking for upvotes, posting promotional comments or links too often (spamming), and posting content that’s irrelevant to the subreddit topic.

Individual users get notifications when they get replies to their comments or posts. They also get points based on how many votes they get, which are called “karma.” Users generally respect other users who have high levels of karma or who are regularly seen contributing interesting posts and responses.

In sum: Reddit is a place where people go to see interesting links and engage one another in productive conversations. Community members are not only highly enthusiastic and engaged, but they also take action when they see something they don’t like. This quality separates Reddit from social media channels like Facebook, where your experience is at the mercy of the platform and the sometimes nasty users that visit it.

Why Is Reddit a Good Social Media Marketing Channel?

Reddit has a reputation for its tight-knit, informed community. It remains distinctive by using community-led moderation to cut down on all the noise other social platforms create. People who don’t abide by etiquette (“reddiquette”) guidelines get “downvoted” into oblivion. This tendency prevents trolls and spammers from stealing attention or derailing conversations.

For marketers, Reddit provides an opportunity for authentic interaction with people interested in your industry niche. There are over a million different subreddits for every conceivable community out there. You’ll find professionals like photographers exchanging advice, dedicated hobbyists like golfers sharing links, and fans of just about every pop culture franchise under the sun conducting spirited debates on opinions and theories.

Business owners have two main opportunities when trying to reach communities related to their industry vertical:

Advertising in relevant subreddit forums, ensuring that every ad impression reaches someone who cares about that niche

Participating as a user to answer questions, share links, and generally engage with the community

The first strategy runs through Reddit’s advertising platform, making it a business activity like any other. The second strategy poses more complexity and much greater risk of alienating your community. But when brands or employees conduct themselves well and remain transparent about their affiliations, they can reap substantial rewards.

How to Not Get “Flamed” for Marketing Through Reddit

There is an inherent risk with using Reddit as a marketing tool: the community could revolt against you and ban you so fast it will make your head spin.

“Redditors are a particular community,” writes the Dreamgrow blog. “If they suspect you’re there because of marketing reasons, things can quickly turn bad.”

You may wonder: “If marketers get chased off the platform with torches and pitchforks, then why would anyone bother marketing on Reddit?” Well, the truth is that the community isn’t opposed to marketing outright.

In fact, you could easily argue that tons of subreddits are nothing but a grassroots marketing campaign. There’s an Olive Garden subreddit (r/unlimitedbreadsticks) with 8,600 members. The r/blackfriday subreddit has over 31,000 subscribers and is dedicated to giving people alerts about deep holiday discounts. r/gaming, one of the biggest subreddits at 18 million members, is wholly dedicated to discussing products people buy.

What separates the things these communities do from the more loathed version of marketing? A few things:

Product-focused communities are built around the fans’ needs, not the needs of a company that wants to make money.

The actual companies represented in these subreddits understand they have a very delicate relationship with their community.

Companies and their employees must always be transparent with their affiliations. Reddit users don’t like to be deceived even more than they don’t like being forced to participate in marketing schemes.

Each one of these principals reveals an important reality that businesses interested in Reddit marketing must come to grips with. Looking at No.2 above, the lesson is that moderators run the subreddits, not brand employees. The brands themselves only show up to answer questions or reveal information people wouldn’t find anywhere else.

If Patagonia has just started a huge ad push for their new jackets, r/CampingGear probably doesn’t need the company to make a new post telling them what they can already see on TV. Similarly, if people are asking opinions on the Patagonia brand, then Patagonia should be really careful about having someone go in and post “Yeah! The jackets are great!” without disclosing their relationship to the company. People will dig through your account to find proof that you are a “corporate shill” after all.

On the other hand, if a Patagonia rep sees the above thread and notices someone has a question about their repair policy, then they can declare “I work for Patagonia, and here’s how we repair things…” and receive a positive reception. Or, if someone wants to let people know that there’s a sale on specific high-demand items at a particular retailer, the community might appreciate the head’s up.

It’s all about thinking from the user’s perspective. If you are transparent and provide some valuable information or entertaining content, then people will warm up to you. If you try to trick them or post nothing but spammy promotions, they’ll quickly find ways to keep you from coming around.

Reconsidering Reddit Marketing in Light of the New Platform Improvements

Now that Reddit has improved its interface in ways that keep the community engaged, it’s definitely worth a look. You can depend on the platform to build audiences, generate traffic, create leads, and generally elevate your brand image in the eyes of users. You can also advertise under specific, relevant subreddits to earn clicks from people who are eager about your niche.

Be a good user, keep people’s feelings in mind, and always strive to provide value—that’s the key to building a community in Reddit that thinks you deserve all the karma you can get.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/after-the-reddit-redesign-should-your-business-give-the-social-channel-a-look/

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Everything You Need to Create a YouTube Channel That’s Ready to Grow

Despite being over a decade old, YouTube still acts as a ripe garden bed for audience growth. Brands looking to interact with audiences in current, relevant ways will find that video marketing content is one of the most effective methods they have at their disposal. They’ll also find that YouTube still remains one of the best platforms to host this content.

While big social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are shrinking, YouTube pulls in over 1.8 million unique users every month. That figure, by the way, ignores all of the views that come from people who aren’t logged into a Google or YouTube account. YouTube’s traffic volume is so large that it is the second biggest search engine after Google and likely the most common platform for embedded videos seen around the web.

Creating a YouTube channel is therefore one of the best methods for earning traffic and engagement from audiences. By making smart moves and structuring your YouTube channel properly, your video content marketing campaigns can be poised for excellent growth. You’ll also be positioned to easily share and embed video content in order to grow your viewer base. It’s the perfect recipe for branded exposure!

You can start your business’s YouTube channel off on the right foot by following these steps to create a channel and give it the most growth potential.

1. Decide on Your YouTube Channel’s Video Marketing Positioning and Strategy

Your channel’s “position” is a name for basically everything that makes it distinctive. The idea is to not only have a channel that matches your branding principles but that can also meet your goals for audience building, lead generation, engagement, awareness and more.

The first step is to determine exactly who your audience segments will be, along with a few actions you want them to take in response to your content.

For example, maybe you are in an exciting industry like online retail for motorcycle apparel and accessories and you want everyone to come to your channel weekly for reviews and news on the latest products. Or, maybe you are a law office that wants to pop up first when people search for answers to their legal questions.

As another alternative, maybe you want to create highly shareable videos that generate brand awareness and drive traffic towards your site.

Your goals and your audience will significantly affect how you decide to run your channel, including:

Your style and approach (e.g., formal or conversational)

The format of your videos, such as an ongoing “show” vs. how-to videos vs. quick Q&A sessions

How long your typical videos will be

How often you will post new content

Who your target audiences will be, and how you intend to reach them

Your amplification strategy for getting maximum views on your new content, such as sharing new videos on Facebook or through your email list.

All of these factors come together to make your YouTube channel unique compared to others. And being unique is important considering that over 400 hours of new content are uploaded on YouTube each minute. Being unique also means that your channel is as prepared as it can possibly be to appeal to your chosen audience and accomplish your chosen goals.

2. Decide on a Channel Name and Icon

Your next step is to start filling in the blanks for your new channel. Specifically: what’s your name going to be? And what image will you use for your channel icon?

These two seemingly minor things can have a gigantic impact on your ability to attract audiences. Your channel name serves as both your brand and your initial pitch to potential viewers.

You can choose a descriptive name, such as “DUI Law Q&A,” which already promises what type of content the channel will contain.

Or, you can go for a long-haul strategy and create a unique brand name for your channel that allows it to build a presence as it builds an audience. Channels like Smosh and Dude Perfect have titles that are as recognized as any pop culture movie or show.

Plenty of people choose to use their business name or even their personal name as their channel’s title. This strategy provides the benefit of immediate association. As your channel gains strength, you can rely on more people knowing who you are or what your company is, thanks to the shared name.

Once your name is chosen, decide on an icon that reads well on a small screen. Keep in mind that over half of all YouTube views come from mobile devices. You might not be able to use your logo or cram a bunch of text into your shrunken down profile picture.

Settle on something that’s easy to comprehend, such as a few letters or your host’s face. You can also use some sort of iconographic representation of your channel’s purpose. For instance, the fictional motorcycle gear review channel mentioned earlier could have a helmet or a gloves gripping handlebars.

3. Come Up With Channel Art, a Description, and a Trailer

Some channels stand just on the strength of their content. They earn views through shares and YouTube algorithm suggestions, and eventually someone might connect the dots to realize several of the things they’ve watched come from the same channel.

Smaller channels, especially business-focused ones, often come under much more scrutiny. Someone may wonder “what are these people all about?” and take a look at their channel to learn more.

This instinct to inspect actually benefits your business. When they read your channel description, they can learn how the channel connects to your brand, for instance. They might even follow a link back to your official website.

Above all else, they’ll get a first impression that helps them decide then and there whether they’ll bother to ever check out your channel again. Accordingly, your channel’s “home page” elements better make one heck of an impression!

Start with your description. It should be short, exciting, and explain exactly why they should tune in to your channel regularly. Avoid talking too much about yourself or your business unless you think those elements hold inherent interest.

For instance, a personal injury law office might not want to bore people with local peer awards they won in the precious channel description space. On the other hand, they might want to throw out a number like “we’ve earned our clients nearly a billion in injury settlements.” Wow! That’s something they can get interested in.

Consider your channel art a supplementary description of what your channel offers. Maybe you have an image of a handsome host dressed smartly next to some of the informative topics they’ll cover. Or, maybe it’s an image of an awesome project your business has completed, such as a sandwich shop showing a record-breaking hoagie.

Keep your channel art simple and readable. Think of it like a billboard you have to read while whizzing past at 60 mph; if you cram too much on there, it’s just going to be a distracting mess. Limit the amount of text you use to a dozen or so words. Balance any “busy” graphics with blank space to give them air.

Finally, you’re going to want to create your channel’s trailer. This is a video that ideally gets someone hooked on first view. Far too many channels instead approach the trailer as a show-and-tell. “Hi I’m Bob this is my channel we have many exciting things to share with you…”

Instead, think of your trailer as a highlight reel of sorts or an actual TV show trailer. Yes, you want to tell people what you’re about, but you can do that by showing rather than telling.

If you aren’t 100 percent in love with any of these elements, then let that motivate you to revisit them over time. Your channel trailer in particular will evolve as your skills, content, and familiarity with techniques improve.

Getting Ready to Launch Your YouTube Channel

After you have all the main elements of your channel in place, you will want to prepare for its launch as a sort of grand opening. Consider that this is your chance to debut with flash and gather an early audience. If they get a bad impression, you’ve sown the seeds for an uphill battle to convince them to come back.

Ideally, you will have several videos’ worth of content for them to peruse—including your channel intro. You should also have the next months’ worth of videos queued up on your backburner so that you can ensure your channel posts regularly. Channels that post sporadically tend to lose audiences. They also have a more difficult time getting visibility via suggestion algorithms compared to more-active channels.

These are just the ingredients to the recipe for YouTube success; it’s up to you to make them work! If you need help with any aspect—including content creation—do not hesitate to contact an experienced digital marketing company to ensure your YouTube marketing meets with success.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/everything-you-need-to-create-a-youtube-channel-thats-ready-to-grow/

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4 Essential Facebook Marketing Strategies the Top Business Pages Use

There is no official playbook for getting great social media performance. Those who succeed get there by making educated guesses, marking their results, experimenting with optimization changes, and measuring again. You should go through this process, too, but you can take a shortcut by observing what works for others. Visit https://amrutservices.com to get full understanding about digital marketing which would help you get better business.

 Facebook’s algorithm is changing all the time, and even the people behind the scenes aren’t 100 percent sure of how it will affect things. That’s why they’re always tweaking it. You should always be tweaking, too. Otherwise, what gets good performance today may not be viable tomorrow.

 Keeping this in mind, know that the most successful brands on Facebook are doing a lot of tweaking and experimentation for you. By observing what they do, you can get great ideas for how to improve your social media marketing strategy. What works for them may not work for you, but it’s at least a good starting point for an educated guess.

So, to help you improve your Facebook marketing success, here are four common traits between the top pages worth putting in your personal strategy book.

They Post Multiple Times a Day to Beat the Engagement Slump

The biggest challenge business pages face on Facebook these days is earning reach and engagement from their posts. To combat this trend, many of the top brands post content daily—often multiple times a day.

Make no mistake: organic reach on Facebook has taken a nosedive over the past few years. Adjustments to the newsfeed algorithm in 2016 lead to a precipitous 20 percent drop in overall engagement for brands and publishers over the course of 2017.

Then, things got even worse. Facebook retooled their newsfeed even further to obscure page posts in favor of posts from friends. The change was devastating, leading to post engagement drops as big as 96 percent.

Data from a joint Buffer App/Buzzsumo study shows that the biggest pages are getting hit hard, too. Overall, the study found that engagement has dropped by 50 percent over the last 18 months.

The study also determined that the top Facebook pages all have a similar strategy to fight against engagement drop: posting more frequently. According to their data, the overall volume of posts from the top pages grew by nearly 20,000 posts from Q1 2017 to Q2 2018. On average, the top 20,000 highest-performing Facebook pages post 135 times a month on average, which averages out to just over four posts a day.

This data doesn’t necessarily mean you should go all out on Facebook posting. Top pages admittedly already have large audiences in the millions, so posting more often is more likely to lead to a significantly higher volume of views and clicks.

At the same time, while brands that post five times a day get the highest volume of engagement, brands that post less than once per day tend to get the most engagement per post. Additionally, pages that posted 10 or more times actually saw their engagement drop.

So, since your page likely doesn’t have millions of followers, the best takeaway is to experiment with how frequently you post and measure the results. You may find that producing steady streams of content can help you build audiences, but you may also decide to dial back if you discover that posting too frequently offers diminishing returns.

They’re Diligent About the Times They Post

Avoid Facebook posting to an empty room. Audiences follow similar engagement patterns throughout the day and week, meaning that they tend to log in around similar times. Your job as a social media marketer is to figure out when those days and times are.

For instance, unless you know for a fact that your audience is up at 3:00 a.m., maybe hold off and schedule that post for the next afternoon.

You can identify when your audiences tend to engage the most within your page’s insights data. You can also look to engagement data from big brands to see if their strategies work for you.

According to Sprout Social, Wednesdays and Thursdays get the best engagement, with the weekend days getting the least by far. Their data also shows that people tend to browse Facebook most heavily during work hours, especially around lunch time. Who would have guessed?

They Pique Interest Without Being Clickbait

What are the types of Facebook headlines that get the most clicks? The answer may surprise you!

In all seriousness, viral Facebook content has evolved considerably since the days of shameless clickbait headlines from yesteryear. Make no mistake: there’s still a formula to top-performing headlines, but it’s gotten more informative rather than mysterious.

Another BuzzSumo study gathered data from millions of headlines and found that the absolute best performing phrase used was “will make you…”—as in “This Video Will Make Your Heart Melt” or some similar promise. Essentially, the headline promises some sort of emotional reaction, and people really seem to bite. The phrase earned over double the engagement of the runner up (“this is why…”). The phrase also appears in self-help type content, such as “This cooking technique will make you better at barbeque.”

Taken beyond face value, the phrase “will make you…” gets to the heart of what the best content does: it’s transformative. You’re a slightly different person after consuming it because you learned or felt something. Keep this type of concrete promise in mind when you craft content for your audiences.

And don’t skimp on quality, either! Another BuzzSumo study found that even though engagement rates are dropping across the board, recent Facebook newsfeed algorithm changes seem to favor high-quality content. The study notes that, “interestingly we have seen higher engagement with paywall content over the last year, which may again relate to perceptions of quality.”

Put in effort, and offer audiences value to ensure their clicks lead to a rewarding experience.

They Ensure Their Facebook Page Provides a Service, Not Just a Presence

The biggest reason people don’t engage with Facebook pages (beyond having them hidden from view by algorithms) is that they really don’t have much reason to. If a brand isn’t publishing funny, entertaining, informative, or highly clickable content, people don’t just visit its page to hang out.

On the other hand, brands that offer value get rewarded. Some brands are even going above and beyond the typical Facebook offerings to help their customers out.

Starbucks, for instance, has embedded a handy maps tool on their page that helps people locate a store near them. They can also click around the map to see store hours, whether the location has a drive-thru, and other tidbits. Definitely consider this feature if you have multiple locations, or consider using it to point people to areas of interest related to your services.

The Starbucks page goes even further by sharing intriguing Pinterest content posts about coffee recipes, how to’s, and historical facts about coffee. “The goal of this integration is to keep you glued to their Facebook page,” explains Neil Patel. “You could spend hours going through every content piece here.”

Patel also provides another excellent example of a seldom-used Facebook capability: providing great customer service. Online shoe retailer Zappos, for instance, told an inquiring shopper where they could buy a particular shoe brand offline. Even though pointing the customer to a brick-and-mortar competitor could cost them a potential sale, it goes a long way towards building a trusting relationship. 

Discover Your Own Winning Facebook Marketing Strategy

The brands mentioned above may have oodles more money in their marketing budget than your business, but the strategies they use are pure and simple. By identifying an optimal posting schedule, promising transformative experiences in their content, and going above and beyond with social customer service, they make an impact and keep their engagement levels high.

 You may not be able to copy them and find automatic success, but at the very least you’ll be headed in the right direction. Learn lessons from others and from your own data as you experiment to ensure your Facebook marketing meets your business’s specific goals.

from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/4-essential-facebook-marketing-strategies-the-top-business-pages-use/

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Why Your Business Needs Social Media

Social media has profoundly changed the way we all use the internet, and that includes how businesses interact with their customers.

In the years since platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn were first introduced, they have evolved from an occasional distraction to the focal point of many people’s internet browsing. Conversations and content that used to be spread across multiple sites can all now be found in the same place: your social media news feed.

Businesses that ignore this transition face a harsh reality. Social media is often the first thing people check when they go online, and it may even be the only thing they check on any given day. Without a presence on social media, your business may very well be invisible!

That’s why many businesses, such as art installation company studio SPACE NYC, have a social-first approach to their online presence. “If we look at the analytics of the website and how many people view my Instagram account, we’ll see 200 a day on Instagram and 15 on my website,” says its owner, Jacob Fisher.

Not being on social media also means you miss out on huge opportunities for advertising, customer support, boosting performance for your marketing campaigns and much more.

To help you understand why so many companies and small businesses take their social media marketing strategy seriously, consider the following five essential benefits and capabilities it provides below.

Everyone’s on Social Media, Giving You Opportunities for Huge Reach and Impressions

The first thing to understand about making your business active on social media is that you’re hardly shouting into an empty room. Facebook alone has 2.2 billion users worldwide, and 83% of U.S. adults under 50 have a Facebook account. Even among those 65 and up, 41% are active on at least one social platform.

 Suffice it to say that’s there’s huge audiences at stake! While it may take a few weeks or months to find your footing, there is no shortage of potential exposure. Companies that create the right type of content and form an engagement strategy can quickly amass a following. This can happen especially fast when you leverage your existing network of friends and customers.

 Just think of it as “word of mouth” transitioning to the digital age. By being available for mentions, shares and engagement on social media, you can create thousands of chances a day for new customers to discover you and existing customers to get reminded about what makes your business great.

Social Media Creates Effective New Advertising Channels

Exposure to your brand on social media doesn’t just have to happen by accident. Each social media platform has its own set of powerful advertising tools that can be used to directly put your business in front of its most valuable audiences. Millions of businesses rely on these tools to drive their marketing goals, which is why social media spending nearly doubled to $31 billion from 2014 to 2016 and increased by an estimated 26% in 2017.

 Facebook and Instagram, for instance, have incredible audience targeting capabilities for their ad campaigns. Local businesses can select demographics and geographic areas that perfectly fit the qualities of their most loyal customers. A new bakery can target people in their city or in certain neighborhoods, and it can even find people who recently announced their engagement!

 These highly specific targeting tools ensure you’re not just sending out ads to people who won’t become customers. You also directly expose people to your business offerings within the same stream of content they browse every day.

 Since the organic posts you create can also be “boosted” while using targeting, you can leverage paid social media to grow your reach beyond people who already like and follow your page.

 The data you generate from these ads also creates valuable insights for how to make both your organic and paid marketing more effective. “Paid boosting can help the organic social team discover what works much faster and also play into paid ad creative ideas,” explains Depesh Mandalia of SMCommerce.

Opens a New Communication Channel for 1:1 Conversations and Support

Businesses on social media can deftly juggle marketing and advertising with more meaningful outreach to their audiences and loyal customers. Answering people’s questions and participating in conversations can put your business top-of-mind any time they need the services you offer.

 Customers absolutely prefer that the businesses they use be available for these types of interactions, as well. 48% of people said they will be more likely to purchase from a brand that directly interacts with customers and answers questions on social. 33% of people also now prefer to get customer support through social rather than a phone call.

 Being able to wow people during these interactions pays off big, too. 71% of people who have a positive interaction with a business over social media say they’re likely to recommend that business to their peers. And since nearly three times as many people trust peer recommendations over ads, demonstrating how much you care via social counts for a lot.

Your opportunities for engagement don’t even have to be direct, either. One video game publisher searched for phrases similar to “I want the new [game name] but it’s too expensive” and saved all the users who made the comment. When the game went on sale, they reached out directly to these people, helping them sell over 70,000 copies of the game.

So get creative, listen intently, and seize every chance you have to make a good impression through the highly public social platforms.

Social Ties Together Your Other Marketing Channels

The majority of businesses consider social media “essential” for marketing, beating out every other form of advertising out there. And it’s not just because of the capabilities described above, either. It’s really because social media tends to tie together all the other channels you use in a seamless way.

For example, you can:

Post content to lead people back to your website.

Announce a new product, promotion, event, or free demo

Share your local cable ad, or overlay a radio ad over an image slideshow.

Create contests to earn email signups or email followers

Gather data on the performance for certain types of content before investing heavily in something like pamphlets, print ads, or search engine marketing

All of these activities have the effect of increasing the return on investment for your marketing spending. You get to dramatically increase the exposure for your content while creating a pathway towards your other marketing channels and campaigns.

In this way, social media can reinforce just about everything your brand does while serving as your friendly, highly public face.

Using Social Media Marketing Ensures You Keep Pace With Your Competition

All the above benefits can make a significant difference when it comes to your business’s ability to earn new customers, clinch sales, and stay in touch with your most loyal repeat clients.

 But, more importantly, if you’re not doing these things your competition likely will be. Ignoring the potential of social media basically leaves countless opportunities on the table — opportunities others can hungrily scoop up right from underneath your nose.

 So take social media seriously, and don’t give your competition a foothold to develop more meaningful relationships with your best customers. Form a strategy, stay vigilant for chances to engage, create outstanding content, and let social media be the scaffold that makes your overall marketing apparatus stronger.

 Ready to learn more about making social media work for your unique marketing goals? Drop us a line at Amrut Services, and we’ll answer any questions you have and tell you how to get started creating some killer campaigns.

  from Amrut Services https://amrutservices.com/why-your-business-needs-social-media/