Here's How To Make Customers Out of Your Social Media Fans

Wondering whether your social media marketing investment is paying off? Your potential customers are already spending hours on social media. If you’re not investing in social media marketing, you’re missing out on a cool opportunity to attract leads and customers. Let’s take a look at a few strategies to turn social media users into leads and customers.

1. Make your links clickable

Marketers often focus on getting more likes and shares for the links they share on social media. Along with other success indicators, emphasis should also be given to click-through rate for the links you posted. Driving more clicks to your links will help you drive huge traffic to your site. In order to ensure that the links you post on social networks are enticing enough, it is essential to add Open Graph (OG) tags to your site. OG tags are for social networks what meta tags are for Google. It helps you automatically preview your link by pulling out an image, heading and description when the link is being shared. This preview influences your users’ decision to click on it or not. Always keep your images according to the optimal size of your preferred social site. If you’re targeting Facebook and Twitter, you might use an image with the size 1024 x 512 for perfect fit.  

2. Become an early adopter

The early adopter advantage is huge when it comes to social media marketing. For example, in just 19 months, Zynga became one of the fastest companies to reach $1 billion valuation, just because they were one of the first companies that have adopted social gaming for user acquisition. Similarly, Spotify was an early adopter of integrating their app with the Facebook news feed, which helped them grow tremendously from 3.4 million to 5.3 million users within just two weeks. If you’re looking for a rapid growth, be sure to jump on the social media bandwagon as early as possible whenever a new social feature is released. Below are a few tips that you’ll find helpful if you’re looking to increase customer acquisition.

• Choose the right platform: Don’t spread yourself too thin by focusing on all the different social channels. Instead, identify where your potential customers are and create a strategy for gaining traction on one or a few platforms in particular.
• Seize opportunity at the right time: As social features mature, social sites will likely change the way they treat the app integration. It’s vital to seize the opportunity at the right time or you’ll fall behind.
• Create an independent product: Social platform like Facebook is always in flux, so there is no guarantee that your app integration will work well all the time. It is in your best interest to create an independent product that doesn’t heavily rely on social media integration.

 

3. Build social proof

Non-app businesses can also leverage social media for user acquisition. Innocent Drinks is just one example. Wondering why brands invest in social user acquisition? It’s because people have a tendency to follow the choices of other people, such as their friends and family. By building social proof, you can create a positive perception of your brand in your niche circles. In fact, studies show that 7 out of 10 customers trust product recommendations from family and friends. Only 32% people trust content on your website and even fewer trust your ads. Keep in mind that at its core, social networks are publishing and sharing platform. Rather than hard selling, build a relationship with your fans and followers on social media. Starting a hashtag campaign can be helpful to spread the word out about your product. Tourism Australia, for example, encourages their fans to share their photos on Instagram during their Australian visit with relevant hashtags.  

4. Retain your existing customers with remarketing

Social media is a great remarketing platform that lets you connect with people who have shown an interest in your product or services. With remarketing, you can show a customized ad to your existing and prospective customers, prompting them to return to your site. In fact, it takes 3 to 4 visits for your prospects to visit your website to actually think of doing business with you. With remarketing, you can encourage them to return often and entice them to take action that you deem to be of value, like subscribing to your list or purchasing a product. Target people who have shown an interest in your preferred social network by implementing a remarketing pixel on your site. The pixel will add a cookie on your visitors’ browser, which your ad network can identify. This way you can target them with a customized ad you’ve created just for them. Follow the following remarketing tips for the best results:

• Use onsite retargeting: Create an onsite retargeting campaign that targets users on your site who have engaged with your remarketing ad and show them a custom marketing message. This strategy of showing a custom message to the specific audience has proven to convert an additional 2 – 4% of your visitors into leads and customers.
• Spend your remarketing dollars wisely: For the best ROI, it is advised to filter out people from your remarketing list who haven’t spent significant time on your site. This way you can save your remarketing dollars by not targeting people who are not likely to do business with you.

 

Conclusion

Social networks are great platforms for building brand awareness and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche circles. They can also be used to connect with your customers and retain them for the long run. With the right strategies, you can turn social media users into leads and customers for your brand.

Losing Traffic? 10 Tips to Boost SEO and Start the New Year Right

Are you seeing a decline in your website traffic no matter how many blog posts you produce? Would you like to optimize your website for Google without spending any money on marketing agencies? Then you came to the right place. There are several strategies and tips you can apply to optimize your website to boost SEO while also getting ahead of your competition. Whether you’re working to rank on the first page of Google or beat Amazon, it can be achieved with these ten simple tricks.

1. Improve Your Website Speed

The love Google has for speedy websites is no secret. In fact, the search engine giant officially declared that they will use speed as a ranking factor in an upcoming search algorithm update. What are you doing right now to improve your website speed? A website’s performance speed depends on several factors:

• Resources offered by the web host
• Location of the servers
• Website caching
• Domain name
• The code used by your website

And that's just to name a few. Start by switching to a lighter and a mobile-friendly website design. Then, install a caching plugin on your website. And set up a CDN to deliver your website more efficiently to visitors around the world.  

2. Optimize Your Blog Posts For Voice Search

It’s safe to say that voice is the future of search. With Amazon Echo and Google Home taking over the homes and offices, people are now using their voice to search things on search engines more often than typing. Are your blog posts optimized for voice search? Searching for something on Google using voice is entirely different from searching by typing. When you use voice search, you tend to spell out entire sentences or questions, like “What is the best way get more website traffic” or “How can I start a business from home?" Keep this in mind when you create titles for your new blog posts. Make sure your blog posts are optimized to reach the massive audience that uses voice search.  

3. Aim For Long-Tail Keywords

Keyword optimization takes a key role is website SEO. However, targeting highly competitive keywords is one of the biggest mistakes most marketers and businesses often make when creating blog posts. The best way to increase your chances of getting better ranking is to aim for long-tail keywords with low competition. To do this, combine the research you do with Google Keyword tool with a keyword competition analysis tool like Moz Keyword Explorer or KWFinder. Use these tools to find long-tail keywords and search phrases that are easier to rank for.  

4. Implement a Mobile-First Design

With more people using mobile devices to browse the Internet, Google is now placing a priority on offering the best experience to mobile users. The company has already started rolling out its mobile-first index. This new search algorithm update heavily promotes websites that are optimized for mobile devices and punishes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. In addition to switching to a mobile-first design, you should also consider optimizing your blog and formatting blog posts in a way that’s easier for the mobile users to consume. For example, you can use shorter paragraphs and more bullet points in blog posts.  

5. Target Local Search Terms

If you’re promoting a local business or a service, there’s so much you can achieve by focusing on optimizing your website for local search. It will not only make it easier for you to rank for keywords but it will also reduce the international competition you have to deal with. Start by letting Google know that you’re a local business. You can do this via Google Search Console. Then, optimize your blog posts to target local audiences. For example, if you’re a business in San Francisco, start incorporating phrases into your blog posts to let people know where you’re from. Instead of writing a blog post titled “How To Start A Business In San Francisco,” you might use more specific titles like “How To Start A Restaurant in the Bay Area.” This type of content will go along great with retargeting marketing campaigns to reach local customers.  

6. Update and Republish Old Posts

Google bots are constantly scanning your website for fresh and new content. When your blog isn’t getting updated and blog posts are getting outdated, Google will start to consider your website as dormant or inactive. This will affect your rankings. That's why it’s important to always update your blog with new content. Also, update your older posts with timely content to make them relevant. Then republish them to let Google know that your blog reliably offers up-to-date content.  

7. Compress Your Images

Using lots of images in your blog posts is a great way to convey your message more effectively to your readers. However, adding more images can also make your web pages heavier and slow loading. Thankfully, you can fix this by compressing your images. There’s no need to buy expensive software to do this. Simple and free plugins like WP SmushIt will automatically optimize the images without harming the quality.  

8. Generate More Social Signals

SEO experts are still in debate on how social signals affect website rankings. However, the data seems to suggest that having a strong social presence can boost your website’s search engine visibility. Keep an active post schedule on your social media channels and don’t be afraid to reshare the same links more than once. Paying a few dollars to boost your Facebook posts may not be a bad idea either.  

9. Create A Guest Blogging Campaign

Guest blogging is an effective way to build backlinks to your website. However, guest blogging is more than just about building links. Having a guest blogging strategy will also help you reach new audiences and generate traffic to your website. It’s also one of the cheapest marketing strategies that will generate long-lasting results. Create a list of websites and blogs in your niche that accepts guest posts and start contributing.  

10. Create Superior Content

Coming up with effective blog post ideas can be tough, especially when all the good topics have already been covered by your competitors. The only way to beat your competition in such a situation is to create superior content. For example, if there’s a blog post titled “Top 10 SEO hacks” that ranks on top of Google, you can create a better and more in-depth post like “Top 20 SEO hacks” to outrank your competition.  

Conclusion

Follow these tips one step at a time. And remember, even after implementing all these tips, don’t expect results right away. Generating organic traffic and reaching higher rankings on Google takes time. Until then, be patient and keep producing great content.

Email Marketing Do's and Don'ts

Avoiding spam filters, figuring out the best times to send an email to your subscribers, implementing email segmentation... there’s a lot to learn about email marketing when you’re first starting out. But, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Email marketing is a medium that requires careful management. You can’t just expect the subscribers in your email list to become loyal fans of your business all by themselves. You have to put in a lot of work to build that relationship. That’s the main reason you created your email list in the first place: To connect with your customers. Email marketing is all about building relationships with your customers and proving yourself worthy of their loyalty. How can you achieve that goal? You can start by following these tips.  

1. Learn The Basics

What good is an email list if you don’t have the proper knowledge to even format an email? Not to be rude, but if you want to build a more engaging email list, you need to show off professionalism through your emails. No one will take you seriously if you write emails like this: Learn to format your emails properly. Customize your email templates to fit your branding. And, above all else, learn to write like a professional. Also, learn how to avoid spam filters. The words you use in your subject lines may cause email spam filters to assume your email campaigns as spam. Spammy words like 100% Free, Act Now!, Free Money, are sure to get your emails blocked by spam filters. Replace those spam words with power words to make your subject lines more attractive and boost email open rate.  

2. Develop High-Quality Lead Magnets

Just because you’re giving something away for free doesn’t mean it has to be cheap. Your lead magnets are the source of your lead generation process. It’s where the relationship between you and your subscriber begins. Develop useful and high-quality lead magnets to make a strong first impression to your subscribers. Show people how much you value their email by giving away things that they normally have to spend money on. Go beyond free ebooks and checklists. For example, QuickSprout offers a free online marketing course worth $300 for their email subscribers. That kind of commitment shows subscribers what type of content they can expect from joining the email list.

3. Collect And Measure Your Data

Data is the best friend a marketer could ever have. Without gathering and measuring data related to your marketing strategies, your efforts to grow your business will go to waste. It’s the only way you can know for sure if your business is growing or not. So start collecting data from the first day of your marketing campaign. Go to the root of your marketing strategy and start by measuring the content marketing ROI to see how your blog converts visitors into leads. And then you can measure your email campaigns to improve open rates and click-through rates. Also, make friends with A/B split testing tools. Test everything from your opt-in forms on your blog to your email subject lines to find what works best for your audience.  

4. Segment Your Email List

Email list segmentation is becoming one of the most important factors of creating an efficient email marketing strategy. This could very well determine whether or not your marketing efforts are going to be successful. Email segments allow you to better target your email campaigns to send the emails to the right people. Whether it’s based on interests, location, special holidays, anniversary celebrations, or even sending a birthday wish, list segments will help you build a more successful marketing strategy.  

5. Find The Right Time To Send Emails

Finding the best time to send an email to your subscribers can be tricky. Because you may have a list of subscribers from around the world. If you send an email at the wrong time, it might get mixed with rest of the emails and your subscribers may not even notice your email. So, how do you make sure you send the emails at the right time for all your subscribers? This is where your list segments come to help. If you’ve collected the location data of your subscribers, you can create a sending schedule for segments separately based on the location. Or, you can use the tools provided by your email marketing service and let them find the best time for your email list. Email marketing services like Constant Contact have advanced technologies that help you figure this out.

6. Personalize Like A Friend

It doesn’t matter whether you’re representing a corporate brand, a small business, or even yourself, you should personalize emails to send them to individuals, not a group. Emails are read individually so you need to personalize them in a way that helps you to create a connection with each individual. The best way to do that is by treating each and every one of your subscribers like your friend. According to research, personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and boost conversions by 10%. Just remember not to treat them like your best friend where you end up making bad jokes or write emails in slang terms. Keep things casual and friendly, like a new acquaintance you don’t want to lose.  

Conclusion

Overall, these practices can help you develop a good email marketing strategy. But, if you care about making a true connection with your subscribers, find a way to offer value through your email campaigns. If you’re only using your email list for sales and promotions, you will start to lose your subscribers one by one.

How to Make Your Website More Mobile Friendly (And Why You Should)

Are you seeing a decline in organic website traffic? Are you still using the same old website design that you used when first starting your website? It may be hard to believe, but your bad website design may be the main reason why you’re losing website traffic. As you may know, Google recently changed its search algorithm to give a ranking boost for mobile-friendly websites and also punish other desktop-only websites. If your website is not properly optimized to meet Google’s mobile-friendly standards, you're putting your entire business at risk. It’s time you make some changes to improve your website. You can start by optimizing your website for mobile devices. Here’s why.

Mobile Is The Future

You’re probably getting a decent amount of traffic for your website. You’re generating good sales. And everything seems to be working fine. So you might wonder: Why change your website design when nothing seems to be wrong? Well, maybe you haven’t noticed yet is that mobile devices are slowly taking over the world. In fact, mobile devices are already in the lead for most internet usage after surpassing desktop devices. In a few more years, everyone will be using smartphones and tablets to browse the web. It will probably be too late to save your business by then. So, take action now to make your website future-proof.  

Beat Your Competition

Reports show that 62% of companies with a mobile-first website design see an increase in sales over companies with desktop-only websites. It’s not surprising, then, that 52% of users claim they are less likely to engage with a website with a bad mobile user experience. By making your website mobile-friendly, you're better equipped to beat your competition and rank higher on Google Search. Show the world why your business is more innovative than the competition and also increase your sales in the process.  

Rank Higher On Google

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Google now gives a ranking boost for mobile-friendly websites. That means whenever a user searches for something on Google, the search engine will show mobile-friendly websites above other websites. Google rolled out this update to its search algorithm in May 2016. So, if you’ve noticed a drop in organic website traffic since then, this could be the reason why. Optimize your website with a responsive design and you’ll be able to recover the traffic that you’ve lost and even gain better ranking on Google.  

Tips for Making Your Website More Mobile-Friendly

Before we get started on optimizing the website, you need to figure out how much your website needs to be improved. Use the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool to test your website and see which parts of your website needs to be fixed. The tool will also offer suggestions on how to improve your site for mobile devices as well. You can also use your Google Analytics data to learn what type of mobile devices your website visitors mostly use. Then you can better optimize your website for certain device screens based on that data.

1. Optimize For Touch Screens

One of the biggest differences between mobile and desktop devices is their interaction methods. On mobile devices, people are used to zooming in with fingertips and swiping across to view more. Making your website design responsive is not enough to offer a great user experience to mobile users. You have to optimize your website for touch screens as well. This includes adding touchscreen navigation to the website. For example, you can make sure the slideshows on your website can be swiped across with fingertips. Make forms, such as your email opt-in forms, easier to fill by reducing the number of fields in a form.

2. Compress HTML, CSS, and Images

Making your website load faster is another important part of optimizing a website for mobile devices. You must make sure that your website loads fast enough to keep visitors from getting frustrated, especially on mobile devices. Compress your high-resolution images to ensure your blog posts don’t consume too much data on mobile devices. Also, compress and minify your website’s HTML and CSS to give a speed boost. Installing a good caching plugin will help you with that.

3. Choose The Right Font Sizes

Even some of the most popular blogs are still using tiny font sizes that makes our eyes hurt when reading. Your visitors shouldn’t have to zoom in on your blog posts just to read its content. This completely ruins the user experience. You can actually fix this problem by configuring a viewport to make sure your fonts are rendered to correct sizes on different device screens. It’s a simple process, but you’ll need some CSS skills to get it done.

4. Switch To A Better Theme

Of course, since you’re using WordPress, the easiest method to make your website mobile friendly is to upgrade to a better theme. Simply buy a modern WordPress theme that comes with a mobile-friendly design and replace your old theme with the new one. It’s as simple as that. Or, you could use a plugin to optimize your website for mobile devices. However, this method is not recommended and it will make your website load slightly slower. Only use it as a temporary fix until you find a permanent solution.

5. Implement AMP

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source project developed to offer a smooth web browsing experience to mobile users. When implemented, AMP creates optimized versions of your blog posts that can be viewed on mobile devices in split seconds. It makes your website load so fast that browsing an AMP-powered website feels like using a native app on your phone. Google also ranks AMP-powered websites higher on its mobile search results. You can easily implement AMP on your website using a free WordPress plugin.

Over To You

Keep testing your website until you perfect the design for mobile devices. Use a tool like BrowserStack to get that job done. What advice do you have for making a website more mobile-friendly? Please share in the comments!

Creating a Content Marketing Strategy for Your Blog

Blogging is a great way to build awareness for a business. But, you can’t just launch a blog and publish random articles hoping it will increase your sales. You need a proper plan for that. Reports show that blogging help generates 67% more leads for B2B marketers. However, according to Content Marketing Institute, only 86% of B2B companies and 77% of B2C companies currently use blogging as part of their marketing strategy. If you’re starting a new business blog, you already have plenty of competition to beat. And the best way to make sure your efforts last is to get started with a well-executed plan. This is where the content marketing strategy comes in.

Why Create A Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is simply a plan that you put together to make sure you create, publish, and promote content that ultimately helps you with website traffic generation, lead generation, and to increase sales. This process is called the inbound methodology. An effective marketing strategy that turns strangers into leads and then into customers.Content marketing is an important part of the inbound methodology. Content is what brings the visitors into your blog and convert them into leads. Obviously, without a proper strategy, all the efforts you put into creating blog posts and videos will go to waste. Follow these tips to create a content marketing strategy that brings solid results.  

1. Plan Your Content Based On A Buyer Persona

The first step in setting up your content marketing strategy should be creating a buyer persona. The buyer persona is the profile that describes your ideal customer. Its main goal is to figure out what type of customers you want to target through your content. If you don’t have a buyer persona yet, go and create one. Once you have a buyer persona, you can start planning your content based on that profile to attract your ideal customers. For example, if your ideal customer is a 20-year-old female entrepreneur who’s planning to start a business, you can create blog posts with beginner-friendly tips for launching a business and also talk about the problems female entrepreneurs face in this field. Planning ahead is the key here. You should at least plan for 3 months worth of content to keep consistency and add a flow to your blog publishing schedule.  

2. Work Towards A Specific Goal

The main purpose of using a content marketing strategy is to achieve a goal. Otherwise, you can publish random posts only wishing people would subscribe to your email list or buy your product. It’s important that you define a specific goal for your content marketing strategy. But, it should also be realistic. For example, if you’ve generated 1,000 subscribers in the past three months from your content efforts, you can set a goal for your next 3 months to generate 20% more leads. It’s all about always working toward a better goal and increasing the results of your marketing campaign.  

3. Measure Your Content Marketing ROI

Being able to measure the success of your content is probably the most important part of your content marketing strategy. However, it’s also one of the aspects most bloggers and marketers forget to imply. Unlike offline marketing, the great thing about digital marketing is that it allows you to easily measure the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns. And yes, you can measure your content marketing ROI as well. Just make sure you use the right metrics to measure your content marketing strategy. For example, how much shares your blog posts get on social media is not an effective way to measure your content. Instead, measure how effective a blog post is at converting traffic into leads.  

4. Experiment With Different Content Types

There are many types of content you can include in a content marketing strategy. You can create videos, blog posts, SnapChat videos, podcasts, eBooks, and more. Different types of businesses find success in different content types. For example, a startup that targets teenagers will find success with Snapchat content than blog posts. So, instead of trying to conquer them all, experiment with content types to figure out what brings you the best results and invest on creating more of that type of content. If blog posts generate more leads for your business, then try creating different types of blog posts like how-to guides, checklists, and case studies. See what type of blog posts works best and craft more of those.  

5. Update & Repurpose Your Old Content

Ask any professional blogger or marketer and they’ll always advise you to create “evergreen” content to achieve the best results from your blog. This is true. Some topics can bring you more results in the long run than the others. However, even these evergreen posts need to be updated from time to time. Do an analysis of your blog content every 2-3 months and see which blog posts generate lower results. Then revamp these blog posts by improving the quality and optimizing them for better keywords. Ahrefs managed to boost their pageviews by 468% by simply updating one of their old blog posts. When done properly, this strategy can bring you amazing results. Also, don’t stop after hitting publish on your blog posts. You can repurpose your blog posts to create more content from them. For example, you can create a Slideshare using the bullet points in your blog post. Copy and paste your blog post into a Medium post or a LinkedIn post. Create a short video. Or turn your blog post into a PDF ebook. There are so many ways you can try to make the most of your content.  

Conclusion

While these tips can aid you in creating a content marketing strategy, remember that the success of your efforts will depend on the quality and the consistency of the content you create. Even if the results are coming in slow, keep developing great content and stick to your content plan. Eventually, it will deliver the best ROI you can receive from any marketing strategy.