Tag Archives: digital marketing

The Ultimate Guide to Micro-Influencers [Gifographic]

You’ve heard of influencer marketing, and what it can do for your business. But did you know that working with micro-influencers can help your brand get the most bang for your marketing buck?

Working with other types of influencers can also be a cost-effective marketing strategy that delivers high ROI. But micro-influencers provide a unique set of benefits that other influencers cannot. Specifically, a higher degree of engagement and authenticity. Therefore, micro-influencers are quickly becoming the top choice of many brands and marketers.

Higher Relevancy and Engagement with Micro-Influencers

Micro-influencers are people that have expertise in a certain niche. Some common categories they specialize in include makeup and beauty, gaming and entertainment, technology, fashion, lifestyle, and fitness and health.

Micro-influencers cater to highly specific audiences. Their followers look to them for reliable advice on topics related to their specialties. The people who follow micro-influencers share an interest in that particular niche.

By working with a micro-influencer, you can tap into their highly targeted audience. Which allows you to expand the reach, and relevance of your marketing message.

Additionally, because of their smaller audience sizes, micro-influencers are known to be more engaging, honest, and supportive than top-tier or broad-scale influencers.

In fact, a study conducted by Markerly discovered that the engagement rates of Instagram influencers increased as the number of followers they have decreased. This means that micro-influencers tend to have a higher engagement rate than those with a larger number of followers.

Cost-Effectiveness of Micro-Influencers

Another notable benefit of working with micro-influencers is that it costs much less than working with top influencers or A-list celebrities. Since most micro-influencers charge less than their larger counterparts, they can be a perfect fit for a small business or startup on a tight marketing budget.

For example, an influential blogger with more than 500,000+ blog impressions a month may charge anywhere between $1000 to $5000+ for a single sponsored post. For the same kind of post, a micro-influencer with 10,000 to 50,000 blog impressions a month will generally only charge $175-$250. That is a huge difference in the cost of working with a top influencer as opposed to a micro-influencer.

Based on these benefits, micro-influencers are proving to be ideal for startups, small businesses, and marketers with limited budgets. Working with micro-influencers can help you achieve high levels of engagement with your audience for a minimal cost.

Thanks to our friends, ShaneBarker.com for sharing this interesting gifographic.

How to Improve Sales Leads on Mobile Devices [Infographic]

With Google’s ‘mobile first’ initiative, now is the best time to improve sales leads on mobile.

Here are a few tips to get you on the right track:

Redesign your site to be mobile-friendly.

It should display properly on smaller screens. Remove the clutter, make buttons clickable, shorten long titles and sentences, and create visual content to enhance text.
Aim for faster load times.

People use their devices on the go, they won’t have the patience for websites that take forever to load. Especially when other websites are faster. Use the free Mobile-Friendly Test offered by Google to assess your website.
Launch mobile ads on social media.

Many people use social media apps to access their accounts, so you have a good chance of reaching your targeted audience on their smartphones when your marketing goes mobile.

Our thanks to Salesforce.com for this informative infographic.

digital marketing, improve mobile sales leads, improved website speed, mobile friendly web site, social media marketingMarch 10, 2017

Facebook Ad Targeting Options [Infographic]

Facebook allows you to target your ads specifically to the audiences you want to reach. There are a lot of options to choose from to build your ideal demographic. This infographic will help you understand and narrow down Facebook ad targeting options.

Demographics

By determining what groups users belong to, you can your target ads. Examples:

What’s going on in their personal lives? – Birthdays, new jobs, newly engaged, just married, having a baby
What kind of house do they live in? – Condo, apartment, house, manufactured home

Behaviors

What is your audience doing (or planning on doing)?

Job Roles and Companies – Seniority, industry
Purchasing Behavior – Purchase habits, subscriptions

Interests

Using interests, like pages, and activities on Facebook, you can add user’s interests to further ad reach. There are numerous categories for interests including:

Industry – Science, business, small business, healthcare
Entertainment – Music, games, television
Wellness – Yoga, running, weight training

This helpful infographic was created by our friends over at ThePerformanceMarketingNetwork.com

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customizing facebook ads, digital marketing, facebook ad targeting, Facebook Marketing, social media marketing, tips on facebook adsMarch 3, 2017

Facebook Marketing Done Right: 7 Small Businesses to Learn From

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

How can small businesses with a limited budget and expertise maximize their advertising budget using Facebook ads? Let’s review a few companies who ran successful Facebook ad campaigns.

1. Motion PR: Happy Nut Year

Motion PR is a public relations firm that took first place in the 2014 Small Business Online Marketing Contest, hosted by the Chicago Treasurer’s Office. Their award-winning campaign was for the Nut Health Facebook page. The concept was to spur social amplification on Facebook by recruiting people to join the Nut Health “Nut Year’s Resolution” campaign, which encouraged customers to eat more tree nuts.

The campaign asked people to add nuts to their diet, and then to like, share and otherwise announce to their friends that they had taken the challenge. The campaign worked. Before the campaign, Nut Health had just 129 Facebook likes. After the campaign, they had 2,433 new Facebook fans.

2. State Bicycle Company: Riding High on Facebook

The State Bicycle Company of Phoenix, Arizona ran a remarkable campaign in which the business gave customers a sneak peek of their new line of bicycles — but only for people who liked the page. The campaign was the result of a series of targeted Facebook ads that focused on specific cities. Those ads led to $500,000 in new sales traced directly to the campaign — and it also increased their fan base tenfold.

3. Nike: Giant Corporation, Small-Business Strategy

Hubspot calls Nike’s Facebook page “a balance of new products, science, charitable initiatives, and encouragement.” Nike is hardly a small business. Although most corporations and all small businesses can’t imagine the size of Nike’s marketing budget, Nike sets an example that any business can follow.

Nike sets themselves apart from the ferocious industry competition (think Adidas, Reebok and Under Armour) by using Facebook to reveal the level of research and development that goes into their products, instead of just announcing deals or new lines. This strategy, which any business can use, not only shows customers the level of craftsmanship and design behind the product, but it works to justify a relatively high price point.

4. Dove: Cleaning Up on Facebook

In another example of a not-so-small business setting an example that even tiny companies can follow. Dove’s Facebook page shows the power of hashtags and the power of amplification with one simple campaign. Best of all, they didn’t broadcast or obsess over their brand. The #ShareYourStories campaign encourages fans and viewers to do exactly what the hashtag’s name implies — share personal stories about someone who is important to them.

The campaign, as Social Media Examiner points out, resulted in half a million views and nearly a million likes — all for just one video associated with the campaign.

Facebook Marketing Done Right_ 7 Small Businesses to Learn From - 1

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

5. Rue La La: Video Works

The Rue La La Facebook page is bursting with colorful, visual appeal, and video. It is common knowledge that visual imagery receives more social amplification than posts without images. However, video is a medium that is unrivaled on social media — especially Facebook. As Hubspot recently pointed out, part of the reason the Rue La La page is so successful is that Facebook loves video. In fact, Facebook recently announced that it will give preference to content with video.

The reason?

50 percent of the people who visit Facebook watch online videos every day. The number of videos uploaded to Facebook by businesses and individuals has increased by 3.6 times year over year.

6. YogaClub: Never Pay Retail Again!

Yogaclub launched their new subscription box solely relying on Facebook ads to generate interest and leads. With an initial investment of less than $1500, they generated close to 1400 conversions to their monthly YogaClub subscription.

The beauty? Every conversion creates a recurring subscriber. While the cost of acquisition is just over $1, subscribers will pay a monthly subscription of at least $50 for an average of at least 6 months.

Using cool, catchy ads focusing on strong value propositions, YogaClub was able to launch a thriving business using Facebook Ads.

7. Maes Radler: Drink Up

A small brewery called Maes based their campaign on a nearly universal truth — people love free drinks. The beer company offered a free barrel of beer to anyone who changed their last name to Maes. As long as they shared the brew with their friends. The result was more than 7,000 people changed their last names to Maes on Facebook. The business received 75,000 likes in just one day and half a million page visits in six weeks.

Facebook works for small businesses. Even the smallest companies can achieve amazing results on Facebook with few resources. As long as they are inventive, creative and always put their customers first.

customizing facebook ads, digital marketing, Facebook Marketing, facebook marketing tips, tips on Facebook marketingFebruary 15, 2017

How to Integrate Social Media with Blog Writing to Grow Leads

To attract traffic and generate leads, there are 2 things you need to do: blogging and social media networking. They work so well together that you won’t see optimum results if you only choose one.

Here’s how to integrate both into your digital marketing campaigns:

Add a ‘Click to Tweet’ Link

Prepare a pre-written tweet composed of a catchy one-liner from your post along with a short summary. If people find your content engaging enough, they can click on the accompanying button to tweet it to their networks. This works because they don’t need to exert a lot of effort to share your content.

Go Beyond Text

People respond to visually appealing content, so add an image to your posts. This image will appear as a thumbnail when the content is shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. You can find free stock photos if you don’t have the time to create your own graphics or the budget to buy photo licenses.

Make Following Easy

Add follow buttons to all your social media pages so people can follow you right away. If they have to leave your blog and look for the button, there’s a big chance they’ll quickly forget about it. If you’re worried about cluttering your blog, opt for buttons that go with your site’s design and brand.

Make Sharing Convenient

People use social sharing buttons to share content on their own accounts. Make sure your blog content has social sharing buttons in a prominent place on the post. The traffic you generate with this method is considered earned traffic. It is much more organic compared to traffic from your own social media channels or paid ads.

Retweet Your Own Tweets

The typical lifespan of a tweet is around 18 minutes, so there’s a big possibility your followers missed it the first time around. So you can easily repurpose old tweets into new ones. Add enough time in between (like a few weeks) so that the tweets will look fresh, even to those who have seen them before.

Share on Social Media

If you can’t produce all-original content, follow the 80:20 principle which is an effective tactic on social media. The idea behind it is to curate 80% of the content from third-party sources and create the remaining 20%.

Make sure to tag the creator of the content you’re curating to let their networks see your post. All of these methods are great ways to attract more traffic, but ultimately, your goal is generate qualified leads, which you can do by directing visitors to your mailing list. Simple additions like slide-ins, pop-ups, or subscription bars placed on your site can grab attention and consequently, emails.

Give people an incentive for submitting their contact details to you. Extras such as free ebooks and whitepapers available only upon signing up can motivate folks to subscribe.

Quality content is still the main ingredient in successful digital marketing campaigns, but it takes social media to spread awareness across many networks. Use these 2 tools and your business’s online growth will be unstoppable.