Let’s face it. As digital marketers, we often need a tool that will allow us to collaboratively work with other content creators to produce great content.
Project management tools help different people in the organization come together. It helps provide a structured communication system between people.
Communication is a MAJOR key especially when leading a team. Now more than ever, more companies are working remotely and when it comes to managing a team spread out in different continents, having a tool to manage tasks is essential.
Well, it’s because of this concern that project management tools came about as they allow people to interact and manage tasks more effectively and save money while at it.
When I think of a project management tool, my mind immediately clicks to ClickUp! I genuinely don’t think I have used or heard an easier-to-use, reliable, and efficient tool that allows great management of tasks than ClickUp.
Why Do You Need A Project Management Tool
The correct question should be, why not use project management tools? As a digital marketer, here are the reasons why these tools are a necessity and not a luxury for me:
It’s easy to find your tasks.
Some project management tools don’t clearly outline what tasks you have. I have been using ClickUp lately and I’ve noticed that you can quickly find and organize your activities with it.
It follows a simple yet intuitive structure.
With it, you can see the documents shared with you, assigned to you, and your private documents. In this way, you are able to plan your work more effectively.
Many Assignees
You know how you have a big task that you need to subdivide among members but want them to know they are all responsible for the task? ClickUp allows you to assign tasks to as many people as you want.
When you delegate the task, your team members get a notification in their emails letting them know about the task.
Once the task is done, you can delegate it to someone else who should take over. The delegation is flexible and you can change the responsibilities anytime.
Sends task reminders
We can all be forgetful every now and then especially when we’re handling different responsibilities in an organization. And what better to jog your memory and your team members than with reminders?
Honestly, we all have busy schedules and now, during a time when remote working is the best way to work and stay safe, you will need constant reminders. Your colleagues and employees will need a tool that will constantly remind them of when their tasks are due!
Not only can you create and schedule text reminders on ClickUp but you can also add attachments too! And if you have a forgetful team member, you can delegate a reminder to them too.
ClickUp takes care of it all, as it emails people when their tasks are due, even on the eve of their due dates.
This helps people be more aware and alert.
4. You can prioritize your tasks
With ClickUp, you can decide on which are the most important. Based on the urgency, you can add a unique Priority Flag to each task.
5. Allows you to monitor
For me with Clickup, I can see the progress of tasks as they develop. One team member comes up with an idea, creates the copy for it, finds the right visuals, optimizes it, then completes the task. It helps me see all these stages.
This means anybody from a manager to an employee, as long as they have access to ClickUp, can know how far along a project is.
At a glance, you can see:
What others are working on
What tasks they’ve completed
Who’s overloaded with work
6. Allows Feedback
With ClickUp, you can directly add suggestions and criticism. It allows you to add comments directly on images, videos, and content. This is great as it allows you to give your opinion on someone’s work and ask for clarification where nec.
7. Clickup is customer-centric
If you’re someone who enjoys an application that is always in constant improvement, then ClickUp is your ideal project management tool. It keeps getting better every time by providing new features, improvements, and enhancements based on what customers need. For instance, when I first started using it, I couldn’t add emojis easily to my copy but now it’s possible.
8. Time tracking
Being a digital marketer, I love knowing how much time I spend on tasks. This helps me schedule my workload effectively.
ClickUp allows you to track how much time you spend on a specific task as long as you hit the time tracker button.
In conclusion…
I can bet on ClickUp however I’m willing to sample other platforms. I just noticed how online task management tools such as Monday.com have a very simplified way to task management with beautiful visuals.
ClickUp is a suitable tool of choice regardless of the size of the business and number of employees! As a digital marketer, I’m very keen on tools that allow me to enjoy the process of creating which ultimately makes my work more efficient.
If you’re conflicted and feel like trying something different than your usual, then you should consider ClickUp or Monday.com!
Once you start ClickUp, you realize that project management tools are actually key for anyone or a team that want to be productive!
Author: Ann K is a digital marketer at Digicurated who manages social media, article writing, and email marketing. In her free time, she enjoys finding inspirational art and spending time with her friends and family
We’ve all heard the famous quote that content is king. The importance and crucial role of content in any business can never be overstated. Therefore hiring a content marketing agency if you don’t have a content specialist or team is key for your content marketing strategy to work for your business.
Content that is shared on social media pages, websites, blogs, guest posts, and many other places plays an essential role in keeping followers engaged. At the same time, consistent content brings new followers to the website.
Content Marketing Statistics
Research from the US-based Content Marketing Institute (CMI) shows that content is big business and it is rapidly gaining good traction unlike in the past when it was looked down on. Here are some interesting statistics and findings that CMI came up with when they researched content marketing.
The B2B content marketing statistics show that 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers.
86% of B2C marketers think that content marketing is a key strategy.
72% of marketers say that content marketing increases engagement.
72% say that content marketing has increased the number of leads.
The Return on Investment (ROI) of content marketing is equally impressive because Tiger Fitness content marketing ROI case studies uncovered that 60% of marketers reported a returning customer rate with video content marketing.
Analyze your competition’s content strategy
Content marketing is especially important for small businesses who are looking to get a share of the market cake in a field that has fierce competition. It is also important to analyze your competitors’ content strategy so that you can come up with something unique.
Experts advise that before you come up with a content strategy you should analyze your target market. Your target market will determine the kind of content that you will churn out. Every audience has very unique characteristics and they are not amorphous. That is why companies develop buyer personas.
Your target audience may be millennials, millennial parents, baby boomers, young women, young working men, small businesses in the fashion industry, working women, sportsmen and women, families, and so forth.
The audience that you are targeting has different dynamics such as where they can be found, how they like being communicated to. Therefore, the channels you use and the messages that you pass across will change with the audience. That is why not all channels will work for your business.
For example, if you plan on reaching businesses or professionals, content on Facebook will not give you the results that you desire. But if you optimize for LinkedIn and significant investment in Twitter you will build the right following and even get good business.
When you have all that well figured out, it will help you come up with content marketing goals and plans. Your goals will help you find out if you can internally achieve them. If not, you should employ the services of a content marketing agency.
Your goals and strategies will save you time and get you a more focused approach. If your goals are to reach C-Suite professionals, you will look for agencies that develop professional, quality, and data-driven content. However, if you intend to reach the urban youth, you will look for companies that have playful, creative content that uses informal language.
Pointers to great content marketing agencies
These are vital aspects that you should look out for when you are sourcing for a content marketing agency:
Their major audience– There are companies that have specialized in reaching all kinds of audiences but there are those that pick a certain group set e.g. millennials then segment them. You should find the agency whose audience rhymes with yours. When it comes to targeting professionals or business clients, Digicurated has significant experience.
Aligns with your business needs– Even before you scour the market for an agency, you should first assess the specific needs of your business and its particular requirements. This will help you get the right content marketing agency instead of the best one. Business needs such as reaching a new market, pushing a new product, SEO, blogging, accelerated growth, etc. These needs will help you get a fitting agency.
Location– You need an agency that understands the audience that you are targeting, where they can be found, and also where your services/offices have been located.
Experience– As you vet content marketing agencies you should look into their past projects, samples of their content, campaigns for various firms, and all.
Niche and specialization– Every single content marketing agency has an area that they specialize and do well in. For example, there are marketing firms that specialize in the food industry more than other industries. If you are a restaurant business you will need their services.
SEO Performance– Content marketing is one of the most important foundations of any SEO strategy. If an agency’s SEO performance is wanting, you will not get value and good returns for your business. All you need to do is to Google relevant keywords and see how they rank on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The best content marketing agencies rank well on search engines.
How much they charge and their payment plans– Different companies charge different prices and you need a company that will charge you a price that you can afford. Secondly, the content marketing agencies have different payment plans.
There are content marketing agencies that do one-year projects and others semi-annual or quarterly payments.
The best payment plan is the one that suits your needs.
Conclusion
There are very many B2B Content marketing agencies and great ones for that matter. However, not all are right for your business. With the above tips, you will be able to choose an appropriate agency that will help you reach your business goals. Look out for additional insights in our top 10 marketing trends in 2021.
When you buy something using the affiliate links in our blog, we may earn a small commission. Digicurated does not accept money for product reviews.
In today’s fast-paced technological environment, it is only wise to future-proof your business by taking it online. In this Semrush review we will attempt to show you how you can leverage on their tools to remain up to speed with the technological advancements. According to a KPMG report, 55% of consumers go online to check the reviews for a product before making a purchase. 47% visit the company website, 26% check out the physical store, and 23% of people talk with friends and family about it.
However, these impressive statistics also mean that there will be increased competition from different spheres. Therefore, it is prudent to invest in some tools like Semrush and strategies to align your business for massive wins in the digital space.
One of the best tools to this end is Semrush. This is a tool that provides ideal solutions to help online businesses to amplify their digital marketing strategies. Also, the online tool comes with over 40 tools, including new ones, which are designed to cover different aspects of content creating and market research.
Recently, Semrush was reworked, which means that the packages now cost a little bit more but come with a host of new plans and visuals to ensure that even with the updates, everything is worth your overall investment.
In this Semrush review, you will find everything you need to know about the recent product updates and how ideal they are in amplifying content marketing strategies for your business.
New Semrush Pricing Plans Updates
There haven’t been any price changes in the Semrush plans since 2017. However, inasmuch as they continue updating their products year in year out, the price changes will affect only the new users that are signing up for their packages from 2021. Therefore, if you are an older user, you will continue enjoying the new updates with the same old pricing plans.
Pro Account: For this account, new users will have to part with $119.95 per month, which is about 20% higher than the previous price. However, as a Pro user, you will enjoy more capabilities, including sharing PDF projects, creating 5 instead of 3 projects and access ‘read-only’ projects.
Guru Account: When you sign up for your Guru account now, you will pay $229.95 per month. Much like the Pro account, there are also more capabilities here, especially in terms of functionality. Some of the updates you can expect include creating 15 projects, historical data access, monitor over 1500 keywords and access Google Studio Connector, among many others. Therefore, this is a pretty robust platform to amplify your content marketing strategies in 2021.
Business Account: Costing $449.95 per month, the Business plan, you will easily create 40 projects and at the same time monitor the estimates of your online SoV (share of voice) with your position tracking tool.
However, it would be best if you kept in mind that the type of package you choose to go for will largely depend on the nature and size of your business. Therefore, ensure that you find one that suits your business best.
Furthermore, it is worthwhile to mention that the platform offers a lot more features, which you would have to pay more for on other platforms. Some of these features include access to:
Keywords
Mobile data
Extensive reporting, including customizable options or pre-built templates
Hyper-local position tracking
Advertising and Content Marketing Toolkit Updates
Content marketing is king in the future. Semrush understands this fact, which is why they also added updates to this end. There were some minor tweaks and improvements but bottom-line, the functionality remains the same.
The content marketing platform by Semrush is quite unique, especially in the amplification of digital marketing strategies for any sized online business. It is capable of covering the whole workflow for creating top-quality and highly relevant content that not only meets the user’s needs but SEO as well.
Now, you can easily discover the headlines, trending content ideas, and questions to ensure SERP feature optimization using their Content Marketing Toolkit. Also, you can create SEO-friendly briefs or copies, which will stay in line with the SERP success while keeping track of the content performance. You will also be able to carry out a thorough audit of all the existing content assets.
On the other hand, their advertising toolkit was revamped to better how you create your Google Ads campaigns. It will enable you to conduct in-depth competitive research while exploring the campaigns of your business rivals to ensure that you find not only the best but also the most efficient keywords. Furthermore, you can use these advertising toolkits to amplify your strategies to enable you to bring higher ROI and CPC from your PLA, PPC and other campaigns.
Social Media Updates
Although this toolkit is not a major Semrush feature, it is pretty ideal at enabling your business to build its presence across different social media platforms while helping you with social media management.
The toolkit, together with other tools like Social Media Poster and Social Media Tracker, you can now better automate how you schedule your social media routine on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter.
The two updates introduced in 2020 were:
Social Media Analytics tool: This tool comes in handy in helping your keep your business’s reporting and analytics in one place. Therefore, it is a reflection of your performance metrics, including post reach, new follows, engagement and the engagement rate for Instagram and Facebook.
Social Media Ads tool: If you want to amplify your business’s social media advertising, you can use this tool to create your ads, air or manage them across different platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Facebook. Also, you can do the same for the Audience Network platforms. You don’t have to worry about complex settings any more. Therefore, you will gain a competitive edge because of the performance-driven ads.
This updated toolkit is quite comprehensive and it can deliver impeccable results when it comes to online advertising, SEO, benchmarks, market trends, social media, content and PR strategies.
The toolkit ensures your business is always in a position to make data-driven decisions while coming up with incredible marketing strategies. Here are the improvements that Semrush made to this toolkit.
Review of Semrush audience insights on traffic analytics
This too is instrumental in allowing gain a broader perspective of how your website is performing, including an overview of the traffic acquisition tactics, top sources of traffic and user engagement signals.
Since the improvement of the traffic estimation algorithm in 2020, users can now gain a more accurate insight about their competitor’s traffic count. Also, you can now easily use to analyze your rival’s subdomains in case you need data on a given section of their website.
Inasmuch as this was a significant update, the Audience Insights aspect carried the day. This is a way of helping you the overlap percentage between another domain and yours. Therefore, now you can:
Gain a better understanding of if you picked the right competitor for in-depth analysis.
Easily evaluate the potential of your audience.
Ensure that you make better informed and data-driven decisions regarding the potential impact of partnering with others and marketing activities.
More market benchmarks
When you use this tool, you can get an incredible overview of any particular market, which is vital to help you know the exact industry trends, audience characteristic and market benchmarks. At the same time, you can easily get a better picture of the main players including their market share.
Since there was a great geo-expansion, this tool now extends to more than 190 regions and countries. With the addition of the Growth Quadrant widget, the market intelligence tool can now easily showcase the key industry players, categorized into:
Established players
Leaders
Game changers
niche players
Moreover, they also added the Benchmarking Report that functions to allow you to choose up to five rivals to compare traffic sources, counts and the important audience characteristics.
SEO Updates
The SEO toolkit is a collection of about 15 tools. The tools ensure you have a wholesome coverage of everything SEO. This is including on-page SEO analysis, site audit, rank monitoring and backlink management.
Furthermore, the platform comes with a wide keyword database with over 20 billion words. In 2020 only, Semrush was able to update its SEO toolkit with a host of features, including:
Domain Overview: This is a high-level tool that gives a bird’s eye view of any website’s online presence. It includes the position trends, traffic numbers, keyword and backlink profiles.
Essentially, you don’t have to enter a country to gather the important site metrics. You can now easily enjoy a worldwide view. Also, it doesn’t only limit you to the domain view analysis. With the roll-out of the URL-level and subdomain-subfolder analysis, you can choose to look a specific section of a competitor’s website.
Moreover, you can now simultaneously analyze and compare five rivals using the Compare Mode. This is a significant method of enabling you to spot a few common patterns across the rivals’ performance online.
For you to assess the potential of any keyword, you can use the Global Volume feature. It enables you to see the monthly search volume of the keyword of all the featured countries. At the same time, it will show you the breakdown of the keyword showing where it is searched most.
Furthermore, you can use this report to get an in-depth analysis of the SERP. It will show the top 100 search results for every keyword. It includes the referring sites, keywords, backlinks, search traffic and URL’s key metrics. Also, with the addition of the Questions and SERP features, you can get insights to help in keyword optimization.
Another significant update in the SEO toolkit was the polishing of the Keyword Gap feature. This tool is pretty handy in enabling users to spot any hidden or missed organic and paid keyword opportunities. This is depending on the competitive insights.
Other Updates in Review of Semrush
Here are some of the other updates that are worth mentioning:
On-target Backlink Audit: This year, you can enjoy advanced and more accurate Toxic Score of every link. Therefore, if you want to get an overview of the best-performing pages on your website, use the Target Pages report. You will gain deeper insights on the lost, broken, active or new backlinks. If you want a detailed analysis, you will have to link your Google Analytics account.
Powerful Site Audit: Businesses use site audits to analyze the health of their websites. With the recent improvements, users can now use the Markups report. You will find points of improvement to enable your website to experience better organic performance. It utilizes user-friendly vizualisation of markup implementation errors and usage to enhance the overall functionality of the site’s audit.
Listing Management Tool: This tool is vital for enabling greater local SEO wins. With the 2020 geo expansion, there was an addition of more available countries like Germany and France. Therefore, you can now enjoy the benefits of a comprehensive SEO toolkit.
Agency Growth Kit: This toolkit includes a range of features tailored to help your business to attract and retain customers. Using the Agency Partners Platform update, you can gain new lead generation opportunities. Furthermore, your business will enjoy greater access to advanced reporting capabilities that you can find under ‘My Reports’. Therefore, you can use a wider selection of report customization options, including white-label and branding.
Unlimited Client Manager Access: You can take advantage of this update to automate your customer management routine. You can do this by adding all the customer profiles. At the same time ensuring that you maintain all the crucial client data, reports and projects in one place.
In a Nutshell
Despite all the challenges of 2020, Semrush came up with updates that will ensure that online business stay afloat. These updates will significantly amplify their strategies. Furthermore, these updates are instrumental in making the platform better and stronger to attend to all its clients’ needs. This is because it offers the services of many platforms in one.
Newsletters are sent by different companies to keep their clients and prospects engaged. Companies and communities use newsletters to update customers on the latest news about what they are doing. Newsletters also contain new products, improvements, financial health, projections and plans for the future.
Rarely do people think of newsletters as a form of an asset the same way they do the stock market or real estate. However that mindset is slowly changing and individuals and business owners are starting to notice an interesting trend in the field of newsletter investing.
Best example of successful newsletter
One of the best examples is when Yaro Bagriy, a Minneapolis-based indie maker, small business investor, and developer acquired the IndieMailer newsletter community. Yaro said that the 100+ members pay a certain amount per month thereby bringing revenue. Nevertheless, he foresees that in the world of newsletter assets newsletter fatigue could pose a potential loss in the area of newsletter flipping, as there’s only a number of newsletters one can subscribe to monthly. This then leaves an opportunity in growing one’s revenue through affiliate links or sponsorships.
Hubspot academy in its 2020 marketing trends and statistics report, indicated that 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020). The conversion rates in newsletters are proving to be more promising than any other digital marketing channel.
Email marketing
Newsletters and email marketing go hand in hand because that is how most of us receive our newsletters from different marketing managers. However, newsletters are meant to be less salesy and non-promotional. The key thing is that they’re both supposed to keep readers engaged.
According to Hubspot, the inbound marketing gurus, “You might be wondering if email is still a worthwhile marketing strategy. Well, it is. In fact, email generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 3,800% ROI, making it one of the most effective options available.”
In an increasingly digital world, email has cut out its space and every marketing department is scrambling to organize their email marketing efforts. Statistics prove that there are more than 3.6 billion email users daily. In addition, 73% of millennials prefer communication from businesses to come via email.
It is advisable, therefore to ensure that you press the gas pedal on your email marketing efforts and most especially optimize your emails for mobile devices too. Did you know that in 2020, Hubspot reported that Mobile opens account for 46% of all email opens? To top it all, 35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device.
Let’s look into the benefits of newsletters.
Advantages of newsletters
1. They don’t require a rigorous learning process for one to produce them. When done well, they have a tendency to create an impression of high effort in creating them. With amazing tools like mail chimp for sending out personalized emails and canva as a source for beautiful images, sending newsletters has become much easier.
2. Newsletters don’t get affected by rapid Google SEO core updates. Google regularly updates its algorithms and it takes time for websites to figure out what needs changing. Newsletters are obviously not affected by these rules as they’re on email. This is in comparison to having a website as an alternative asset that would be affected by Google algorithms.
3. Regular revenue streams from subscriptions and affiliate sales.
4. Vital data such as open rates, click rates, number of subscribers are available and easily verifiable.
5. Very few risks involved.
With that in mind, if you want the newsletter strategy to work for you, getting dedicated, specialized Email copywriters is key.
1. Copywriters help you complete projects quickly and in due time.
In the interview with Stefan Von of Alternative Assets, the IndieMailer owner is of the opinion that one of the trends in newsletter acquisition that is likely to grow is the need for curators. We only have so much time in the day and therefore it makes sense to get people to curate content specific to the different communities you’re in. This is where curators come in.
2. Takes the pressure off the marketing team.
Copywriters handle the arduous task of researching and putting quality content together without any grammatical or typographical errors.
3. Freelance copywriters can also help you get more flexibility while saving costs.
For instance, if you have huge projects that will take two weeks they can work on it in that time only. Freelancers get paid per project rather than on a full-time basis which is budget-friendly in some instances.
4. Maintain great quality content
As professional copywriters keep on helping you release good, quality outstanding content, you stand a chance in maintaining quality standards that your audience will appreciate.
Professional copywriters are able to focus on specific topics and thus become experts in certain community interests. This further enables them to get creative and innovative about different ways to engage with your audience.
Conclusion
Take time to do some research on potential newsletters that you want to acquire. This is the right time to dive into new territories in the digital investments arena. It’s always better to get into the investment game before it becomes flooded. When demand and supply factors come into play and cause the prices to escalate, your margins will ultimately shrink. Flipping a newsletter is just like buying a website. Research on the best strategy to employ so that you can tap into this under-rated gold mine of newsletters acquisition. It’s expected to continue growing as far as the trends of digital marketing in 2021 are concerned.
If you asked me in 2019 if digital marketing would be among all the top priorities for businesses worldwide, my answer would be no. These innovative digital marketing trends for 2021 are among the top priorities for most business owners this year due to the pandemic experienced in 2020 that had business owners sell and consumers buy online.
For any business to remain competitive and thrive in today’s online market, it must adapt to the rapidly evolving changes in digital marketing. Below are some of the trends to consider or follow in 2021.
Consumers look for convenience in all aspects. With everything moving so fast, people want to get whatever they need instantly. If they don’t get what they want from your business, they move on to the next site-your competition. Being able to respond to their questions quickly definitely gives you an edge. However, you must be careful to get everything set up correctly by making sure the pre-programmed responses to questions actually answer the questions. It can be so annoying to get the same response to different questions where the correct response was never created.
If you want to stand out in 2021, you need to personalize your marketing – and that means personalized emails, web content, products, and more. Consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts and most of them say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences since they find personalization appealing. It’s easy to implement this especially with email marketing which has a high return on investment. This is one of the easiest digital marketing trends to implement with the use of the right tools.
The most effective digital marketing trend is Video marketing
Video marketing is one of, if not the most important marketing trend today. This is likely to remain the same for the next 5-10 years. Video marketing trends have shown that it’s now possible to shop exactly what you’re watching through ads. Perhaps in the near future, it will be possible to hover your cursor on a product within the video content and get linked to the online store. Let’s not forget how engaging videos are with music on them and interesting visuals.
The latest digital marketing trend is Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing. It focuses on using key topic leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following. As such, they can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels.
Influencer marketing is generally more authentic than corporate advertising. The challenge with influencer marketing finding influencers who are trusted by their audience. Not every influencer with a huge following or high engagement rate can help you win consumers. People have become very smart and recognize influencer brands that are authentic by observing their reputation on different matters.
SEO A/B split testing
Modern marketing is all about testing and analysis. By using A/B split-testing, you can isolate the variables in your campaign and easily identify which versions are driving the results you need. This form of testing offers marketers a methodical approach to making effective changes to their content. Platforms like ClickFlow suggest pages with untapped SEO potential – a high-impression count but a low click-through rate (CTR) which you can then improve to increase traffic, leads, and of course, conversions. This should definitely not miss out on your digital marketing plan.
Huge digital marketing trend in 2021: Interactive content
360 degree video
One of the fastest-growing digital marketing trends in recent times is interactive content. In 2021, we’re likely to see a shift from traditional text-based content toward dynamic, engaging content that offers users an immersive experience. For example, think about quizzes and polls, embedded calculators, augmented reality ads or 360-degree videos.
If you need convincing, consider that 91% of buyers are actively searching for more interactive content. People like it not just because it’s fresh and original, but because it makes them feel more connected to brands and the buying process. Interactive content is more engaging, more memorable, and more likely to generate the results your business needs.
Google ADS smart bidding
With intense competition on social media slowly suffocating organic reach, paid advertising will become a more trusted force in 2021. And when you consider the Smart Bidding feature on Google Ads, you’d be self sabotaging not to give it a try. Advertisers can hand the reins of their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to Google’s AI system, which will then optimize their budget to maximize their ROI. This works for any number of PPC goals. With Smart Bidding running the show, marketers will have more free time to focus on strategy, copywriting, and analytics.
Establishment of brands
We live in a time when consumers are spoiled for choice. It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in – it’s unlikely that you operate in a vacuum. Most consumers say that they feel connected to a brand whenever they trust it. To earn their trust, you have to establish a solid brand.
Better analytics
Modern marketing and metrics go hand-in-hand, so if you’re not investing in better analytics, you’ll struggle to drive the results you want to see. The problem, however, is that the customer journey is more complex now. With multiple channels to manage and a myriad of ways to market your products and services, the job of analytics tracking is fast becoming a massive mission. As a result, many companies are looking beyond the basics of Google Analytics for a comprehensive business intelligence solution or analytics dashboard.
Illustration of young lady browsing social media under a tree
Origins of social media
The advent of social media came with an intention to bring people together and establish connection without being hindered by distance or time. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in Havard in 2004 so that students can socialize. It grew so much that it has more than 2 billion monthly users today.
When Twitter started in 2006 it was just about Odeo employees messaging each other but no one would have thought that it could have been a behemoth with more than 200 million users. Instagram now has 1 billion users worldwide, bigger than the population of the USA and Brazil combined.
Affordable advertising for small businesses
With all those users businesses decided to target their audiences more directly and more affordably because heavy TV advertising and big promotion companies locked out small businesses but with social media marketing, small businesses got a new lease of life to compete.
In fact there was a recent boycott of Facebook by big companies such as Unilever, Coca Cola, Netflix, Target, HP, Clorox, Nike, Hershey, Microsoft and others but at the end of that quarter Facebook reported a 22% growth in revenue to $21.5 billion.
Why? The Facebook Vice President of Finance Susan Li said that the revenue was fueled by small and medium-sized businesses increasing their spending as they look to grow their online sales. That means that social media has leveled the ground for small and medium enterprises to market their products and services to their audiences.
With the right strategies and techniques, social media marketing and advertising can increase sales by huge numbers.
The role of social media marketing
Young woman watering flower pots representing social media followers
Social media marketing is using social media platforms to connect with your audience with the following aims:
Build your brand
Increase sales
Drive website traffic
Build a relationship with your audience
Drive customer engagement
Receive feedback for your products and services
This involves publishing great content on a business’ various social media profiles, analyzing your results, listen to and engage your customers, and run social media advertisements, according to buffer.com.
Social media marketing for business
Illustration of woman marketing on social media through a mobile phone
Social media marketing began when businesses started sharing content on their social media channels to generate traffic to their websites, increase conversions, and sales. However, with time the social media has evolved to become a platform for more than marketing and advertising.
Companies now use social media platforms to drive conversations such as campaigns to keep safe against Covid-19, listening to what people are saying about their brand, observing their brand mentions. Businesses are also gauging how they are performing on social media by analyzing reach, engagement, and sales by using social media analytics tools such as Hootsuite, Hubspot, Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, Curalate, Keyhole, and many others. This exercise can also be called social media management.
Pillars of social media marketing
Social media marketing stands on five pillars:
1.Strategy
2.Planning and Publishing
3.Listening and engagement
4.Analytics and reporting
5. Advertising
Social media strategy
Illustration of young lady explaining social media strategy
Successful social media marketing is not just about posting and publishing content aimlessly. You must establish and follow a plan so that you can have much better results than the expected outcomes.
You must have a goal in mind first. There are various goals that social media can help you achieve that we have highlighted in the article such as brand awareness, customer engagement, sales, community management, customer support and experience.
With those goals, you will be able to pick the appropriate platforms that will facilitate achieving your goals in a more successful way. There are different social media platforms and they all have different audiences. According to Hubspot Academy, being on every social media platform doesn’t translate into success. Instead they advise that you pick two to three platforms in which you will employ the best strategies.
You also need to map out your target audience by creating buyer/market personas. The personas will guide you on the kind of content you will post so that you can attract and keep followers. This needs to be reviewed regularly. The content could be videos, articles, images, links, or all the above.
Planning and publishing
Kenyan brand and social media marketing expert Janet Machuka says that you need to be consistent as a brand so that you can see your social media following grow.
Publishing on social media means posting an image with captions, video or a blog post. Instead of posting spontaneously, you need to plan your posts by having a social media calendar. Planning gives you consistency and frequency which maximizes your social media reach. Your content also needs to be authoritative, engaging and informative so that you can rank well on search engines.
There are good tools that can help you schedule posts such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, CoSchedule, Feedly, Airtable, Planable, Sked Social, Postplanner and others. They help you publish content automatically at your preferred time and they save you time to reach your audience when they are most likely active and can engage with your content.
Listening and engagement
Social media listening is about listening in on what people are saying about your brand on various platforms. This includes mentions, tags, comments or direct messages. Sometimes they may talk about you without notifying you and that is why you need to engage social media monitoring.
There are some tools that can help you with social media listening- Socialbakers, Brandwatch, Digimind, Sprout Social. There are also free social media listening tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, Tweet Deck, and others.
Social media analytics
Social media analytics is basically about evaluating the performance of your social media marketing. The following metrics can be used: Reach, Positive mentions, How did your hashtags perform. You can get an overview of the information from the various platforms but social media analytics tools will give you a more in depth analysis. Buffer Analyze, Sprout Social, Hootsuite are tools you can employ.
Conclusion: Invest in social media marketing to grow
It’s clear to see that the benefits of social media to small businesses are huge. Once you’re clear about your business goals, come up with a strategy. It can feed into your entire content marketing strategy easily thus making your marketing efforts more comprehensive. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, increase sales, or build relationships with your audience, it can be done. You just have to be patient and invest time in it. Alternatively, you could reach out to us and we can figure it out together. Our experience working with small businesses internationally has taught us a couple of things about social media marketing. We’re so excited to hold your hand and help you grow your business.
It is almost impossible for a business to thrive online without putting out information that is attractive and engaging to its potential customers. The human concentration span is continually taking a nosedive meaning marketers should put out content that is easy to understand. There are various forms of marketing and content marketing is one of them.
