What Benefits Can Social Media Bring To Your Business

There is a lot of buzz around Social Media sites these days and the kind of options that it can provide to businesses globally. If you are new to the business world, you might find this strange or perhaps not that majority of businesses in the market nowadays make use of Social Media in some way. Sometimes it is to spread the word about their products or services, address customer complaints or even create brand advocates on Social Media. So, how can Social Media marketing help your business grow? Social Media marketing and engagement is not only used to spread the word about your business but also helps in building your brand and allows you to actively engage with your target audience in a more personal way. The main Social Media marketing sites these days that are the most used in the market are Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you can cover these 4, you will have a good reach amongst your customers and prospects within the Social Media world.

Social Media marketing allows you to not only target your audience but understand what your customers are interested in and what they are looking for. For example, if someone buys a product or service you offer and gives feedback of that product or service in a positive or negative way through Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on, you can understand the thought process of this customer along with the feedback they are providing. You can understand what they liked or disliked with your product or service and make the necessary changes if need be. For example, if they are a happy customer, you can thank them and if they are not happy for whatever reason, you can directly address any problems that they may have. This will allow you to not only address any negative Social Media comments but can help you turn an upset customer into a brand advocate through direct personal interaction. Consumers will appreciate and become brand advocates as a result of the personalized interaction they receive from your business through Social Media. Here, we will take a quick look at some of the benefits that Social Media marketing can have on your business.

✓ Better engagement
One of the main benefits of Social Media marketing services is better engagement. Customers today are exposed to the world of the Internet more than ever and therefore they are well informed and research on more products or services than they did earlier. This means that as a business owner you need to go out and engage with your customers and convince them why they should choose to buy your products or services. With Social Media marketing, you can do just that as you can create profiles on Social Media sites and turn your business into a unique personality that interacts and gives out the right information about your business. With Social Media marketing, you can ask direct questions to your customers and in return get real time feedback and suggestions. This will help you in not only in retaining customers but also acquire new ones.

✓ Build your brand
Building your brand is important if you want your business to succeed. For this, you will need Social Media marketing services that represent your business across all Social Media portals to make your brand consistent. This simplifies the equation of turning your brand into a live person and communicating with the audience to ensure that they are getting a similar experience across all platforms. With the help of a Social Media marketing company, you can do this easily as they have the expertise to help you build your brand online. They can advise the do’s and don’ts when it comes to Social Media as they will have the expertise and experience.

✓ Updates & information
Staying updated is something that customers like in this fast pace world. Consumers today are connected through mobile devices and computers and therefore they seek updates and information at all times. With the help of Social Media marketing, you can update your customers about your new products or services and also about how you are investing in the future to bring them better options. Social Media marketing services can also help you to post information about new contests and events that your business will hold in the future.

✓ Building a reputation
With the help of Social Media sites you can focus on your brand and business reputation. Social media marketing services can help you develop a reputation and voice on Social Media sites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter. This will indicate the level of your business popularity and how you can take advantage of that reputation and popularity to boost your business further in the future. You will be pleasantly surprised as to the impact that a Social Media campaign can have on your bottom line and how it can increase the reputation/brand of your company. You can easily and quickly build a loyal following and acquire new customers

Summary
Social Media marketing and engagement has almost become a necessity these days. With more and more people spending time online and engaging with brands, friends and family, Social Media has become a party of daily life. People are more than likely to believe or try a new product or service that has been used by someone on their Social Media network versus a TV ad. No matter how small or large your business is, the power of Social Media can no longer be ignored. If you want to be engaged, visible and connect to your customers or prospects, Social Media is one of the best ways to do so. If you are looking for a creative, reliable and experienced Social Media marketing team the can help you, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital group. We would be more than happy to help you on how you can become more “Social.”

Reference-https://www.minddigital.com/what-benefits-can-social-media-bring-to-your-business/

Social Media Optimization (SMO) Benefits To Your Business Or Website

Experts consider SMO to be the next wave of online marketing. They have reached at this conclusion after analysing social networks and their ever-growing usages worldwide.

Social media is now much more than just a platform to chat, converse and post photos. These networks feature prominently in online marketing strategies of brands small and big alike cutting across industries.

Further, SMO is a perfect mix of social media and SEO and thus, its benefits are bound to be manifold. This branch of marketing is meant to give a visibility boost to your website across social networks.

Which means, even the best SEO service won’t be able to fill in the value created by optimization efforts you do put for social media. This is why SMO matters a lot.
 

Is SMO worth the investment?

This is a good question particularly for brands low on budget yet want to leverage social networks to full. The answer is YES! Well, to understand why an investment in SMO is worth the effort, you need to look at some stats and figures –

✓ The userbase of Facebook is now reached at 1.71 billion people worldwide

✓ Over 1 billion people use social site YouTube

✓ 70% of the total internet population uses social media

✓ Some 200 million users are added to social networks annually

✓ 83% of Fortune 500 companies use Twitter while the rest have a presence on Facebook

You can see how social media is growing at an amazing rate. If your business is not on these networks, it then stands to lose a lot for sure.
 

Why SMO?

We know social media is one of the best ways to improve organic search results of websites. We also know how social networks have risen in usages world over and how they can’t be ignored.

Here are reasons why SMO is important –

✓ It gives your business an opportunity to connect and reach out to people in various online venues

✓ You leverage social networks and extend the reach of the business

✓ People on the internet can easily link back to your website

✓ Traffic gets driven to your website

✓ Brand awareness takes place

✓ Brand loyalty happens

✓ Your content is shared and spread across social channels

✓ The visibility of your website gets a boost

✓ Your business’ conversion rates go up
 

Things to know in SMO

SMO is important. Without it, your business won’t be able to extract the most out of social networks. However, there is plenty to consider with social media optimization.
 

Here are some of things to know in SMO

✓ SMO is about optimizing your site largely through social media

✓ Apart from social network, this marketing method also involves promotion through blogs, communities, podcasts etc.

✓ Experts use RSS feeds, blogging, social bookmarking, photo & image sharing and social news buttons for optimization purposes

✓ It’s about creating links to a site by boosting social media visibility of the website

✓ There as two ways or methods to leverage SMO efforts, first by adding to the content social media features and secondly by doing promotional activities in social media

✓ SMO is about driving traffic to your site sources other than search engines however with the focus to improve ranking and visibility in search engines

✓ It involves getting links to your website

✓ Your social media optimization also includes creating inbound links

✓ You need to do bookmarking and tagging

✓ Your content needs to be shared and spread so that others can benefit from it and make use of it

✓ The more your content travels, the more SMO benefits reach to your website or business
 

Tips to make SMO beneficial for your website and business

Well, your social media efforts need to be rewarded in due manner as this is why you do it in the first place. However, you need to be aware of the ways and methods of doing SMO and then only can you thing of doing it perfectly.

Here are valuable tips to get the most out of your SMO efforts –

#Create attention-grabbing content

The backbone of your SMO effort would be to creating attention-grabbing content and then spreading it further. You need to cover engaging and compelling topics and post regularly across social channels. Enrich your blog with appealing content, tweet something that catches the attention and use social platforms to inform and entertain your audience.

#Look for more buzz through connections

Social media is all about networking and connections if you’re a brand. Whether your network or friend’s or competitors or industry pals – you need to tap into them all. All your posts and updates and content must get comments, LIKES so that more buzz is created. In a sense, you need to leverage connections no matter from where they come and get the most out of social media.

#Grow and expand your base/audience

Social media benefits more if you have a large audience. Brands that are aware of this don’t delay in engaging with anyone on social media. They know the value of starting a conversation, coming in contact with both, those who matter to the business and even those that don’t. You got to look for ways to expand the base and audience for your business.

#Get the audience back to the site

What purpose of expanding the audience and horizon when you can’t convert them into prospects? So, you must have CTA back to the site. All your marketing materials, including teasers and giveaways, should aim to cox the audience back to the site. In a sense, your messages and ideas and content should guide users clearly about how to reach to the site.

#Get the content updated regularly

The best way to engage your audience is by giving them fresh, unique and updated content to consume. This way, you not only inform them but add value and open the window of enrichment. So, every aspect of your social activity, social posts, including your status and updates must be in tune with the current times.

#Show to the world you social signals

Your social signals are an asset worth spreading and worth showcasing to the world. This way, you can build trust among users and also aim to gain new users for sure. So, from friends to comments to LIKES to tweets to retweets, everything must be shown and leveraged to win the confidence of the target audience out there.

#Promote others’ stuff

Social networks are more of a give-and-take kind of arrangement where you get what you give. This is true in terms of sharing and liking. So, you need to share and promote the stuff of all those who do yours without issues. You need to reciprocate others as only this can help you reach up the ladder and build the brand presence.

#Engage your audience

SMO is successful if you know the art of engaging your audience. Engaging the audience means giving them something they relate to, something that adds value to them. Your social content should be enriching, informative, valuable and compelling, all at the same time. Your audience matters above everything else and you need to keep then engaged.

In overall, you need to trust and hire social media consulting services and open the big world of prospects for your business. After all, social media is something you just can’t ignore ever.

Reference- https://www.minddigital.com/social-media-optimization-smo-benefits-to-your-business-or-website/

How To Do Content Marketing On A Small Budget

Content marketing is about building your brand’s reputation online with a view to pulling customers towards your brand.

Content marketing is different from direct advertising or a campaign by campaign approach.
 

Why Do Content Marketing?

Small business and local business owners may be a little bit uncertain about this new mysterious marketing technique. But really when it comes to the digital space, content marketing is less technically complicated than other digital advertising techniques such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, banner ads, YouTube video ads and so on.

And the trendlines are clear. Here is data from Google Trends.

(Google Trends result for ‘Content Marketing’)

The Basics

Content marketing at its simplest level may mean adding a blog to your business website and posting content there regularly.

So, if you are a famous (or a new) bakery shop owner, you may want to post some of your baking secrets or tips on the blog. Similarly, if you own a specialist seafood restaurant, you can post prawn and shrimp recipes to the restaurant’s blog and help people cook tasty seafood themselves.

Be the Gordon Ramsay, or Martha Stewart, or Anthony Bourdain, or Jamie Oliver in your niche.

If you sell hiking equipment, you can always post tips about safe hiking practices or safe whitewater rafting practices to your site’s blog.

GoPro, which sells action cameras, aims to differentiate itself from other camera companies by claiming to be a content company.

Once your business acquires a certain size, you can do content marketing at scale. Both employees as well as consumers can become participants by creating content for you — basically, becoming volunteer evangelists for your business.

Consumers may do this by writing about their own transformative experience with a product or service sold by your company. Or, consumers may upload a video to YouTube that showcases the GoPro camera or the ‘Insane’ mode of their Tesla or its ‘AutoPilot’ features.

There is more to content marketing …
 

ROI

You may ask: what return do I get on my ‘investment’ in content marketing? First of all, the great benefit and advantage of content marketing is that it suits the pockets and budgets of all sizes. It can be done free of cost or you may need to spend a few thousands of dollars per annum on your content marketing effort.

And the ROI will be there. With content marketing, it takes time for results to show. There are SEO and organic search benefits as your content spreads across different social media.

Content marketing is not like a traditional advertising ‘campaign’ or its digital equivalent.

If you spend X amount of dollars on a PPC campaign or a banner ad or a Facebook campaign, the ROI on that will be measurable but clearly any gains of that campaign will be short-lived.

Think of the effect of such an ad campaign as being like the chart below:

(Benefits of Digital advertising plotted against time)

With content marketing, the reach, engagement, and trust keeps increasing over time.

Think of the benefits of content marketing over time as being somewhat like the chart below:

(Benefits of Content marketing plotted against time)

There is no fixed duration of content marketing as it is not a traditional advertising ‘campaign.’ It is more of a persistent, ongoing effort to capture the mindshare among your target audience and convert them into potential customers.

The primary purpose of content marketing is to enhance your brand’s online personality. Once your audience is hooked on the useful, engaging, or entertaining content from your brand, it is a matter of time before you can convert them into your customers.

The ROI after six months of a content marketing campaign can easily reach 300% and it keeps increasing over time. But the ROI depends on the quality of content.
 

Outsourcing Content Marketing to A Digital Marketing Agency

You should perform a cost-benefit analysis of which approach to content marketing works best for you.

Your options are:

✓ As the founder/owner, you do all of the content marketing yourself including writing the blog posts, replying to the blog comments, posting to social media, keeping tabs on the different social media reactions and conversations happening

✓ You put someone in-house as the guy in charge of content marketing and she takes care of all of the above tasks noted in point No. 1 above

✓ You hire someone to a full-time position to be in charge of all of your company’s content marketing

✓ Or, you outsource your content marketing efforts to a digital marketing agency such as Mind Digital.

Experienced digital marketing agencies will be able to expertly manage your content marketing campaign while ensuring all the right boxes are checked such as:

✓ Good quality content

✓ Presenting the content in a variety of forms such as blog posts, pdfs, slideshares, podcasts, videos, etc.

✓ Maintaining a regular content calendar

✓ And regularly posting to social media.

For small business owners, it may be better to focus on the core business rather than on creating content and so on. Similarly, having a full-time content professional in-house may be an overkill for a startup.

Outsourcing content marketing to a digital marketing agency is the most cost-effective solution.
 

SEO And Content Marketing

With Google growing more sophisticated in how it ranks websites in the organic search results, having good quality, fresh content is one of the best ways to rank well in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

When your content is shared widely on social media or has good quality backlinks from high authority websites, Google gets the ranking signal it needs.

You simply cannot conceive of an SEO campaign without content these days. And content — properly executed content campaigns — always carries an SEO signal or contains an SEO message for search engines.

Your content needs to have the target SEO keywords sprinkled in it as well as the LSI keywords and Google will do the rest.

One of the benefits of outsourcing content marketing to a professional SEO agency is that they are well acquainted with the necessary keyword density requirements as also how to avoid keyword stuffing.

With the right keyword research using tools like the Google Keyword Planner, you can really get to the high return long-tail keywords. SEO professionals at SEO agencies such as Mind Digital will have experience with finding out the correct long-tail keywords by conducting keyword research.
 

How To Do Content Marketing On A Small Budget

Adopt a multi-pronged approach to content marketing

This benefits your readers some of whom may like to read blog posts while others may prefer to download content in pdf format for reading later. Still others may prefer podcasts while short YouTube videos may be the format of choice for others.

So, present your content as:

A. Blog posts
B. Podcasts
C. Slideshows
D. Videos
E. PDFs
F. Infographics.

When you push the same content out in different formats, you should also study how they are doing relative to one another.

If you have invested your own time as the business owner/founder in writing the blog posts, creating the podcasts/videos, infographics, pdfs, and so on, then you would be interested to know which of these activities represented the best investment of your time.

After all, making a slick video or a good looking infographic will require time even if you have created the content while writing blog post.

On the other hand, if you have outsourced content marketing to a digital marketing or SEO agency, then evaluating the cost and performance of each type of content becomes even more important so that you can smartly allocate your content marketing and digital marketing budget.
 

Quality Over Quantity

You should not worry about how often your competitor posts content. Some bloggers may be able to post good quality content thrice a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That’s great! But you may find that pace difficult to sustain initially. Not a problem! You may opt for two blog posts per week. No point in having blog content that does not provide exceptional value or have some useful info for your readers. You should only try to post content that is likely to gain traction across social media and that will oly happen if your content is top notch, unique, and exceptional.

Think of the Olympics. There are teams from more than 200 nations playing in Rio at the moment. Probably the United States will be at the top of the medal tally at the end of the Games. Or China will be.

Look at the size of their teams. And also look at the team sizes of the UK and Australian contingents. Remember that the population of these four nations ranges from 1.4 billion to 20 million.

Which country out of the above is likely to win the most number of gold medals or any medals on a per capita basis? Most likely, that country will be Australia.

You can then say that Australia is the highest quality nation in terms of athletic prowess and excellence.
 

Don’t Waste Money on Trying to Create Viral Content

There is no secret formula to guessing the correct Powerball combination. Otherwise, everybody — or, lots of persons — would guess the correct combination.

Similarly, there is no secret formula to creating viral content. A Buzzfeed watermelon bursting experiment goes viral but you cannot plan that in advance — it is likely that hundreds of copycat viral video attempts have failed.

Sure, if you can have two men in jet packs flying over Dubai, the resulting video will get millions of views on YouTube, but that video means huge expenses. Drone videos are cheaper to make. Drone videos of theconstruction progress of Apple’s Campus 2 get good hits on YouTube as also videos of people boiling an iPhone in Coke.

Your challenge is to come up with something that is both creative and cheap. Philippe Petit’s stunt from 1974 where he walked across the top of the towers of the World Trade Center would probably be a guaranteed viral sensation today but tougher security would probably make the walk impossible in the first place.
 

Repurpose Great Content

Repurposing content means converting one form of content into another. If you have a blog post, if it easy to convert it into a slideshow or infographic, or a podcast, or video. It depends on your level of familiarity with these different content formats.

By presenting your informative content in multiple formats, you are able to get the maximum return on your research effort that went into writing the original blog post. Also, you can reach a larger audience by presenting your content in different formats.
 

Guest Blogging as A Source of Free Content

You can create a guest blogging page on your site where bloggers can pitch their blog posts. Of course, you reserve the right to accept or reject these pitches. You may end up rejecting about 90 percent of them but you may find a few good pieces occasionally that are worthy of publication and make the effort worthwhile.
 

Content Marketing Tips

Become A Better Writer

It’s always a good idea to improve your writing skills. If you are planning to handle the bulk of content marketing yourself, you can work on improving your writing skills so that you can produce increasing better content over time.

One of the key enablers for you to become a good writer is of course to read good stuff — whether online or offline. There are lots of long-form content that is published regularly online on an ongoing basis: The New Yorker is one good source and there are content aggregation services like Pocket and Longreads Weeklywhich will send the best of the day and best of the week email newsletters if you subscribe to them.

Here are a few tips to write persuasive, compelling online content:

✓ Online content should be presented in easily digestible form. You need to craft a really good headline to pull the reader in.

✓ There should be good subheaders as well.

✓ Short paragraphs with up to four sentences is the name of the game.

✓ Use active voice and avoid passive sentence construction.

✓ Use short sentences with not more than twenty words.

✓ Use the word ‘you’ to address your reader.

✓ Make it punchy.
 

Ensure Your Content Is Factually Accurate

Donald Trump may have come quite a long distance despite many plainly inaccurate claims on the campaign trail — and he continues to venture into uncharted territory — but you cannot hope to make an impact as a trustworthy and informative writer if you do not care about accuracy. So, skip the hyperbole and be sober.
 

Ensure Your Content Is Grammatically Correct

Having silly grammatical errors creep into your content can detract from the impact it can have on the reader. So, find someone — your spouse or kids who might do a quick proofreading of your content before or after you hit publish; but preferably before.
 

Develop A Unique Voice

This is probably easier said than done. You can present personal anecdotes in your writing or talk about politics or be unique in some way. It should reflect who you actually are — be authentic and people will likely love it. Social media such as Twitter is a great tool where you can reveal the informal side of yourself to all.
 

Make Content Easy to Engage With

You should enable comments on your blog posts so that your readers can provide feedback or ask for clarifications. You should engage with your community. You can add ‘Click to Tweet’ functionality to your content to make your content more shareable. There are WordPress plugins available as well as various other solutions you can find by a Google search.
 

Different Formats For Different Folks

We have already talked about the benefits of presenting your content as blog posts, email newsletters, PDFs, infographics, podcasts, YouTube videos, and so on.
 

Rich Media Content

Make content attractive to look at. Use Instagram and Pinterest images, video embeds and so on to make your blog posts attractive.
 

Conclusion

The battle to capture eyeballs in the online space is huge and digital ad spending is expected to overtake television ads in 2017 or 2018. Along with the growth in digital advertising, content marketing is growing non-stop. Here is a useful overview of the whole content marketing landscape.

The biggest benefit of content marketing as a digital advertising technique is that it can be done as cheaply as you want. Whether you choose to do all of it yourself or opt to outsource your content marketing to adigital marketing agency or SEO agency, you should remember that this is something for the ‘long-haul’ and the benefits will show eventually.

Reference:-https://www.minddigital.com/affordable-content-marketing-ideas-and-techniques/