5 Digital Marketing Tips To Grow Your Startup In 2018

It’s a great achievement to be able to launch your own startup in this tightly packed global business industry. You dreamt big and coalesced resources, ideas, and action plan to create your nascent platform.

A pat on the back for you, and a nudge on the other shoulder. You have yet to go stronger to grow stronger.

In this fast-paced and influencing business industry, you need to take measures on establishing your brand name with a robust digital marketing strategy.

Digital marketing is a powerful tool, can contribute powerfully to your online presence, and positively impact your bottom line.

Everything you do to build your digital presence counts toward your brand name getting known. When you are known by your target audience, it will start affecting your bottom line.

And one of the most effective ways to create a strong presence is by using digital media for your marketing needs.

Here are 5 essential digital marketing tips for startups:

1. User experience

Your audience is what matters. Your audience must be able to engage with your brand name, your values, and your product, to build a lasting relationship and association with your company.

Similarly, the audience is now more reflective and receptive when brands offer them unique user experience and brand value.

Your digital marketing strategies must be designed carefully to appeal to the audience of your market. Delve into research and find out what works for your audience.

Build their interest and knowledge by providing them with content that informs and inspires. You will also be able to strengthen the brand voice by continuously engaging with your audience.

User experience can be made effective primarily through content, communication channels and intuitive UI.

The loading speed of your website; the intuitive menu navigation; chatbots that assist in communication; and simplicity and tone of your content is key to a great user experience.

In addition, you need to develop a client management strategy that helps you connect with your customers.

This strategy will walk you through query and complaint management. Moreover, it will collect feedback for improvement and make your clients feel part of the brand community.

For example, develop a series of simple FAQs and use them to respond to your audience and clients’ queries on social media, via email, on phone, etc.

If you are keen to getting involved more, digital world is full of new updates. Go ahead and search for more tips and trends on making a captivating user experience.

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2. Creative content

You will need to invest in a solid content marketing strategy that engages your audience. Create content that is unique and fresh as it can have a strong impact o your target market.

From communicating your brand’s message to engaging your customers with information,  content is supreme as it gives something useful to your potential customers.

Great content can increase your organic traffic and can improve your search engine rankings.

Your audience is primarily looking for content that communicates value. Jeff Bulla says that you should use the 80/20 rule of creating and managing content.

Get to the point!80% of your content should not be about your product – no, it doesn’t backfire at all – and 20% of it could be focused on your online sales, giveaways, etc.

Messaging is also taking the industry by storm. Neil Patel shared how Facebook Messenger marketing campaign lends a bright inlet to effective digital marketing.

Your audience will be more likely to follow a link received in Facebook Messenger than they would through email marketing campaign. Again, the content you create and the medium you choose to employ will greatly affect your business’ growth. Learn more about Facebook Messenger bots here.

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3. Social media platforms

Your online presence and identity begins with your website and social media platforms. So you can engage your audience, communicate your message with powerful content through a strong social media platform.

As a startup, one of the first things that you probably worked on was an active social media strategy.

You know that in this business industry, social media is the key to leveraging your brand awareness and value.

Apps like SnapChat and Instagram are becoming popular and engaging the audience with brand names.

Be consistent and regular in your social media strategy and maximise your growth. Good social media strategies can have a profound impact on lead generation and conversions, brand awareness and, of course, better search engine ranking.

And while social media platforms are effective and raging with success for startups and established brands, influencer marketing has seen a rise since 2016. This is like referrals that are convincing for the vast majority of social media users.

Keep a watchful eye on who could be your brand’s influencers. Get in touch with them and engage them in helping you build your brand’s visibility.

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4. Video marketing is seeing an upward trend

Videos are powerful tools to communicate extensively. Consider Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and SnapChat stories to engage your audience.

You can hold webinars and live events for product launches, hold tutorials, and answer questions in real time. This gives a tangible feeling to your audience and helps them connect more closely with your brand and product.

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5. Search engine optimization

And most importantly, invest in a credible SEO solution. Conduct an SEO audit and find out how users are interacting with your website and social media platforms.

SEO will look into aspects of your website and page optimization, device optimisation and credible link building for better visibility in search engine results.

For example, in one of Google’s highly important updates, the websites that are not responsive on various digital devices will not appear in search altogether, regardless of their SEO measures!

Once you understand the nature of association, outreach and impact of your brand’s SEO, rehash or redefine your digital marketing strategy accordingly.

Understand how SEO works and learn about the expectations and prospects of hiring SEO specialists. This will help your startup to grow quicker. Be consistent and regular in your digital marketing strategy.

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Growth optimized

A good digital marketing strategy can act as a catalyst to business outreach, impact, and growth because it connects the audience with the business in real time, and hence, swifter than conventional marketing strategies.

Resultantly, the conversion rates could be impacted positively as well. The consumer trend of trying new brands is growing if they are genuinely made to feel a connection with the brand values.

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Being consistent and regular in your digital marketing strategy will help you to increase your startup’s visibility most effectively.

Moreover, engaging an effective, result-oriented team of SEO professionals will help you attract traffic to your brand’s online presence.

A good digital marketing strategy will do just that – attract the right kind of consumers to your business – and ensuring your survival in the fast-paced and dynamic industry.

Source: https://digitalagencynetwork.com/5-digital-marketing-tips-to-grow-your-startup-in-2018/

15 Ways to Use Snapchat for Your Business

by NEIL PATEL on FEBRUARY 23, 2018

The days of Snapchat being used solely for sending pictures between friends are over.

This social media platform has evolved. Your company can’t afford to ignore the impact this marketing channel can have on your business.

It’s an absolute necessity if you’re focusing on Generation Z as your target market. That’s because 71% of Gen Z use Snapchat as part of their daily routines. Plus, 51% of this group use Snapchat roughly 11 times each day.

While Snapchat is known for its popularity with teens, its market penetration is starting to hit young adults and older generations as well.

Snapchat is a viable marketing channel if your current target market falls anywhere between the ages of 12 and 34. But keep an eye on these trends as older generations may continue adapting to this platform.

In Q4 of 2017, Snapchat hit 187 million active daily users. The platform has seen more than an 18% growth rate in terms of daily users in the last year.

There is no sign of a slow down, and I expect these marketing trends to continue in the future.

What exactly does this mean for your business?

It’s great news. You now have another viable marketing channel to engage with your customers.

But this may be intimidating or confusing if you’ve never used Snapchat before and don’t know how to apply it to your business.

Fortunately, you’re in luck. I’ll show you the top 15 ways to use Snapchat for your business.

1. Post to your story often

Once you’ve created a Snapchat account, you need to make sure it’s active. The best way to approach this is by adding content to your story on a daily basis.

Anything you post on Snapchat will disappear after 24 hours. Posting content often will keep your brand fresh in the minds of your followers.

Just don’t go overboard. Posting 20 times in one day isn’t effective.

That’s because people will skip over your posts. Depending on how many people a user follows on Snapchat, they’ll have lots of stories to view each day.

But that doesn’t mean they are going to watch every single post in its entirety.

According to a study conducted by Snaplytics, engagement drops by 36% once users reach the fourth snap of a story. They also discovered that roughly 80% of your followers will see your post about 4 or 5 hours after it’s been added to your story.

What does this mean for you?

Based on these numbers, I’d recommend updating your Snapchat story about three times per day, every four or five hours.

This will help keep your engagement high and prevent your followers from skipping over your content.

2. Promote your Snapchat account on other marketing channels

For your Snapchat strategy to be successful, you need followers.

Rather than trying to conjure up followers out of thin air, try to target users following your business accounts on other platforms.

Look at how People Magazine uses this strategy in their Instagram bio:

This is really important for you, especially if you just created a Snapchat account for your company. Nobody’ll know you have an account unless you tell them.

In addition to Instagram, you can promote it on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can even work this promotion into your YouTube videos.

Tell your email subscribers to follow you on Snapchat and pitch it on your website too.

The more channels you promote it on, the greater the chance of getting more followers you’ll have.

3. Create a sponsored lens

People love to use Snapchat filters and lenses.

It’s estimated that sponsored filters are seen by 16 million users each day. These filters are a way for people to take creative photos.

Snapchat has plenty of them built directly into their platform. Instead of posting a basic selfie, users can make the image black and white, apply a filter to make their eyes abnormally large, or make their nose disappear.

Some filters for video snaps can even change the pitch of your voice.

All of these were created to make users have more fun. They’ll send a snap to their friends with one of these filters because it’s entertaining and often humorous.

But now businesses can create a sponsored filter as well. Gatorade used this strategy during Super Bowl 50, and it turned into one of the most successful Snapchat campaigns on record.

If you’ve ever watched the Super Bowl, you know it’s tradition for the winning coach to get Gatorade dumped on his head by the players. So Gatorade created a sponsored filter during the game that would simulate Gatorade getting dumped on the user’s head.

The filter had more than 165 million views and increased their purchase intent by 8%.

Here’s another example from Taco Bell to show you what these filters look like:

As you can see, the filters themselves are silly, but they create brand awareness and help you create engagement.

The only problem with this strategy is that it’s expensive. If you want to create a filter during a holiday or special event, such as the Super Bowl, you have to be ready to dish out between $100,000 and $750,000.

That cost will keep your filter active for 24 hours. But if you can afford it, the return on your investment can be huge.

The Taco Bell filter above was viewed 224 million times. The average user spent 24 seconds playing with the lens before sharing it with friends.

4. Let social influencers take over your account

Another great way to get more followers and increase engagement is through social proof.

Celebrities and other influencers already have a steady following on social media. Take advantage of that.

If you allow someone else to take over your Snapchat account, you can expose your brand to a much wider audience. Some of these people may not even know your company existed until they saw an influencer talking about it.

You may need to pay the influencer to do this unless you have some kind of other mutual agreement or common interest in whatever you’re promoting.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about from iHeartRadio:

They allowed singer Hailee Steinfeld to take over their account. As a result, she promoted the takeover to her fans on social media.

Hailee has over 933k followers on Twitter and more than 8 million Instagram followers. This is great brand exposure for iHeartRadio, especially because she is directly related to their industry.

That’s important for you to keep in mind as well. You may find a professional basketball player with 10 million Instagram followers, but if sports aren’t related to your industry, their followers may not be relevant to your company.

5. Feature user-generated content

Ask your followers to send you pictures and videos of them interacting with your brand or using your products.

You can repost this content on your Snapchat story.

A great way to encourage user-generated content is by running contests and similar promotions.

GrubHub used this strategy on Snapchat a few years back. Their campaign was a huge success.

They ran a contest called “SnapHunt,” which lasted for a week. Every day they posted a new challenge. A winner was selected for each challenge and won a $50 gift card.

During this contest, GrubHub’s followers grew by 20%. Furthermore, 30% of their followers participated in this contest.

It’s safe to say engagement was high.

6. Offer discounts and promo codes

Not sure what to post on your story?

When in doubt, give your followers something they can actually use. Send out discounts and other promotional offers via Snapchat.

This strategy will also help you drive sales and increase conversions. KIND used this strategy to offer their Snapchat followers 15% off a purchase.

When you’re posting on Snapchat, keep the overall goal of your company in mind. Don’t get distracted with all the other bells and whistles.

You want sales.

Offering discounts is a great way to accomplish this.

7. Take over another account

Earlier we talked about letting someone else take over your Snapchat account. But another effective strategy is taking over another account yourself.

When someone else takes over your account, you’re relying on that person’s followers to add you on Snapchat to view your content.

But when you take over an account, the audience won’t have to do anything. It will be your job to convince them they should be following your brand.

Make sure your content is engaging.

Even if they don’t add your Snapchat account, you’ll still be able to create brand awareness with a new audience.

8. Promote a new product

Keep your followers up to date with any exciting news from your brand. A new product launch is definitely worth mentioning.

Even if your product hasn’t launched yet, you can build hype and anticipation—consumers will be ready for it when your product finally gets released.

Here’s something to take into consideration. How often do people visit your website? I’m willing to bet that the average consumer isn’t checking your website on a daily basis for any updates.

But they are checking Snapchat every day.

Just because you’re promoting a new product launch on your website doesn’t mean that people will see it. That’s why you’ve got to take advantage of other marketing channels.

Here’s an example of a new product promotion via Snapchat from McDonald’s:

Try to follow their lead the next time you want to tell your followers about a new product or service.

9. Provide exclusive access

It’s obviously unreasonable to let your social media followers to walk right into your office and check things out.

But with Snapchat, you can give them that same exclusive feeling by providing them with behind-the-scenes content. Show your followers what it’s like in your office or production facility.

If you’re at an event, take snaps of some of the action backstage.

This type of content will keep your followers engaged because it makes them feel as if they are getting VIP treatment.

10. Reply to your followers

The majority of your Snapchat strategy should be focused on uploading content to your story. However, that’s not the only way to engage with your audience.

Followers may reply to your story and send you direct messages as well.

On other social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, everyone can see whether you’re responding to followers or not.

But on Snapchat, only you and the person sending the message know whether you’re responding. So it’s easy for companies to ignore comments on Snapchat.

But you should still make an effort to reply to your followers.

Getting a personal response from a brand will make the user feel special. Ignoring their message shows them you don’t care about what they have to say.

68% of customers say the reason why they stop using a particular brand is if they don’t think the company cares about them.

You can easily avoid this by simply responding to those private messages.

11. Post relevant content

Your snaps shouldn’t be mindless images of your products. You can use this platform to show your audience your brand is aware of various topics.

You could talk about charities or any other type of social involvement of your business.

Here’s an example from Dove. They used their platform to discuss self-esteem issues:

Their Snapchat story featured interviews with 30 women and various psychologists. They wanted to have an open discussion about self-esteem issues to help women enhance their self-images.

As a result, the campaign had more than 130,000 views.

Just make sure you tread carefully when you’re approaching something like this. It’s best for businesses to stay away from issues involving race, religion, politics, and other controversial topics.

12. Promote an upcoming event

If your company is hosting or attending some kind of meeting or event, tell your audience about it.

Depending on what kind of event it is, you could even try to get your followers to come and show their support.

67% of people are more likely to purchase tickets to an event after watching a similar event on a live video stream.

While Snapchat technically isn’t live video, it’s pretty close. You can assume the percentage of people interested in the event will be similar.

13. Drive traffic to your website

Snapchat recently introduced a new feature that allows you to add links to your story. To do this, simply take a photo or video using their camera as you normally would.

Then click the paperclip icon before adding it to your story.

Now you can add a link to your post. Users will have access to the link if they follow the prompt at the bottom of your story to “swipe up.”

This is a great way to increase your website traffic.

14. Inform your followers about an important milestone

Keep your Snapchat audience informed about important dates for your company.

Is it your 10th anniversary? Is it your CEO’s birthday?

You can even talk about other milestones, like getting your 10,000th follower on a certain social media platform.

All of these are great excuses to post on Snapchat. It’s a nice break from the same boring posts that get shared on a daily basis.

15. Mix it up

This piggybacks on my last point. You don’t want your content to be boring.

Lots of the tips we’ve discussed so far are definitely useful and should be applied to your Snapchat marketing strategy. But with that said, don’t just pick one or two and use the same ones every day.

You’ve got to keep things interesting.

If your followers aren’t entertained, they’ll stop following you. Once that happens, it won’t be easy for you to market to those people again.

You can avoid this by keeping your content fresh.

Conclusion

Snapchat is growing in popularity. If your company doesn’t have a Snapchat account, you need to create one ASAP.

But once your account is active, you need to get followers and keep them engaged.

Overall, you want to make sure your Snapchat marketing strategy makes your business better. In addition to creating brand awareness, you want to drive sales as well.

Whether Snapchat is new for you or you’re looking for a fresh insight to spice up your existing Snapchat marketing campaign, the tips I’ve outlined above are a great place to start.

Use this guide as a reference for increasing engagement on Snapchat.

Source: https://www.quicksprout.com/2018/02/23/15-ways-to-use-snapchat-for-your-business/

Using Facebook to promote your business - checklist

 

Facebook allows small businesses to build relationships with customers, encouraging endorsement and spreading positive word of mouth. Here's how to get the most out of your Facebook business page.

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• Find out if your customers are on Facebook; and whether they expect to find your business there. If you run any kind of consumer-facing enterprise, such as a café, a shop, a plumbing business or an ecommerce website, many of your customers will want to keep in touch on Facebook.
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• Register for your free account and set up a Facebook page for your business. If you've already got a personal Facebook page, it can help to drive traffic to your business page.
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• If you are stuck for ideas, you can get inspiration and advice on Facebook’s own Facebook for Business page. It has useful case studies and step-by-step guidance.
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• Tell people you are on Facebook. Use other social networks, like Twitter, to post links to your Facebook page, put details of it on your website and all your marketing literature, and include a link below your email signature.
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• Make the most of your profile. Include appropriate images, a link to your website, an overview of your company and a description of your product or service.
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• Use keywords in your profile and posts that people are most likely to search for in relation to your product – that way your page will appear more prominently in search engine results. A key advantage of having a Facebook page for your business is that customers will be able to find you more easily from their mobile devices.
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• Post content that people typically enjoy on Facebook. Images, in particular, tend to attract the most likes, shares and comments. According to Facebook, images account for 75% of content posted by brands.
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• The content you post should show the human side of your business, but make sure it is in line with your brand values and does not damage your reputation. Create a social media policy so that your employees don’t go ‘off-message’ with their comments.
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• Consider advertising on Facebook if you want to reach specific groups. Facebook allows you to target ads based on everything from location and demographics to behaviour and interests.
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• Engage with your followers. Facebook users love to talk to real people and share their news and views. Reply to queries and respond to comments, including any complaints. You can also encourage discussion and feedback - positive user-generated content provides a very powerful endorsement for your business.
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• Direct people to your own website or blog from your Facebook page. Set your blog's RSS feed so that you automatically publish snippets on your Facebook page to encourage followers to visit your website.
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• Try rewarding your Facebook followers by running competitions or providing exclusive deals. Many people use Facebook to find special offers that aren't available elsewhere.

Be sure to measure everything. Page Insights provides an overview of who your customers are and how they're connecting with your business. You can also use the Adverts Manager dashboard to see how your ads are performing against your objectives.

Source: https://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/social-media/facebook/using-facebook-to-promote-your-business-checklist