5 Criteria To Select The Ideal Content Distribution Channel For Your Business

With more [distribution] channels, it’s important to have ‘must-have’ content and brands that cut through the clutter. -Thomas O Staggs

Deciding the ideal distribution channel for your business is extremely critical. It can potentially lead to huge profits or losses or can also put your future survival in jeopardy.

In this blog post, we will discuss guidelines on selecting the various channels on which you can aggregate your audience. Some of the most popular options are:-

  1. Social Platforms- Eg. Facebook, Twitter etc.
  2. Email
  3. Forums/Community Sites

You can pick and choose either any one single platform or you could choose multiple channels for the distribution of your content. However, for a small business just starting out into the market with a limited number of resources, I would suggest you stick with one channel, the one most appropriate for you, and then later diversify and expand into different channels.

In this post, for the purpose of easy illustration, we will consider and take into account three different platforms and discuss it’s advantages and limitations so that you can select the ideal content distribution channel for your business:-

  1. Email
  2. Facebook
  3. Twitter

Let’s get right to it then:-

1. Reach-

Which channel will help you to most effectively reach out to the maximum of your target audience?

In terms of an industry benchmark, Email> Facebook> Twitter

Why do I make such a bold statement? Because “there are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined.”-Campaign Monitor

“In 2017, global e-mail users amounted to 3.7 billion users” – Statista.com; as compared to “2.07 billion monthly active Facebook users” – Zephoria.com. “As of the third quarter of 2017, the microblogging service [Twitter] averaged 330 million monthly active users.”- Statista.com

Facebook- Think of it this way. You need an email address to sign up for Facebook. Do you need a Facebook profile to create an email address?

Twitter- With respect to the reach of Twitter, it is nowhere near Email or even Facebook for that matter. The only plus point for the consideration of Twitter in this list is due to the presence of thought and opinion leaders on this platform.

But surely email does not get to enjoy all the benefits. The disadvantage of email as a platform is that you will have to begin from scratch, just like a community forum. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter almost hand out their users to you on a red carpet, to be used at your disposal.

2. Content Publishing Frequency-

What kind of content publishing frequency do you expect?

Email- If you have selected email as your distribution channel, you simply cannot bombard your audience with 5-7 emails a day. You will experience an unsubscription rate like never seen before. A frequency of once a day is more appropriate to engage your audience.

Facebook-2- 3 updates a day is acceptable by users, provided that your content provides value to them and is not merely monotonous sales ads.

Twitter- Users are more than happy receiving even 1 content unit every three hours.

This is the beauty of each platform. You need to decide what kind of content publishing frequency your business demands and act accordingly.

3. Content Consumption Pattern-

How do you want people to consume your content? How do you want users to engage (take action) with your content?

Facebook- Good multimedia content like photos, graphics, videos etc. are bound to perform better on Facebook than on Email. In fact, Facebook’s algorithm favours those who publish multimedia over textual content.

Email- Images on email will not be visible in the first view and the user would need to click a separate link which would redirect them to a blog post featuring your content. Seems tiresome, doesn’t it?

Now you see that in case of email, inline consumption is not favoured while in the case of social platforms, inline consumption of content is not only favoured but appreciated and encouraged. In fact, social media platforms allow you the option to engage with your audience. Users can easily like, comment and share your content with the click of a button, which could otherwise not be done on Email.

Here is where our beloved social media platforms rank higher than Email.

4. Profiling, Personalization and Targeting-

Segmentation and Targeting is the place where Email emerges victorious once again. Even though Facebook allows you to send targeted messages to a set of users that have liked your page, email is a free platform that you have 100% control over.

It is up to you what kind of data is available to you and what kind of data you can capture.

You can actually send out an automatic welcome email to visitors who have filled out a newsletter subscription form on your website or a reminder email to those who have not visited your website in the last 30 days. The customizability is endless.

Thus, from the Profiling, Personalization and Targeting perspective, Email is a winner here.

5. Channel Stability-

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. are all proprietary platforms. They own and control every aspect of the platform and have the authority to choose who gets to view your content and who doesn’t. If you think that is not right (or a violation of your rights), take a look at their comprehensive terms and conditions; which we all supposedly read and accept.

Facebook, for instance, changes its algorithm almost every week.

In the earlier days, a content unit posted on Facebook would reach out to a significant proportion of your likes, if not all. That’s not the case anymore. In a bid to increase paid ads, Facebook has immensely reduced the reach of your post, persuading you into opting for the paid alternative to promote your post to your own likes.

A study from Edgerank Checker found that between February 2012 and March 2014, organic reach for the average Facebook Page dropped from 16% to 6.5%. Research from Social@Ogilvy, meanwhile, suggests that for Pages with more than 500,000 Likes, organic reach could be as low as 2%.-Hubspot

As a small business, this would most definitely impact you as not everyone can afford to spend lavishly on every post.

However, in the case of Email as a platform, that’s not a problem. An email sent to your audience would most assuredly reach the inbox of that users. (Spam and Promotion is a different matter entirely. In order to avoid our email going into spam, we need to focus on using the right techniques of sending an email.

Conclusion-

The above 5 criteria are a short list of guidelines that every business must consider before opting into a particular platform for the distribution of your content.

Note that in most cases it’s not necessary to choose one single platform or two for that matter. If relevant, you can opt to go for multiple channels as well.

However, as I have mentioned before, you should focus your energy and resources on a single platform and then subsequently grow out into multiple channels.

Image Source- OptinMonster.com, Google, Business2Community.com,

Top 10 Ways To Make Your Content More Clear And Creative

About

Content is the basic way to describe your product or service. Everything can be great if your content is attractive and easily communicative. We will discuss how our content can be clear and creative. There are so many ways to make it more understandable. So below we will discuss the top 10 ways to make your content more clear and creative: –

Set a clear target

Create a targeted content with the main point. First and the most important is to know about your target audience. Create a content according to your customer preference. There are so many different types of customers which can be categorized. For example, new engaging customers, the old customers who are now not coming to your website and there are many more variations.
The segmentation on the basis of locality is the most common one. As we create the segmented list we have a clear target what type of customers to be taken in mind while creating a particular

Content has an important role
An important role

page. Be clear for whom you are writing your words. This will help you to advertise your various content to different people according to their category.

 

Work on your subject

Work on your subject deeply. What you are trying to say must be first clear to you. Talk about something which is making your time useful. Make the best use of social media. There is so much to know about whatever you are going to write. And social media a free and a vast exploration of it. It will help you with each and every question you come up with while writing content.

Effective language

Make your words clear. The language in which the content should be understandable by the person from whom it is. Use common words but the attractive one. So many variations will lead to a complex content. Which will confuse your customer and the person will probably ignore your content.
Get your whole content to the point. Create a good set up before you actually go to the main page. Connect it with your previous page and also the one which is yet to come.

Build a trust

Be so generous with your content so that it creates a sense of belongingness. People should relate to what they read. An engaging way of writing is the best way to get your customer involve in the subject you are talking about.

Include links to your content

Include different links to your content so that it leads the person to your landing page. I would say create a connection with all your social media platforms. Be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube on whatever platform you have your page connect each of them together. So that people could make it an easy source to get into your whole story. On whatever platform they go they find the same advertisement on each of them.

Increase the reputation of your content.
Increase the reputation.

 

Clear call to action

Call to action is very important for any business or blog. It can be in the form of lead, sales or web traffic. Create an easy and effective call to action. Also, the page where your call to action will lead them should be understandable. People will not try to make effort to understand what you are trying to say. They want the landing page to be understandable by itself. So, work on your landing page which will make the meaning of your call to action.

Add SEO to your account

Yoast SEO is an option provided by WordPress. It makes your content clearer in its own way. It helps you with the word limit, images. Basically, it improves the way you write any content. It provides you with improvements you should make in your content. It’s a very important tool for writing. It scores you according to your writing so that you could improve your work. It helps you with the systematic order of your words.

Be screen friendly

Now that what to and how to and why to questions of yours and solved. You should look up to the clarity of the content. The images or the videos which have been entered in the content should be of high quality. There should not be any error in those images or videos.
It leads to the bad impact on the ones looking for it. Videos should be clearly visible on each and every device. No two person uses the same devices to read the same content. It can be a laptop and at the same moment, it can be a cell phone or a tablet. So, consider in mind how you can adjust them accordingly.

Keep it short and simple

Understand the time game. A few moments and the content can get unread. It’s a second’s game make it worth. Trim your words, make it short. Don’t expect people to spend their time reading your whole page. That would be the biggest mistake you could do. Only the person will give their time to your page is when your page contains an attracting information. It should attract people. Think like your consumer and make it clear, precise and simple.

Create mini stories

There is pages which is can be made attractive by an easy medium. Sometimes when people start taking interest in your work. You can go for mini-stories for your subject. Give knowledge for free. Sometimes these sorts of things keep engaging customers. They will relate your subject, which can also lead to keeping a good interaction with customers. These small things can make your customers your promoters.

Quality of content is important
Quality of content is important.

 

 

Conclusion

These points are very important while writing the content. Be sure of following them. These can change the page to whole new level. There are so many tools to make your content better, practice each one of them. You will get more variations with your writing. The more you try to improve the more you can interact with people, after all, that’s our main goal. We say less is more. That is what content is, the less and attractive you make it, the more people will get to know about it.

Result Oriented E-Mail List Segmentation using Tools and Software

Email Marketing Segmentation

Introduction

Result Oriented E-Mail List Segmentation using Tools and Software- in this regard, what makes email marketing so powerful, some say that the secret sauce is email list segmentation. email list segmentation is the practice of dividing your email list into groups based on the characteristics. Segmenting email list helps to speak more intelligently and directly with customers, giving them information that they want at the opportune time. Smart marketers use email list segmentation to drastically improve the effectiveness of their email marketing campaigns. Personalized emails deliver higher transaction rates, yet many of brands fail to use them effectively. By understanding the specific characteristics that differentiate each of these groups, you can tailor the content of your email marketing campaigns to each individual segment and significantly increase conversions.

Everyone’s business is different, so the ways that you choose to segment your email list will differ from how someone else segments their list. However, there are a few basics that will help to segment list properly and effectively:

  • Email Segmentation Software: Email Service Provider(ESP) allows to segment email list. There are number of Email Service Providers in the market lets take a look later.
  • Page-Level Targeting: A tool that will allow to create targeted email opting forms for specific website visitors, and then add them to the appropriate email list segments.
  • Lead Magnets: Now we need to create some lead magnets that will allow your website visitors to self-identify as belonging to one of your segments.

 

Email Segmentation Definition

“Email list segmentation is a technique that email marketers use to send highly targeted emails by dividing their list up into smaller groups or segments”.

Email Segmentation Software and Tools

1. EmailOctopus:

  • $0-$42/mo
  • EmailOctopus sends your Mail through Amazon’s simple Email service(SES), saving money without sacrificing deliver-ability.

 

2. MailChimp:

  • $0-$10,000(Free-high Volume Custom Quote)
  • Send Better Email.
  • Its Features and integrations allow you to send marketing emails, automated messages, and targeted campaigns and detailed reports help you keep improving over time.
  • Get insight about your subscribers and keep your contacts in one place with subscriber profiles.
  • Helps you email the right people at the right time.
  • Send automated emails based on customer behavior and preferences.
  • Get started with pre-built Workflows or use our built-in segmentation and targeting options to build custom rules. And get in-depth reporting on how each of your automated series is performing.

3. Aweber:

  • $19-$194(Monthly-Yearly)
  • Easy email marketing tools that allow you to send awesome emails.
  • Time-Saving Autoresponders, Seamless Integrations, Faster Email List Growth, Easy Importing, Industry-Leading Deliver-ability.

4. Intercom:

  • $49 – $500
  • Intercom is one place for your entire business to see and talk to customers.
  • Have live conversations and send targeted messages to website visitors and users of your app.

 

5. ConvertKit:

  • $29+
  • Email marketing for professional bloggers

 

 

 

 

6. Newsletter2Go:

  •  $0-$1200 (Premium)
  • Newsletter2Go’s email marketing software is specifically tailored to online retailers, which is demonstrated by its many integrations for online shops and its unique features such as 1 click product transferal or automatic recipient synchronization.
  • The Newsletter2Go cloud software is Easy to use – thanks to an intuitive editor allowing responsive newsletters to be designed in minutes.
  • Secure – due to 256-Bit SSL encryption and Newsletter2Go’s strong commitment to European data protection laws. Powerful: thanks to white listed servers and numerous certifications, which mean that Newsletter2Go can offer excellent delivery rates!

7. ActiveCampaign:

  • $9-$149 (Basic-Enterprise).
  • Grow your business with email marketing automation, sales automation, marketing automation and automatic follow ups.
  • Send newsletters, design beautiful email campaigns, and keep in touch with your contacts and customers.
  • Automate your marketing channels using personal and behavioral data about your contacts.
  • Get more leads and close deals faster with our refreshing new take on customer relations.

8. Customer.io:

  • $50-$1250 (Bootstrapper-Custom Quote)
  • Customer.io helps you send targeted human messages to your users, by utilizing their unique interactions with your business.
  • Send emails based on what people do (or don’t do). Flexible segmentation, Comprehensive reporting and A-B testing are a sample of our enterprise-class features in every Customer.io account.
  • It track the way people use your app and keep every email you send each person.
  • You can use that history to tailor each person’s experience.
  • Immediately your real-time data is streaming in to Customer.io and triggering actions based on rules you control.

9. Sendbloom:

  •  Custom Quote
  • Make outbound sales feel inbound. Sendbloom is a data-driven sales automation platform that makes it easy to create hyper-targeted email campaigns.
  • Know your Prospect, Tailor your messaging, Nurture Active Campaigns, Track Valuable Metrics, send with Google Gmail.

10. Iterable:

  • Request quote
  • The Right Message,to the Right Device,at the Right Time. Real-time consumer marketing made simple. Send the right message.
  • Select seamlessly between email and mobile push notifications based on what a customer does on your site, your app or in past campaigns.
  • Build sophisticated workflows in minutes without any code. Segments and dynamic lists are completely up-to-date, campaign analytics and reports are instant.

11. SmartMail.io:

  • Request Strategy Quote
  • Triple Your Open & Click Rates. Sell Up To 430% More With Email.
  • We implement and manage life cycle email campaigns for eCommerce companies.
  • Send immediately after user signs up, For new visitors only.
  • Campaign Setup, Email Template Design, Automate and Send, Monitor progress on all key metrics with login access our real time reporting.
  • Our techies handle the entire data integration process so you don’t have to lift a finger.
  • smartmail.io manage all the email sending and deliver-ability with no limits on how many are sent.
  • smartmail.io develop subject line and body copy for every email to ensure optimal performance

12. Send With Us

  • $0-$399/mo
  • Email automation for product teams and developers.
  • A beautiful dashboard to manage all your templates and a simple REST API to automate everything.

13. Zenbership

  • Free
  • Free & open source membership CRM software for online businesses facilitating the acquisition, monetization & retention of members.

14. ExpertSender

  • Custom Quote
  • “Triple Your Open & Click Rates, Sell Up To 430% More With Email We implement and manage lifecycle email campaigns for eCommerce companies.
  • Message content features, Managing effectiveness of email campaigns, Flexible configuration, Mailing list management, Managing subscriber, Advanced subscriber segmentation, Deliverability and authentication, Task automation.

15. Campaign Monitor

  • $9+
  • Campaign Monitor makes it easy for you to create, send, and optimize your email marketing campaigns.
  • Getting started only takes a few minutes.
  • Campaign Monitor offers a powerful email builder to design pixel-perfect, branded emails that look incredible in every inbox, on every device.
  • Campaign Monitor also gives users the functionality to A/B test, use dynamic content, segment their lists and more to make sure your email campaigns deliver results.
  • They also offer email automation and transnational email for marketers so that users can deliver a branded, consistent experience across every customer communication

16. Emma

  • Request
  • Emma’s a web-based service that lets you create, send and track stylish email campaigns and surveys.
  • Every Emma account includes: Unlimited emails to your list of subscribers; A revolutionary editor to drag, drop, edit and style content in seconds; Smart audience segmentation with unlimited groups and fields; Seamless integration with popular CRM, e-commerce, event, survey and social tools Onboarding that sets you up for success; Automated emails for welcomes, birthdays, win-backs and nurture series; Real-time analytics and insights, even when you’re on the go; And, of course, our fantastic, award-winning, super-helpful customer service.

17. Ongage

  • $499-$949 (Gold-Custom Quote)
  • Empowering email marketers to optimize.
  • The vendor-agnostic email marketing platform.
  • The only front end for hire that connects to your email delivery provider, including SMTP relays, ESPs & on-premise MTAs.
  • Optimize deliverability and reduce email marketing costs by working with several email delivery vendors and on-premise MTAs, at the same time.
  • Unique email routing.
  • Multi-view in-depth analytics.

18. Activetrail

  • 9€-99€ (Minimum-Maximum)
  • ActiveTrail is a leading multichannel email marketing platform provider (SaaS).
  • ActiveTrail provides an advanced multichannel platform for authorized email marketing, landing pages, surveys, lead management and more, all built on a multilingual and user-friendly web-based system.

19. Sendy

  • $59 (one time free)
  • Send newsletters, 100x cheaper via Amazon SES

20.Threads.io

  • $0 – $600
  • Easily understand user engagement and trigger behavior-driven communications

21.Nudge Spot

  • $0-$199/mo
  • Proactive Customer Communication Made Simple.
  • Talk to your customers based on what they do (or don’t do).
  • Give a 10x boost to your customer engagement.

22.MadKudu

  • MadKudu helps SaaS companies convert more trials into sales.
  • Results show a 20% increase in conversion rate.
  • MadKudu’s technology automatically mines user behavior data to identify which users are ready to convert, which are stuck and why, in order to trigger smart messages using the marketing tools companies already use.

23. Get Vero

  • $99-$1049/mo
  • Customer engagement made easy. Customers, users, subscribers…they are all people.
  • Vero helps you get to know them.

Email Segmentation Best Practices

1. New Subscribers

Don’t neglect your brand new subscribers by taking their email address and leaving them in the cold. Instead, give them a warm welcome with a welcome email. Simply add an exit-intent popup to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers. Then engage with them to convert them into customers, But why stop at just one welcome email? You could even send a series of emails to all new subscribers with the best of your blog content or show your new app users how to take the first step and then the next and the next. Whatever you decide to do with your welcome email or welcome sequence make sure that you are introducing your new subscribers to your best stuff, so you can begin to grow that relationship with them.

2. Preferences

Ask your customers how often they wish to receive your emails, and give them the option to select the type of emails they want to receive. Do they want blog posts updates, discounts, important updates, unsubscribe or all of the above.

3. Interests

Use your data on your subscriber’s interests to curate content that you know they’ll love.

4. Location

Unless people travel across the country or the world to attend your events, you probably don’t want to blast your entire email list every time you have an in-person event in a particular city.Instead, use your subscriber’s location to send targeted emails to let them know about upcoming events in their area.

5. Open Rate

Use information about your subscriber’s open rate to segment subscribers who frequently engage with your emails vs. those who engage less frequently. For example, you could reward your more engaged subscribers by giving them special opportunities.

6. Inactivity

If your subscribers have been inactive for a little while, remind them of the next step that you want them to take.For subscribers who have been inactive for a long period of time – say two months – you may want to send out a targeted email to see if they still want to hear from you, or if they would rather unsubscribe. This way, you keep your list fresh. 

7. Lead Magnet

Segment your subscribers by the specific lead magnet that they opted in for.

8. Lead Magnet Type

Everyone learns in different ways. Some subscribers may prefer to attend your live webinars, others prefer to read your summarized PDF reports.When you segment your subscribers based on the type of lead magnet that they initially opted in for (and any additional types they opted in for later), you can continue to give them the type of content they like best.

9. Opt-in Frequency

Some of your subscribers opt in for one of your lead magnets, while others may opt in for multiple lead magnets. Create a segment of subscribers who opted in for more than one lead magnet, and you’ll know who is most likely to want to hear about any new lead magnets that you have coming out. Then, you can notify that segment about your new lead magnets without pestering your other subscribers.

10. Abandoned Form

How about targeting visitors who started to fill out a form on your website, but never completed it?For example, you may have a web app with a free trial that requires a signup. A certain percentage of your visitors are going to start to sign up and then either change their mind or get distracted. You can recover those signups by sending them an email reminding them to finish the process. Just make sure that the first step in your signup form is to ask visitors to submit their email address.

11. Abandoned Shopping Cart

Shopping cart abandonment is a common issue for eCommerce sites. Thankfully, you can use targeted email marketing to re-engage those shoppers.

12. Didn’t Buy

Perhaps your visitor missed out on an opportunity to buy something altogether. For instance, you may have launched a product for a limited time, and now they’ve missed the window of opportunity to buy.What is the next step for these subscribers? The first thing you may want to do is send them some really valuable free content, to remind them of why they wanted to follow your brand in the first place. Maybe they didn’t buy because they don’t know your brand well enough, or they don’t have enough trust for you yet. Build a stronger relationship with these subscribers, and the next time you have something to offer they will be much more likely to buy.

13. Purchase History

Use your customer’s purchase history to offer cross-sells or up-sells.

14. Amount of Purchase

Segmenting your customers by the amount of their purchase allows you to offer them an appropriate up-sell on the back end. You can also give special treatment to customers with especially large purchase amounts by offering them a free “thank you” gift, or some other bonus that will reinforce in their minds that they made a good decision by buying from you.

15. Type of Purchase

Especially if you offer a lot of different types of products, segmenting your customers by purchase type is a great way to determine what their interests are so you can offer curated products that you know they’ll love.

16. Purchase Frequency

Reward your frequent shoppers with a special coupon just for 3rd time buyers or an invitation to join your loyalty program. On the flip side, you use targeted email marketing to encourage one-time customers to come back for seconds.

17. Buyer Satisfaction Level

When you get a new customer, do you ask them the following loyalty question: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” You can use their answers to segment your list based on Net Promoter Score(NPS), or those who have a high score between 9-10 (“Promoters”), a medium score between 7-8 (“Passives”) and a low score between 0-6 (“Detractors”).

18. Purchase Cycle

Certain purchases have a cycle: they are seasonal, or they occur at certain times. Knowing where your customers are in their unique purchase cycle can guide your email marketing campaigns. For instance, let’s say you sell diapers, and one pack usually lasts for one month. When the customer is probably starting to run out of diapers (say, 21 days after their purchase), you might send them a friendly reminder email asking them if they’re ready for a new shipment.

19. Stage in Sales Funnel

Each subscriber’s stage in your sales funnel should determine what email they receive next. New subscribers need to be nurtured. Warm leads need to be primed for the sale, and eventually sold. Customers need to be presented with cross sells or up sells. Every stage should have it’s own unique email marketing campaign.

20. Change in Engagement

Sometimes people simply get busy and they stop engaging with your emails like they used to. This can happen no matter what you do. However, if you don’t do anything to re-engage those subscribers, you could lose them forever.

21. Change in Purchase Behavior

Particularly if you offer a monthly subscription or you have a product that needs to be re-purchased on a regular basis, you should check in with customers when they change their purchase behavior. If a customer cancels their subscription, you might want to send them an email to ask them why. Even if you don’t get that customer back, their answer will help you to improve the experience for future customers.

22. Mobile vs. Desktop

49% of email marketers still don’t segment their lists based on device habits. However, the email reading experience is completely different depending on whether you are reading on your mobile phone or your desktop.

23. Type of Email Account

If you want to refine your email design even more, you can segment by the different email clients that your subscribers use. Perhaps an even better use of this segmentation, however, is to interpolate what other services your subscribers have along with their email provider. For instance, HubSpot suggests asking everyone who has a Gmail address to add your blog to their Google Reader.

24. Affiliates

Do you have an affiliate program? Don’t forget about your affiliates! Nurturing that relationship will really pay off, so make sure you have specific email campaigns just for them.

25. Subscribers Who Referred You

Maybe you don’t have an affiliate program, but you do have subscribers who referred you to their friends. These are highly valuable subscribers who should be treated with special care, so give those people a special tag. Once tagged, you can give these evangelist subscribers a special “thank you” gift, an exclusive discount, or VIP access that no one else gets. Let them know how much you appreciate them for spreading the word about your brand, and they will show you undying loyalty.

26. Customers Who Haven’t Left a Review

Your customers can be your best brand advocates but only if they take action by sharing their experience. Customers who haven’t left a review yet can be sent a targeted email with a friendly request to leave a review. 

27. Brick-and-Mortar Customers

If you have both a brick-and-mortar plus an online shop, segment your customers by where they shop. That way, you can provide specific information to your brick-and-mortar customers about in-store only promotions.

28. Customer Lifetime Value

Do you have different customer profiles who are worth more or less over their lifetime as a customer? Be sure to segment those out so that you can really focus in on those customers who are worth the most over the long-term. For example, you might have one segment of consulting customers who hire you to give them advice, and another segment who hires you to provide them with high-end, done-for-you services. The done-for-you customers have a much higher lifetime value, so you may want to give them some special treatment.

29. Website Activity

Monitor your subscriber’s activity on your website so you know exactly what they are looking for.

30. Website Inactivity

You can also use website inactivity to segment your email list and get those users back on task.

31. Web Store Visit History

Use your website visit data to send targeted email campaigns to subscribers who visited your web store or your sales page but didn’t purchase.

32. Buyer Persona

Most businesses have more than one buyer persona. These personas usually have different needs and respond to different copy, so why not send targeted campaigns to each? You can create targeted email lists by separating your subscribers into various buyer personas by looking at what they’ve opted in to, what they’ve clicked on inside your email campaigns, and their behavior on your website. Use that collective info to create segments for each of your customer profiles.

33. Job Title

What does your subscriber do for a living? Are they a designer or an art director? Are they a salesperson or a customer service representative? Each job title has different pain points which can be addressed separately with segmentation.

34. Seniority

When it comes to making the decision to purchase your product or service, your subscriber’s seniority in their company often plays an important role. For example, a busy manager may want to know that your solution is something that they can delegate to their employees. On the other hand, the employee will need to have compelling reasons to give their manager for making the purchase, since their primary motive is to make their manager happy.

35. Skill Level

How skilled is your subscriber at the discipline you are trying to help them with? Are they a complete beginner or fairly proficient? Or are they already advanced, and looking to take their skills to an even higher level? The content you send to your subscribers can vary greatly depending on the skill level of your audience. So knowing what level to speak to them at can be extremely helpful for your campaigns.

36. Birthday

Segmenting by birthday is a nice thing to do for your subscribers, and it makes them feel special. By sending them targeted emails with special offers, or even just a simple “happy birthday” note, you can connect with them on a much more personal level.

37. Weather

Does weather play a role in your subscriber’s behavior? Use what you know about the weather in their area to entice them to take the action you want

38. Psychographics

What can you deduce about your subscriber’s psychographics from your data? Psychographics are traits like personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. If you know what makes your subscribers “tick”, targeting emails to them will be so much easier and more effective. You can collect your data from lead magnets downloaded to clicks and website activity to “profile” your subscribers by psychographics and send them targeted emails that focus on just what they need from you.

39. Event Attendance

Use your data on who attended your events to send segmented emails. For example, you could keep track of people who attended your webinar vs. those who registered but never showed up Or you could have a segment of subscribers who attended your in-person event so you can send them photos from the event and notify them about the next one you have coming up.

40. Business Industry

If you collect industry information about your subscribers, you can tailor your email content so it is highly relevant to them. Perhaps you have written a blog post about how to market your business. When promoting that blog post to your email list, you could send one email to your real estate subscribers that explains how this blog post will help them get more clients. You could send another email to your restaurant owners that explains how your blog post will help them get more customers through the door, and so on.

41. Business Type

If your subscribers have their own business, you can segment by the type of business they own. Are they an eCommerce or a brick and mortar? Are they a franchise or a non-profit? Are they an enterprise or a small business?Each business type has it’s own unique needs that you can specifically address by segmenting.

42. Survey Respondents

If you sent out a survey, send something special to those who participated. They will be glad to know that you respect and appreciate the time they took out of their day to help you out!

43. Membership Expiration

Is your subscriber’s free trial about to expire? How about their membership that’s almost up? Let them know that it’s time to upgrade or renew.

44. Webinar Attendance

Segment subscribers who registered for a webinar by whether or not they attended. That way, you can re-engage those who didn’t attend with an opportunity to register for the encore Or you can simply give them a brief summary of what they missed. You can also segment your webinar attendees by how long they stayed on the call. Those who stay for the entire presentation might get a special bonus download, whereas those who drop off early might receive a survey about why they had to go or what caused them to lose interest.

45. VIPs

Reward the top 1% of your email list in terms of engagement and purchase activity with something exclusive, just for them.

46. Gender

If you have different offerings for men and women, go ahead and segment your subscribers by gender. Adidas sends out two completely different email campaigns. You’ll get one or the other depending on whether you’re male or female.

47. Age

Sometimes segmenting by your subscriber’s age can be important in relating to them better. 

48. Income

Segmenting your subscribers by income can be helpful. For instance, some subscribers need different information depending on their current income. If your subscribers are small business owners, one segment may want to learn from you about how to grow their 5-figure business to 6-figures. Another segment might want to know how to scale from 6-figures to 7-figures. Yet another segment may just want to know how to make their first 2K month.

49. Level of Education

In some cases, it may make sense to segment based on level of education.For example, if you are an educational institute, you may need to send different content and promotions to subscribers who’s highest level of education is a High School diploma, versus those who have earned their Bachelor’s degree and are looking to get their Master’s.

50. Employment

If you are a career coach or a recruiter, you may need to segment based on employment. Your groups might look something like this: 1) subscribers who want to change careers, 2) subscribers who are unemployed and looking for employment, 3) subscribers who simply want to “climb the corporate ladder”.

5 TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR EMAIL LIST SEGMENTATION

Isn’t the whole point of strategizing email campaigns is that the company provides relevant content to their email recipients? Yet, this simple process sounds so daunting that we spend hours marking strategies, setting up marketing tools, trying to get access to futile customer data and what not; when all you have to do is swear by one simple strategy that can help you tremendously without creating havoc and panic.

Email list segmentation is all about breaking an email list into multiple groups in order to target different audiences with a  tailored unique messages with the help of a marketing campaign. According to certain reports, marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue everytime they apply segmented campaigns. This is actually an ideal scenario- The more relevant the message, the more likely your subscriber/ consumer is to act on it.

Segmenting your communication is the best strategy marketers can adopt if they wish to improve their email marketing campaign by leaps and bounds. With proper analytics, user data and relevant information, marketers can segment their list in simple ways like gender, geolocation, past purchase, consumer preferences, Industry, interests and so much more! This not only personalizes your customer’s experience but also motivates the right call to action.

Let’s look at a few simple ways through which we can slice our email list into valuable segments based on what we know about each user and in return boost engagement and increase conversion–

  • Geographic Area-

One of the most popular and helpful methods of segmenting an email is by the user’s geographical location. This method allows you to engage with customers who not only have the ability to relate to your business but also helps you deduce what your customer might be exactly interested in.This only works best when you are in the vicinity close to the consumer.  Avoid marketing to a territory that your organization doesn’t even have a presence in yet.

A tip – utilize the geographic location by localizing subject line with an address of your local presence in the email. This creates value for the customer.

  • Past Purchases –

Segmenting your customers on the basis of their past purchase pattern optimises your targeting. If a particular set of your target consumer has purchased from you before, understand the kind of products they bought, the category of the product, when they made the purchase, the need for it and so on. By studying this behavior and utilizing the gathered information you can send them emails that not only cater to their interests but also use it as an opportunity to sell complementary products that could go well with their past purchase.

  • Education Level –

There are two ways to deal with this. Either segment your list on the basis of the educational qualification that they hold or on the basis of the information they have on your brand/product. Marketers generally get confused and mix up this criterion leading to disastrous results. The educational qualification helps you decide what level of messaging can the audience understand and apply; whereas when it comes to the amount of education they have on your brand it helps you to know how persistent you have to be in order to move them closer to your desired call of action.

  • Content Type –

Many a time marketers have to segment a unique list catering to the content type.This means that the leads or contacts are far more interested in certain content topics than others. Another interesting way to look at it is also the format that you deliver your content in.  Some like blogs, some like posts, some like videos and some are only interested in graphics. Just be more certain and less confident in knowing what segments of your list prefers to consume content in what format and deliver it to them via their preferred format. Take a look at what content gets people clicking, and segment your list based on that.

  • Inactive Customers –

There is a critical segment list that caters to abandoned and inactive customers. This is the segment that forms the space for improvement. You need to pique their interest and try and recover some of these abandoners back into your sales fold.  Figure out ways to re-establish contact and attempt to re-connect with them. Send them a survey form asking for insights to better your messaging, or send them an email that connects emotionally, like “We miss you!” or “Hey, It’s been a long time.” Tip – Cut through the noise by targeting this audience based on their real interests.

Every time a marketer selects a group from its email database, it’s applying email marketing segmentation and therefore they understand best, the complexity and gravity of email list segmentation. Owing to its intriguing pros any marketer can propitiously take an email marketing campaign to the next level, e.g.  -a segmentation by subscriber activity can help them identify and send direct messages to loyal subscribers and a followup campaign, on the other hand, can be directed towards not so engaged subscribers. If they can get their segments right and users end up receiving relevant emails packed with information that they actually want, unsubscribing rates will drastically fall down. It is simple, the more value you give to your subscribers, the more responsive they’ll become. Furthermore, personalization of messages leads to appropriate conversions, more purchases, and of course happier long-term clients which is a sign of having a positive impact on the engagement of their users. Because when you understand the reason why they joined your email marketing list in the first place and cater to that your job is half done.

Yet, every month email marketers have to deal with a new email-killing product that hampers their communication from reaching the targeted consumers in ways that best connect with them.to beat this, they just have to be confident enough to use mail segmentation in a way that is right for them.

Therefore, email marketing segmentation is about more than just converting; it’s about understanding your audience better and learning how to better serve them in the process.

Different Ways To Increase Facebook Ads Performance

There are many social media platforms where you can advertise your business but Facebook is one of the best social media platform to advertise and to reach your audience. Approximately there are 1.609 Billion active users on Facebook and it has users from all age demographics, making it one of the most diverse social channels. There are number of ways to get your Facebook Ads work.

1. Targeting

Facebook’s advert targeting options allow you to build audiences of people who are likely to be interested in what you have to say and there are many ways through which you can do so:

  • Location: Target adverts by country, postcode, region or even the area around your business. You can reach your customers in the areas where they live or where they do business with you.
  • Demographics: The customers your business serves are on Facebook and you can choose the audience that should see your adverts by age, gender, interests and even the language they speak.
  • Interests: When people are interested in your business, they are more likely to take action on your adverts. You can choose from hundreds of categories such as music, film, sports, games, shopping and so much more to find right people for your business.
  • Behavioural and Connection: As you know your customers best, you can find your easily according to their behaviour or the type of phone they use.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads

2. Types of Ads

One of the most common purpose of Facebook Advertising is to generate traffic to your website. There are different types of Ads that helps brands in improving the awareness of their products. some of the types are:

  • Carousel Ads: The carousel format allows you show up to ten images/or videos , headlines and links, or calls to action in a single ad unit. Anyone who sees your ad can then scroll through the carousel cards by swiping on mobile phones or tablets or clicking the arrows on a computer screen. This format can support a variety of businesses and needs. Carousel Ads can also helps in:
  1. Showcasing specific products you sell or you own
  2. Showing details about specific products, packages or applications.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
  • Dynamic Ads: Dynamic ads look exactly like other single image ads or ads created in the carousel format on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network. It use your Facebook pixel or SDK to show ads to people who have already shown interest in your business by taking actions you care about on your site.  However, instead of individually creating an ad for each of your products, you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your data feed for things you’d like to advertise.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
  • Offer Ads: Offer Ads encourages people to shop at your website, at you physical store or both. You can share offers that are discounts with your customers on Facebook and you can also design your offer to appear as a video or include up to 5 images that people can click through. 
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads

3. CTR affects Ad quality 

Quality of an ad should be the first priority for the best performance of an ad and CTR is a most important to measure the quality of an ad. CTR or clicks through rate is a number of clicks received divided by number of impressions received on Ad. (If your ad received 10,000 impressions and 100 clicks then your CTR is 100/10,000 = 0.01%).

Facebook runs an algorithm to decide the quality score between your own ads and optimise to get the most value. When you launch a campaign with many ads, Facebook give all of them the same exposure in order to identify the CTR of every individual ad. Once Facebook realises which add is generating a higher CTR or have a higher quality score – these get more impressions compared to the less converting ones. Over time Facebook will stop showing ads with a lower CTR completely. The higher CTR you can achieve, the greater chance you have at winning auctions. If you create an ad in the carousel format, you can see the CTR for each carousel card within the ad. Generally, the first card in the series will get the most link clicks, but it’s not necessarily the best performing card. CTR takes into account how each card performs against other cards in the same position.

4. Retargeting

Retargeting is an effective way to increase and prove your conversion rates through Facebook ads. When someone visits your webpage say an online shopping, and browses through some pages but leaves the page without buying then the brand can retarget your customers  and can prompt the user through Facebook targeted ads. When you advertise on Facebook, you can target people who have an existing relationship with your business. This existing relationship is the basis for custom audiences, which are really remarketing or retargeting audiences.You can also create a personalized target audience through which you can retarget only a portion of traffic that has visited to your landing page earlier.

Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads

In order to start retargeting your audience you’ll need a pixel code on your website. When someone visits your website and takes an action, the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. This way, you’ll know when a customer took an action after seeing your Facebook ad. You’ll also be able to reach this customer again by using a Custom Audience. When more and more conversions happen on your website, Facebook gets better at delivering your ads to people who are more likely to take certain actions. This is called conversion optimisation.

Photos: Digital Vidya Gallery

 

 

 

 

What Is Inbound Marketing And Why It Is Essential For Every Marketer To Implement

If you have more money than brains, you should focus on Outbound Marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on Inbound Marketing.

-Guy Kawasaki

Co-founder, Alltop.com

 

You may have come across this phrase ‘Inbound Marketing’ from various different sources and especially in recent times, its use has increased stupendously… and rightly so!

So let’s dive right into it. What is Inbound Marketing?

Traditional marketing is a one-way conversation – the marketer talking ‘at’ the potential customer. Inbound marketing is an invitation to an ongoing dialogue in which you can communicate with your customers in both a professional and congenial fashion.

In general, Inbound Marketing is an approach focused on attracting customers through content that is relevant to capture and convert potential customers through channels like blogs, search engines and social media which draws the user base to your product or service.

If the content educates, informs and engages directly with your target buyer persona, it serves to build awareness and increases interest generating leads. Once a visitor becomes a lead, based upon on a scoring system, you can pass them into a sales funnel. Once they convert and buy repeatedly you can analyse the process to produce more desirable content and showcase your expertise.

Now that we understand the concept of Inbound Marketing, let’s get onto why it is important because there is no point in learning, understanding and implementing something if it’s useless and does not help us achieve our ultimate objective.

Why is Inbound Marketing becoming so popular these days?

If you’re new to digital marketing, you might be a little bit fuzzy about the concept of inbound marketing. It’s a relatively new tactic that’s almost exclusive to the Internet.

Inbound Marketing did not exist from day one when the digital marketing industry cracked into the traditional marketing world. Today, more and more businesses are trying to jump onto the Inbound Marketing bandwagon and trying to leverage it as a part of their overall marketing strategy.

  1. The Role of Customer in the Buying Process is Changing-

The traditional Marketing Funnel has changed its attributes. This new marketing funnel visualizes the various psychological phases a customer travels through before they actually try or buy your product. In recent times, a customer now passes through all the stages of the funnel, their number dropping out at each stage, and only when they reach the last two stages of Evaluation(final stage before the purchase decision) and Sales(the result of the marketer’s effort throughout the process) does the actual consideration of purchase take place. Earlier was a much simpler and easier time when sales took place right from when a customer began considering a product or service.

2. Majority Are Not Ready To Buy Yet-

Now, with a shorter attention span, massive increase in competition and increasing availability of sources of information, customers are getting onto the web more so for research purposes than to make an immediate purchase.

This normal distribution curve (bell curve) shows that the majority(95%) of qualified prospects on your website are there to research and not to buy.-Marketo

What is important to keep in mind here is that it is not that this 95 % of people are not relevant or not interested in your product or service but rather that they are just not ready to buy from you at that point of time. The bell curve shows that only about 5% of users are actually there on your website to make an immediate purchase. These are very very significant numbers and something that every marketer must consider at the time of developing his inbound marketing strategy.

Of course, these numbers are not always 100% accurate. there is a minor deviation on a case by case basis depending on the industry, but overall this graph applies to every marketing campaign.

Marketers now need to nurture the users who have just visited their website to research more about the product or service and convert their interest into a purchase through regular and efficient inbound marketing, holding their hand from one stage of the marketing funnel to the next.

70% of people on your website will buy either from you or from your competitor- Marketo

3. Personalization Is Possible At Scale-

In today’s day and age, technology has increased at such a stupendous pace that there is now an availability of tools and techniques which has enabled personalization at scale. This was something that was not possible earlier.

This custom tailored Happy Birthday email mentioning the name of the viewer and wishing him on his birthday along with a discount coupon is a perfect example of Personalization. Instead of simply handing over a coupon, to a customer, the brand gifted it, and that’s what makes all the difference. What this does is that it builds a relationship between a user and the brand, thus increasing relatability and credibility.

With today’s technology, it hardly takes any super-coding skills in order to actually create such detailed personalization.

4. Cost of Inbound Marketing Strategies-

Studies show that Inbound Marketing costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing tactics don’t generate leads, they generate revenue.-Hubspot

The average PPC on any popular website will support that statistic.

5. It’s Organic and Natural –

Take this scenario: someone searches online for a specific service at 3:00 am on a Saturday; your listing appears in the search engine’s results; your rich content provides them with fundamental value and inside knowledge that will improve their understanding and prompts them to contact you – they become a profitable lead. Inbound marketing is natural, targeted and truly resonates with a primed audience.

6. Attract More Website Visitors-

Inbound marketing is about getting the most out of your website. Creating great content that will attract customers is part of the process. A blog becomes an asset that drives traffic to your website. You can identify “keywords” that your customers are searching and leverage it to your advantage. Therefore, SEO is of utmost importance. If you commit to the process you can drive more visitors to your website. This can increase your chances of converting visitors to leads.

Conclusion

Inbound Marketing is no longer a secondary marketing tactic within our overall digital marketing strategy. In 2018 it will be a must for every marketer to implement and only those businesses that are able to leverage Inbound Marketing effectively will be able to survive in this fast-moving digital marketing world, the rest will inevitably perish.

Wondering how to organically increase your level of engagement on Facebook? Check out ‘8 Types of Facebook Content to Drive Engagement’.

Image Source- Google, Digital Vidya

How To Get Highest Returns Through Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing

A message in a electronic form is popularly known as ‘Email’. A personalised message or commercial message to a group of people by use of electronic form can be defined as ‘Email Marketing’. Most commonly through advertisements, requests for business, or sales or donation, any email communication is considered email marketing if it helps to build business, customer loyalty, trust, product, company or a brand. Email marketing is an effective and a efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting business.

Why Email Marketing

With email marketing, one can easily and quickly reach target markets or industry without large investments on print space, television or radio air time or high production costs. A study by Direct Marketing Association has observed a $35 Return-on-investment for every $1 which is spent on Email Marketing and no other medium delivers this high on returns.

Email Marketing

Here are few compelling reasons why email marketing is important and how they can help business:

1. Stay in contact
Emails have the ability to keep your customers informed.Consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient. It can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them. This email can be as simple as saying: “Hi, you’re on our mind, here is a special offer!” Those that have signed up to your email list have already made a commitment to receive these notes. So they will likely enjoy these emails and will boost engagement with your customers.

2. Reach customers in time
According to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This is very significant and should come into play when planning any marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails but all other types of media and information.

 

 

3. Preferred medium type
For a long time now, email has been a form of communication. As the years have gone by, email has fast become one of our main choices of communication. We have all been groomed to reply to an email in some fashion. Whether it is to reply, to forward, click through to something else embedded within the email, delete, or to buy something, or to sign up. We tend to do something with the email. Knowing this, you can use email to drive people to your website, to pick up the phone and call or any other call to action.

4. Email marketing is easily measurable
Email marketing tools or softwares offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, and open rates. This gives you a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working, which ones to tweak or which ones to get rid of altogether. These metrics should not be ignored. They are an important part of your internet marketing campaign as a whole.

5. Email marketing is affordable
Emails can reach a large number of consumers for less than pennies per message and the cost per conversion is so low with email marketing. Email marketing services such SendGrid, iContact, GetResponse, MailChimp, Pinpointe and SurveyGizmo are the email marketing software solutions suitable for various types of businesses. These email marketing software solutions also do offer larger monthly plans for growing businesses and high volume sender plans. They also offer subscription services for higher-volume senders. So, yes, while it does offer a significant ROI, it might be a wise idea to hire someone to manage these efforts.

6. Targeted messaging
One of important aspects that email marketing serves is lead nurturing. The main idea here is that potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Segmenting these customers into appropriate email marketing lists helps businesses target these groups more effectively. Customers need information to move them to the next buying cycle stage; pushing the right content can do just that.

7. It’s timely
One of the benefits of email marketing can be to sell your products, if approached in correct time and correct fashion. It’s important to use all the customer data and information you can. Sending customers a special offer on festivals, birthdays – customers are much more likely to purchase the deal.

8. Everyone Uses Email
A Hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email. That alone should be enough to convince you to explore the tool. Email is especially huge in the B2B world as it accounts for the most prominent form of communication.

 

Email Marketing Objectives

Email marketing is an indispensable tool for achieving the targets set out in your online email marketing campaigns. The use of email marketing requires the design and development of a clearly structured strategy. This includes the definition of concrete objectives that have to be reached with individual measures, such as mailers or newsletter, campaigns or transactional messages.

Learn Email Marketing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below are 6 critical objectives which can be achieved with email marketing:

1. Increase In Sales
Probably the most pursued objective in email marketing is to generate sales. Email marketing, however, can help to prepare a potential purchase by explaining the product.

2. New customer acquisition
When it comes to attracting or acquiring new customers, it is about making offers to customers / prospects that are still no clients of the company. But since email marketing is about permission marketing you can reach users who have already registered for your emailers or newsletter.

3. Brand and product awareness
Inform recipients of the availability of products or services that they may want or need and keep your brand image strong and consistent.

4. Brand recall
It means that the user remembers a trademark immediately just when the product category is mentioned, a high brand recall is needed and email marketing surely stand’s out here.

5. Customer Loyalty
Email marketing strengthens customer loyalty and helps in achieving long-term commitment from customer, seducing the person to regular purchases, and most importantly guaranteeing not to lose the customer to competitors by offering relevant offers that meet the customers’needs.

6. Customer Retention
There are a lot of reasons why email marketing drives retention. It’s more personal and direct than other marketing channels, and people love receiving email from their favorite brands. The type of emails work best for driving retention are such as Welcome Emails, Loyalty Emails, Post-Purchase Emails, Transactional Emails etc.

 

Email Marketing Challenges

Email marketing is a key to successful marketing and sales process, but there are numerous challenges to making the most of this critical marketing tool. As per MarketingSherpa’s email marketing benchmark study, the most important email marketing challenges were:
– Integrating email data with other data systems.
– Improving deliverability.
– Increasing Open Rates.
– Growing and retaining subscribers.
– Achieving measurable ROI.

Conclusion

It’s likely that there will always be new email marketing challenges just like any other marketing channel. But don’t give up because you can always overcome such problems by making the right moves and observing your performance. Email marketing is often an unbelievably powerful tool for curating, and keeping a loyal client base engaged with a clear impact.

Hope I did not miss that you wanted to know about Email Marketing – if yes, then please update in comments.

Top Social Media trends to look out for in 2018

With 2017 vying for an end, social media with its set of trends and surprises are ready for 2018. According to findings by We Are Social in 2017 social media penetration globally was around 37 percent i.e. 2.80 billion users. As you look ahead to 2018 and plan to strengthen your social strategy, it’s important to keep a pulse on trends. To help, here are some social-media trends you need to prepare for in 2018:
 

  1. Opportunities for personalized content arise due to robust social analytics:

    Everyone likes content relevant to them, which is especially true during interaction with a brand you have a rapport with. The only thing we want is a piece of relevant content that offers something unique to us as a member of that audience. In fact, only 25% don’t care about the content while rest get really frustrated with irrelevant content.

    Personalized content for audiences is a major trend in content marketing, and same goes for social media, too. As social media platforms evolve, their analytics tools and business-specific insights and features will become more important to brands. This kind of data means marketers will have the insights to craft better and more personalized content that speaks and engages audiences.

    The need for selectivity arises as platforms’ features overlap: –

    Timed videos and visual content were both features of Snapchat and Instagram, so the main points that differentiate them are the audience and reach. Compared to Snapchat, Instagram Stories has a wider reach and is more engaging. Daily opens with Instagram Stories of Instagram celebrities are up to 10 percent of their audience members, which is significantly higher than in case of Snapchat. On the other hand, Snapchat continues to entice younger demographics.

    As more platforms continue to offer overlapping features, brands and marketers will have to be more creative and selective about what to invest in. Take advantage of analytics and reporting features to identify which platforms could offer you the best return, and start there.

    Brands will be able to get through to audiences by social listening: –

    Mentions and what people are saying should be key metrics of comparison of social media performance between competitors and us.

    “Using web monitoring, we can collect an enormous amount of data on our company and our competitors that can be used in our marketing strategy. At Brand24, our research showed that in one month, 14,000 online searches started with ‘Can anyone recommend?’ and about 30,000 searches started with ‘Where can I buy?’ About 60 percent of these questions never received responses from companies; this is a huge opportunity,” says Magdalena Urbaniak, global communications manager at Brand24.

    Urbaniak says monitoring these social mentions can be an insight into the shared audience’s like and dislike, which can show how a brand can improve. Social listening can be the key advantage in social media strategy as they give you valuable information about your competitors’ performance and your own audience.

    Chatbots will be key to faster and easier customer service: –

    Instant connection and high internet penetration have prepared an adequate condition for brands to give instant feedback to the fast-growing impatient customer base. Unfortunately, this has prompted a lot of brands to do one of two things: respond so quickly that mistakes are made and service quality suffers, or freeze in their tracks because they’re not quite sure how to meet this demand for speed.

    Chatbots give you the chance to interact quickly and personally with your audience. Maybe that’s the reason why there are at least 100,000 monthly active bots on Facebook Messenger and over two billion messages per month are exchanged between brands and their audiences.

    Transient content will lead the pack: –

    Latest marketing buzzword ephemeral/transient content, in the coming years. Snapchat Stories and live streaming videos are some examples of ephemeral content today. This type of content has a short lifespan of 24 hours and then disappear. Thanks to Snapchat’s popularity this content has seen a steady rise.

    The Snapchat Discover channel of Cosmopolitan generated “more than 19 million average monthly visits.” It is interesting to note that the brand’s website generates “20 million unique visitors per month.” With 10 billion daily video views, it is one of the best platforms to reach millennials and generation Z. It’s a no surprise that Instagram and Facebook are also following the footsteps of Snapchat by providing services for distributing fleeting content.

    It’s a difficult time for marketers as it might sound scary that all efforts and money that went into creating the content which has become fleeting in nature. But the results may be quite outstanding provided content created is really interesting and have proper strategies for ephemeral content marketing. There are quite a few reasons why ephemeral content works:

    Fleeting nature of the content, like those raw clips and images available on Snapchat or Instagram, fills users with excitement and trust for the brand. A great way to show insight into forthcoming projects, showcase BTS content, offer promotions and other content that is supposed to be short-lived.

    Augmented Reality will gain more focus: –

    Apple announced the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X at the first-ever event hosted in the Steve Jobs Theater. Both devices incorporated a new chip that allows the phones to become augmented reality enabled and provide users with extraordinary experiences. While mobile gaming seems to be first affected by augmented reality, it is likely that social media platforms will find ways to incorporate the new technology as well.

    Similarly, brands could soon project their products into the homes of social media users through special filters.

    Social platforms compliance will become stringent:-  After a series of controversies that cropped up during 2016 US presidential election, social media platforms have adopted a far stringent way to govern the conduct on their respective platforms. Facebook recently turned over thousands of ads that seem to be connected to Russian meddling and has invested in new AI and human forms of monitoring.

    In 2017, Facebook and Twitter received a very wide criticism, it is likely that these platforms will embrace codes of conduct and governance policies that protect the brands from future criticism. Better compliance will not only promote better content but also safeguard the interest of the users.

Conclusion

Understanding these trends will present marketers with better opportunities to connect with the audience and create better content. These shifts are frequent, therefore understanding and staying ahead of the trend is of vital importance.

LinkedIn VS Facebook- From A Marketer’s Perspective

With the increasing number of social media platforms, as a marketer, we need to make a crucial choice of focusing our social media efforts on a limited number of platforms. This decision is vital to the existence of a brand and can make or break it as well.

In this blog post, we will discuss the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook and which platform will best help you achieve your goals and objectives.

A brief introduction of our two contestants for today:-

Facebook– People tend to spend more time on Facebook than on LinkedIn for the simple reason that it is perceived as a more ‘fun’ platform where friends are able to get together and share their thoughts and opinions over a casual post like a meme or joke. Facebook is clearly in the quantity win with over 2.07 billion monthly active users.

LinkedIn– LinkedIn, however, is a more serious platform where users log in for a specific purpose, be it recruitment, job hunting, connecting with colleagues or sharing their professional expertise on specific industry related topics. LinkedIn is far behind Facebook when it comes to the numbers game, with around 467 million members.

1. Audience Profile

Facebook– General consumers. Facebook is primarily a platform where friends and family get together to de-stress or connect with known persons. Marketers on Facebook need to keep their audience interests in mind, keeping the tone light and friendly. Create content which your audience would like to consume.

LinkedIn– Companies/organizations/businesses. LinkedIn allows users to create a professional, job-oriented profile, offering a variety of ways for a marketer to target based on seniority, job function, industry and more. Marketers on LinkedIn should keep the tone serious and professional, industry-specific and to the point. LinkedIn is primarily used by B2B businesses to connect with users in the same industry segment.

2. Analytics-

Facebook- Facebook provides real-time, built-in reports consisting data of the type of audience, their country of origin, and others ranging from likes, reach, visits, posts, people, events, videos, messages to a lot more. This data is very useful to a marketer as their job hardly ends after an advertising campaign is created. They constantly need to optimize it to achieve the best results at the lowest cost.

LinkedIn- LinkedIn does not provide extensive insights on page performance limiting to updates, interactions, clicks, impressions, reach, followers and visitors. This makes it difficult for a marketer to analyze and extract data on the performance of a LinkedIn campaign. 

3. Cost-

Facebook- Facebook gives the option to adjust how much you’re willing to pay per day (starting at Rs.40 per day), which corresponds to the number of users you reach out to. Overall, Facebook is a much cheaper option, with the average CPC of Rs. 5, being the lowest across all social media platforms. As a marketer, a lower cost is of vital importance in determining the success of an advertising campaign  

LinkedIn- LinkedIn offers a specific way to reach an audience but the cost is higher than Facebook’s. LinkedIn is said to be one of the most expensive advertising platforms in terms of average CPC of Rs.150. The minimum amount that LinkedIn will generally require you to allot for your CPC and CPM bids is Rs.100 (for either). And the minimum budget generally allotted by LinkedIn for your daily budget is Rs.500. The huge difference in cost from that of Facebook, shy away many marketers, making LinkedIn a secondary consideration. That being said, there a number of successfully launched campaigns on LinkedIn as well,  like the Volkswagen Campaign, where the results were far greater than the initial cost.

4. Branding-

Facebook- On Facebook there is a strong distinction between a user’s personal profile and a brand’s page. The content posted on a personal profile and a company’s page is completely different and unrelated. A marketer must build his company’s brand and his personal brand separately and simultaneously.

LinkedIn- On LinkedIn there is no distinction between personal and professional branding as it seamlessly integrates with each other in the form of a common profile. Through a user’s profile, it enables the audience to connect with the brand. Vice-versa if a brand posts valuable content then the employees of the brand are known as well. A marketer needs to be able to sell himself as well as his company through the use of one single profile.

5. Thought Leadership-

Facebook- Facebook is not a platform where users generally express their professional opinion but rather a light and casual conversation amongst friends. Marketers cannot hope to get their audience to pour out their expertise and insights into their industry or job.

LinkedIn- LinkedIn is the primary platform where users come together to influence others through their professional opinions. The most common place of thought leaders is LinkedIn groups where experts speak about their opinions with respect to a specific industry.

6. Marketing Objectives-

Facebook- As a marketer, Facebook provides a number of opportunities to achieve objectives such as Awareness, Consideration and Conversion but is more suitable for Direct Sales and Traffic. The level and detail of targeting on Facebook is world’s apart that of all other social media platforms, making it ideal for marketers to grow their brand.

LinkedIn- As a marketer, LinkedIn cannot be used to directly sell to your industrial buyers as users on LinkedIn login for their own personal and professional development rather than to outright buy a product or service. It will lead to a very low conversion rate and more often than not, a poor brand image.

Conclusion-

The controversy of which platform is better for marketing has been chewed over and over in the last years by marketers, entrepreneurs and bloggers.

Lately, Facebook is focusing on improving their paid marketing campaigns and continue to develop new and innovative features appealing to B2B companies and marketers alike, in a strive to reach above LinkedIn in the B2B space.

Having a deep understanding of who you are marketing to (your buyer personas) and how they use these platforms at each stage of the buyer’s journey, will enable you to become more customer-centric in your marketing.

Instead of focusing on which platform is better for your marketing strategy, simply being aware of how and when to use each on the potential journey your prospects go through before they decide to buy from you can make a dramatic shift in your marketing strategy.

 

Image Source- Hootsuite, Pear Analytics, Pinterest, Social Media Examiner.

5 Social Media Branding Strategies To Follow In 2018

Social Media Branding Strategies To Follow In 2018

Every company in today’s competitive world is after creating a long and everlasting impact on their customers. Every time we step out to shell out some bucks we look for a brand. We don’t like to compromise a brand for money. So, we can see how a proper branding of a product is so valuable for continuous growth of our business. Businesses are trying to figure out their target audiences and best fit products or services for their target audiences through various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Until 2017, in social media marketing, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WordPress, Tumblr played a major role in branding. There are few social media branding strategies needed in 2018 and brands should keep an eye on these while preparing marketing strategies.

Strategy 1 | Embracing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Imagine a user experience where shoppers can try your products and make a buying decision without walking into the store. Have you experienced Lens kart’s augmented and virtual reality on their product landing page? Yes, they use both strategies to help users decide on their purchase by providing them a live experience about the product. In short, Virtual reality uses a 360- degree product view to move you from your current environment to a virtual world. On the other hand, Augmented reality adds digital insights to transform the current environment. Therefore, virtual reality replaces your sight, augmented reality enhances it. So, let’s look at some key facts which will help us decide to embrace these technologies.

  • 25% of the brands will embrace AR to enhance their end-user experience and it will record more spending starting from 2018 to 2022.
  • In 2017 end, 37% of world’s population is active on social media. In 2018, most of the giants and mid-level brands are going to incorporate AR to stay ahead in the market.
  • AR & VR users will hit 200 million by 2018 and 65% of the online customers will make a purchasing decision on the product landing page. AR advertising spending would be on the higher side than VR. Businesses, marketers should bet big on using AR on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Strategy 2 | Embracing Investment In Influencer Marketing

Social Media is all about influencing and attracting your customers towards your brand. Furthermore, businesses focus on influential people to influence potential buyers and influencer marketing is proven to be the best way of marketing in social media in 2017. It will continue to be a focus of smart marketers from the beginning of 2018.

Also, let’s find out who all are our mega, macro and micro influencers in social media. Mega influencers are the celebrities in social media and they have typically more than a million followers. Macro influencers are typically business professionals or famous product specialist or freelancers. They typically have approximately ten thousand to a million followers. And, micro influencer category has 500- 1000 followers because they are mini-celebrities in their own circle. Working with micro influencers can provide best results if the business is following a long- tail strategy. So, let’s dig down to the facts of influencer marketing and why it could be useful for marketers.

  • Influencer marketing delivers 11 times more ROI than traditional digital marketing. The need for Marketer interest in Influencer marketing increased 90x from 2013 to 2016. This has been drastically doubled in first nine months of 2017 and the same is excepted in 2018.
  • People follow and highly seek for influencers in social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. To attract customers and promote products or services, most of the businesses decide to include influencers having thousands of followers. In return, the high demand Social media personalities increase the value of services.
  • Video content would be the biggest platform for influencer marketing in 2018 with a presence in social media. A report shows that videos are twice as effective to lead generation or drive sales as normal text-based contents.
  • 49% people depend on the influencers engagement on their purchase decisions.
  • Twitter users reported 5.2 times increase in purchasing decisions made when they are exposed to influencer contents.

Strategy 3 | Focus On Gen Z

According to a recent study conducted by Goldman Sachs, Gen Z is more valuable to any business. Did you know that from a span of 2018 to 2020, Gen Z will account for 40% of all consumers? The oldest Gen Z’s are avg. 22-year-old and businesses are planning to move their marketing strategy based on Gen Z’s need. 2018 will experience a big bet investment made in Snapchat or Instagram which are loved by Gen Z’s.

Gen Z’s represent a buying power of $44 billion and influence an additional $600 billion of family spending. This includes over 70% of family food choices and 80%- 90% of the items are purchased for them. Marketers need to make the video content more engaging and especially relevant, Gen z’s have an 8- second filter for any digital content. According to the research report, 9 out of 10 Gen Z’s watch YouTube daily, 70% prefer streaming over broadcast or cable TV.

Strategy 4 |Increasing Brand Participation In messaging Platforms

While approx. 2.5 billion people use various messaging platforms and yet, brands focus on connecting with consumers on social networks. It is high time that brands should focus on messaging platforms which comes handy for customers to use and communicate. It is likely that brands will invest more in 2018 in time and money to connect with consumers in messengers. Technologies like artificial intelligence, voice assistants, and chatbots will enable brands to offer personalized shopping experiences on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, messenger etc.

Strategy 5 | Invest In Popular Social Media Platforms Of 2017

Don’t you think this can be a great strategy to embrace the familiar social media platforms and make more investments to enhance them? Therefore, few points will help marketers take appropriate decisions.

  • There must be an increasing popularity of Instagram stories. Over 200 million people use Instagram stories each month, which is over 50 million more who use snap chat. As a result, half of the Instagram users will use stories at the end of 2018 and brands must take time to master their stories.
  • Expansion of live streaming is going to be a great way to capture the attention of the followers in social media. 2018 would be a booming year for more and more brands to introduce live streaming to their customers to enhance customer experience.
  • Twitter branding strategy needs rethinking. Twitter has failed to grow followers significantly in 2017, therefore, Twitter leadership will aim to rethink on the platform which includes revamping the Twitter advertising options.
  • Marketers need attention in the recent Facebook business strategy. Facebook is coming up with a new technology called “Spaces” which is designed to allow friends and followers to connect in Virtual Reality. Facebook will be the first successful VR social media platform for marketing.

In conclusion, marketers should be clear about the objective, target audience, a clearly defined outline to measure KPIs and last but not the least, make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic and Time-Based).