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Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Marketers use various strategies for firms to market and raise brand awareness. Social media marketing and email marketing are two of the most popular and successful ways to accomplish marketing objectives. Both are magnificent in their own ways. As of 2021, there were around 3.78 billion users of social media and 4.1 billion users of email globally, according to Statista. This amount represents about 48% of the world’s population.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular every day. Nevertheless, we are unable to control how emails affect their users’ ability to transact. The issue at hand is which is superior. Which of the two can influence the target audience more effectively?

What is Email Marketing?
A type of digital marketing called email marketing uses emails to spread brand recognition. It informs customers about the newest items, discounts, and services to help them remember the brand. The following are some advantages of email marketing:

  1. Strengthen Relationships, Loyalty & Trust
    Building individualised interactions with present and potential clients through email marketing is a terrific strategy. The readers of your newsletters and emails will come to know, like, and trust you and your business if you write them well. Consumers also do business with trusted companies.
  2. Increase Brand Awareness & Stay Top of Mind
    Consumers are reminded of your business, products, and services every time an email is delivered to them. This helps customers remember your business when it’s time to make a purchase.
  3. Segmentation
    Email marketing allows you to establish lists of each market segment based on demographics, interests, previous behaviour, etc. This allows you to develop marketing messages that are specifically tailored to each target audience. With the help of this incredibly successful marketing strategy, each segment will closely relate to your marketing message.
  4. Low Cost & Good ROI
    Comparatively speaking to other marketing strategies, email marketing is relatively affordable. For every dollar invested, email marketing typically returns $44.25 in profit.
  5. Easy to Use
    An email campaign may be set up quite quickly. You may upload subscriber information, segment your lists, use email templates, fill in your content, and send out emails to subscribers regularly using the many resources and software providers for email marketing available online. Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are two of our preferred email marketing services providers. Instead of using a pre-made template, having a customised email template that aligns with your company’s brand can be much more successful.

Read more: Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Email and Social Media Marketing Ideas for Consulting

You already know that email and social media marketing are goldmines for driving new leads and building your consultancy brand.

But how, exactly, should you approach email and social media marketing campaigns? There is a sea of advice to be found online for digital marketing, but much of the information comes with complex marketing jargon that you don’t have the time to decipher. You need clear, common sense ideas that you can put to use quickly.

The good news is that today, you’re in the right place.

There are many effective, straightforward online marketing campaign strategies you can use to enhance your consultancy right away, and we’re here to share several of them with you.

In this article, we’ll dive into several examples of email and social media campaign methods you can learn from and implement. You will find new ideas for brand building, lead generating, and increasing conversion rates.

Read more: Email and Social Media Marketing Ideas for Consulting

How To Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

I don’t need to tell this audience about the importance of SEO for your business. However, one area of the digital marketing realm that I do feel could use some building up is social media marketing. Social media can accomplish so many things for your business if you leverage it in the right ways.

From building your brand to generating cold, hard sales, social media has a lot going for it. Here are some tips for optimizing your social media marketing strategy.

Establish Goals

Just as in SEO, you will need to know what you want to accomplish from the outset of your social media marketing campaigns. Your goals will determine how you should approach everything going forward.

For instance, your goals might be one or any combination of the following:

• Grow brand awareness.

• Drive new leads.

• Increase website traffic.

• Make new sales.

• Boost customer relations.

Which goal will be right for your business will depend on where you are in your growth. A new business will probably want to focus first on building brand awareness before devoting too many resources to the other goals.

Once you have a good foothold in that, you will of course want to go after leads and sales, and when you’ve done that, keeping your social media-based customer relations on track will be vital.

Find Your Audience

Your chances of getting conversions from social media marketing increase with every interaction with a potential or existing customer. Communicating directly with people on social media helps you find and grow your audience. Through that process, you will learn what people want and how you can give it to them.

One way to do it is to take a look at your social media analytics and other data that indicates which types of audiences tend to use which platforms. For instance, slightly more men than women use YouTube, while you will find a much larger female audience on Pinterest. You can then tailor your social media outreach based on who you are targeting.

Read more: How To Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

3 Social Media Hacks to Help Your Content Go Viral

Whether you own a nonprofit or a social impact company, your cause deserves mass exposure. At times, it can feel challenging to utilize social media to unlock this. With so many competing causes and companies, much of it can feel like white noise. Fortunately, thanks to today’s social media accessibility, it’s easier than ever to get shares and more eyes on your cause’s content. A recent report by Statistica found that 95 percent of young adults follow a brand online. Social media isn’t just for friends and social engagements anymore.

Achieving virality is quite random, but there are a few social media hacks that can get you closer. Used consistently over time, these hacks can — at the very least — garner your cause more exposure than any of your previous social media efforts.

1. Capture attention right off the bat

Especially if you don’t yet have a big name or a significant following, it can be hard to fight for viewers’ attention. Because the average person has the attention span of a goldfish, they have to instantly be interested in your content in order to engage further. Garrett Adkins, the co-founder of Impact Media, says it’s “all about the first three seconds.”

Read more: 3 Social Media Hacks to Help Your Content Go Viral

How To Grow Your Community With Social Media Marketing

One of the most important ways to boost customer loyalty is by building a community. Even though smartphones and mobile internet connect billions of people, it’s harder than ever to gain trust or loyalty. This is because your audience is inundated with content, including promotional messages from your competitors.

You can advertise to your user base but it’s harder to make them remember you and trust you enough to buy from you. You can manage this distance by creating an emotional connection between you and your audience. And the most practical way to do this is by creating a community.

In this post, we’ll look at how you can leverage social media to build a solid community around your brand. Businesses like Lego, Harley Davidson, and many others have online communities to share ideas. These places offer a curated space for people to share their passions.

For some types of businesses, not having a community is not an option. Coaching, personal wellness, or educational businesses need to develop a community to share information and offer their audience support.

Let’s look at how you can build your own brand community by leveraging social media. We have two main approaches based on the platforms you choose. You can:

Create a membership site and use social media to draw in more members
Build your community using social media as your main platform
Each option has advantages and their own problems too. You can also use both options simultaneously.

Whatever approach you adopt, you need to have a clear strategy in place. Let’s get started!

Creating a membership site
A membership site or portal is a gated website where your audience can access content by signing up as a member. You’ll need to have a membership software to do this and create unique content that members are willing to come back for.

You get more control and several benefits by creating your own membership site.

  • A membership portal allows you to build your brand image more effectively
  • You can add features to your site such as email marketing, online courses, forums, and loyalty programs
  • The availability of in-depth analytics
  • Complete customization of your membership site

Read more: How To Grow Your Community With Social Media Marketing

7 Social Media Marketing Myths, Busted

One of your greatest foes as an entrepreneur is misinformation. There is a lot of erroneous advice online, especially when it comes to social media marketing. Unfortunately, much of this guidance seems reasonable on paper. Without the right research or knowledge, you may end up unwittingly endangering the future of your business. Here are seven common social media marketing myths you need to watch out for.

  1. Negative feedback can be safely ignored
    Social media marketing isn’t just about promoting the positive parts of your brand. It also involves managing any and all negative feedback directed at your business. Ignore those snipes and jabs and they will fester online, convincing consumers to ignore your brand at a time when you need every single customer to help your company grow. When you find negative feedback, answer it — strategically. Respond to all comments quickly. Not only can you tamp down on negative feedback before it gains any ground, but quick responses will show that you listen and respond to customer concerns, even if they are negative.

Matt Broussard, content creator and chef at Spiceology in Spokane, commands more than three million followers on TikTok, and as he shares, “All feedback, both positive and negative, has merit. As a chef, that’s what I live on: how a dish is, what it needs, how I can improve it, etc. I don’t push off negative comments, because that helps fuel how I iterate my recipes.”

  1. Email is no longer relevant
    Social media marketing should not be considered a replacement for other methods, but rather a tool to augment your customer reach. Email still has a role to play in your marketing campaigns, so keep those recipient lists and e-marketing campaigns around. They are still worth your time.
  1. All content represents thought leadership
    Content marketing is an integral part of social media marketing. The social platform is what you use to efficiently distribute content to your users, and the content itself is responsible for perpetuating and developing your brand. However, many entrepreneurs falsely equate all content with thought leadership.

Your best content is what will likely give you that kind of authority over your audience. Some of it will revolve around answering questions or giving the market exactly what they asked for. This is less about thought leadership than appealing to your audience directly. The distinction is important, because without it, you may create content that doesn’t reinforce your brand’s authority and trustworthiness.

Read more: 7 Social Media Marketing Myths, Busted

Useful Tips To Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media is an incredible tool that has allowed billions of people all over the world to connect with others and stay updated on the world. It lets you keep up with your favourite athletes or celebrities, as well as make friends all over the world. It allows you to communicate with other like-minded individuals on nearly every topic under the sun.

By Wendy Dessler

In addition to being great for users to get their news and entertain themselves, it can also be great for businesses. Social media marketing can be great for promoting an array of different products and services and can grow companies and brands quickly.

However, building out your social media marketing strategy can be intimidating at times. Thankfully, having to create your social media content strategy doesn’t have to be a nightmare. With that in mind, this article is going to go over a few tips to build a great social media marketing strategy for 2020.

Know Who You’re Trying to Reach

The most important part of any social media marketing strategy is to know your target market. They are the individuals that you feel want or need your product the most and are most likely to convert into customers. When researching your target market, be sure to look at things like their age, their education, their gender, their hobbies and interests and several other things.

Being aware of your target can make it much easier to create content that they will enjoy or find value in. If you simply make assumptions on your target without doing research of any kind, your success (if any) is likely to be limited. You have a ton of data out there at your disposal, so you might as well use it.

Be Aware of the Benefits and Drawbacks of Different Platforms
Next, you need to think about the social media platforms themselves. While your marketing strategy can include different platforms, you need to break down the benefits and drawbacks of different platforms. Some content will surely perform better on certain platforms than others. You need to keep this in mind when creating content for specific platforms.

For example, YouTube and TikTok are likely best for videos, Instagram for pictures and Facebook or Twitter are often the best for text. Also, be sure to take advantage of the certain features included on different platforms, such as Instagram Stories.

Once you know about the benefits and drawbacks of a platform, you can create customized and engaging content for said platform. If you create one piece of content and spread it across all of your different platforms and channels, it won’t be as effective.

Read more: Useful Tips To Build Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

How to Use Empathetic Marketing in Your Social Media Strategy

If you’re like 44% of people worldwide, you’ve been spending more time on social media during the pandemic. Whether you’re catching up on the latest news on Twitter or chatting with family on Facebook, social media has allowed us to stay connected.

But as a small business owner, are you spending more time on social media being empathetic?

While sometimes confused with sympathy, which is feeling compassion for someone else, empathy means putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes.

By empathizing with your customers, you can better serve them.

Here’s the Merriam Webster definition of empathy: “the action of (or capacity for) understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”

It’s important to take an empathetic approach in all of your marketing materials, from your website copy to your social media strategy.

Because social media offers such a great way to interact with a large audience, you should be willing to put in the time and effort to ensure your communications are not only engaging, but empathetic to what people are going through.

According to the Braze Brand Humanity Index research, around 65% of people were more loyal to brands they felt a human connection with.

So to help you get—and stay connected—with your customers, here are four ways a small business owner can build a social media presence with more empathetic content marketing.

Create an empathy map.
This can be a good first step to put you deeper into the mind of your customer. Originally a tool used in the design and agile development worlds, empathy mapping provides a deeper understanding of your customer. It’s usually split into four quadrants: says, thinks, does and feels.

With your target customer’s persona in the middle, you begin to brainstorm questions, like:

  • Why do you need my product?
  • How does using my product make you feel/think/do/say?
  • What are some stressors/fears in your life?
  • How does my product help you reach your goals?
  • Write out your customer’s thoughts the way you think he or she would express. Their needs, wants, desires, hopes, fears, goals and dreams will start to be more clear, and you’ll be able to build a social media presence using messaging that resonates with your followers.

Tap into your customers’ emotions.
I’m not talking about playing on their fears to sell your products, but rather, thinking about how your product makes them feel.

Here’s a way that a brand helped ease their smallest customers’ fears. Philips invented a miniature version of a CAT scanner called the ‘KittenScanner,’ which doctors use to educate kids about the MRI process and put them at ease. Children can try it out with toy animals, taking the focus off of their procedure and onto fun.

It was created back in 2004, but it still gets mentioned on social media, in videos and in health journals as a way to reduce the need for sedation. How could you position your brand in a helpful, stress-reducing way for your customers?

Read more: How to Use Empathetic Marketing in Your Social Media Strategy

5 Mistakes You Might Be Making in Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the best ways to market your business, no matter what industry you belong to. This is because platforms like Facebook and Instagram have millions (or even billions) of active monthly users, and you can easily reach out to them by sharing relevant and interesting content.

That said, here are 5 common mistakes you need to avoid in social media marketing.

Overlooking Branding
There are thousands of large and small businesses posting on social media, so you need a unique brand image in order to stand out. Use various components, particularly the color palette, communication tone and language, and an attractive logo.

When you share images and videos on social media for marketing, make sure they include your company logo, making your brand more recognizable and memorable. If you don’t have one, use a professional designer or freelancer. You can’t use a machine to create a logo, even though these services can be affordable. Only a graphic designer can understand your brand requirements perfectly.

Buying Followers
It’s clear that social media and influencers are changing ecommerce by affecting the very dynamics of marketing. However, do you know that most social media celebrities have tons of paid followers? Many brands and influencers purchase followers, and there are many easily accessible platforms for that.

If you’re considering this step, stop right there. Most platforms have advanced algorithms that can detect accounts that have paid or fake followers, and you could be banned if you’re found to be engaging in this practice. Also, you won’t be able to generate actual interest for your brand online as these fake followers won’t interact with your shared content. So, it’s better to get as many organic followers as possible.

Ignoring the Comments Section
One of the biggest reasons brands are active on social media is to be able to interact with their target audience in a relaxed, comfortable environment. If you want the best results from your social media marketing campaigns, it’s important to interact and engage with your followers on a regular basis.

Responding to comments on posts is a great way to improve your social media engagement. Whether you get praises or complaints, addressing them promptly and professionally will ensure your customers are happy. You can also register their feedback in order to avoid doing things that upset them in the future.

Read more: 5 Mistakes You Might Be Making in Social Media Marketing

4 tips to elevate videos for social media marketing

Most social media managers know they must incorporate visual content into their plans.

Dynamic videos and video clips are increasingly becoming part of this strategy, too. Now, 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool—up from 63% the previous year—according to HubSpot. With video content becoming an integral part of an organization’s overall marketing strategy, it’s more important than ever to make sure it’s executed seamlessly, professionally and in a way that will drive a return on investment.

Although the social media world is ever-changing and requires innovation and experimentation daily, social media managers and corporate video editors can keep in mind a few best practices to drive results, foster engagement and increase followers. Here are four for managing video content marketing for Avid’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts:

Optimize for mobile.  Brightcove’s Global Video Index found 53% of global video views begin on smartphones and tablets, siphoning market share from desktop computers. On top of that, social media platforms have been redesigned to cater to mobile. Instagram, for instance, doesn’t make it easy for everyday users to upload content in its desktop version. CNET details how users can bypass this problem so they don’t have to transfer images from their computer to their phone. CNET notes Instagram’s adoption of a mobile-first mentality. Failing to optimize for mobile is a crucial misstep when you’re creating videos for social media channels. If you’re uploading content that’s suited only for horizontal versus square formats, followers probably won’t bother to watch it.

Read more: 4 tips to elevate videos for social media marketing

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