3 Reasons Your Business Should be Using Instagram

instagram

Facebook and Twitter (though in decline)  have been the standard for online networking years. The demographics of social networking platforms are beginning to be stirred up as new stages develop. What’s more, as Facebook and Twitter  have begun to put more focus on paid targeted promotions, business entities are have a harder time getting an organic presentation on platform causing these organization to look to other platforms to generate leads and push out authentic content. One of these is Instagram

In an especially telling noteworthy issue, in September 2015 Instagram surpassed Twitter in number of users, making it the second most utilized networking platform behind Facebook, who owns it. Twitter is not third with 340 million users which are in steady decline as of late. Those sorts of numbers are difficult to disregard and this dazzling development is part of the reason that individuals are beginning to eye Instagram as the premiere spot to advertise their business offerings.

1. Instagram is continuing to displace its rivals

Throughout recent years, the development of mobile-friendly platforms has been paramount when considering social patterns, and we’ve at long last come to the tipping point. In 2015, we finally reached the point where people’s time spent on mobile media, whether it be phones or tablets, was essentially higher than that spend on desktop. Portable is no longer just a growing entity. It has turned into the essential way that clients are getting to online substance.

This gives Instagram promoting a gigantic preference point over its main three rivals, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Unlike its rivals, Instagram was initially imagined as a mobile application and not a desktop based entity. And despite other networking heavyweights putting gargantuan dollar quantities into their portable applications’ development, it’s troublesome for these stages to remain as consistent, organic and locally relevant. While these applications continue to hash it out with unlimited upgrades to more smoothly integrate various functions, pages, and menus, Instagram’s straightforward, stripped-down versatile interface makes it simple and instinctive for its varying clientele .

2. Organizations can market themselves through visual narrating.

It’s said that a photo is worth 1000 words and there is not a single place where this adage is more true than Instagram. Being a visual based platform serves a variety of functions, but none more so, from an advertising and marketing standpoint, than to tell a story without using words. The object of the marketing game, after all, is to convey a memorable idea or image that potential leads can relate to. In this respect visual content is king and will continue to trounce superfluous wording when it comes to memory recall and by extension, branding, for all time.

3. More posts are seen on Instagram

It’s been verified that posts published by you on Instagram are far more likely to be seen by your followers than on Facebook or Twitter. Often times content looks like it’s  in pole position in the news feed on Facebook, but what a lot of people don’t know is that Facebook’s algorithm tailors peoples’ feeds according to their interactions, search histories, and more. Twitter on the other hand, keeps posts in chronological order,  but due to declining health as a social platform remains at most a back up plan. 

Growing your Online Business: Top 3 Lead Generation Strategies You’ll Need

Putting up your own online business is never as easy as 1, 2, and 3. If your ambition is to run a successful business and grow it to the next level, you’ll find yourself  working day in day out to reach your goal. It’s a tougher job across the board, but at the core, the most crucial part to help your business to grow and flourish comes down to finding potential clients and converting them. This process of conversion into actual customers is where the power of lead generation comes into play.

Definition

In marketing, it is the generation of interest or inquiry of consumers into products or services that a business offers. Consumers, or more simply put, leads, can be created for a variety of purposes such as e-newsletter list acquisition, list building or for sales leads purposes. It is all about drawing in or attracting the right prospects, and getting them in touch with you and vice versa. To get them attracted, below are the top 3 strategies that you can utilize.

Strategy 1. Content That is Fresh

It is vital to keep your content updated and fresh. You ought to consistently be adding new content to your website, whether it be blog entries, upgraded information or even design changes. Envision strolling into a store in a shopping center and seeing that the majority of the items being displayed there were dusty, the edges of the room had spider webs and the sales representative didn’t exactly look congenial. You most likely wouldn’t have any desire to purchase anything there, would you? Truth be told, you’d be out of there before a sales representative had the opportunity to inquire as to whether you need anything. The same situation is valid for your website. Potential clients need to realize that you think about what you’re putting forth.

Strategy 2. Email Lists

Email addresses are one of the most ideal approaches to create leads. The potential client has offered their email address with a specific end goal to get more data about the product or service that your business offers. You now have the chance to transform them into actual clients. Email is the most ordinarily utilized lead generation form, so it must be done well.

Strategy 3. Social Media

Social media’s viral nature means it is a hotbed for linking with new leads. By persistently captivating your existing clients with high quality content you will increase new leads more naturally. On the chance that you can make content that is engaging, that your customers will forward to friends and family members, then you’re on the right track. You are on your way to effectively generating new leads.

The Top 3 Content Marketing Metrics to Pay Attention to

When it comes to content marketing, there is a long list of metrics that marketing professionals pay attention to in order to determine the best course of action moving forward, but often times different metrics take precedent depending on the business. That being the case, when asking marketers what the most important metrics are concerning content marketing, you’ll receive a variety of answers. This is all well and good. Different product and service avenues are going to be more focused on different metrics, but despite that there are three content marketing metrics that underscore every business and are the topic of discussion in today’s blog. That shouldn’t imply that we should track just these metrics exclusively, but focusing on these  will provide a foundation for you to draw conclusions from more advanced metrics and achieve tangible results.

Monthly Sessions

This marketing metric is one of the simplest to understand which indicates how well your business is doing at the top of the funnel concerning things such as social media, PPC, and other things that drive traffic to your website. Stemming from this metric are plenty of other specific metrics that measure more detailed facets of website traffic such as number of organic sessions vs. referenced sessions,  session length, landing pages and time spend on these pages, etc., but highlighting and understanding monthly sessions in general provides a quick overview of your website traffic and insight into potential leads.

Conversion Rate

This is the bread and butter of any digital marketing campaign: converting complete strangers into devoted customers. The number of conversions is the end all be all metric when it comes to determining success. Therefore, tracking this number is crucial when is comes to reaching a concrete target such as a goal number of leads or customers and for determining trends in your marketing performance. When you track the conversion rate you’re able to compare sessions and conversions more objectively.

The One Metric That Matters

The first two metrics covered are like the bumpers in a bowling alley, guiding every marketer to their objective goal and making the process easier. They clearly indicate if you’re on track to hit business goals like monthly recurring revenue or customer growth. This third metric, the one metric that matters, is how you improve the first two metrics. Granted, it’s more of a concept than a concrete metric but it’s important to include because as was previously mentioned, metrics vary from marketer to marketer according to the business and transform over time.

The concept of the One Metric That Matters, coined by Alistair Croll, means focusing on the most important metric at a given moment. In his original explanation of the term, he presents it in the context of a company as a whole, but the idea can be tailored to fit marketing specifically very easily. If you take a look at your website’s metrics right now what would you see that needs work? Does any one metric stand out more than another in the context of needing to be modified or having its game upped? Generally speaking, the metric that matters at a given moment should be one that fits the following three criteria:

1. It will have the most impact on your overall company objective
2. It has the most potential for improvement
3. You have means to improve it now.

How to Increase Your Email Open Rate

First of all, response rate is a better indicator of performance than open rate. Response rate is a very important metrics when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of email marketing. To improve email marketing, increasing the response rate is essential. Here are a few tips to improve sales email response rates:

1) Prioritize thoughtfulness over tools: Sales teams today are lucky to have so many options when it comes to sales tools to help with things like outreach, target research, and funnel analytics. But no set of tools is a replacement for necessary customer research. Plenty of startups that use these tools, however, still suffer from sub-5% response rates because they fail to speak to their audience in terms that engage and interest them.

2) Parse all available data sources to understand your target: Social media is an underrated source of information when it comes to building buyer personas and Ideal Customer Profiles. Begin with (at the bare minimum) a dozen “ideal” customer contacts for this specific campaign. ICPs can vary at bit for each campaign. For example, some may target the user bottoms-up while others may target the budget-holder top-down. Parse each of these contacts’ social profiles. Start with LinkedIn, which everyone should have: look not only at their current and past roles, but also their certifications, publications if any, professional groups, and endorsements.

3) Watch response rates over open rates: Open rates can be misleading. For example an email with an exceedingly weird subject line can catch one’s eye, but if nothing resonates within the email recipient, your response rates may be just as bad as before. Especially in B2B sales messaging, the best metric to measure the effectiveness of an email sequence is the resulting response rate; remember, the goal here is a conversation. In particular, the number of appointments set up and resulting qualified opportunities are your guiding measures of success. Prioritizing response rates means prioritizing thoughtful emails, which will naturally yield more sales.

4) Make the prospect the hero: Even if you have one core ICP, various different personalities exist within that audience, and your sales email copy needs to correlate to the right set. For instance, a CFO may be more receptive to cost reduction value props, while a developer might be more attuned technical benefits, even though both are stakeholders in vendor selection. Make the prospect see the potential to be her company’s saving grace with the help of your product. Outlining pain points the company faces is not enough; show prospects how they (personally) can solve them today.

5) Think about what’s already in their inboxes: Overly “salesy” or impersonal content isn’t just heading straight to archive or spam; it reflects poorly on your business in a world where everyone receives too much email. Keep in mind the volume and style of sales mail you receive in your own inbox. What do you hate? What’s the last cold sales email you opened? Envision what your contact’s inbox might look like given their company and position. Use that mental image to differentiate your messaging. Avoid ubiquitous jargon or mentioning your own company’s name off the bat. Other smaller elements common to sales emails may also set off alarms that will land your email in the trash: over-formality, fancy signatures, and long blocks of product-description text are a few possible examples.

3 WordPress blog Lessons You Can Benefit From Today by Maurice Lennon

Recently I was reached out to by one of our readers for advice about starting a running a successful website? Tragically, there is no simple shortcut or answer. To begin with, simply working hard is a great place to start. In this article, we’ll take a look at where that hard work should be aimed towards with 3 top tips for starting a successful website based on WordPress. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you have already picked your niche and have decided why you need to make a WordPress site. So what’s next?

Purchasing

With regards to choosing your domain, I advise you to go with a standard www.__________.com instead of using the default assigned “yourbrand.wordpress.com.” Try to purchase a domain. Many of the domain registrar providers nowadays are reliable. However, on a more personal note, I would love to suggest “NameCheap” due to the fact that you get whois guard that is absolutely free. If you want to go a step further though or are finding it hard to find a domain that is suitable for you, you need not worry. Here are 5 more of our favorite domain providers.

1. Lean Domain Search

2. Domainr

3. Panabee

4. Name Mesh

5. DomainsBot

Creating Engaging Content

As we continue to say over and over, content is a very vital ingredient in creating any WordPress Blog. Simply pumping out article after article won’t always be enough though and you’ll have in work from a different angle or approach. Include some videos, web applications as well as infographics. Always keep your readers, who are the lifeblood of your WordPress Blogs, aware that you are there to serve and help them. In the event that you are not yet an expert on a specific topic, you might need to think about citing several experts. Crediting people this way is a good way to build relationships and eventually have others crediting you and linking traffic to your site, which leads us to our 3rd tip.

Reach Out and Listen

Everything is two-way when it comes to blogging — – you share engaging content, and the readers give their insights about yours. So make it to a point that you give them blogs you would want to read. In the same manner, listen to their suggestions as well as to their article recommendations. At the end of the day, it’s your audience who brings positive traffic to your blog.

10 Helpful Tips for Effective Blog Marketing pt. 2 by Maurice Lennon

As was promised in the previous article that you read, we are giving you few more tips for effective blog marketing, which will definitely attract potential readers.

Tip 6. Some Good Photography Skills Are A Great Plus

Content can always be enhanced with good photography skills. Readers will share your blog if they like it. With good imagery and photography, the probability of someone sharing blogs that you’ve written will go up. Plain and simple, people like to look at things and love validation in their tastes so be sure to plan out your photos to get the shot that will drive traffic. A great example for a post that potentially has great photos would be writing a blog about a certain dessert recipe and including photos not only of the step-by-step process, but of course the finished product as well.

Tip 7. Formatting

Word and image formatting are also important in blog writing. Align texts on the left side of the blog and images at the center for a more professional and friendly-looking blog. There are variations of alignment that you can play around with but sticking to the classic method never hurt anyone and is the preferred method for a reason. Lastly, make sure that the title is in bold and has bigger font.

Tip 4. Write As If You Are Just Talking To Your Friends

Readers love reading blogs wherein the author’s personality shines right through their written words. It generates a sense of familiarity that makes people comfortable. Readers will feel like they are right in front of you, partaking  in your thought process and ideas. The posts are more engaging and easier to read. Let your reader build connection with you with the help of your blog posts.

Tip 8. You Have To Fake It Until You Make It

Be overly confident while putting your best foot forward. It can actually get you further than you expect. Your blog might be pea-sized, however, you have make to it look as large as it can. Money can be an issue, but in any case, simply do what you can to have a decent format and an alluring header.

Top 10. Socialize and Make Friends

You have to socialize with your readers to continue to grow your audience. If you have enough time, interact with your audience by responding to comments and answering their questions. By doing such, your readers will feel they are significant and are recognized as well.

Above are just 10 of the countless tips to effectively market your blog, and if you do have one in mind that I did miss listing down, be sure to include and consider that prior to creating your very first blog entry.

Have a nice day!