by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media |
Google plus is an interest – based social networking platform used by business owners all over the world to increase their ranking in search engines. Following are the steps of how to get your first 1000 followers on Google+.
STEP 1: Fill Out Your Full Profile
Click on the About tab of your Google+ profile to ensure that you’ve filled out the necessary information. The different categories that have to be filled out in the profile are:
- The Story showing your tagline, introduction section, and bragging rights
- Communities showing the Google+ communities you’ve already joined
- Links showing your website, youtube and custom links
- Contact information showing your email, phone number and address
STEP 2: Share Your Google+ Profile Link via Other Social Networks & Email
Make your friends become aware of your business Google+ profile link by sharing it with them via other social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This will make them follow your profile and make your business popular. You can also share your Google+ profile to your e-mail subscribers and market your business.
STEP 3: Leave a Google+ Follow Button On Your Website
Setting up a Google+ Follow button on your website is necessary for your website visitors to follow your profile. There are five different shapes and sizes in Google+ Follow button. Another option is to go with a Google+ Follow badge which will appear along with your profile picture, cover photo and tagline.
Google+ Follow button
Google+ Follow Badge
STEP 4: Search And Get Involved In Relevant Google+ Circles
Google+ is the best platform to build up communities between users. When you follow someone, automatically they get added to your circles by which you can start sharing information. Start by searching for circles which would be suitable for your business and then get involved with them.
Just type ‘Circle’ and relevant keyword in the Google+ search box and you’ll find out circles that might interest you and be suitable for your business. Another way is to directly visit pages that interest you and follow them and look at their circles and get involved with them too. This way you can grow the number of your followers by following them and making them follow you back.
STEP 5: Participate And Contribute To a Google+ Community
Google+ communities prove to be a great option for increasing your followers by interacting with a group of users at the same time about an apt topic regarding your business. You can even start your own community with some ideas or topics in mind and start engaging potential customers to participate in it. This creates good visibility and presence and thus promotes your brand over the web.
Being a part of a Google+ community can spread your name and attract more followers too. Through communities, you can get connected to more like-minded Google+ users and start sharing your business discussions and content. This holds to be a direct communication medium with your target audience, which brings in more followers and thus indirectly goes into good revenue yields.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media |
Facebook is an efficient social media platform for new business owners to market their business worldwide. Here are the steps for getting your first 1000 fans on Facebook.
STEP 1: Complete Your Profile Page
For fans to reach you quickly, fill out the important areas of your profile.
- About section
- Profile picture and cover photo
- Website URL
- Start info
- Address
- Description and Mission
- Contact information
Make sure that you create and post several updates so that there is good content on your page that readers can look into and know more about your products and services.
Example of a professional Facebook business page
STEP 2: Send Invitations To Your Friends To Let Them Know About Your Page
Make use of the ‘Invite your friends’ option in your facebook page to send invitations to your friends who may be quite interested in your business. It’s better off to select the people who may be interested in your product rather than just clicking the Send Invite button to all of your friends.
You can get reached to 25 to 50 friends by this method and then further proceed after getting a vanity URL for your facebook page. A vanity URL will look like facebook.com/yourbrandname which will give a more professional branded image for your business and eventually, more fans too.
STEP 3: Share Your Facebook Link via Other Social Networks and Mail
Popularize your business by sharing your Facebook URL through other social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Tweeting your facebook link to your followers or sharing your Facebook page would do wonders in maximizing the number of likes for your facebook page. You can implement the same idea to your e-mail subscribers list too.
STEP 4: Insert Facebook Buttons Into Your Website
One of the best things you can do to get more fans for your facebook page is to make use of the different Facebook buttons and widgets that they provide. Have a look at the social plugins of Facebook.
- Like button
- Share button
- Follow button
- Send button
- Comments
- Embedded posts
- Activity feed
- Like box
- Recommendations feed
Like button and like box are the two ideal options you can go for to increase the number of likes and fans for your facebook page.
Website with Facebook Like Button
Website with Facebook Like Box
STEP 5: Pay Out a Few Bucks On Facebook Advertising
In addition to setting up your Facebook profile and sharing it with your friends, it’s also necessary to spend a few dollars to get your page advertised and marketed to your target audience. Since Facebook lacks many of the advanced options of taking your business to the next level, you’d require spending a little and promoting your page and boost your ads to potential customers in the social media platform.
STEP 6: Add a Facebook Call – To – Action On Your Website
You can try working out calls – to – action through your Facebook page for increased fan numbers on Facebook. It should be alluring enough to draw people towards your business.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 22, 2017 | Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup |
You’ve got into your own business?
Got a neat professional website?
Have your own short – term and long – term goals in terms of sales and revenue?
Gained enough resources for developing your small business?
Framed a small budget for marketing and promotional purposes?
If your answer is a big ‘YES’ for all these questions, come on and jump into marketing your product worldwide to start making money out of it. There are lots of marketing ideas that you can do manually in your own area to make people come to know about you. But, your goal is to reach all over the globe man!!! But how? Here’s the answer to that too – “Online Marketing”.
Did you know that 61% of global internet users research products online?
Did you know that almost 40% of the world’s population (3 billion people) are using the internet?
Did you know that 71% of internet users are more likely to purchase a brand that they are following in a social networking site such as Twitter or Facebook?
All these facts prove the importance of online marketing for your product to get visible worldwide, thereby getting your potential customers.
Hey, but you don’t need to worry about how to start marketing your business online at the start. With the little number of bucks you have and the least amount of resources or even by yourself, you can make your business online marketing like a cake-walk.
Here are ten perfect ideas to start marketing your business online. Have a keen read on these tips and start using it for your marketing giving a brand image for your business worldwide.
1.Build Your Own Blog
It’s important to have your own blog in your web page and you gotta add posts on a daily basis to reach your target audience effectively. Saying it more clearly, let your blog posts directly or indirectly speak about yourselves and your product to get sold. People always look for useful info that might influence their purchases. So write up posts that would induce your potential customers to buy your products and keep them coming back to your page.
Go through these simple tips about what kind of content you can have in your blog posts.
- Collect statistical lists related to your business that might be interesting and make it into a post and share it.
- Curate content from other sources and add your own taste of unique content to it, giving due credits to the sources..
- Teach your readers by providing ‘how to’ and ‘top10’ kind of lists posts.
- Check out your Analytics account every now and then and see which posts have gained more visibility and popularity among visitors, and rewrite or write posts related to such topics.
- Be keen on writing catchy titles because only if your headline is attractive, one will have the urge to look into it.
- Make good use of templates, infographics, graphs, and charts in your blog posts as people always go for visually appealing content rather than plain-text ones.
So, the key points to keep in mind for promoting your business through the blog are churning out quality content, inviting bloggers/influencers who might be interested in your business and share it over the web platform to reach worldwide.
2.Brand Your Business
What’s branding in marketing?
Assigning a name or a symbol or a design unique to your business can be called as a brand.
A logo is the principal branding identity that provides a distinct image for your business. You want to make your product reach over the globe and the first thing you have to do is to design a special logo.
Just think about some branded companies like Apple, Nike, Reebok,…….All that pops up in your mind is that logo right?
Logos are the face of your business. So, be careful while designing it. The way your logo is designed greatly impacts your customers coming forward to buy it.
Some reminders before designing a logo for your business:
- Your logo should be tempting to your target audience.
- Let your logo be a unique and special one.
- Your logo should be classic lasting with time.
- Setup your logo with a trend and not copying from others.
- Your logo should be simple conveying its own special message.
- Your logo design should support your brand.
- Use colors, fonts, white spaces and shapes correctly such that it reinforces your product.
- Your logo should be flexible for big screens/mobile screens and its print in black/white color.
Examples of some best Logos
3. Get On Some Stylish Business Cards
The best marketing tool that is handy for your business is a business card. Having an attractive set of business cards in your pocket and handing it over to ever people with each handshake, doesn’t it sound good?
Design your business card with a benefit-driven headline always. It should be like:
“Benefit + How”
For example, “We provide the best home-based food for you by adding organic ingredients” can be the headline for a home-based food style restaurant.
Another point to be kept in mind is, always provide your business card to the other with a specific call to action.
For example, render some firsthand offer for them to download from your website by collecting their email address.
Give a handshake…Slip on your business card into their hands…Let them take a glance into your card and that’s more than enough buddy!
4. Get Your Business Listed On Business Directories
Do you know that nowadays people search on the internet for businesses? It’s necessary that you list your business in some of the main business directory websites so that people can come to know about your business.
Some of the common popular online business directories where you can list out your business are Craiglist, Yelp, Yellowpages, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Angie’s list, Manta, Foursquare, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn, The Business Journal and so on.
There are also so many business directories specific for your business and you can also list yourself in those niche-specific websites.
Guess you don’t have to think over this as it’s completely free!
5.Promote And Advertise Your Product
There are various ways by which you can promote and advertise your product online, thereby gaining potential customers for your business.
Go through these simple ideas that are put forward for promotion and advertisement of your business.
- You can implement to cross-sell your product by establishing a joint venture with other business owners who sell products that would complement yours. By this marketing practice, you can easily make your customers buy your product.
- Begin a customer referral program by offering your existing customer a free month of service, a free product, or some other profitable reward for referring new customers.
- Providing giveaways/free stuff/ sweepstakes for your target audience can again promote your business. This technique is easy and also you can ask for a free email subscription with the submission form.
- Make up a Press Release (PR) that’s newsworthy and interesting about your business based upon your data and share it widely.
- You can also offer free work or pay a little amount for your website visitors.
6. Send Cold Mails And Make Cold Calls
The next way to trigger up your sales is to send cold emails and make cold calls to potential customers all over the globe.
The main hints for sending a successful cold mail that would generate a good number of leads for your business are subject lines, and then the body of the mail. Subject lines should be always targeted towards the customer focusing on what benefit they would reap out of your product.
Making cold calls is always executed by business owners all over the world to make common people know about their product. This technique has also been successful in generating sales for businesses as people talk over phones and convince customers to buy their product.
7.Adopt Social Media Marketing
Social media has been the recent trend in online marketing and the one which gets you good business online. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Pinterest and the like have taken millions of small business owners to great heights.
Continue reading below to know how to create a brand image for your business via social media marketing.
- Make use of your blogger profile for commenting on other peoples’ blog posts so that you’ll be visible on their platform. You could provide useful information to their blog visitors, and automatically people would check your public profile and website.
- Setup a Facebook page for your business and start posting updates.
- Setup a Google+ page for your business and be active in it.
- Setup the LinkedIn Company page and let people know about your business.
- Setup Company page on Pinterest and start sharing images and infographics.
- Setup Twitter profile for your business and tweet on an everyday basis.
- Sign up a Youtube account and start posting videos about your product, teach the viewers and address their common questions too.
8.Gear Up On Email Marketing
Email marketing is taking its grand place in promoting your business online to potential customers. It helps to retain current/previous customers and also gain new customers. Let’s see how it works.
- First of all, make sure that you’ve implemented Opt-in for your marketing emails which mean that you obtain prior permission from the customer or recipient of the mail for allowing you to send more emails. This would surely increase your credibility with the customer.
- Start an e-mail newsletter and make your new website visitors subscribe to it by offering any bonus content price for subscribing. Then you can slowly grow your subscriber’s list and transform them into paying customers by sending quality emails about your offers and promotions.
- Build a candid e-mail signature and add a link to your giveaway content and auto subscribe the person who downloads that.
You can start and continue your email marketing campaigns using free services like MailChimp.
A Sample Simple Newsletter Subscription Form
9. Be A Part Of Networking
Networking plays a vital role in connecting with people doing businesses similar to yours and to other potential customers all around the world. If you have started your business, and just sitting with a cup of drink on your desk, you’re not going to succeed in it. The success of your business lies in how much you get connected with prospective buyers through various networking groups and events.
- You can make yourself as a part of local events in your area by either sponsoring food or any giveaways (like custom balloons printed with your business name). The trade show or event that you’re participating should be related to your business so that you can visit and talk about your product to the visitors.
- Join Mastermind Groups related to your business so that you can meet partners over there.
- You can also get good contacts by joining Membership groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and other forums.
- Host your own free webinar.
Finally, don’t forget to send out gifts and handwritten Thank you cards to your customers via post.
10.Publish Great Content
Content Marketing is becoming the backbone of so many businesses and it yields good returns in turn for the owners.
Just grasp these key points on how to publish good content which will, in turn, yield good revenue for you.
- Focus on your audience
- Add visual elements (infographics, videos and slides)
- Interview experts in your industry and publish it in your blog
- Let your titles focus on Top 10 lists which attracts people to read
- Write e-books, whitepapers, guides and publish it in your website
Don’t just stop with framing up with good content. Get on with publishing and sharing it on top social networks and your email subscribers and then you get to see its results soon.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing |
Being the owner of a small business is not so easy job as you’ve to look into so many tasks, one at a time. One such prime tasks are business development. To develop your business effectively, you should have the good store of marketing knowledge in your brain. Only then you can catch those fishes easily in your net man!
You may have an idea on how to market your product by getting first-hand information from experts, surfing through the web and so on. But do you think all this is enough to take that level of success you’re aiming for? Surely No!
Only if you set aside some personal time of gaining knowledge through writings from experts, you’ll know how to do it in the right way.
Neil Gaiman says, “A book is a dream that you hold in your hand.”
Yes by reading books on Marketing and getting the good understanding about the know-how of promoting your product, you can achieve your dreams and goals in your venture.
Here are 10 most recommended marketing books that you should read to get a clear idea of marketing your business.
1.How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
My friend, Marketing is all about influencing and attracting people. To buy your product, first they should like you and they should heed to what you’re trying to say to them, isn’t it?
This is the best handbook for you to learn more about people and how to win over them. Note that so far 15 million copies have been sold worldwide.
With this book, you can
- Enhance customer relationships
- Become a better salesman and market your products effectively
- Win people applying psychological theories while handling them
- Grow your earning power
- Become popular
“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.”
This is how this book gives many tips as to how to talk to people and impress them. There are six main sections in the book.
- Principles of handling people
- Ways to make people like you
- Win people’s minds
- How to be a leader
- Letters that return good results
- How to make a happy home
On the whole, read this book and you’ll know how to get people coming to buy your stuffs.
2.Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert
The title of the book speaks about itself. The books talks about how to influence and persuade people to say ‘Yes’. It indeed takes you into the path of different applied psychological principles and teaches you how to become better persuaders.
The author Dr. Robert Cialdini, with his 35 years of deep research into this subject and a three-year program study, has effectively put out his thoughts with anecdotes and examples in a simple writing style, about how to influence people. This is a must-read book for marketing professionals, they say.
You’ll read six universal principles about persuasion and influence and how to apply it in your daily life, and take up marked success.
“Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.”
This quote of Dr. Robert from the book ‘Influence’ is an example of what and how we come under the influence of different people or things, knowingly or unknowingly.
Read it and you’ll find this to be a quite interesting book.
3.Tribes by Seth Godin
“Tribes: We need you to lead us” by renowned business blogger Seth Godin is a book about leadership. It says that we all are groups of people belonging to multiple tribes, and if you’re the one who wants to bring a change in your community, then you gotta take up the leadership status and do it buddy.
Internet can provide a variety of sources and tools, but who’ll lead us? Its only people like you who can lead up resources and make them accomplish great tasks. So, as a business leader, you’ll get to know how to make things work out for good under your leadership.
“The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
With encouraging words like these, this book will surely kindle up your spirits to rise up and go and make a change in the world. It makes you understand that the term ‘marketing’ is all about building up that fire or passion inside you and throwing it upon others, and make them believe you as well.
All about leadership and social change, this book with short chapters, will be a treasure hunt for those business owners who want to lead people.
4.Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah
“Stop wasting money blasting the world with marketing messages that nobody cares about. Instead, learn to get found with Inbound Marketing.”
From the back cover of the book “Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” written by the two co-founders of HubSpot Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, hope you can clearly get an idea about this book.
Swiping off the traditional outbound marketing techniques like cold calling, emails and so on, people are now turning their heads towards Social Media, blogs and Google to find their preferred products and services. Inbound Marketing is becoming a boon for today’s business owners to market their products online and get good returns from it.
The book ‘Inbound Marketing’ is a perfect how-to-guide that provides you with useful insights about the following.
- Getting your business found by social media sites, Google and blogosphere
- Increasing your Google ranking for gaining more traffic
- Creating a blog and promoting your business
- Growing your community in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
The authors have put up the facts to be known about Inbound Marketing in a very crisp and easily understandable way. So, it’s a must-buy for you!
5.Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
“Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook : How to tell your story in a noisy social world” by Gary is one of the highly recommended books to any business owner who’s looking to build up their brand.
Gary, the social media expert comes up with useful tips and ideas as to how to build up your social media marketing in the right way. He clearly puts up the vital points needed to convert your website’s traffic into sales. If you’re marketing your product via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or Tumblr, then you must read this book.
While planning up your social media strategies, you may always look up for ways to take the ‘right hook’ which is sales and revenue. So, you go up jabbing your customers to take up the right hook and Gary easily helps you how to do it through his book.
“Your number-one job is to tell your story to the consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment they are deciding to make a purchase.”
Gary is a wonderful storyteller and he teaches you as to how to tell your story to your target audience and followers in Social Media platforms and make them buy your product. Content is the main part in Social media marketing and he tells you how you should frame up sales-inducing content.
Why waiting to buy such an incredible book?
6.Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
This book “Traction : A Startup Guide to getting Customers” is a gem for all start-up business owners to keep control of their business tractions. The main reason why many products / businesses fail at the beginning is due to the owners’ failure to take up proper marketing tactics and get customers.
So this Traction book serves to be a great guide for all employees and start-up founders to employ the right principles of traction for their company. The traction frameworks are supported by interviews with some founders of top companies like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Alex Pachikov (Evernote), and many more.
The authors have covered 19 marketing channels that help companies achieve good traction. Some of the marketing channels covered in the book are
- E-mail marketing
- Public Relations (PR)
- Business Development (BD)
- Trade shows
- Offline Ads
- Sales
“This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.”
Yes, this book can be said to be a Bible of Traction.
7.The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Al Ries and Jack Trout, the famous Marketing Consultants, in their book, “The 22 immutable laws of marketing: Violate them at your own risk” have given out 22 unchangeable laws of marketing that would stand over time.
The Law of
- Leadership
- Category
- Mind
- Perception
- Focus
- Exclusivity
- Ladder
- Duality
- The opposite
- Division
- Perspective
- Line Extension
- Sacrifice
- Attributes
- Candor
- Singularity
- Unpredictability
- Success
- Failure
- Hype
- Acceleration
- Resources
All these laws are very much applicable for your Marketing strategies. The following quote from the book summarizes it.
“Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products.”
Go ahead buying this book without a second thought.
8.The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza
Sean D’Souza, in this book, has clearly brought out points about how your customers’ brain goes through decision – making before buying your product. It simply educates you with the information needed for your customers to make purchasing decisions. So, you’ll come to know how to present that info needed for your customer effectively.
“The Brain Audit: Why customers buy (and why they don’t)”
As this headline of the book states, as a business owner who intends to sell your product, you’ve got everything in this book that you needed to know about marketing. This book is worth every penny as you get deep insights into marketing after giving it a read.
9.Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy, who are popularly known to be the ‘Father of Advertising’, has written this book in such a beautiful way that the one who reads it will know everything about advertising. Advertising, being the number one way of marketing your product, is something which every business owner should know and execute as a part of their marketing strategy.
“What you say in advertising is more important than how your say it.”
Ogilvy has given many simple tips like this describing how to advertise your product such that it reaches your customers and makes them to buy your products.
10.Ask by Ryan Levesque
“Ask: The counter intuitive online formula to discover exactly what your customers want to buy…..create a mass of raving fans….and take any business to the next level”
This headline of the book itself gives you a proper understanding of what the book is about. It renders a unique formula to capture what’s in your customers’ mind in terms of buying and provide them with their needs.
Once you buy and read this business book and put the formula into practice, you’ll automatically see the positive results of it. It’s found that the Ask formula outlined in this book has been a great aid in building multi-million dollar businesses in 23 different countries, generating over $100 million dollars in sales in the process. That’s something great man!
Expert online marketer Ryan has presented a neat step-by-step process to analyze your customers, get to know what they want and how to provide it tactfully. If you’re a business owner looking out for your selling your products online and boosting up your business, then you need to ask the right questions and ‘Ask’ helps you in that way.
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Marketing, Social Media |
You’ve started up your business with so many goals in mind, the topmost being your marketing plan. That’s the one which is going to get you potential customers and sales too, right?
You’d have also setup your social media business profiles as a part of Social Media Marketing. As a part of your everyday tasks or to-do-lists, have you set aside a section to concentrate on Social Media Marketing and boost it?
You may now ask ‘Buy Why?’
The answer is here dude. Latest statistical reports state that there are 1.82 billion social network users over the globe. And you know what? This number is expected to increase to nearly 2.33 by 2017. So, social media Marketing is one of the best ways to reach and engage your audience and gain more popularity than your competitors.
But it’s no big deal at all investing time or money to boost your social media marketing.
Yes, all it takes is a few minutes everyday to promote social media marketing and get good returns out of it.
Here are some of the ways by which you can boost up your Social Media Marketing strategies and see the changes taking place around in your business.
1.Increase Your Social Media Viewers
Your audience should be your main target while coming into the Social Media platform. This is because they’re the ones who’ll automatically get transformed into potential customers if you do your marketing and promotion in the right way.
In social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, check on a daily basis and you’d find that there are lots of people who have either shared your post or liked it or commented on it. Don’t just leave them, but grab them.
Once your eye notices that they’ve given importance to your post, return them with an indication of ‘Thanks’ by following them or ‘favorite’ ing them (in case of Twitter).
This will surely help you get more audience for your business and eventually get you good profits out of it.
2.Give A New Social Media Look To Your E–Mail Signature
Did you know that you can even catch up with your e-mail subscribers via Social media networking tactics?
It’s a way too simple man! Instead of just typing out your name with designation and company name in your e-mail signature, also add up links to the Social Media business profiles that you own. People who’re interested in your business would automatically click up on that link and start following you and get more info on a daily basis from your social media sites.
An Example E-Mail signature with Social Media Buttons (links)
This looks pretty cool and you can configure one like this for you too.
All you gotta do is, go to your Settings part in the e-mail you’re using and select ‘Signature’ and edit it and set it with your own preferable colors, background, text and so on.
3.Frame Up Your Name Board In All Social Networks
It’s very commonly known that business owners tend to sign up and own profiles in Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and the like. But there are more and number of Social Media sites like these where you can register your brand and keep, even if you think it’s not much important for your brand’s promotion.
You know why? There are people who search you throughout the web platform to get to know your company’s presence and when you’re present in almost every social network, it gives a good impression for them about your visibility and credibility.
Knowem is a site which helps you in this. It assists business owners to register and set up profiles for their product in many social media sites. It charges somewhere near $25 to make you sign up into 25 social media networks with profile names, email, photos, bio and details.
You can even type up your brand name in the search box and find out which Social networking sites you’re already into. Depending upon that, you could decide to sign up into more Social Media platforms with Knowem’s facility.
4.Build Up Your Posts With Visual Content
Text and links are of course important in communicating what’s in your mind with your social media viewers. But instead of putting them up alone, it’s a great idea to cover them up with images or any other form of visual content such as Infographics, block quotes, short ordered lists, charts, and many others.
Recently researchers have found out that images can result in 85% interaction rate in Facebook and increased retweets by 35%. That’s why it’s better to take up social media and visual content go hand in hand.
Some variety of options of how you can include visual content into your social media posts are:
- A screenshot of your product or any other useful information about your service.
- Uploading an image and asking followers to caption it.
- Conducting a photo contest
- Sharing images of your team members or any events that you’ve participated in.
- Creating collages through tools like Photovisi, Picasa, Fotor or Canva.
- Making cool and easy-to-understand infographics via Piktochart.
If in case you’re opting out to screengrab an image for your post, this is how you do it.
- PC users – Press the ‘Print Screen’ key and the screengrab goes to your clipboard
- Mac users – Press Cmd + Shift + 4 and the screengrab goes to your desktop
5.Complete Your Social Media Profiles
It can be widely seen that most business profiles, though listed in all social media networks, lack a completely filled up profile. Always keep in mind that unless you have a fully completed professional profile, your audience are not going to take you much important.
Be it Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, make sure that you’ve filled up all the blanks including location and e-mail because even the meanest details may be useful for your customers to reach you. Also, only a complete profile would get good visibility in search engines too.
- Facebook : Go to your Page’s settings -> Info
- Google+: Go to the ‘About’ tab and click ‘Edit’ on whichever fields you need to fill up.
- Twitter : Go to Settings -> Profile
- LinkedIn : Go to your profile and click ‘Complete your profile’ button to complete filling up your details
You can even consider the option of connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that your post appears automatically in Facebook once you post it in Twitter and this saves your time.
Setting up Profile in Twitter
6.Customize Your Images Using Fiverr
One of the best tactics that you can adapt for your business to gain much traffic online is to add a personalized touch to whatever you post in Social Media, even if its images. It’s always best to create your own customized images and share it via Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter.
Fiverr is a new crowdsourced service community found online that helps you do this with just 5 bucks in hand. They offer many services for creating your own graphics and design elements like images, logo designs, and reports and so on.
It’s also been heard from many business professionals that traffic to their website has doubled or tripled when making using of custom images.
All you have to do is give your idea and render life to it by sketching it into a unique image.
7.Validate Your Blog Post Ideas by Using Twitter’s Help
You’ve got an idea for your next blog post?
Wanna know how much it will be successful in reaching your audience after posting it?
Or need to get more valid points to be included in the post?
Will the post serves to be an aid to boost up your business?
So many questions running in your mind and the best platform to get your doubts clarified is the same platform where you’re gonna post it.
Just quickly share a post on Twitter that you’re researching for more points under your next topic “blah blah blah” and wait and see how many comments you’re getting from the interested audience.
With this, you’ll easily know how much effective or not your post will be; what people are expecting from you and accordingly you can frame it up and post it. It just costs you a few minutes of researching into your Twitter followers’ opinions via Tweets.
8.Make Use Of Hashtags
Now, this is another social media trend that’s gaining good visibility for businesses. Try adding a couple of hashtags in each of your posts to reach your potential customers.
Effect of Hashtags’ usage in Twitter
Given above is how hastags’ usage increases the number of retweets in Twitter. Similar to this, in all other social networking platforms too, addition of hashtags has increased the visibility of the posts shared.
Putting it in simple words: Hashtag your posts and more people get to see it!
9.Shake Hands Of Promotion Between Your Profiles
It’s normal that you may have your own Social media profile as well as your business profile. Why are you drawing lines between personal and professional usage? After all, it’s your company and you.
A great idea to boost up social media marketing is to always cross-promote your content or post between profiles. You can add up a reference in your bio section of your personal LinkedIn profile to your company’s LinkedIn profile. Doing so, even people in your network will come to know about your business and click and view the profile and its contents. You’ll get more clicks as well as more followers for your social media accounts.
Who knows, they may become your regular customers too……
Sample LinkedIn account linked with Twitter Profile
10.Link Up Your Social Updates With Your Landing Pages
All the online marketing strategies that you’re undertaking are to increase traffic to landing pages of your website, right? To get more leads, try including links to your landing pages along with your social media post. It can be even like a call-to-action, say for example, for more information on this offer, click https://www.xcompany.com/
Example of a promotional post with a link to the Landing page
by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing |
As a small business owner, you’d have come across so many people using the terms ‘Public Relations’ (PR) and ‘Marketing’ interchangeably. Mostly these two terms are thought of to be same. But did you know that they’re not the same, but do have a slight borderline of differences between them?
Being the boss of your company, first, get to know how PR and marketing are different from each other. Only then you can know which one to adopt for your business.
First, let’s look into these quick definitions.
- Marketing: The process of promoting, selling or distributing your products/goods/services to your customer.
- Public relations: The action of building up public understanding and goodwill/trust towards your company and its products or services.
Wanna get it clearer? Now, look at these examples.
Let this be more interesting ok…You love a girl and you’re proposing directly to her, “I love you, Rachel.” This is in Scenario 1.
Oh no…You don’t want to tell her directly that you love her. But you pretty want to let her know how true your love is and how much you are obsessed with her.
Call up Tom your friend. Tell him about your feelings and now Tom stands before Rachel and says, “Jack loves you so truly that he can’t live without you. And he’s a guy who deserves you more than anyone else on this earth. He’s such a lovable human!” This is in Scenario 2.
Scenario 1 is Marketing and Scenario 2 is Public Relations.
You yourself taking up steps and promoting your product is marketing and making the public to know about you through some other third party is Public Relations. Got it?
See below the sample Ad and PR of the same service offered by Amazon.com.
First comes the advertisement and next comes the PR (news article).
Advertisement (Marketing) about Black Friday
PR about Black Friday
Key Differences Between PR and Marketing
PR and marketing are related to each other. But both are employed with totally different strategies. These are the main differences between PR and marketing which will help you to draw line between them and get to know which one to implement for your small business.
1.COST : Paid / Free
Marketing your product involves your pocket to be emptied. Yes, you need to have a marketing budget for executing ads and other marketing campaigns to sell your product. And your ad appears as planned. So, advertising comes to underpaid media.
In contrary, PR is based upon a third party endorsement of your company and its something similar to earned media. This mostly involves publishing press releases or other newsworthy articles about your product in any news outlet at free of cost. And you cannot have much direct control over it as to when and how to publish it.
2.MAIN OBJECTIVE : Value / Image
Both marketing and PR’s basic focus is to promote the brand and gain popularity. But, the chief purposes differ: Marketing targets on selling selling selling……whereas PR targets on gaining trust and relationships with the public.
Marketing strategies mainly shoot upon making customers buy their products. It’s complete sales – oriented. Whereas while speaking about PR, it’s about building positive relationships with your target audience through exposure and broadcast media such as TV, radio, newspapers and so on.
Marketing = Customer Interest; PR = Customer relationships.
3.CONTENT: Twist / Straight
In marketing, content is one of the main aspects of advertising the product. It involves all attractive twisted content to induce your customers to buy the product.
In PR, content is all about straightforward facts without spins or turns. It’ll be mostly in the form of news just informing people about your product.
You’ll understand this correctly by looking at the ad and PR of Black Friday example.
4.CONTROL: Full/Free
You can have 100% control over the marketing efforts of your company. It can be ad or campaigns or contests or whatever way in which you’re trying to promote your brand, everything lies in your hands. How? What? And Where? You can decide everything man!
But in PR? Oops! You have zero control over it once you hand over any news release to the PR agency or media. They are not compelled to publish it and even if they do, they can pitch something, drop out something or do whatever tricks or twirls they wanted to do with it.
Differences between Advertising and PR
Though these are the four key differences between PR and marketing, there are still more distinctions between the two, which are as follows.
- Activities or Tactics employed:
Marketing -> promotional, direct marketing and advertising to boost sales
PR – > reputation management by creating positive media coverage and stakeholder communications
Marketing -> potential customers alone
PR -> anyone in the public who’s interested in the organization or brand
Marketing goals – Sales focused actions to reach consumers and sell the product. Its direct goal is revenue.
PR goals – Maintenance of positive image between the company and its public thereby indirectly boosting the company (product)’s reputation. Its direct goal is Good name.
Articles or press releases or any content written by PR professionals are considered to be more credible and legitimate by the consumer group. Whereas, advertising content is very well known by the audiences that it’s the company’s own effort to boost their sales. So, people consider PR as more trustworthy than ads.
Your Return on Investment (ROI) is easily measurable in marketing than in PR. Because Marketing is more focused on direct sales, you can easily make out how many leads have been roughly generated with your marketing tactics.
But, since PR’s focus is on building an image, trust, and relationships with your prospective customers, there can’t be many possibilities for ROI in terms of revenue.
Marketing – Short term activity because its goal is about yielding instant revenue or sales
PR – Long term investment because over time, the benefits of its positive reinforcement towards the public can be recognised for future success.
Benefits of PR and Marketing
Though PR and marketing are considered interchangeable in the business world or PR comes under one of the marketing strategies, its benefits are often not much realised. This is because its outcomes are not measurable. But still, PR’s benefits can be measured and can reach more audience when adopting it in the right way.
Similarly, Marketing also can reap out many benefits only when executing it according to your business. There are many marketing tactics like Social Media marketing, direct mail, campaigns, ads and the like. You should know what and which strategy you should adopt for your business to reach that level you’re trying for.
Following are some of the advantages of both PR and Marketing.
- With PR, your company gets increased awareness.
- With Marketing, your product gets brand recognition through increased contacts.
- With PR, your company’s image gets strengthened.
- With marketing, interaction with your customer’s increases.
Which and How To Choose: PR or Marketing For Your Business?
You’ve seen the differences and benefits of both PR and Marketing.
But as mentioned earlier, there’s only a slight boundary between the two.
Considering PR, though it boosts your company’s image and positive opinion, that alone is not enough for your business. All you need is favorable returns in the form of monetary profits, isn’t it? So, PR cannot stand alone but can be incorporated into your marketing strategy.
“PR is just knowing…..but Marketing is doing”. – This is the key boundary.
Since it’s only a fine line of differentiation between PR and Marketing, there’s a bridge which merges both these. That is ‘Social Media’.
Social Media has broken up the barriers between the two as sites like Facebook and Twitter post both press releases as well as advertising Materials. Although PR and marketing services to be operating under two different strategies and purposes, Social media has blurred their boundaries. As a result of this, for your business to take up the next level, coordination and communication between both PR and marketing teams can lead up to mutual success of your brand’s promotion.
On the whole, if you want to boost up your business, instead of focusing on which is better, it’s best to go for how to integrate both of them into your marketing strategies and climb up the ladder of success. Since the lines between PR and marketing have started to soften due to the emergence of Social Media, it’s possible for business owners to blend them together and complement each other for receiving favorable outcomes.
What’s best for your business depends highly on your particular needs so that you can create a strategy that will work out for the best.
Do you prefer total control via marketing or slightly released control via free publicity?
Are you more interested in sales and branding, or just the positive image of your company matters first?
So, with answers for questions like these, you can decide and devise up the best strategy, whether it’s PR or Marketing or a combination of both.
But, be alert enough that you reach your goal successfully.
