Category: Marketing

The marketing category features all of our SEO & Paid Search related articles. Here you will find useful posts about Google Ads, Facebook Ads, SEO, etc.

Marketing

Creative Social Media Content Strategies

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

Social media marketing is more than simply creating a Facebook page. It’s about having a solid social media content strategy.

If you are managing social media for a business, you’ll want to have your content strategy planned out weeks in advance.

The real benefits of social media as a progressive marketing strategy come from the content you provide your fans and followers.

Creative Social Media Content Strategy

Great content will attract attention. It will inform and inspire, and it will establish you and your business as experts in your field. Great social marketing content can also be used to drive traffic to your website, your online store, your blog, and even other social platform profiles. Great content can win you more Facebook likes and find you more Twitter followers. Great content will spark interactions and positive debates. People will share and like your posts, and they will refer their friends and business colleagues to your social media profiles because you have such great ideas.

The following below are the creative social media content marketing strategies you can adopt.

Start your own blog

Blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and to also define your own niche. If you are a great writer, and you can express yourself clearly, then consider writing it yourself. You can easily outsource blogging to professional writers at an affordable rate, however, it is essential that you find a writer who can convey the messages of your business. A blog should be unique and personal. You could consider writing some notes or bullet points, so your writer can use these in their blogs. If you do write a blog yourself, ensure that the communication remains professional and that you express yourself well.

You will also need to ensure that you have enough time to maintain it while managing your day to day business operations. You can follow our article to learn how to start blogging now.

Show off cool stuff

Social marketing is all about honesty and personality. Tell the story of your business, the people, the background, the experiences of the business that will interest people. Bring your business and your team’s personality to life! Post music you like, infographics that inspire you, links to creative designs and products that are not your own, or events and celebrations that you are taking part in. This is especially important if you are in a creative field. There is nothing wrong with a graphic designer posting about the music he likes while he’s working on his latest project.

This information helps build your authentic online presence, and defines you as a real individual, with tastes and personality. You are not just a name on a computer screen. You can follow our article to learn about social media growth tips.

Share behind the scenes photos

People like to know what’s going on in your world. They are intrusive and use social networks to get the latest gossip. Not only in celebrities, but in you too! Consider taking spontaneous photographs of your office, your home or your special job functions. These should always be tasteful, but there is nothing wrong with showing a few funny bloopers or personality shots. It all depends on your own business image, and how you want to present yourself.

Take photos of exhibitions you attend, work, Christmas parties or professional development days. If you have a great office, tidy it up, and take some photos of the people who work there.

Become a resource for others

Your social media content certainly doesn’t need to be your own. The beauty of social media for business is that you can easily share content created by others, elsewhere on the web, or within your own professional network. If someone writes an article or shares an idea that is related to the work you do, share it. This is also a networking strategy. When you share the work of your clients or business partners, it helps them and makes them feel good.

This is how successful business relationships work. A simple share can mean a lot for someone else, and later on, they will return the favor.

Conclusion

Keep it simple and don’t be afraid to imitate strategies that work. We hope our creative social media content strategies article was helpful. Check out our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies for more examples and tips.

Tags creative content strategies, social media content strategy

Marketing

Email Marketing Best Practices for Beginners

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build an online business.

A potential consumer will not be ready to purchase from you the first time he or she visits your website. It is important to demonstrate that you are a trustworthy source for your niche.

However, to be effective, you must follow the email marketing best practices when it comes to business.

Email Marketing Best Practices

If you follow these easy to follow tips, you will keep subscribers for longer and make more sales.

The following below are some email marketing tips that will help you send more effective emails.

Personalize Your Emails

Forget copying and pasting the emails found in affiliate marketing tools provided by merchants. It is very likely that many people receive the same email many times from different affiliates. They will read one and the same title will have the rest sent to the trash.

What are the chances that the message that is read is your email? If you personalize and rewrite these emails, you will get many more of them open. People also like to think that you are talking to them, so if you personalize your messages for each person, you will attract more to open them.

Use Plain Text or HTML Email Format

More and more emails are being sent in HTML so people are getting used to them. The problem with simple text emails are those ugly autoresponder links that indicate that the email is part of a bulk email.

Some People prefer text emails while some prefer to send plain HTML ones so that their links can look better and hide those awful looking autoresponder tracking links.

Unique Email Subjects

Do not send emails with the standard subject lines since people will receive multiple emails with the same subject line and delete them instead of opening them. Note that the subject line of your email is what gets your emails opened. You must write a subject line that calls the attention of people who wish to open your email.

Keep the Message Simple

Sometimes, you get some emails that leave you scratching your head but you can not be bothered figuring them out. So only send emails that are simple to understand and related to your niche.

Always Have an Unsubscribe Option

Always have an unsubscribe button at the bottom of your messages so that people do not feel trapped by not having the option to receive their emails or not. People’s needs change so they may only want what you have to offer them while ever they are interested in that subject matter. Avoid those unsubscribe methods where they have to send you an email or key in their email address to unsubscribe. Some people are wary of scams today which send spam emails to capture email addresses.

If people are trapped and do not want to be on your list anymore they are unlikely to continue reading them to give them the option of unsubscribing.

As we talk about email marketing best practices, one of the most effective means to build a relationship with a potential customer is through good email marketing.

You can not make that demonstration if your prospect clicks away from your website and is never heard from again. That’s the charm of email marketing and the reason why every online business owner should have a good portfolio of email marketing examples.

Email Marketing Content Examples

Every time a prospective customer does hear from you, you are strengthening a connection that might lead them to return to your website and make the purchase. In order to do your part, you need influential email marketing examples – the kind that will hold a client’s limited attention and encourage them to go back to your website.

Successful email marketing examples show that if the content is timely and current, it’ll most likely be a winning email campaign.

Here are the fundamental email marketing examples to consider.

Emails with Free Whitepapers

Naturally, the kind of report you’ll give away on your website isn’t a whitepaper in the traditional sense, but a swift and easy analysis of some problem that the client is having. These have been around for ages, however, just what some people fail to realize is that the longer you stretch the payoff over time, the higher the response rate tends to be. A report distributed in 7 separate emails, once a day, will have a tendency to make a greater influence than the exact same material provided all at once.

Emails with Price Markdowns and Contests

Inevitably, you will certainly have some customers who are not as interested in your email marketing. However, they will not literally unsubscribe from your newsletter at first. To get these disengaged readers to respond, they need to experience something they cannot resist as they scan your message. A discount, complete with time pressure, is one successful option. Contests that call for only minor input, such as a separate sign up, might also be useful.

Emails for Virtual Events

Virtual events such as workshops produce extensive leads quickly. These complimentary events can easily net you sales overnight and will also tempt the disengaged “lurkers” on your list.

Conclusion

The examples above explain how simple email marketing can help build an online business. If you are getting started, it’ll be wise to stick with one of the winning formulas. When you have extra money, then you can be riskier and try to think outside the box. Hopefully, our Email Marketing Strategies article was able to help ignite your creative juices. Check out our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies for more content marketing tips.

Related: Email Writing Tips

Tags email marketing, email marketing best practices

Marketing

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy and Plan?

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

The purpose of a content marketing strategy is to drive traffic to your website in order to increase sales using your content.

A solid strategy in content marketing for startups won’t just increase profits, it will increase brand awareness, as well as boosting user engagement.

The content should whip up a sales funnel that gathers in new customers while keeping existing ones.

Content Marketing Strategy and Plan

Without a clever content marketing strategy and plan any inbound or content marketing process is destined to fail, wasting a significant amount of time and money. This article suggests some important steps to take to build a clever content marketing strategy and plan.

The steps to follow to build a solid content marketing strategy and plan are not, in principle, different from the standard marketing planning process established a long time ago.

A good content marketing strategy will have the following:

An achievable goal

This required outcome must come from top management. What does the business want to achieve, where it is heading, what are the key numbers, what are the deadlines, what resources are available?. From this overall mission, it is important to define the role of inbound marketing and content marketing as a major element. What defines success (or otherwise) and what are the numbers?

Analysis of the business

Without defining exactly where the business is now, how it got there, its customer base, why they buy and in what segments they are located, products and services, organization and capacity, then it is not possible to define the way forward. The analysis is the foundation upon which any successful content marketing plan is built.

A backup objective

With a solid grasp of where the business is now and a definition of where it needs to get to, it is possible to conceive several potential routes to get from A to B. Each route needs to be thought through in detail before deciding on a way forward and how inbound marketing can contribute to achieving that goal.

Progression milestones

With a route in place, it should then be possible to set a number of short to medium term objectives (or simple business milestones) with timescales and measures to ensure the objectives are delivered.

Real objectives

Strategies can then be designed to achieve each objective. These objectives may be broken down into individual elements to be built into a solid plan that specifically defines each part of the project. At this point, you should have all the legal business stuff taken care of if this has turned into more than just a hobby project.

An exit plan

Well as we all know, nothing can last forever. You may not want to do this forever, even if you plan to do this forever, it’s best to have a plan in place for potential changes, mergers, or buyouts.

Conclusion

When a content marketing strategy is done properly it builds credibility, presents you as a professional, removes barriers, and places prospects at the beginning of your sales funnel. Once people see you as credible and trustworthy, they’ll trust your recommendations and won’t see you as some sort of salesperson trying to make a quick buck. For more tips on content marketing, please read our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies.

Related: Content Marketing Tips

Tags content marketing plan, content marketing strategy

Marketing

Social Media Marketing Examples and Tips

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

Social media marketing is the process of getting attention and web traffic through social networking sites.

During this process, creative content must be made with the goal of reaching the masses, so that people can share the content with others. The end result should be a vicious social media chain (or viral post) that would make the business reach a huge new audience.

Every social media marketing plan should have an objective, a product, a service and a reason for the promotion. If you already have those things figured out, then congratulations, because you have already done the hardest part of this social media marketing game. From now on, everything you do should help you reach your goal.

Social Media Marketing Examples

Social media has changed marketing forever. It is no longer about throwing millions of dollars at a commercial and expecting a 5x return on investment. Brands must be smart to succeed with social media marketing.

The following are new brands that used social media efficiently. Peel, Wayfair, and Casper didn’t rely on millions in funding for success. These social media marketing examples are here to remind you that being creative with a small budget still works.

Social Media Marketing Strategy of Peel.com

Peel sells cases for thin phones, and the main point of sale is that they are functional and elegant. So, of course, social networks are a great way to showcase their products. This company simply used Facebook Video Ads to help tell the story of what separate their products from the rest.

Social Media Marketing Strategy of Wayfair.com

The next example of social media marketing comes from Wayfair. The online retailer is known to sell affordable furniture and household items. As you can imagine, a large part of their audience is active on Instagram. Through Instagram purchases, brands have the ability to tag specific products within an image so that users can go directly to a landing page and buy it. Wayfair has done a great job of implementing this function in its social media strategy.

Social Media Marketing Strategy of Casper.com

The direct consumer mattress industry has exploded in recent years. It seems that a new brand appears every week. A company that has led the charge, with the help of its social media strategy, is Casper. Casper injects humor in its commercialization without being crude or inauthentic.

Conclusion

Social media has become the “great equalizer” for sellers. With platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you do not need millions of dollars to run a successful marketing campaign.

To succeed, you just need to have a few things such as:

a good product
a creative way to showcase that good product
a targeted audience for that good product

Tags social media, social media marketing examples

Marketing

Email Marketing Tips for Beginners

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

These email marketing tips will remind you how to play it safe before you start emailing your lists.

Hopefully, you’ve found a great email marketing service provider as email is still one of the most powerful forms of advertising. Email marketing can be a powerful marketing tool if you know what you’re doing.

Remember that no one likes spam! In the United States, spam is illegal and the Federal Trade Commission will shut you down and fine you for spamming. Rather than spamming millions of email addresses, build a list of customers, and market to them.

You can use your email as a marketing tool in a variety of ways. For example, you can create a mailing list with relevant content that your list can actually use. Or, you can send emails announcing your latest product or service. The key is to make your emails something your list wants and to ensure those emails are not marked as spam.

Related: Email Writing Tips

Best Email Marketing Tips to Follow

Email marketing can be a challenge due to the prevalence of spam filters in current email programs today.

The key to successfully promoting your business with email marketing is to ensure the emails you’re sending out will not be flagged as spam.

Try using a premium email service when getting started

The best and easiest way to ensure you’re not sending spam is to enlist the help of a service that scans emails to determine whether or not they will be flagged as spam. To avoid having your email marked as spam, avoid such blacklisted words as ‘buy now’ and ‘free’. Even if you avoid such words that are considered spam, make sure you use a reliable premium mailing service like ConvertKit to ensure your emails are never labeled as spam.

Keep your emails user-friendly with plain text available

In addition, remember that not everyone has high-speed internet access. Therefore, if you’re sending out HTML emails, your dialup customers may find the email download takes far too long and won’t take the time to read your email. You’ll definitely need to make sure you’re using compressed and resized images to reduce the size as much as possible. So, make sure your list has the choice between receiving HTML and plain text emails.

Not too many emails, never ever spam your mailing list

Email marketing can be extremely effective, but do not overdo it. Just send your list periodically. Once a week, every two weeks, or once a month. If you flood email inboxes with emails, it’s just going to annoy those people on your list.

Conclusion

Additionally, ensure you personalize each email by using the list member’s name in the heading and even in the body, of the email. Email marketing can be an extremely successful promotional method if you send emails only to people who have signed up for your mailing list. The last thing you want is to be known as a spammer.

For more marketing tips, please read and share our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies article.

Tags email marketing tips, email writing

Marketing

Social Media Marketing Tips for Beginners

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

These social media marketing tips are simple to follow and easy to remember.

Social media marketing is the art of advertising and raising awareness about yourself, your products or business through social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and other platforms.

The objective is to attract large traffic to your website to increase product knowledge and thus win more friends or followers and find potential customers to trade.

Best Social Media Marketing Tips

There are numerous reasons why you should advertise on social media platforms as opposed to traditional forms of advertising. Social media platforms are one of the quickest ways to spread a message by word of mouth.

Using social media marketing is a great way to grow your business. To be good at social media marketing, there are a few basic guidelines you should follow in order to succeed on these online platforms.

Focus on one social media platform

As a beginner, it is important to choose only one social media platform to market your content. Trying to use every website will lead to failure, trust us because we did the same thing and failed after getting overwhelmed! To find the best platform for you, try to analyze the best marketers in your niche and learn from their posting style.

Create an optimized profile

Now after you have chosen a social media platform, you need to optimize your profile. This helps your visibility in search engines and helps you get more followers. In order to optimize your profile, you must:

include a website link in the profile
write an interesting description in the profile bio (you want to write something about your background, business achievements, and anything else useful that can generate interest from your targeted audience)
have a real photo of a contact person, product, or original brand

Follow people with great influence

The next step is to simply follow popular people in your niche of business to build your flood of followers. This is a tedious task however as follow and engage with other people’s followers, you’ll slowly get their attention and gain some real followers.

Engage with your followers

It’s necessary to keep your followers happy these days. The unspoken rule of social media is that you should follow back people that have followed you. It’s good to maintain the balance between followers and those you are following as this builds confidence in followers.

Consistently share fresh content

Do not let your content be a common thing that can be obtained anywhere, create special content that has your distinctive style. Additionally, remember to keep your posts consistent and high-quality. Your followers will expect fresh content from you on a schedule… so create a long-term plan that works for you. You can’t give them content every day and then take weeks off.

Conclusion

If your budget is limited, social media marketing is the best way to grow your business. Don’t be afraid to imitate the successful strategies of other social media accounts in your niche. Keep it simple.

Finally, please read and share our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies if you’re in need of additional social media marketing tips.

Tags social media, social media marketing tips

Marketing

Content Marketing Examples and Tips

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

Content is king and will forever be king when it comes to Internet marketing. The content marketing examples below will cover the different ways you can use content marketing to:

grow your brand
increase visibility online
develop customers relationships
create a schedule to share great content

Content Marketing Examples

Content is the information that search engines show when people search for information online. The more content you have the more likely you are to get found. The team here at Blackandise has been creating and sharing content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Youtube.

A few examples of good content to create includes:

Web pages
Blog articles
Press releases
Twitter tweets
Facebook posts
White papers
PowerPoint slides
Podcasts episodes
Case studies
Video clips
Audio files
PDFs

The Importance of Content Marketing

Having content is extremely important when it comes to content marketing because it’s how you get found online. The more content you put out there, the more opportunities there are for people to find your content. People are always searching for something online, so when you mix great content marketing + keyword research + luck, you have an opportunity to get discovered online!

Why Use Content Marketing?

There are a few reasons to focus on content marketing for your business. As you gain experience, you’ll figure out more ways to utilize content marketing to take your business to the next level. If you’re still wondering, most of our traffic comes from SEO (specifically 90% Google & 10% Bing), Pinterest, and Instagram.

Here are the most important reasons we love using content marketing.

Content Marketing Will Increase Your Visibility

Offering more and varied types of content increases the chances that Google or another search engine will decide your information is relevant to a customer’s search and show your material in the search results.

Situation: Today Google is serving more variety in their search results including short videos clips, audio files, creative news stories, and PDFs if they’re relevant.
Opportunity: Repackage your content to take advantage of the lack of content in those spaces.

Content Marketing Will Help You Build Authority

Situation: Spreading your expertise around the web and getting backlinks from others will expose your content to more people. When this happens, it builds authority and helps with your search engine rankings.
Opportunity: Backlinks are the essence of SEO in terms of getting higher rankings. Additionally, they’re great sources of targeted, direct traffic that isn’t dependent on search engine rankings.

Content Marketing Will Help You Build Relationships

Situation: Getting traffic to your site is a good start, but starting a relationship with your visitors is even better.
Opportunity: You can repackage your content into other forms such as a creative blog post, audio file, or eBook. The new content can be offered as a free download, free email course, or a premium product.

Content Marketing Allows for More Site Updates

Situation: Google has an option to show websites based on its update time. If you’re producing content on a regular basis then people looking for information updated within a period of days, hours, weeks, etc. will find you.
Opportunity: Use the latest news in your niche to take advantage of people using the time option in Google.

Conclusion

Never stop creating new content and remember to repackage your old content. Content will forever be king. Please read our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies for more content marketing examples and tips.

Tags content marketing examples, content marketing tips

Marketing

Email Writing Tips for Beginners

Post author By Cartez Augustus
Post date April 20, 2019

An important part of writing better emails is to convey your message with an appropriate tone.

These email writing tips are easy to follow and can be used for any niche. This is especially important when you write emails to business customers where the tone of your message can make or break a deal.

The tone reflects the spirit in which you relay your message – do you sound courteous, respectful or friendly?

When doing email follow-up marketing, your emails have basically three challenges to win:

The email has to be opened
The email has to be read
The email has to accomplish a goal

Easy to Follow Email Writing Tips

Sure, the first challenge is a tough one and it’s also crucial to get it right as it affects all the rest of the challenges. You can’t get your emails to read if they are not even opened. But we are not going to get into details about the first challenge, as there are already plenty of tutorials and guides online on creating a subject line that gets your emails opened. Instead, we will be discussing the guidelines to write emails that get read.

Catch the reader’s attention

The first thing you have to do after the email has been opened is to wake your reader’s interest. The most important thing to start your email with is a brief paragraph that tells the reader what they will be getting from your email. But don’t reveal the whole thing at once. Give the reader something to wait for. Make your reader a promise: “In this email, I will tell you exactly… just read on.”

Answer the reader’s questions

There are certain questions you will have to answer in your emails. Here are the questions your recipients will have on their minds when opening your email:

Who is emailing me?
What does he want?
Why should I care?
What’s in it for me?
What do I have to do next?

If you manage to answer all of these questions in every email you send, you will certainly raise the click-through rate of your emails. Your recipients will soon learn that your emails are worth reading through.

Provide the reader with some value

The most important question to answer is “What’s in it for me?” If you can not answer this question, it is best not to send the email at all. You don’t want to waste your recipients time, do you? It doesn’t have to be a big thing, but something useful. People love tips or other pieces of useful information.

Respect the reader’s time

People often ignore emails, especially when it comes to emails from strangers. Most of your recipients probably receive tens of emails daily. This means they don’t have too much time to spend per email. That’s why you should get straight to the point and skip the introductions. Being casual is also a good idea. If you want to build a relationship with your recipients, write your emails as you would write to your best friend.

Give the reader a sneak peek

At the end of your email, tell the reader that you are going to send another email in a few days. Give him/her a little sneak peek on the topic you are going to introduce and don’t forget to point out how he/she can benefit from it. This way you not only make the reader open your next email but also prepare the recipient to receive the information you are going to give.

Conclusion

Following these simple email writing tips will ensure that your recipients will actually read the emails you send. Ultimately, this should improve your click-through rate and ROI from your email marketing campaigns. Read our Ultimate List of Content Marketing Strategies for more content marketing help.

Tags email marketing, email writing tips