How To Leverage Social Media As A Blogger To Extend Your Reach
This is a guest post by Ken Rhie, CEO of Trumpia. Trumpia is a complete SMS software solution with mass SMS messaging, smart targeting and automation.
There are always new ways to alter your marketing strategy in an effort to reach a wider audience. When you are focused on growing your business, you’ll have to do some investigating.
First you have to identify who your target audience is. After you have a strong understanding of who your followers are, you have to figure out where they are hanging out. There are a number of social media platforms to use, but matching the right platform to your target demographic takes some work.
To get started, you’ll need to learn about the various social media platforms and set up accounts on each to learn what will work for your business.
Set Up Your Social Media Accounts
When you want to leverage social media, you have to get started by setting up accounts. Three popular social media sites include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Each site offers you ways to promote your business and to share news with your followers.
The younger crowd tends to be on Instagram, while the most popularly used social media website is Facebook. Set up an account on all three sites and focus on growing a following on each platform. Once you get your accounts set up, you can begin to see what works for your audience and which platform is more popular for you to use with your customers.
Evaluate What Is Working With Your Followers
Take the time to look at each social media account you have set up. Consider what your customers are reacting to. If they are commenting like crazy on your posts on Facebook, but you get no action on Instagram, it’s time to put more of your marketing efforts into Facebook.
Once you see where your customers are engaging with your business, you need to focus on that social media account for a while. Learn how to gain followers on your chosen platform, and become a master at creating engaging content. While you can continue to post to other platforms, focus on what is working now to grow your business.
Send Links to Your Favorite Posts Through Text Messages
You’ll have to create an opt-in campaign in order to build an audience for text messages.
Once this is done, you can invite customers to visit you on your social media sites by sending a marketing text message. When you have the ability to reach your customers through text messaging, you are opening up a whole new world for your marketing efforts.
You can get customers to sign up to receive text messages by sharing the information on your social media accounts, and you can get customers to visit you on social media through text messaging. The more ways you try to interact with customers, the easier it will be to discover what works.
When you have a blog that you want to share to your target demographic, you need to unleash the power of your social media presence. Through the use of text messaging and social media posts, you can get your message out to your audience.
How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking With Content Marketing
When a new client approaches us for a website design, one of the most common issues with their current site is that it hasn’t been updated in months or years. Your web designer or a dedicated person on your team should be constantly crafting new content for your website to keep it fresh.
A decade or two ago, it was common thinking that a website should be set in stone and only updated very occasionally, like a brochure or business card. That’s simply not the case anymore.
The Online Experience Centers Around Content
As can be seen by the popularity of sites like The Huffington Post, Reddit, HowStuffWorks and countless blogs, fresh, ever-changing content helps sites retain and grow a following and build their ranking in search engines. Sites which are constantly changing their content, being added to and improved are getting the most traffic.
However, each of those sites have a focus: news and opinion, cool and strange things from the internet, and explanations of how language, mechanics and other things work. Their content focuses on those things and their readers reward good content with clicks, time spent on the page and site, and sharing those articles on social media.
Therefore, your site should not only have new content, but it needs to be centered on topics which reinforce your business. This is the heart of content marketing.
Experimentation
Another great way content marketing can improve your search engine ranking is by experimenting with different types of content and different types of pages.
Do you have a blog currently? If not, that’s a great place to start, as blogs are a good way to create consistently new content based around a theme. Experiment with different formats of blog posts, like lists, ‘How Tos’ and others.
Also experiment with infographics and videos as well as text posts to see which perform better. Use your websites built-in analytics or sign up for Google Analytics to get a better idea of how each piece of content performs with your visitors, and don’t forget to promote it on social media!
For help with the whole gamut of content marketing, contact us today!
How To Get The Most Out Of Email Marketing Services
Email marketing services like HubSpot and MailChimp help you organize your mailing lists and send templated messages to many users at once. But not many people are using email marketing services to their fullest.
At Cohlab, we have some best practices we utilize for our clients’ email marketing services which we’re happy to share with you. For additional help, contact us anytime and we’ll be happy to assist you.
Get The Most Out Of Your Email Marketing Services
Get Permission
No matter how you are getting these email addresses (a sign-up at your brick-and-mortar, a form on your website, a giveaway or contest) people need to know what they are signing up for. Before you ever use email marketing services or gather a single address, be sure people are aware that:
- They will receive X number of emails per month
- They will get (discounts, coupons, product information, first chance at new products, e-books, etc.)
- You will not spam them or sell their email address to another company
Set Expectations
After a user agrees to be on your email list, send a follow-up email immediately to thank them, introduce yourself or your company, and remind them again what type of emails you will be sending to them. Most email marketing services like MailChimp and HubSpot have an option to set up an autoresponder when someone signs up for your email list.
Segment
Segmenting your email list is an extremely important aspect of email marketing services.
Someone who is on your list because they are a customer is going to be interested in different things than someone who signed up for an e-book. Similarly, your particular industry will have different segments, whether this is based on gender, age, job title, company, etc.
Each segment will likely be interested in a different aspect of your business. If you’re a restaurant, you probably won’t want to send info about your Senior Specials to the under 50 crowd, while information about Kids Meals should probably go to the 25-45 age group.
Most email marketing services will allow you to manually place email addresses into various segmented groups which you design. It isn’t rocket science, but it does take time to setup at the start.
Optimize
When preparing for email marketing services, be sure to optimize the actual content of them. For instance, subject lines of emails have been shown to be extremely effective at <50 characters and >70 characters. Between 50-70 characters, emails tend to be opened less often.
More specifically, emails with subject lines of <50 characters tend to be opened more often than any other length, while emails with subject lines of >70 characters see the best click through rates (on a link or deal within the email).
Overall, emails should be short on content. If you have a lot of content to deliver, put short summaries and link out to a blog post on the topic. In general, emails shouldn’t have more than about 200 words in the body.
Remember, for additional email marketing services help, contact us anytime!