Digital Marketing Trends 2014

Now-a-days, businesses are seen to be rapidly increasing their social media involvement. Smart businesses are creating their own social media divisions which are very closely working with sales, marketing and other such departments to create content that is interesting, appealing, important and interactive. The buyer and seller are now, just a click away. Social media has proven to be a bridge between the producers and consumers.

Many organisations, mostly those in the B2B (business to business) space, are still being away from the social media seeing it as merely another retail medium. What they do not know yet is that this medium is very necessary for customer engagement, selling a product/service and is a good retention resource for B2Bs. Some of these companies have adopted LinkedIn as its social network but many are not using it to the fullest. Social media is more than just LinkedIn. It is a great way to drive sales and is making businesses more effective.

Why Social Media?

Social media is not to advertise yourself in traditional ways. That would be a bad strategy. It is about engaging the audience first and then selling.

LinkedIn is constantly changing and makes it possible to B2B businesses to promote valuable content across networks, create communities, advertise, go to prospects directly, and build visibility and sales. It has big plans to change the sales space with their latest step to ‘nurture’ clients with content marketing.  

B2B companies are engaging themselves on Facebook and Twitter as well. They know that many people use these two popular platforms. This is the place to update consumers and users on the latest news and stuff about their market, industry, product launches and so on. If the content is good and engaging, then it is easy to reach a mass audience who can share their good views about your product with others through comments. This is how it can go viral.

Content is the Key

Your key to success on social media is the content you put across on different platforms. Only when your content is interesting will you manage to grab the attention of your potential customers. It is all about engagements, education, building communities, entertaining and delivering value. If you want to succeed with driving sales on social media, your content better be good.

Social Media is the Way

Companies know that their people are engaging with customers and colleagues through social media. The trend sees social media becoming an accepted way of doing business. Smart organisations will approach social media, knowing they if they do not do so, their sales strategy will be incomplete. Executives will get on board because they know that social media success is one of the main business objectives.

Social media is vital for the brand’s health and will be a company-wide movement. 

Keep reading our blog-posts and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest! 

3 Reasons Why Twitter Marketing is Important

In our previous blog-post, we have told our readers about how important it is to market your business on Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. It’s also necessary to go all out on Twitter for branding. It is a valuable tool and its’ time you took advantage of it. Here’s why:

For Customer Relationships

Just like other social platforms, you’re main aim on Twitter should also be to connect with your audience. As a brand, you have to answer to their questions, thank them for shares and comments, respond to their appreciation/complaints towards your product/services, post stuff which would interest your customers, thank them time and again for being your customers and so on. Photos have gained importance on Twitter off-late since this site is focusing on a more visual timeline now. Also, keep in mind that Twitter is all about the 140 characters limit so your tweets have to be short and crisp.

                                                                          To Connect With Other Businesses in Your Industry

It is simple and great to connect with other businesses within your industry, or for that matter any brand you like. You can follow and interact with organisations and companies on Twitter and create a close network professionally and personally. The more you interact, the more likely, they are to follow you, your brand and share your content.

To Connect With Industry Professionals and Biggies

Twitter allows you to share the content of people in your industry professionals and big names within your line of business. You can develop your own expertise by taking advantage of Twitter. It also lends you a trustworthy impression. Twitter is flooded with millions of people who are looking for more information all the time. If you’re a brand which does not provide it to them, your competitors will be there before you do.

Using Twitter is quite simple once you get a grip on it. Post simple tweets, connect with your customers and be sure, that you are more than half way through. If you’re not marketing your business on Twitter already, make a start today.  

Keep reading our blog-posts and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest! 

  

Social Media Marketing for Schools

Social media has become a part of everyone’s life now-a-days. Youngsters breathe social media. Even kids these days are all aware about Facebook and other social networking sites. Organizations too are actively carrying out social media activities and campaigns to promote their brands. With all the social media buzz around and more play schools and high schools round the corner, let’s see how social media can help schools to function better.

Easy Communication

Social media should be included into the educational world to improve communication. Our schools hold many events and activities that can be communicated in a much easier way to the community and different groups of people. With social media, the school authorities can send necessary information directly to the students, teachers and parents within few seconds.

 Positive Promotion

Other than keeping everyone up-to-date about events and providing immediate information, there is another advantage of social media, i.e promotion of schools on different social media platforms. Schools can share information, photographs and events on social media and let everyone know that great things are happening in the schools. For this, there has to be active participation and willingness from the school principals, teachers and students.

  

If we focus on the above points we can carefully integrate social media into education. Social media in schools will save time and allow us to focus on passing on good messages and for promoting a school. It has great benefits to the community and society if used appropriately.

Keep reading our blogs and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest!  

How can you boost your Facebook likes?

In this blog-post, we will be talking about simple ways to increase your Facebook likes..

As we all know, Facebook has is tremendously popular for personal networking as well as useful for business. As seen in our previous social media blog, Facebook allows you to market to your target audience, or rather your consumer directly. The power of Facebook marketing takes place in the form of ‘Likes’. The more Likes a company or business page has, the more people or impressions that advertisement will reach. So what is the key to successfully market your product or service on Facebook? The answer is easy;simply increase the ‘likes’ of your page. Let’s see how to do that:

Promotion by Exciting Schemes

You can increase your page likes by engaging the consumer in a manner that they would understand and appreciate. An offer/discount scheme will attract the consumers to like your company. If you have fabulous offers, you will see people actively liking your page, as well as engaging with your business on your Facebook timeline.

Good Content

The matter you put up will be seen by your consumers on your timeline. Through this, they will get engaged with your page. If the content is good, you will encourage more likes.  If your stuff on the page is original and interesting people may even share it with their Facebook network. If your friend shares an article on his or her page, there is a good chance you will take a look at what it is all about, and possibly go check out the source. The end results of engaging, fun and interesting content, is more Likes for your business!

Other Social Sites – Using other sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and your blog to direct people to your Facebook page for additional information is always a good idea. Promoting your Facebook via Twitter will give your audience a place to interact with you outside of the 140 character parameters that Twitter has. LinkedIn is great for social networking, and is a good place to build personal and professional relationships. Linking your Facebook company page on LinkedIn will give your connections more information on your company and its social media efforts. It will also give them an option of contacting you and your company in the future. If there is a link to Facebook on your blog, whether a large audience reads it or not, it will allow your reader to find out more about the company who is posting these articles and give them another social platform to engage with your business on. More visitors on your page will increase your ‘likes’.

Personal Network 

You can have your social circle do this for you. From family members and friends, to colleagues and professional connections, having them suggest your Facebook page can increase Likes as well. Word of mouth marketing is still the most powerful and influential marketing tool around.

Facebook is a great marketing tool. The above tips will help you power up the ‘likes’ of your page significantly which will in-turn make your brand a grand success!

Keep reading our blogs and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest!  

Blog Power

When you think of social media marketing, you are sure to think of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter...What about blogging?

It’s time to give this social media element some importance too. Let’s see what role it plays in your digital marketing strategy.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are obviously the most popular social media sites. They have been more successful than other social platforms. In this whole Facebook and Twitter rage, most of us are sure to forget about blogging. It’s a common mistake we make. Nothing has replaced a blog for its ability to convey information in greater detail and outside the subject scope of what you’d typically find on one of your web pages. An active blog contributes significantly to the success of your website and overall digital marketing plan, allowing you to put together useful information and products and services your company offers. Blogs require a great deal of commitment to post good content regularly. For this, a schedule is helpful for keeping you on track. When your blog is updated with fresh content, your website will gain more credibility and visibility with search engines and start to rank higher while you create more brand awareness online.

Blogs are an important component of an overall content development strategy and more companies are emphasizing content creation for its SEO and marketing benefits. If you’re planning to make a start at blogging, here are some easy things you may want to keep in mind:

Provide good information:

This is the most important part. Mostly, people use blogging as another social media platform to make a presence on. Instead, give your audience information they can use, whether it’s an insight into a particular topic or links to other websites and news sources.

Make sure your topics are interesting

The topics you decide to write on, will determine the number of people who will read it. It should be interesting and must get the readers hooked to it. You could use your analytical tools on blogging websites to see what kind of posts are read more and fit your matter in, accordingly in your blogs.

Come up with new ideas

If you introduce your visitors to new ideas, you’re on the right track. Everyone likes to read new and fresh articles. As a blogger, try to widen the perspective of the people by making them understand newer concepts and ideas in any topic you write about. Needless to mention, make sure the facts you talk about lie within your confidence and are all real.

Links

You could embed useful links in your blog to authenticate the facts you mention in it. Also, this will help the readers to be more engaged and make your overall blog interesting. This is also an excellent way of conveying your message/information in a versatile and diverse manner.

These easy tips will definitely make a good blog with information which engages many readers. Happy Blogging! Keep reading our blogs and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest! 

Creating a Successful Social Media Campaign

Are you planning a new marketing strategy for your company? You should explore doing that on social media. Most of the big brands are actively carrying out great social media marketing activities to promote their products. Social media is one of the most effective ways of connecting with a huge audience, communicating with them and selling products and services. Before you get there, you must be ready and equipped with a solid social media strategy and campaign to ensure complete success. How do you do this? 

Read this simple process to know:

Choose Your Platform

Your first step is to identify which social media platform suits your business the best. Choose a platform where you’ll find your target audience and would be able to communicate about your company with them. To start with, you can explore Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Youtube, etc. for social media marketing since almost everyone is flooded on these sites and are very active here too.

Target Audience

This is another very important step in your online marketing strategy. You have to know your target audience and who you want your customers to be. For this, you have to include demographics (Age, gender, educational qualitfications, etc) in order to understand clearly. You also need to know what value your customers will bring to your business. Your campaign depends on who you are targeting. For Eg: If you deal with cosmetics, women of all age groups would be your primary target market. Your social media campaign must be designed around your target audience to get the desired results.

Execution

Once you’ve figured out your target market and your social media platform, you have to begin by designing a page to talk about your product. You have to make sure your page has great graphics and an attractive layout due to which your audience would like visiting the page time and again to know more about the business you’re marketing. Every visit to your page on social media should be a pleasure to your customers. Also, navigation there should be easy.

Engaging Your Audience

Every social media marketing activity you conduct should be interesting enough for your audience to click, read and appreciate. A strategy with no engagements from the audience will prove to be quite a waste. Make sure you post things in a manner that will compel the audience to react positively and get involved with your products. Appreciate every positive comment/share/like, etc. that your customers do since that is of high value to your strategy.

Evaluate

At regular time spans, you must evaluate your strategy to know your success rate. Evaluation will make you know and understand your strong and weak points and boost further improvement. You should be up-to-date with what your customers like in your social media strategy and what they do not appreciate. The most important factor is to know how your campaign is affecting your business and what your company’s image is in the eyes of your fans, followers and customers.

It is only when you try and experiment new things within your social media marketing campaign, would you know the power of it!

Keep a track on our upcoming blogs and also find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest! 

  

  

Social Media Predictions for Year 2014

The New Year is almost here, and it is quite necessary to know where social media is heading in 2014. This blog-post can help you keep pace with the fast changing social networking trends.

Social Media Will Be a Necessity

2014 will no longer be a year where will you be able to get away from making a presence on the social media! As we all know, even today this is necessary but you will be in a do or die situation in 2014 in this digital world. Businesses will realize the importance of getting their internet marketing in place with a perfect content strategy, lead generation and so on. Also, organisations will see a big need of hiring digital marketing experts to get their job done.

Google+ is seen as a superstar in 2014

Ofcourse, Facebook leads the pack when it comes to social media but Google+ is racing it’s way too. Google+ has bigger ownership in terms of search power and is one of the most powerful social forces on the internet today. By the time 2014 dawns, no one will be able to underestimate Google+ and people will be able to use it as a personalised web experience that integrates all interactions that a user has with Google products. Google authorship is said to become one of the key factors to Google‘s search ranking algorithm by the end of 2014.

Visual Websites Will Be a Huge Success

Websites that are image centric will see success. Visual social media platforms are more appreciated than text-based ones. This will amplify in 2014. So, visual based sites such as Pinterest will be a critical part of marketers and retailers. Tumblr, Slideshare, Instagram are all on the higher side of the graph for the next year.

LinkedIn will be on the top as a B2B Market Player

In year 2014, LinkedIn will be a primary player in the B2B market. It has 238 million users and is the best social networking site for professionals. It has managed to position itself as one of the largest sources of content generation for professionals. This means, B2B marketers will enjoy great benefits from LinkedIn.

Hope this blog-post has made you well aware of where you should make a presence in social media for your personal as well as professional growth!

Keep reading our blog and do follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.  

Why use Pinterest for Marketing?

If you have a business of your own, by now, you must have already sketched out your online marketing strategy..but have you included marketing on Pinterest too? Let’s learn why Pinterest is important for digital marketing.

Pinterest Has Incredible Growth

Pinterest started off on quite a low note, but in the recent times has grown tremendously as a social media platform. Not only can you share photographs here but also include links to videos, blogs, etc. It is very dynamic and one can put in a lot of information and a variety of things on this platform. Pinterest has almost caught pace with Twitter now!

Attracts Web Traffic

If you are a regular pinner for your brand, you are sure attracting a good amount of online traffic. MarketingCharts reported that Pinterest drives more traffic to websites than Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and other such all together.

Pins Last More Than a Week

A tweet’s life is about 5 to 25 minutes and a post on Facebook could be around 60 to 80 minutes. Your customers can pin pictures on Pinterest to share with friends, collect them and finally to save for later if they want buy it.

Pinterest Users are Potential Buyers

Many pins are linked to the website where customers can visit and finally purchase the desired item and pinners are much more reactive to this.

Pinterest is Different from the Rest

Pinterest is visual. It is more about sharing pictures with information and interesting facts rather than random status updates and updates about where people are eating/hanging out.

Integration to Other Social Media Platforms

You can link and push pins out from Pinterest onto Twitter and Facebook to make new engagements and get more followers.

So that’s how Pinterest plays a crucial role to make your digital marketing drive successful! 

Keep reading our blogs and do follow us on, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest!

  

How to expand your blog audience through social media?

Blogging is a great way for marketing a brand/business. Read our blog on 'Power of Blogging'. Let’s see how to increase the number of readers for the blogs.

You can do this by sharing the content to relevant audiences online. The following are few ways to do this:

·         

      Share a link of the blog on the Facebook pages which are relevant to the blog topic

·         If you want to increase your blog audience significantly, you can consider creating a Facebook page just for your blogs. You can keep posting links to your blogs on the page

·         Encourage people to like, share and get hooked onto the blog. Make sure you market well enough to get more and more fans on the page  

·         Use Twitter to connect to bloggers. Hashtags are great to discover content on a specific subject

·         Link the blog to your LinkedIn. Those on LinkedIn would generally find your topics interesting. They can also know about your web and writing skills. These are some really simple tips to get more eyes on your blogs!

      

      Keep following our blogs and let’s hope your blogs too reach out to many!

Few Social Media Predictions for 2014

As we all know, social media is the newest way to communicate and network. Social media marketing is a whole new revolution and slowly the traditional means of marketing are becoming obsolete. This fast and easy medium of communication, marketing and networking has made the world a smaller place. In this blog-post, we’ll be discussing about the some predictions made by experts in the world of social media.

There are new social media platforms which are being introduced from every corner, making it quite a task to understand which ones to be active on and which one works well for marketing your product/industry. As we’re moving towards the latter half of 2013, it is important to look ahead and know where social networking is heading and how we can be on board with it.

Investing in Social Media – A Necessity

Social media has become a ‘must have’ in most organisations today. Investing resources and time to develop a good social media team and strategy is critical for all businesses. Almost every business big and small conducts social media marketing (SMM) activities due to its impact in terms of lead generation, increased website traffic and revenue. Now a-days, companies prefer hiring social media strategists to carry out SMM activities rather than having their existing staff do the same.

Some of the few benefits of social media in short are as follows:

·         Improved Brand Awareness

·         Word-of-mouth advertising

·         Increased customer loyalty

·         Easier buyer-seller communication

·         Improved mass audience reach

·         Economical

·         Improved social signal

Increased Importance of Google+

Facebook is the most powerful social media tool but others are gaining momentum too. Google+ is going strong as well and has the second highest number of monthly users. Google+ is not just any other platform. It gives users to collect personal information and is proving to be a major part of Google’s strong scheme of SEO, social signals and providing a much more personalized search experience. Due to its vast usage and many advantages to users, social media experts are predicting Google+ to be one of the key components to Google’s search ranking algorithm by 2014 end.

The Success of Image and Video-based Social Media Sites

Sharing on social media sites is better with image and video -centric sites. We’ve all seen how good it is to share a videos /photographs with your audience rather than a text based content. Predictions tell that visual content has increasingly got more reach and will be a critical part of a social media content strategy. So, it is a good idea to give weightage to visual –centric sites such as Slideshare, Pinterest, Youtube and more.

LinkedIn – A boon for B2B business growth

LinkedIn will hold a steady position as one of the best social networking site for professionals. With its newest launch of the Influencers Program, LinkedIn is positioning itself as the largest sources of content creation for professionals. The advantages of LinkedIn are tremendous for B2B marketers.

Facebook and Twitter

Facebook and Twitter will continue to be massively successful. With the growing buzz about Google+, Facebook and Twitter surely have to be innovative to keep up with the growth of Google+ as well as the image and video based networks. 

If you want to be a successful marketer, its’ time to make the right choices and get ahead with a super social media strategy!

Keep a track on our upcoming blogs for many more discussions on some of the latest topics in the social media space!

LInkedIn Groups

Professional networking

Grouppology 

LinkedIn members can now discover, share and participate in a number of professional conversations happening in their industry and areas of interest.  You can find and join LinkedIn groups from the Groups Directory or the Groups You May Like page. Please note that there may be multiple groups on LinkedIn for each interest, organization, or affiliation.

Finding a group you want to join:

• Move your cursor over Groups at the top of your homepage, and select Groups Directory from the drop-down menu.
• Browse the Featured Groups on the page.
• Search for a group using the Search Groups box on the left.
• Move your cursor over Groups at the top of your homepage and select Groups You May Like from the drop-down menu.
• Browse through our list of suggested groups.
• Choosing the right group for you:
• Joining a group:
• Group managers may review your request to join or ask for additional information to make sure you meet their membership criteria. Membership approval is solely up to the group manager.

We invite you to join this group on LinkedIn - Click here to go to the group "Your Success is Our Goal"