What Do Brands Want From Digital Marketing Professionals?

Digital marketing has taken on in full swing in almost all organisations. It has expanded its horizon and is established as a separate industry altogether. This industry has generated employment for thousands of professionals of all age groups. Organisations are even ready to pay digital marketing professionals who work on this platform as full time employees. If you’re looking for an opportunity in this field, the following will help you to know what employers look for in this industry…

Qualification

The first step to finding a good opportunity as a social media executive is to get trained in it from a good institute. This training will not only reward you with an official certificate but also will help you to increase your knowledge in the field. You can function on different social networking sites more fluently and confidently after getting hands on training. It's a good idea to get enrolled at the earliest.   

Knowledge

The digital marketing advertising industry is also on a rise. Understanding this side of advertising is vital for any ad/digital marketing professional. Being up-to-date about consumer behaviour, branding, competitor analysis and such factors will definitely earn you some brownie points there. When it comes to social media marketing as a career, make sure you’re aware about all the popular platforms. You must know how all the social platforms will be useful for your brand in different ways. You could start by experimenting with all the features, tools and characteristics of the various social networking sites.  

Creativity

Creativity is one of the most important in this stream. Digital marketing and advertising is vast and whoever dreams of making it big in this space should be able to think of fresh, new and innovative ideas. One must have the capability and passion to think differently.

                                                                            Communication Skills 

If you’re an aspiring digital marketing professional, make sure you polish up your written and verbal communication skills. You should be able to put concepts across with minimum words since some sites like Twitter restrict the number of characters. Also, keeping it short and crispy on social media is preferred since the attention span of online readers and followers is limited.

Story Telling

Social media professionals should be able to tell a story about their brands to attract more eyeballs. A knack for story telling is good for blogging and will keep your audience hooked to your brand. This way, you can establish a good communication and link up your customers with your product/service.

                                                                                      Reading and Follow-Up

You must be acquainted with the top people in this industry by following them on social media platforms and reading their blogs. Through these blogs, you can update your knowledge about the industry and different brands. Different brands have different social media strategies and campaigns. If you follow them, you could implement a few things for your organisation too. Watch out for the newest social media trends as well.

If you think you have the potential to become a successful digital marketing professional, you could log onto some social media job portals and make your way through.  

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

Which Sites Should You Use for Image-Focussed Social Media Marketing?

In the previous blog-post, we discussed the importance of having an image-centric approach to your social media marketing drive. Let’s see which top sites cater to this...

Pinterest

This site is quite recent and people have actually been hooked to it. It is one of the most preferred visual websites and has gained its popularity due to its simplicity and artistic feel. It does not focus on lengthy textual pieces, but is neatly designed with simple colours and backgrounds with pins of attractive images and videos. It is not too interactive, and allows members to ‘pin’, ‘re-pin’, ‘like’ and write short comment on images and boards. It is mainly used to exchanging ideas through visual content.

Those who are not yet on this site can create a profile and carry out a social media campaign. It is user-friendly and extremely easy to understand and learn. One has to only create boards, separate them categorically and pin relevant images/videos accordingly. Before publishing the pin, there is a description which is to be written in the given space on the board. This helps users and search engines to find content. These descriptions help to form a link with people having similar interests. More followers you have, more will your content be repined. This can increase your visibility and improve your online exposure with fewer efforts. Pinterest helps achieve most of the social media marketing targets and is wonderful for niche businesses like artifacts, food and beverage industry, fashion, home decors and other such.

Instagram

Instagram is a popular site for individuals and brands to share photos with their friends and audience. This site is said to be growing faster than Twitter. It is a great step to build a presence on Instagram. It is fun, innovative and interactive for companies and consumers. It’s good for brands to create a friendly rapport with customers since one can share all pictures of his/her company and staff members. If you’re a brand owner, you could suggest your customers to click a photograph of them using your product and share it on Instagram. This will help you in instant branding and make the user happy as well. This site allows you to use customers in your marketing campaigns, creating loyalty among them. It is an ideal took for branding with a small budget.  

Tumblr

This is a micro-blogging site that is used by creative-minded people. Adding pictures here is easy and is done by posting images from the internet or by re-blogging from Tumblr. It is useful to display a product/service. If you have a product, you can show images of it and attract the consumers to buy and use it. For example: If you are a jewellery designer, you can showcase a model/person wearing one of your pieces. The Tumblr network is very valuable if you aim at a young audience. It is easy to share and tag pictures here which will help improve your product’s SEO. Also, it’s good to be up-to-date with latest trends.

These sites are leading due to the positive results they have given marketers so far and if you use all of the above optimally, your brand will get a great boost.

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

Image-Centric Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is now a common concept and staying active and alert on all the social platforms is critical. Organisations are a lot into making great social media strategies for more leads and customers but an important thing that should be included is an image centric approach rather than a text-based one. Let’s see why...

Catch the Customer’s Attention

If you want your social media marketing strategy to be successful, the most crucial part of it is to build the right content. Marketers have to present exactly what the customers want to see. Mostly everyone has concentration spans that would last just a few seconds. The trick is to get them hooked to your brand within that period. This can be achieved if you have little more photographs and a little less written matter. No one’s going to be generous enough to read lengthy informative paragraphs and no pictures at all.

Be Clear and To-the-Point

You may be coming up with some great textual content but don’t miss out on adding some good images too. Images create breaks between paragraphs and make the reader’s journey through it pleasant and more interesting. Also, photos are digested better into the minds of your audience and will be remembered more than written matter.

Make it Colourful

A written piece can look very dull with just black and white images. Why not add some colour and spice to your post? While you add a dash of colour to your images, be careful not to jazz it up to the extent it hurts the eye! Make it attractive, but simple and its’ sure to grab more eyeballs.

Improve SEO

Practicing SEO tactics is a necessity for the well-being of your online marketing strategies. You can boost your SEO by adding a few images to written content with relevant meta-tags. You should make it a point of tagging each image and using hashtags wherever possible.

Next up, we’ll be talking about some leading social media sites that are image-focused. Keep a track!


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

The Latest Social Media Trends

Now-a-days, brands have taken on to social media marketing and changed the methods of interaction with their audience online. In this blog-post let us see what the top 3 trends are, in social media marketing.

 Trend 1: Focused Marketing

Many organisations have a huge presence on various social media platforms. This has created a genuine, close and friendly brand-customer relationship, rather than a narrow

and impersonal conversation between the two. Businesses are said to continue their social media drives with more specific plans, goals and targets. Companies will listen to their customers across the globe with the use of social networks and respond too.

Trend 2: Marketing which is Information Based

Brands have started gathering a lot of information from different locations, thus making the best of it for marketing in a smart way. All this collected information can help the organisation understand the consumers’ goodwill towards the brand and the sellers can use it to get their customers to take further steps. Experts have even predicated that brands will combine all the data through social networking sites and the data through offline channels, to be able to bring the existing customer data in their system in order to interact better and sell their products/services to them through social media.

Appropriate and Regular Content

Brands need to keep pace with the rapid conversations on various networks. Experts say that it will be vital for businesses to create a special team of social media experts to handle social media marketing, campaigns and big events on various digital platforms.  

Social media marketing has brought about a wave of transformation and companies need to get onto different online platforms aggressively for their brands be in power. 

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

Promoting Your Facebook Page

Most of us are already well-versed with social media marketing and maintaining our business pages on Facebook too. It can be quite challenging to promote the page and keep its visibility going and customer engagements high. It’s time to get the page in front of people and drive traffic to your page... Here’s how:  

Your Network 

People want to connect with you and your brand. Sometimes, you just have to send them subtle reminders to make them aware that they can communicate with you easily. If someone’s subscribed to your emails or newsletter they are most likely to connect with you on Facebook too. Ofcourse, you need to tell them to join you on Facebook and 'like' your page. You can access ‘Constant Contact’ email templates to do so. Once people ‘like’ you on Facebook, your regular updates and posts will show up on their news feed which can help engaging them to your page and brand.

Buyers need to find you

If you have a website or blog, make sure you add a Facebook icon which directs fans directly to your Facebook page. This will make it easy for your audience to find you and connect socially with you on Facebook.

Share It

Facebook has billions of active users. That is a huge pool of potential customers waiting and wanting to connect with your business. Share your page with all your friends and family to make the visibility higher. If you link your business’s Facebook page to your personal network, your fan base will grow. Also, it’s a good idea to share your Facebook page on other social networks.

Connect Offline

If you promote your product on print material, don’t forget to include a show your Facebook page there. Make sure people notice that you have a page on Facebook on offline modes too. The more fans you have, the more your posts, pictures and videos will reach the people.  

Tell Everyone

If you’re presenting your product at a promotional event, workshop, etc, include an image and link to your page in the slideshow.

These are small and easy ways to promote your Facebook page. Get set and begin sharing! 

Keep reading our blogs 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!  

Keeping The Sellers Cart Full of Social Media Shoppers!

Social media marketing has become an important factor for driving more sales in organisations today. This means that every business has to stay active and visible on social media platforms. Social media renders several benefits to us professionally and personally but also comes with a lot of challenges. One must keep up with new innovations and upcoming trends. If you’re looking to build a strong consumer relationship with your brand and increase sales thereon, here are few trends you can follow in terms of social media shopping for your products.

·         Online Couponing

Smart and frequent shoppers try looking for discounts and coupon deals to save cash. Customers are more inclined to collect and use online coupons for e-shopping. Social media is a great avenue for customers to locate the coupons and so smart retailers should find appropriate channels on the social media for coupon distribution. You can engage your customers and attract users with irresistible deals to have loyal followers who further indulge in social sharing.

·         Mobile Engagement

It is easy for brands to connect with social media shoppers instantly now due to the extensive availability of internet browsing/shopping on mobiles. Customers, who are on the run, tend to share their real-time shopping experiences on social media, be it finding a coupon, deals, sharing information on their latest purchase, taking advice/feedback on their shopping from friends, etc.  Mobile engagement with customers is a prominent tool to create social interactions and meet with the customer’s needs.

·         Social Media Conversations

As per the current trend, a customer would rather tweet for an enquiry of a brand/product than make a phone call for the same. Since everyone is so dependent on the social media, brands too need to follow the same. If someone asks you some information for a product through the social media, you need to be available to do the needful for him/her. Social media is a place where customers and brands can make one-to-one conversations.

·         Be Image-Centric

While e-shopping, customers like to see the product to get a real feel of it with just few clicks having the comfort of being at home. Visual social media platforms such as Pinterest allow brands to display pictures of their products and keep customers and keep customers engaged and have a great shopping experience. Shoppers can create their own shopping collections, share and promote favourite brands and find out what’s trending on image centric sites all because of being exposed to visual shopping content of all kinds.

Businesses are now finding it very important to engage cater to the social media shoppers. 

The above steps if followed can result into mass appreciation of your brand through the social platforms and have many thumbs up from your loyal and social shoppers. 

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

Are you making these three mistakes on social media?

You may be actively carrying out social media marketing activities for your business, but you could be doing it wrong. Some companies have mastered the art of social media marketing while some are absolutely getting it all wrong. Our blog-post will help you avoid the three most common mistakes on social media which you could be making...

Mistake 1: Forgetting About Your Account after Posting

If you are an active social media marketer, you would be aware that now-a-days, we are allowed to schedule posts on social media platforms. This means, you are probably scheduling posts for the week and forgetting about following up with your progress there. Your account needs nurturing, attention and care everyday so make sure you log into your account and answer the doubts or reply to the comments that your valuable followers write for you. Keep a track on your progress on all the accounts you have created. If you disappear, your fans will not take time to forget about you and your brand.

Mistake 2: Not interacting To Your Fans and Followers

Social media is where brands and consumers can be on a common platform, with equal voices and can discuss their views, feedback, etc.  Without interacting with your fans, social media marketing makes no sense. Be available for your fans. There will be good comments and negative ones. You have to make sure, you keep your customers satisfied in every way. Not responding is going to reduce your fan base and create anger among the unsatisfied ones. Be there for all and respond to comments politely. That’s your key to several happy and life-long customers on social media.

 Mistake 3: Not Having a Definite Strategy:

Almost everything you do needs a fixed plan. Social media marketing too, needs a systematic strategy to be successful. Plan your content. Decide how and when to post it on social media. Also decide how many times you want to post stuff online. You have to evaluate the content, engagements and your progress very regularly as well. All this cannot happen effectively without a strategy. Your fan involvement too is a part of this strategy. Outlining your strategy will make your social media marketing drive much more efficient and will make it easy for you to constantly improve more everyday.

These three basic mistakes if avoided can make your brand look wonderful on social media.

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

  

All About Hashtags

Are you wondering how to use hashtags? This blog-post will explain what exactly hashtags are, how they can help your business some different types of tags.

Hashtags are everywhere today. We use them on Twitter the most, but now they seem to be all over Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and so on. If you’re a marketer, the use of hashtags cannot be ignored. Hashtags can increase the reach of content, highlight your brand, hit your target market, make your content seen, improve your SEO strategies and do wonders to your social media marketing.

What is a Hashtag on Social Media?

Hashtags are words or groups of words after the # symbol. Eg: (#India or #SocialMediaMarketing). It basically makes it easier to track a specific topic of discussion. If you type #India, you’ll be able to see an entire conversation about this topic by thousands of people. In the same way, you can create a hashtag for your brand for more publicity and recognition.

3 Key Marketing Strategies for Hashtags are:

·         Brand & Campaign Specific

·         Trending and

·         Content

What are they and how do they help your business?

Brand and campaign specific hashtags are those which you make for your own business. You can use them to market your brand and for promotions. Your hashtag should ideally be the name of your brand or company tagline. Make a brand hashtag that is relevant to your business. Your hashtag should be like a signature tag. Get more and more people to use them so that your brand gets marketed. Similarly, campaign hashtags are made for every marketing campaign you hold. For eg. If you have a sale/discount scheme at your store/business you can create a unique hashtag to highlight the sale. If you get people to use the tag, your campaign will get enormous reach.

Trending Hashtags

A trending hashtag is that tag which has become very popular. You must have come across the term about “what’s trending now.” It is referring to the hashtags that are trending or most talked about right now. Trending hashtags constantly change in real time. To have your business hashtag to trend, you must make sure it is used extensively and reaches an enormous audience.

Content Hahstags

Content Hashtags are those you use in your posts. They are not brand hashtags and are not used to define your business and marketing. These may not be trending or may not be that famous. They are simple hashtags that are relevant to your posts and content. Content hashtags improve the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your content. They get your updates noticed by people who are searching or using your hashtag words. 

Hashtags are widely used and are an integral part of marketing your business on social media! 

Keep a track on our upcoming blogs and also find 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!