November 2017 - NextJSjointviews

5 Ways to Create Customer-Centric Content

Posted on November 29, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

In the modern era, the future of a brand lies in the hands of online communities. The collective voice of online consumers is so powerful that it can either make a brand successful or bring it down to nothingness. This has been the trend of marketing today and we’ve all seen such events unfold before us.

How many times have you come across a Facebook post wherein customers are roasting a particular brand for an oversight or mistake? This may not result in the end of a company but it can deeply affect its brand image. In short, brands must be wary of the voice of online customers and strive to leverage it to their own benefit.

One of the most popular yet challenging ways to gain customers’ trust is through customer-centric content. Such content helps to position your brand as an authoritative and credible leader in the market.

Now, let us understand what customer-centric content is?

In traditional forms of marketing, content is focused on putting the brand in the forefront. It is aimed at generating brand awareness, website traffic, and driving leads through the sales funnel.

Customer-centric content, on the other hand, targets these objectives through a more subtle approach. Some of the characteristics of this form of content are:

It is based on data collected from the target audience
It provides readers value without requesting for anything in return
It is customized according to certain user preferences
It is in sync with a brand’s customer-centric approach

Let us now look at 5 different ways of creating customer-centric content:

1. Create Customer Personas

Customer personas help in creating content that is relevant for the buyers. It is basically a guideline to understand the real customer, their job titles, their interests and preferences and education level. There are several free persona templates that startup brands can use.

Once customer personas are created, set out to establish your marketing message, your mission statement, and the possible reactions of the audience to your value proposition. Keep referring to these personas during content development to ensure that your communication remains relevant.

2. Interview the Audience

In order to understand the audiences’ mindset or fill out personas accurately, you must collect information and data. Interviewing the target audience is one of the best ways to acquire data. This could be a face-to-face interview or an online survey created using Google Forms.

Take a look at your customer personas to understand what kind of information you need and frame the questions of the interview/survey accordingly. You can maximize the response rate for your survey by offering a discount or incentive for responding to it.

3. Search Engine Optimization

This is a widely recognized approach and you must utilize it in the best manner possible. Creating consumer-centric content involves a presence on platforms that are used to find solutions to their problems. Search engines are one of the most popularly used discovery platforms for consumers. The tricks and tactics for this technique are easily available online.

You must also identify keyword opportunities on the basis of what consumers are searching for. AdWords Keyword Planner is a tool that can help to create the right content for the right customer using the right keywords. Make use of this tool efficiently as it will give you an insight into the topics that your customers are talking about.

4. Focus on the Content Format

The content format is dependent on customer demographics. For instance, if you are reaching out to professionals, you must utilize whitepapers, case studies or research reports. Similarly, if you are trying to engage with teenagers, your content must take the form of quizzes or humour.

Furthermore, the consumption channel will also vary on the basis of your target audience. This focuses on the social media platforms and an understanding of where your target audience is active.

5. Eliminate the Jargon

Certain brands tend to utilize jargon in their communication. Remember that this does not impress the audience since they are unable to comprehend what you are trying to say. Always keep the language simple and easy to understand. Keep it concise and straight to the point.

Customer-centric content is of immense importance today and no brand can attain success till they start focusing on this aspect of marketing. Without resourceful and engaging content, a brand cannot place itself in the customer’s mind and will eventually die out of the market.

A Guide to Create Ego Bait Posts

Posted on November 24, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Ego bait is content created to capture the attention of a certain group of people. It is basically producing something so that the ego of the person, group or company, in particular, is boosted.

Each individual has an ego, even industry influencers. And so if you process your ego bait posts in a manner that is subtle, you will not be recognized as a flatterer but instead gain a lot of exposure, traffic, and links. If the work you do is good, even after realizing that you are trying to stroke your ego, people will tend to help you out.

Ego bait posts are not widely used and therefore, most individuals still struggle to understand how they can be created. They cross over in various areas of content. Here’s a guide to different types of ego bait posts that can be created.

1. Play the curators role

Organize a talk-show on your website and be the host. Ask experts and industry leaders to share their knowledge with you. Curate these comments, reap out maximum value and promote it in collaboration with the influencers.

2. Prepare a top list

A top list instantly attracts the attention of the target audience. In fact, it is one of the most successful forms of ego bait posts. If a list is prepared correctly, it is cost-effective and helps to generate links. Some of the examples of a top list are as follows:

Top 10 blogs on electronic music in 2017
Most shared SEO content in 2017
Top 10 tricks for lead generation

3. Produce a badge

One of the most popularly used forms of ego baiting is badge baiting. However, successful execution of the same is only possible when you have a reputed and established brand presence. If that is the case, badges help in enhancing your brand visibility and massively boosting your link profile.

4. Regular ego bait

A mention of any individual or company can change the way your regular blog post interacts with the target audience. A lot of SEO blog posts have an individual or a tool mentioned and suddenly those mentioned want the piece of content to be read by as many as possible. This is why you must never say ‘an expert’ in the field of marketing, and use the actual name of the individual instead.

5. Laser Targeted Egobait

While badge baiting helps you reach a larger target audience, laser targeted ego bait posts are more crisp and precise. Suppose you interview an industry veteran, it is only one individual and his or her viewpoints have been covered. This is not a bad thing since you are guaranteeing to get at least that one link from the individual, which is good enough for stroking egos.

How to Get Ego Baits Right?

Knowing the different type of ego baits does not mean that you will be able to get them right instantly. Read on to understand how you can optimize the results of your efforts to the fullest:

1. Ensure that the Website is Maintaining Standards

Just like any other form of decent link building, you will require a basic presence or reputation if you want to be successful in your efforts of promoting ego bait posts. The chances of an individual helping a completely unknown brand are low.

If the current condition of your website is not satisfactory, getting interviews can be tough. Not just that, a lot of people would not even want your badge and you will not be able to curate the inputs of influencers in your industry.

2. Get in Touch With Them

There are a lot of people who create fantastic content, mention the right individuals in the industry but do not inform the featured individuals about it. They hope that the individuals would notice on their own and this is one of the worst mistakes to make.

You must subtly inform the thought-leaders of your industry about your efforts it can completely change the output of your ego bait post.

3. Do not be a Sycophant

While it is good to respect the influencers and give them a high pedestal, do remember to maintain your self-respect. Be polite and let them know that you understand their value but don’t become a bootlicker because they also need to buy into you.

If you treat influencers as someone above you, they will always perceive you like that. Your goal in the future is to be an influencer yourself and you must behave at par with them.

4. Don’t forget the Call-To-Action

Brands, sometimes, send an email with all the information about the piece but without a direct call-to-action. This does not result in any kind of association.

The influencer you are trying to reach out to is in all likelihood busy and does not have the time to find what he is supposed to do. For instance, if you want the influencer to tweet some information, put in a direct link that takes him or her to the option of retweeting that information. A call-to-action tends to give in more benefit than an email with lots of information and no such action-based communication.

To conclude, always remember to be subtle in your communication. Asking for a direct link is not recommended since the influencer could feel that you are using their popularity for your own benefit. If you really want to do the same, make sure you know what you are asking for and where you want it to be placed.

How Chatbots Can Help Marketing and Sales

Posted on November 22, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Chatbots have significantly developed in the last few years, owing to the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) that controls them. They now serve as sophisticated tools and can assist you in automating several business processes.

Apart from being efficient at handling customer care queries, chatbots can help to boost marketing initiatives and drive the customer smoothly through the sales funnel. Given below are some of the ways in which chatbots fit into your marketing strategy:

1. A Personalized Experience for your Target Audience

Interacting with someone who identifies you by name impacts the nature of the conversation greatly. Chatbots align with social media and gather information about every individual they come across. Chatbots respond to queries accurately and further provide shopping advice based on users’ interest and behaviour.

2. Keeps the User Engaged

Chatbots are successful in engaging as well as retaining your customer. This is because, unlike other marketing efforts, chatbots have the capacity to entertain your audience for long. For instance, a video has the ability to engage the target audience but once it is over, the users’ interest in you is also over. On the other hand, a chatbot grabs the users’ attention, captures more information while interacting with them and sends personalized as well as engaging content relevant to your brand, product, and services.

3. Enhances Your Audience Network

Chatbots mostly exist on social media platforms. This means that they are able to reach vaster audiences and can tap larger demographics for your brand. They can be integrated with different messaging applications giving the customer more avenues to connect with you. As a result, you are in a better position to enhance sales with newer opportunities and prospects.

4. Capture Customer Feedback

A chatbot makes it easier for you to collect feedback from your customers. Generally, people do not like to answer questions or complete a survey if there is no incentive involved in it. However, a chatbot subtly approaches the customer gathering feedback in the form of questions through conversations.

Furthermore, by installing the right machine learning tools, chatbots can analyze the data that has been received, giving you more insight into how you can improve your marketing strategies. You can focus more on your customers’ needs and develop an inbound marketing plan which helps to generate leads and sales.

5. Develop Relevant Messaging

A brand’s messaging is crucial to make or break its image. If customers constantly receive emails, newsletters, and other notifications, they tend to get irritated. Chatbots analyze the data that has been collected and send out customized and relevant communication to users through social media. This way, consumers only receive the information they are interested in and seek to know more about the brand.

6. Make Brand Interactions Fun

We all know that chatbots deliver quality information to customers but what they also do is make communication fun. This means that your marketing efforts make a lasting impact on your consumer and increase the number of users visiting your website. Links to relevant blog posts and other content pieces can be shared for consumers to interact with the brand.

7. Proactively Reach Out to Customers

Brands generally like to adopt a passive approach. They only communicate with a user when they have been contacted. A chatbot, on the other hand, welcomes the user when they visit your website or social media page and inform them of their availability. You appear to be more proactive this way and therefore enhance your brand’s reputation, increase interactions and sales numbers.

8. Make the Sales Process Smoother

Leads must be nurtured to help buyers successfully complete their sales journey. However, this can be a time-consuming process. Chatbots enable you to collect important information and accordingly send personalized messages to the users.

A chatbot-based lead-nurturing campaign can be made extremely successful by capturing user data and performing split testing on the messages you create for the target audience. This approach helps you to understand the right marketing strategy and really nurture every lead that comes your way through the website or social media profiles.

Conclusion

Two-way communication via messaging applications has become the ideal way of interacting with customers and reaching out to them. This is exactly why chatbots are becoming the need of the hour. A chatbot integrated into your marketing strategy can help you gather information about prospects, personalize marketing efforts, improve target audience reach, and generate more sales and revenue through social media.

How Visual Content Enhances Your Social Media Marketing

Posted on November 21, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Are you struggling with social media marketing for your business?

In this blog we will show you how visual content can help you get you more likes, shares and comments for your business on social media. We will also give some tips on how to use visual content to boost engagement.

Reaching your followers without paid marketing can be difficult and frustrating at times. That means marketers have to find ways to reach target audience organically. Visual content is a better way to spice up boring content and increase your shareability.

Visual content includes pictures, graphics, memes and videos. According to Viraltag, visuals get 94% more views than plain text content. Posts with visuals grab attention easily. This is why Facebook has introduced the coloured status background for text only posts.

The popularity for visual content is proved by the tremendous growth of visual social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. Instagram users number has grown from 200 million in 2014 to 800 million in just three years.

Marketers know that visuals are a must -have rather than a good-to-have component of content strategy. In 2016, 53% of marketers stated that over 90% of content they produced contained visuals.

Here is how visual content will enhance your social media marketing

Increase Engagement

Posts with visuals get more likes, comments and shares on social media. According to Hubspot, Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without images. Visual content is also 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than any other type of content.

However, social media feed is overloaded with images today and there is something you can do to stand out among that. Your brand needs something more with their image to stand out. There are many strategies that successful marketers follow to increase their chances of going viral.

Check out this post by EA Sports:Madden 25. They have successfully used a call to action to drive user engagement.

Adding a clear call to action in your images will drive up engagement on your posts. Some of the other strategies that marketers use are sharing DIY photos, entertaining or funny memes, optical illusions and images that evoke emotions.

Create Brand Personality

Visuals communicate much more than words ever can. Images and videos evoke emotions and connect with the audience instantly. You can communicate all that your brand stands for in less than two seconds (which is great considering the fact that human attention span have fallen to eight seconds).

For example, RedBull Facebook page regularly posts videos on adventure and sports. This connects with their audiences who are adventurous and identify with the brand for ‘pushing the limits’.

Images are also more memorable and increase your brand recall. According to Lifelearn, people retain 65% of information when content is paired with relevant image compared to only 10% retention when that information is heard.

Posting images with consistent theme, font and logo increases brand recognition and builds a place in the minds of audience.

Drive Conversion

Visual media can directly increase your traffic and conversions. Visuals are great to if you are a product company. In fact, there are many small businesses which have grown big supported only by Instagram sales. Marketers are now giving due place to visual platformssuch as Instragram, Snapchat and Pinterest in their digital marketing strategy.

Instagram has over 1 million advertisers since the introduction of its ad services only four years ago.

Both Facebook and Instagram have introduced carousel ads (pictures that you can scroll sideways) to make their ads more visual. All social media platforms prefer visual content in their organic as well as paid feed for the simple reason that it converts better.

Tips for creating visuals for social media

Whether you are just starting out with visual content or want better strategy for your visual content marketing, following tips will help you:

> Recreate your best text posts in visuals. You do not need to create fresh content every time. Go back to your best performing posts and blogs and redo them in a visual infographic.

> Know your type of visuals. There are so many things you can dowith visuals. You can use photos, quote covers, comics, infograhics, memes, videos, live videos. Understand your audience and analyse their response to different type of visuals. Also keep in mind your brand personality. A funny meme on Donald Trump is not a good idea if you are a professional and serious B2B brand.

> Optimize images for each platform. Keep your posts in line with the overall mood of the social media platform. For example, Instagram is great for a lifestyle and fashion product whereas LinkedIn would be a better place for a B2B software company. Also keep in mind that the dimension and photo quality requirement may differ slightly in each platform.

> Managing too many platforms can get overwhelming. Limit to three platforms to start off with. Choose platforms based on where your target audience is.

> Keep a good variety of content. Some options that are popular are – DIY graphics, educational infographics, funny comics or memes, entertaining videos, GIFs, etc. Be creative and play around with what sits well within your brand voice.

> Use live videos to show the human side of your brand or to give behind the scene updates. Live videos are not yet very popular but they are very engaging. It’s the perfect time to jump on the rising trend that will be common in coming future.

> Use contests and user generated images to engage your users.

Conclusion

We are naturally inclined to prefer visuals to text. The amount of visual content is only growing on social media platforms. Brands must stand out with their creative use of visuals to enhance their social media marketing. Using images, videos and creative graphics will increase user engagement, build your brand voice and ultimately lead to conversions.

How AI-Based Tools are Transforming Social Media Marketing

Posted on November 14, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

From interpreting lab results in healthcare industry to automatically controlling air conditioning temperature, artificial intelligence is changing the face of industries and businesses.

It is also simplifying jobs of marketers by providing tools to make sense of consumer data on social media.

Social media gave marketers a powerful way to reach out to their target audience. However, application of AI has made it possible to reach out to each individual user with personalized content. Here is how AI based tools are transforming social media today:

Chatbots

Artificially intelligent chatbots are common on social media. There are more than 1, 00,000 Facebook Messenger bots and they are here to stay as messaging is the preferred way of interaction for customers. Chatbots allow businesses to send auto-replies, personalized offers and even solve customer complaints.

More than 2 billion messages are exchanged between users and brands every month on Facebook messenger alone. Companies with AI powered Facebook messenger bots see increased user interaction and sales.

For example, Tommy Hillfiger saw a 3.5 times more conversion on messenger than any other digital channel during New York fashion week.

Even Twitter has launched many features this year to promote interaction of users with brand chatbots.

Image Recognition

People share more than 3.25 billion photos a day on popular social media platforms! Brands can draw useful information about users, with so much visual data on social media.

Photos shared by followers can give marketers a peek into places they visit, products they use and how they interact with brands.

For example, an apparel brand can discover where their customers wear their products based on photos discovered on social media. Currently, there is no way to find out unless people tag the brand on a rare occasion.

A lot of information on buying behaviours, usage patterns and aspirational value can be found out by marketers only if they could read and discover images like text.

Thankfully AI is making this possible through image recognition technology. Using technologies like Google cloud vision companies can scan millions of images on social media to identify logos, products and objects.

This is similar to Facebook photos auto-tagging that you might be familiar with. With this AI tool marketers can listen to what customers are saying through pictures and videos.

Advertising

Paid campaigns give the best ROI in digital marketing. Managing campaigns on multiple channel and deciding on best bid for keywords can get difficult at times. Usually campaigns are managed by in-house team or a PPC agency.

AI Tools like Albert and Frank use machine learning to manage paid ad campaign, analyze result and suggest most profitable platform for placing ads. This takes the guess work out of paid campaigns and ensures best return on investment.

AI Content creation

Social media success is dependent on good content. According to Gartner, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines by 2018.

There are already intelligent programs that can write financial summaries and fact based articles. Many of the tech giants are working on bots that can speak and interact like human.

Microsoft’s artificially intelligent chatbot ‘Tay’ was made live on Twitter to learn from other users and tweet like a human teenage girl.

Although the controversial account had to be shut down after it tweeted inappropriate remarks, Tay showed us that days when bots produce social media content are not far.

As Natural Language Processing develops, machines will be able to write human like social media posts to engage followers. They would also collect real-time data on trending topics and write interesting content that drives engagement on social media. A tool called Rocco has already done this.

Rocco is an AI powered social media marketing assistant that suggests fresh social media content likely to drive engagement among your followers.

Customer Intelligence

Posts shared on social media platform can give useful information on customers. Marketers no more have to interrupt customers for surveys and conduct focus groups.

AI machines can search social media platforms for data that matters and collate actionable insights.

Converseon is already doing this by applying machine learning to voice-of customer data.

These insights can be used for market segmentation, building customer profiles and competitive analysis.

AI based tools are going to change how we consume information on social media platforms. This is the reason all of the tech giants and social media companies are investing heavily in it.

Facebook has a dedicated AI research team called Facebook Artificial Intelligence Researchers (FAIR). In 2014 LinkedIn bought Bright, an AI based job search portal, to better its job matching capabilities.

Pinterest on the other hand acquired a data software company, Kosei, to boost pin and product recommendations. It is only a matter of time before marketers start using AI based tools widely on these sites.

Why Content Matters in Social Media Marketing

Posted on November 9, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Social media marketing has emerged as one of the most advantageous types of digital marketing. Businesses can grow exponentially if they utilize the technique in an effective manner. The success of a social media marketing strategy lies in the activity the brand chooses to execute and the way they visualize this form of marketing.

A lot of brands think of social media to be a means of getting more likes, engagement, reach, and retweets. But we suggest you focus on sharing high quality content in order to engage in a dialogue with users and thereby generate a lead.

Here’s what content can do for your social media marketing strategy and help to build a brand:

Expand your network and establish credibility

High-quality content can do wonders on social media. In fact, experts suggest that social media and content marketing go hand-in-hand. All you need to do is figure out what types match the best with each other, and once you have discovered the right pair, you will be able to reach out to large audiences without any obstructions.

Usually, brands publish content on their official website and promote it using social media handles. They expect immediate results but content marketing is not able to deliver the same. Content marketing must build up momentum in order to deliver the kind of results brands desire.

According to content marketing experts, companies must consistently provide valuable content to their target audience. In the course of time, this engaging content will be able to pull the users and help the brand establish credibility. This is an organic approach and may take time to reap results.

If you are confident of the value of your content and believe that it is worthy of the reader’s attention, you may force it to more audiences using sponsored posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter. You could also tie up with influencers and grow your brand’s reach.

Establish a connection with the brand

Content marketing focuses on establishing a connection between a brand and its target audience. This connection must have an emotional appeal to it. Moreover, content has the power to make people empathetic towards a brand.

A content marketing strategy must be so strong that it should be able to convince prospects to convert into sales. This means that you require content that is unique and valuable. Start by sharing and demonstrating the values of your company through the content you share on social media.

Be an authority

If you regularly address current affairs and specific topics of concern relevant to your industry, you are viewed as an authority. The value and relevance of your content strike a chord with the readers and they will await the next piece of content you publish. And social media is the best place to share such content and engage with your users.

People today don’t have much time, but if they come across content that is valuable, they love it. They tend to share it in their groups and networks giving you the publicity and engagement you require. You need not use technical jargon or absolute facts based on research in order to be an authority. Content written in a manner that is interesting and understandable has huge potential with the reader.

Improves conversion rates

Content marketing is the only tool that permits you to create appropriate remarketing lists. This is done using content analytics.

Your website has a number of webpages with different content and there’s also a lot of content on your social media handles rerouting the user to different links on your website. Google Analytics sets a code on your website that tracks visitors and gives you an analysis of their behaviour. This data is further used to prepare remarketing lists and show prospects content that they were interested in.

If your business stays in front of the prospects at regular intervals, chances that they become a customer when considering a purchase decision are high.

Social media platforms have become the new tool for marketers, however, if you are looking at reaching out to more customers, your content must be high-quality and valuable. Perform a thorough analysis of your target audience before devising a content marketing strategy so that you can offer the content they are looking for.

6 Mistakes Small Businesses Should Do Away With

Posted on November 8, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

For the purpose of running a business successfully, you need to have expertise in finance, accounting, business law, marketing, strategic development and many other fields. As your business keeps growing, your responsibilities also keep expanding. There is a huge amount of hard work and risk in any business you run and that’s why many businesses shut down within the first 18 months.

Here are 6 common mistakes small businesses should do away with:

1. No Space for Ego – For a business to be successful, you have to make several right decisions. It is difficult to take the correct decision and choose the best all the time. Mostly, the biggest blockage to making the best choice is not lack of skills or knowledge but the business owner’s ego and stubbornness on his/her thoughts.

Sometimes business owners take a decision depending on their gut feeling without doing any proper research and survey. It is advised to stay updated always and think with an open mind. This is extremely important for a successful business.

2. Be sure before hiring – A hiring manager should hire wisely. Hiring a wrong person could lead to a big waste of time, effort, and funds. Usually, in a small business, only the hiring manager is responsible for deciding and hiring.

You should not limit the interview of the candidate only up to the hiring manager. There should be several rounds of interviews. They could be written or on computer or face to face. You have to keep in mind how well is this resource going to fit into the team. Make sure that the candidate is a complete fit in the company before hiring.

3. Spend Proper Time in Planning –A business owner starts a business in the field of his expertise. This is highly beneficial as it reduces the learning time. But there is a huge difference between having the knowledge and practical application of that knowledge. It is extremely important to have a proper business plan and an execution plan.

Even if the business owner has great skills, he must follow a plan which would be helpful in keeping the business streamlined. Plans help in meeting deadlines and stay focused on the mission of the business. There is a very old saying “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

4. Define proper goals and mission –To achieve success at what you do, you must properly draft business goals, vision, reasons, and points of passion. Even if you have a small group of people working, it is difficult for all the people to have a common consensus. So, at these times, a well-defined goal or mission is helpful in coming to a conclusion and preventing from any form of argument. You should not compromise on your goals in order to meet a consensus.

5. Accept your Weaknesses – Every human has a set of strengths and weaknesses. It would be your biggest mistake if you ignore your weaknesses. No matter how perfect you are at your work, you can still make mistakes. So, you should not be overconfident about your working skills and accept that you are also bound to make mistakes. A successful business owner would be the one who would know his or her weaknesses well. You should be open to inputs from others about what they feel you lack.

6. Manage your employees efficiently – People management skill is one of the most important skills that the owner of a small business should have. There are several misconceptions in everyone’s mind regarding managing resources. The employees are the assets of the company.

All employees are different and as a leader, it’s your responsibility to understand their key skills and behaviour. You should know how to motivate your assets and how to make them work in the most efficient manner. Make sure you spend proper time in understanding each of them.

The key to a successful business is uniqueness, but being over confident is the deadliest mistake. Even a small mistake made by you could lead to the collapse of your business. So, avoid the mistakes mentioned above and keep going, taking your business to new heights.

11 Technical SEO Tips to Boost Your Site’s Rankings [Infographic]

Posted on November 7, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Technical SEO might be a challenging aspect for even the most seasoned SEO experts. Technical SEO just refers to any optimization work that is done aside from the content. Essentially, it’s laying a strong foundation to give your website the best chance it can have to rank for relevant search queries and avoid being the bad kid on the block in Google’s eyes. Analysing and fixing technical issues at an early stage will really make a difference to your website rankings. Here’s an infographic illustrating 11 technical SEO tips to boost your site’s rankings.

8 Steps to Create a Strong Brand Identity

Posted on November 6, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Entrepreneurs make different kinds of brand-related mistakes. Some create a false opinion about their products in the market, on the other hand, some over marketing their products, but the biggest mistake which most entrepreneurs make is poorly creating the brand identity. Brand identity highlights the image of a company which helps customers to form their first opinion.

A successful brand should be consistent in the communication – banners, prints, online ads, website, social media, and customer service. Below are the steps to create a strong brand identity:

Step 1 – Define the Mission and Vision of your Company

You clearly need to draft the reason of your existence, your target audience and what your company is passionate about. No need to start focusing on a big group of audience at the start itself. Concentrate on the target audience and as time would pass, your branding would expand.

Step 2 – Research other Brands within your Industry

You should be fully aware of what your competitors do, what they lack and what they are good at. Make sure you can convince your customers how you are different and better than others in the same industry. You must concentrate on the quality and uniqueness of your products. Hence, you have to dig deep into your research such that you are able to offer products or services which no one else is offering.

It’s a good idea to offer your customers a more authentic product or provide better support system or help in saving money over others brands.

Step 3 – Create an Attractive Logo and Tagline

The logo is one thing that would appear everywhere. It would be on your product, product packaging, ads, website and all other places you can think of. You should try to create something that is unique and extremely attractive. You must spend money wisely and develop a visual presence for your brand. Hire a professional designer to do this for you.

Step 4 – Decide the Tone of Communication

You should be sure of the tone you would like to talk to your customers in. Your tone could be friendly, formal, professional, informative, etc. Choose a brand tone which suits your product and the product marketing style.

Step 5 – Create a Good Personality for your Brand

All customers look for something different and demand extra personal attention. The personality of your brand should be such that people don’t forget it easily and also talk about it. You have to be consistent all around regarding your brands’ personality.

Be consistent with the tone in which you communicate, the description you give about your products, your success stories, your learnings, your business idea, and so on. Everything should be consistent as this helps in gaining people’s trust and interest in your brand.

Step 6 –Your Brand should be a part of every Step taken in Business

In any form of activity, you perform for your business, your brand value should reflect. Always remember, brand building is a gradual and continuous process. It never stops. If your client is walking into your office, then he should be able to feel your brand presence in your communication and also in the surroundings.

All your product packaging, visiting cards, advertisements should have the brand logo on it. Your website and social media activities should also have the logo present.

Step 7 – Think 100 Times before changing your Brand

Once you have decided the tone of communication, the logo, and the name, then you should avoid changing it. Change only if it has a relevant story behind it. By changing your branding, your customers can get confused and might lead to losing their trust on the brand.

Step 8 – Advocate your Brand

You know your brand the best and you are the best person who can advocate it in public. You must spread the word around on your brand. Also, you must train your new recruits well and imbibe in them your brand value. The whole company needs to be talking in the same brand tone.

You would definitely realize that by having a good brand, you can gain the customer’s trust. It takes quite a while to build your brand value and is an ongoing process.It is very important to build your relationship with the customer, and therefore you should be patient and consistent.

5 Strategies for Collaborative Content Marketing

Posted on November 3, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Some companies have a single person handling their content marketing campaigns. If you are one of them, you’d know that there are certain advantages with respect to the management and control since there is only one voice masterminding everything. However, you would also know that you are not witnessing the benefits of collaboration.

Content collaboration is simple – several people working on the same piece of content. These people could be from within your organization, or industry influencers. In certain cases, content may also be collaborated from competitors.

Now, why do you think collaborative content marketing is beneficial?

1. Resources – Through collaboration, resources can be shared for effective utilization of each other’s specialization. For instance, if you are good at curating images, you collaborate with a person skilled at research and create something that is relevant and interesting.

2. Point of views – When more people work on a particular subject, there are different perspectives and takeaways. This makes the final piece of content flawless.

3. Audience – If you collaborate with industry influencers, your reach in terms of the target audience instantly increases. This makes collaborative content marketing extremely powerful for attracting links and shares.

Collaboration helps you reach out to a larger target audience and improve the metrics of your content marketing campaigns. So, what are the strategies that you must use for collaborative content marketing?

1. Form a great team

In order to have a strong collaborative content process, your team must be qualified and well-organized. The functionality of the team must be clearly defined. Each person should be involved and supportive to enhance the ability of collaboration. The final outcome must have a pool of ideas behind it and not just influenced by the marketing team.

2. Share access and control

Give several people the access to write and edit a piece of content. This may sound unusual since the inputs of several people could just ruin the entire objective of the document. However, on the flip side, it could also help prepare a document that is complete with all the information and ideas required to make it interesting and relevant for the target audience.

3. Make use of technology

Collaborative content marketing involves several people contributing to a particular topic. Managing this inflow can be a little challenging. This means that you need to utilize appropriate tools to organize and streamline the collaborative process.

4. Quote and Mention

This one is extremely interesting and simple. When you write an article, include a quote written by someone else. The quote could be back linked and in case it is by someone popular in the industry, it could just add more insight and evidence, making the content strong. Please note that it is important to let the people you are quoting know about your actions.

5. Spread the information

The best research and content collaboration effort can only reap results when it is shared appropriately. Your marketing team must use the information in a manner that it generates profitable sales. Knowing what consumers would like to read is only answering half the question. The second half is to find the means to disseminate this information in a manner that it finally reaches the end consumer.

According to experts, headlines, subheadings, bullet points must all be effectively used to concisely present the information. It must be optimized, adding value to the time spent by the user reading it.

Conclusion

Collaborative content marketing is easy but an important strategy to remember is that you must create information that is relevant. It could come through inputs shared by experts in different skills. The second aspect is to utilize this meaningful information appropriately by sharing it through the right medium that reaches the end consumers.