Social Media Marketing Services Archives

Choosing the Best Social Media Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Posted on August 10, 2017 by NextJSjointviews

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an integral part of digital marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are used by marketers to drive traffic, distribute content and provide a customer experience. According to Social Media Examiner, 92% of marketers have increased their exposure through social media and 80% had positive results in terms traffic.

This blog is for you if you have your own business page and want to improve returns from social media marketing. Social media marketing includes all the activities done online to market your product or service. SMM can lead to more following, increased traffic to your website and customer relationship building.

Whether you are considering hiring a digital marketing agency or buying SMM software to manage on your own, following is the information you must know to choose the best SMM service for your small business:

Have a Documented Strategy

Has your marketing agency developed a written documented Social Media Marketing Strategy? Not having a formalized plan will only lead to ineffective posting on social media platforms. Here is what you can do to document a formal strategy:

1. Know your audience Think of the profile of followers you want to generate on social media. Quality of traffic is as important as quantity. Develop buyer personas and document the needs of your target audience.

2. Develop content to address those needs. Content creation must fit into the broad content plan that you have developed.

3. Make a content calendar to plan when you will share your content. This will ensure consistency in your posting.

4. Also share interesting content by other players in your industry. This could be industry reports, studies and news. Post polls to engage users.

Use Social Media Marketing Tools

There are many tools that allow you to manage all your social media accounts at one place. Platforms like HooteSuite, SproutSocial and Buffer are well known. Using these tools will allow you to schedule posts, track user engagement and monitor your growth on social media.

According to eMarketer, 60% of small business owners say they are not able to track ROI from their social media activities. Tools like Kissmetrics allow you to measure the ROI for each platform and track traffic and conversions coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. It also tracks multiple site visits to give the long lifecycle return from a visitor.

SMM must be tailored to your business

The goals of each small business will be different on social media. Define your ultimate goal clearly. Do you want to drive social media traffic to your site or just want to increase brand awareness in the audience?

As a small business you may also have some budget constraints. Here’s the good news. You do not need a huge budget to market on social media. High level of targeting allows you to reach your relevant audience and convert them.

Visual Content

According to Buffer, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. Many of the social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are visual platforms. For this reason, any SMM service that you choose must have experience in producing infographics, images and videos for each channel.

Paid Marketing

All social media platforms have paid marketing tools that make your posts and ads visible to target audience. In fact, major social media networks are focusing on paid channels to monetize their platforms.

It has become difficult for business pages on Facebook to be visible without running an ad campaign. Instagram has introduced carousel ads and ‘shop now’ buttons to its ads.

As per above graph 92% of marketing professionals are using Facebook to advertise. You can start on Facebook with a small budget. The platform is sure to give you returns by micro targeting your audience based on age, location, interests and much more.

Although social media is only one part of digital marketing, it is by far emerging as the biggest and most influential part of it. According to Hubspot’s marketing statistics, more than half of marketers who’ve been using social media for at least two years report it helped them improve sales.

SMM failed for the others because succeeding at social media requires keeping up to date with the latest algorithm changes and new features. You can take help of a digital marketing expert who will take care of all the above points mentioned.

7 Ways To Provide Great Social Media Customer Service

Posted on June 27, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

Social media has become a major part of our marketing landscape and is a remarkable way to engage with your customers’ while building your brand and your brand’s reputation in the industry.

However, along with this wonderful new way to engage with your customers comes a whole new set of problems, many of which most companies don’t know how to properly address. I’m talking about social media customer service. That’s why I’m going to give you seven tips that will help you effectively address your social media customer service without alienating your followers in the process.

1. Proper Online Verbiage Matters

Just because you are communicating online doesn’t mean your voice isn’t being heard. It’s just as important to use proper verbal communication online as it is offline, such as using online best practices like:

Not typing in all caps
Use proper grammar, capitalization and make sure your responses aren’t littered with misspelled words, etc.

You have to remember that every online conversation will be seen by thousands of people year after year, so how you present yourself and how you handle issues will directly reflect on your brand and how your potential customers will perceive your brand for years to come.

Read Also: What Kim Kardashian Can Teach You About Social Media Marketing

2. Appropriate Online Customer Interactions

Even though you are responding on social media your online customers should not be responded to like you would with a friend on your personal social media pages. Your customers should never be treated as friends. What I mean by that is you should avoid using emojis, internet slang, too-casual language and meaningless banter, etc. Keep it professional yet friendly and your social media interactions will reflect positively on your business.

3. Implement a Strict 24 Hour Response Policy

The easiest thing to let go by the wayside is social media customer service because social media has always been a secondary thought for most businesses. However, that’s no longer the case and it’s imperative that you respond to all social media requests, comments and complaints within 24 hours, if not sooner. If you don’t, just one nasty, unfounded comment or complaint could be seen by thousands of people before you’ve even had a chance to address it or comment on your end of the issue. And viewers who have seen those complaints might never look back at your page again to see how you responded and you will have lost a potential customer forever.

4. Develop an Effective Follow-Up Schedule

Online customer service follow-up is just as important as your quick response to the customer’s initial inquiry. You must make it a policy to follow-up with all resolved and unresolved customer service issues within 24 hours; otherwise, you might as well not have even bothered contacting them at all. Because if you don’t follow-up in a timely manner, your customer’s will view that as if you don’t care and this will reflect poorly on your brand.

5. Hire the Right Attitude

Customer service can’t be trained, customer service has to be hired. What I mean by that is you can’t hire a person who doesn’t have the right personality for delivering exceptional customer service and think you can just train them and expect them to deliver. It won’t happen. You have to hire the right attitude. There are certain personalities that have the proper temperament, attitude and common sense to deliver customer service with an empathetic, nurturing demeanor that comes across as sincere and positive. And that goes for your online customer service hires as well.

6. Strive To Resolve Issues Offline

Everything you do online will be there for everyone to see forever. Therefore, it’s best, whenever possible, to try and take your customer service issues offline. This will give you the opportunity to talk with your customers face to face and address their issues on a more personal level. This will also help keep your dirty laundry off the world wide web for all to see.

7. Empower Your Customer Service Team

There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with a company whose customer service team has absolutely no authority to resolve issues. When this happens, your customers problems won’t be handled immediately causing them to wait. It also gives them more time to be angry about the situation. It also gives them the opportunity to post a rant on your social media pages about how you were not willing to help them, etc. Even if their request is pending a supervisor’s approval. You should provide your customer team with a certain amount of authority to resolve customer service issues on the spot.

You May Also Like: What to Look for When Hiring Social Media Marketing Services

Do you know where most people spend their time online?

On their mobile devices. That’s why it’s so important that your customer service team be proficient in handling themselves properly whether they are delivering text messages or social media customer service.

Your online customer service goes way beyond a few social media pages. Your team will be texting, blogging, commenting, mobile marketing and a myriad of other tasks that all reflect on your brand.

If you would like more information about how to skyrocket your online marketing efforts without breaking the bank, please contact us today and let us show you what we can do for you.

Author Biography

Sophorn Chhay

Sophorn is the marketing guy at Trumpia, a mobile content delivery service that allows users to customize their one-to-one marketing efforts by interconnecting and optimizing all digital platforms. As an innovator in two-way SMS/MMS marketing, Trumpia’s mission is to empower brands and public figures with interactive access to their audiences, reaching targeted affinity groups in a personal way. Trumpia delivers world-class content such as video, ticketing, polling, products sales, contests and giveaways.

Follow Sophorn on Twitter(@Trumpia), LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+

Jumpstart your business by grabbing your free copy of his powerful Mobile Marketing Success Kit.
Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.

What Kim Kardashian Can Teach You About Social Media Marketing

Posted on June 16, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

If you’re a Netizen, Kim Kardashian needs no special introduction. As you know, she is the star of popular reality show “Keeping Up with the Kadarshians”. She runs a clothing line shop popularly known as DASH store. She even published a successful app on her name.

She has taught the online world how selfies work as a promotional tool for any brand. She even published a book on selfies describing her success.

Last year, a silly photo of her kissing her husband managed to get 2.4 million likes via Instagram. It sounds interesting, no?

What magic she is doing with social media? Why other popular brands and celebrities fail to achieve such kind of success? Should social media marketing services have something to learn from this hot online superstar?

Here are five social media lessons businesses can learn from the sexy online enchantress Kim Kardashian:

Get involved in social media passionately

If you analyze Kim’s career you can find she never misses an opportunity to praise social media as a fuel for her success. Kim teaches you, love social media and do every activity passionately, meaning, get involved in social media sites by sharing intimate details of your life with your friends and followers. This will really shake the minds of people.

In fact, Kim allows people the possibility to interact with her in a platform both she and her followers loved. She deliberately tries to involve her audience into her personal life. For instance, she always seeks the opinion of groups on petty things like which face cream to buy, yada yada yada. This will make her followers feel that she treats them as a part of her life.

Always keep in touch

There might be good days and bad days for you. Sometimes you don’t want to engage with people and love to remain into your shells. But Kim never does this. She loves to interact with people irrespective of her mood changes and keeps the conversation going. Literally, it is hard to show such kind of commitment, but it will reward you in the long run for sure.

Read Also: What to Look for When Hiring Social Media Marketing Services

Empower women (crossing international boundaries)

If she’s pregnant and beautiful or pregnant and complaining, with make-up or without make-up, whatever it is, despite of her state, Kim Kardashian can motivate and instill confidence in the minds of women from all over the planet to believe in themselves and take delight in work, interests, family time.

Stick to some healthy values

As far as Kim is concerned, she gives primary importance to her family. People all over the world give importance to moral values. When you look for a role model, you appreciate their consistency and healthy values. Like that, Kim has evolved as a successful online marketer because of her consistency and values.

Businesses and social media marketing services have to learn a lot from her. There is nothing wrong if Kim is the role model for their business tactics.

Social media: A catalyst for your brand

Social media do not create personal brands very often, but you can use it as a vehicle for popularizing your brand. Truth to be told, Kim didn’t become a celebrity because of social media sites. Her personal brand makes her a celebrity. She used social media as an efficient tool to promote her brand.

In fact, she wants to convert her brand a well-defined one. She made more people addicted to her brand by conversing with her fans with this efficient communication channel.

You May Also Like: 8 Social Media Marketing Benefits For Your Business

It’s seen that many brands sending their social media marketing team to study how to engage with their followers. Actually, it’s a sheer waste of money. You guys just think how Kim Kardashian did marketing via social media; it’s nothing but common sense. So love your followers, don’t hesitate to share your details with them and yeah, keep the conversation going!

What to Look for When Hiring Social Media Marketing Services

Posted on May 23, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

We can’t deny that social media is a great platform for all brands. Despite the turnover, businesses, whether it is small or large scale industry, strive to be a leader in Social Media Marketing.

According to a recent study, 41.5% of businesses are investing 1-5% of their marketing budgets on social media. These figures clearly show brands are conscious of increasing their identities and hunting for expertise from top Social Media Marketing Services.

Here are some useful tips for you if you are looking to hire a social media service.

Cooperate and Work Together

If you consider the Social Media Marketing Services just as an outsourcing agency, of course, you are on the wrong path. Obviously they have the expertise to make your brand a success, but don’t forget you are the brand custodian, get involved.

Keep in mind, they know how to market via social media, but you know your brand better. They can guide you how to reach your audience, but you know the real customers. So there will be many situations where you and your marketing services have to work together. Your brand will be a success only if you and your agency work in tandem.

Be prepared to hand over your account details to a new agency if your social media was being managed by any other agency till now. Make sure that all your passwords and admin rights are deleted from the older agency. It will take a couple of weeks for the new agency to understand your social media strategies so far, so cooperate with them.

Read Also: 8 Social Media Marketing Benefits For Your Business

Set Goals and Missions

You should get acquainted with team members of the new agency. Try to give them a clear picture about your brand. To be precise, you are supposed to make them understand about your brand’s philosophy, legacy and the real purpose of your brand not only on social media but in all spheres of its existence.

It is good if you can exactly define what your expectation of social media marketing is, by setting short term and long term goals for your brand.

It is important that the agency team should have an idea about your office culture. You can invite their team to your company. This will help them know about the back- end working, your manufacturing style, how your employees work etc. Sometimes they might find a story from your working ambience to include in their social media campaign for your brand.

Reporting methods and accountability

Reporting methods and accountability is an important process because it helps the metrics to determine what is working and what is not. A mutual discussion between the agency and you help to make sure the reports, numbers, insights would be needed by your marketing team. You have to precisely define schedules and timelines for these reports. Ensuring the data needed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis is also important.

You might be using a social media tool earlier, if so, share your credentials with your new Social Media Marketing Service. They will use the tool and give you reports, helping your marketing team to schedule upcoming quarters. You should seek suggestions from your agency on how to make things better. Suppose there was a decrease in traffic, your agency will comment on it and suggest you measures to rectify it.

Get updated by involving

Everyday social media evolves with new ideas. For example, if an idea works today will be out- of- date in the coming month. As trends change day- by- day, your agency must be updated with the latest trends in the market. You guys both need to work in tandem to know the changes in the market.

Try to conduct brainstorming sessions in a month to place your brand in more impressing ways. Invite employees from different departments of your company to suggest their ideas. Sometimes fresh ideas will come even from people with no marketing background.

You should make your employees understand what their company is doing on social media. Conduct social media awareness sessions with the agency teams and employees from your company. Get updated with the latest features brought in by Twitter or Facebook. Also, find if there is any feature suitable for adopting by your brand.

You May Also Like: How to Decide the Ideal Social Media for Your Business

Trust your Social Media Marketing Service

When you hire a social media service, you should allow them free to work in their own style. You only need to give them guidelines and content. Allow them to communicate with whoever they want. It is good to keep an eye on the activities on social media but never command them how to operate it.

Sometimes there may be situations to do things spontaneously. So, you have to believe in your social media service’s capability. They know what to do for the betterment of your brand. If they get a sign from your side that you trust them, then they can work with much confidence. This will give you incredible results.

Email Marketing: Still Far from Over

Posted on January 8, 2016 by NextJSjointviews

The status of email marketing is a popular topic for debate in every Digital Marketing Agency. Is it dead or alive as of now? Well, email marketing is something that will never ever leave its place in the world of digital marketing. Its importance and presence can never be ignored. Email marketing is not dead, definitely not, and neither will it die anytime in the near future.

A simple statistic will prove the importance of emails in our everyday lives: Over 200 million emails are sent out in a single minute every day. So, you see how heavily email is used as a communication platform for brands, marketers, and even consumers.

There are even more numbers to prove this fact. Over 72% of the adults in USA have stated that they prefer the companies to communicate with them through email rather than any other platform. 91% said they would love to receive promotional emails from the companies that they do business with. As far as the companies are concerned, 72% of them have said that they use email marketing as an integral part of their business and marketing efforts. 25% of the companies consider email as the top most priority and channel for an advantageous return on investment.

Read Also: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

If you are still not convinced and doubtful about the existence of email marketing, here you have three major reasons why email marketing is not going anywhere. Go through them and decide for yourself.

The advantages of social marketing

Social media has a lot of fancy and exciting options to it. This is why there are several rumours that it is slowly killing email marketing which is more of old school. Well, even though social marketing may seem to be more effective in certain case, this one marketing medium is not able to do anything alone by its own. This is one point you need to keep in mind. Vanity metrics and other hollow impressions usually give the marketers a sense of false satisfaction about social marketing. There are simply distracting you.

There are a number of marketers who try their best to gather attention through slightly spammy tactics on social media like filling out Twitter feeds with automated tweets all round the clock, blasting their pages on Facebook with completely irrelevant posts and updates, sending direct messages that are nothing but automated, and also using a huge number of cat memes and circulating them. They do not understand how annoying these techniques can be. Spamming only reduces your followers. They tempt the users to click the unfollow button, and you do more harm than good.

Email marketing, on the other hand, provides useful and relevant content to the audience. This audience consists of people who have willingly subscribed to receive newsletters and other informative emails and would love to learn more. As per data collected in 2012, nearly 90 percent of the internet users have an email account while a smaller number of just 70 percent have an account on any of the social media networking websites. This proves that email is still reigning as the top most form of communication. If you want to reach a majority of the audience and increase your reach, then email is definitely what you need as it is the most effective method in this case.

It is evolving at a higher rate

With emails, brands could get the power to drive customer engagement by monitoring, testing, measuring, and tweaking the emails sent out as newsletters or targeted offerings. The whole game of email marketing has now changed and evolved to a greater extent. Slowly, it is ceasing to be a medium purely for communication purposes to a complete platform that could help the different brands deliver their experiences across various channels.

Here are some of the key email trends that have been explored by Liga Bizune in a recent article that illustrate how emails are slowly evolving to become more than just a channel for communication:

Wearable technologies are evolving. This will slowly change the way brands communicate with the email subscribers.
A new technique of email marketing will surface, which will be hyper-targeted and also location based. The credits for this goes to the integration of proximity and geo-location applications into emails.
Behavioural email marketing will start to get driven by predictive analysis.
As emails are transitioning to mobiles, it has become more necessary than ever to develop better and more creative content. This is the only way to capture the attention of the audience and keep them hooked on.
Videos have started to evolve and find their own place in the world of marketing. They will start playing an even bigger role in email marketing. A bigger emphasis needs to be put into this aspect.

You May Also Like: 10 E-mail Marketing Hacks That Every Marketer Should Know

Correct execution makes it most effective

Emails need to be used properly and effectively to make it more than just a passé. The biggest challenge you face in case of newsletters is that only a small part of the subscribers actually care to open and read the email newsletters you send out to them. This does not, in any way, imply that email is dead or dying. It just points to the fact that your newsletters are not able to make the mark among the audience. They either fail to create the interest in them or your calls to action are not effective enough. Ask yourself a few questions to get your answers:

How is the tone of your content? Is it purely promotional and impersonal, or is it helpful and friendly?
Are you making an effective and meaningful one on one engagement through your content?
Are you striking up a conversation with the reader, or are you just talking at them to get your job done?

These questions will help you understand where you are going wrong. Understand the effectiveness of email marketing to be able to use it in the best way possible.

One thing you need to remember is that email marketing is not going anywhere. Each and every Digital Marketing Agency makes sure to emphasise this point. If you even believe that emails are dying and there is no point in marketing via emails, you will surely start missing out on the wide range of opportunities that this platform has got to offer you. Do not make this mistake, and keep your place in the digital world.

Social Media Sites and Applications to Be Exempted From the Encryption’s Domain Policy

Posted on September 23, 2015 by NextJSjointviews

New Delhi: Shortly after a debate emitted over government’s proposal to explore each message send by an individual by WhatsApp, SMS, or Google Hangouts, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology cleared up in a draft that online networking sites and applications will be exempted from the Encryption’s domain Policy.

The draft posted by Deity indicates that there are classifications of encryption products that will be excused from the draft’s domain national encryption policy.

Encryption products, which are as of now being utilized in web applications, social media sites, and social media applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter etc are excluded from the purview of the draft National Encryption Policy, confirmed a proposed addendum to the policy posted on the department’s website.

Encryption items utilized as a part of Internet banking and payment gateways, and for e-commerce and password-based transactions will be exempted as well.

Read Also: Facebook Introduces SIGNAL, A Social News Gathering Tool for Journalists

Earlier Deity had proposed that all the messages which are sent through encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp (Android version supports encryption), Google Hangouts or Apple’s iMessage, must be stored safe for 90 days. Privacy concerns triggered heated debate.

The draft of New Encryption Policy proposes that upon demand users of encrypted messaging service must reproduce same text, transacted during a communication before law enforcement agencies. It should be in a plain format. Failing to do so may result in imprisonment of the user as per the provisions.

The proposed policy of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology will be made applicable for everyone including government departments, academic institutions, normal citizens and for all kind of communications.

All the modern messaging services like WhatsApp, Viber, Line, Google Chat, yahoo messenger etc, has high level of encryption and many times security offices think that it is difficult to catch these messages.

“All information shall be stored by the concerned B/C entity for 90 days from the date of transaction and made available to Law Enforcement Agencies as and when demanded in line with the provisions of the laws of the country,” the draft said.

The ‘B category’ in the draft is defined as all statutory organizations, executive bodies, business and commercial establishments, including all Public Sector Undertakings, Academic institutions.

The draft has defined ‘C category’ as all citizens including personnel of government and business performing non-official or personal functions.

The user should provide the readable plain text along with the corresponding encrypted information if they communicate with foreigner or entity abroad.

As per the draft, all service providers located inside or outside India which uses encryption technology for providing any type of services in India should register themselves with the government.

Recommended Read: Facebook to Finally Introduce “Dislike” Button

The New Encryption Policy is introduced under section 84 A of Information Technology Act 2000, as proposed by the draft. Through amendment in 2008, this section was introduced. Sub-section 84 C introduced through the amendment has provision of imprisonment for violation of the act.

“Encryption products may be exported but with prior intimation to the designated agency of Government of India. Users in India are allowed to use only the products registered in India. Government, reserves the right to take appropriate action as per Law of the country for any violation of this Policy,” the draft said.

October 16, 2015 is the last date for public to comment on the draft.

“Having a draft on issue is a welcome step. It looks at everything with prism of law enforcement. It will create a license raj. There is very much concern around privacy of citizen. The policy wants messages to be given on demand. If my private information is sought by government, it should be done through courts,” Arun Sukumar,Head Cyber Initiative, said.

Source

8 Reasons Blogging Is Vital For Your Digital Presence

Posted on September 16, 2015 by NextJSjointviews

In the current internet based world, your service or product needs great online presence to reach the desired heights. It will help bring large number, of traffic to your site and stand out among your competitors.

To improve the online presence of your business, you can seek search engine optimization. SEO is highly effective in bringing your business in front of the whole world. Blogging is a vital part of an SEO strategy.

Reasons Why Blogging Is Essential For Your Digital Presence:

Higher Ranking In SERP – Making use of blog in a regular basis is a better way of adding relevant content in your site. These blogs play an important role as they are useful to your customers. It is one of the best ways to increase your search engine ranking.

Your website gets one more indexed page every time you write a new blog, increasing your chances of a higher ranking in SERP (search engine results page). Blogging can increase your web page indexing by 434%. Linked posts will get Google to index your website for high-quality keywords as well.

Read Also: 6 Essential Steps to a Successful Blog Post

Social Media Presence – Blogging also helps you to get social media presence as people can share these blogs on Social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more. This results in getting new, audience to your business. If you have a blog for your website, then you don’t have to ask your social media manager to come up with new content for your brand on a frequent basis.

More Inbound Links – Blogging helps to generate 97% more inbound links. If you share relevant and quality posts, then many people will link to your blog. This will result in generating traffic to your business. Quality inbound links is another factor that can influence search engines positively.

Helps To Bring Traffic – With regular posting, your blog will generate traffic to your site on a large scale. Thus, they will come to know about your brand. In time, brand, trust would grow manifold.

Convert Traffic Into Leads – You will get more sales and high-quality traffic when people find your blog through Google. When you get such traffic, it will be easy for you to convert them to leads with strategic placements of CTAs (call to actions) placed at right places in the blog.

Builds Trust and Reputation – Blogs are where you begin to influence, persuade and move your prospects to act. It’s where they begin to know, like and trust you. Reading about genuine information will make them come back to your website and look for more relevant topics. This builds trust in their mind, leading to better reputation for your website.

Read Also: SEO Two Secret Ingredients for SEO Success

Create Conversations – Keeping your audience engaged is always a good way to build your brand. Blogs create two-way conversations with prospects, customers, and industry peers. It strengthens interaction, comments and feedback.

Knowing Your Audience Better – Blog analytics enables you to track readers, popular topics, click-through, share and comments. By analyzing such data, you will be able to learn more about your audience. Knowledge thus gained can be utilized for furthering marketing strategies.

The earlier you start blogging, the faster your business will obtain its benefits – and don’t forget to set a goal. If you think there are more benefits to blogging, please share with us in the comment section.