social media – Business Plus Baby

February 29, 2016

Need to improve your business social media ad campaigns? Read this!

Everyone knows social media is a good way to increase brand awareness. It’s also a brilliant way to drive traffic to a website. As a business owner, you will no doubt be using social media on a regular basis for those reasons.

The thing is; some people don’t understand why they have little social media interest. Sure, they might be running a series of ad campaigns on popular social networks like Twitter. But, why aren’t more people responding to those ads?

Photo Source

Now is the time to make some simple changes to your social media ad campaign strategies. By changing the way you do things, you will increase your conversion rates and get a better ROI. Here is what you need to do:

Make sure you are displaying ads at the best times

The thing about your target audience is they won’t be awake and looking at your content 24/7. There will be certain times when most of your social followers will be online.

There is no point paying for your ads to display all the time. That’s because you will end up paying a lot of money for your campaigns! Instead, you should find out when your audience is online the most.

If you have a Facebook page, for example, the Insights section can tell you this information. Once you know, alter your campaigns only to serve ads during those times.

Curate an email list

Believe it or not, people still use email in 2016! You should give people the opportunity to sign up to your mailing list. That way, they can receive your brand’s latest news in their inbox. They won’t need to sign into their social media accounts to learn more.

Your social media campaigns should give people the chance to sign up to your mailing list. And don’t forget to do the same on your website too!

Run A/B split tests on your social media campaigns

The golden rule of online advertising is to try different approaches and see which works best. When it comes to social media, you can run A/B split tests and use different ad groups and landing pages.

Doing so will help you determine which ads offer the best ROI. You can then fine-tune your best ads and ditch the worst performers. This is the one thing any good social media agency will tell you to do. It’s quite easy to set up such tests, so there’s no reason not to carry them out.

Use the right ways to capture the attention of your audience

Let’s face it; people don’t want to spend their spare time reading paragraphs of text. They want to look at content that captures their attention and inspires them in some way.

Many online advertisers find sharing images and videos on social media is good. In fact, such a strategy often yields a higher response rate than say linking to a blog post. Well, I hope today’s blog post has given you some ideas on how to boost your social media advertising. Thanks for checking it out!

February 27, 2015February 26, 2015

Why use visual marketing?

Pictures tell stories in ways that words cannot. Pictures combined with text will make your story come to life in a new way.

Any time you have the chance to include images in your marketing − whether it’s your social media profile, your website, your blog or an advertisement, it’s important to give a lot of thought to every image and all the visual cues that you put on your marketing material.

Whether it’s a banner on top of your blog or a logo for your business card, each image speaks to your audience and tells them part of your story.

Marketing is all about communicating a precise message to a specific audience. With the advanced tools available today online, you don’t even need to be a graphic designer to make very effective images to help complete your marketing story.

To be successful at creative visual marketing it’s important to understand what it means, how it works, and the tools that you need to make it work.

Because people are so visually oriented, visual marketing allows you to use design elements, graphics, photographs and videos to tell the story of your brand. The visual cues you use to tell that story will help make your brand more memorable to everyone who views the information.

Using visual cues to help tell your story will attract the people in your audience who are interested in the topic but who don’t want to read a long text-based story. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If this is the case, the graphic images you show will enable you to tell your audience a thousand words of information with just a simple glance from them.

Plus, when you use graphics, photos, and/or video with your text information, blog posts, and sales pages, you make it easier and more likely that others will share the information via social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. In addition, it makes it easier for the search engines to locate the information due to the tags you place with the images.

Images such as infographics are read more often than text-only information such as blog posts that deliver the same information and data. Some marketers estimate that infographics and images are read more than 30 times as much as text-only information. This is quite a difference when you want many to receive and digest the information you are distributing. Using all the visually creative marketing material that you can craft will help you get information out to more people, because they will be more likely to share something that is great to look at.

If you’d like to learn how to make shareable social media images quickly and easily, I’ve created a training module on this in my Online Business Club. Click here for your 7 day trial

November 6, 2013

Ways to enhance your business using social media

Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, blogs, forums or podcasts, we all will use at least one of these social media to interact and connect with others online. While the social side of us can chat and form friendships with people all over the world using the web, we have closed the gap between continents and countries. This has proved invaluable for businesses worldwide and social media continues to prove itself one of the most useful tools available to reach customers and consumers no matter where they are. The question is, have you taken advantage of this? Consider how social media can help your business get off to the best start or start taking the lead in its field.

Free Advertising

Many users of Social Media will think nothing of creating a page to promote themselves or something of interest to them yet businesses can use a wide array of avenues to Advertise services and attract customers to their company using these services. For instance a Facebook page can be created linking your Business Website to a page where you can select a particular type of audience you desire to. As has already been mentioned, the web offers a worldwide audience so it pays off to use Social Media to attract and target many online.

Inform Your Clients and Customers

Now you can get the message to the right audience you can update them and keep them abreast of any promotion, offer and information that will be of interest to them. Let them know any latest business news or any new products or services that have become available to you. Social Media is the perfect way to do this as it will appear as a general message instead of a spam like email that can seem pushy and somewhat intrusive to potential clients. A good example of a business that has blogged successfully is The Workplace Depot.

Find out What They Want

The difficulty with any consumer service is getting the right kind of feedback. Surveys and Customer feedback forms can be a chore to complete and many consumers are reluctant to fill them in or do so quickly and hence inaccurately. Social Media is the perfect way to allow others the chance to leave their opinions and what matters most to them as a product or service. Sometimes bloggers may provide you with useful tips and pieces of information that can help you improve what you have to offer.

Get to Grips with Social Media!

So as well as using Facebook and Twitter to connect with your family and friends, why not use it to maximise your business. The more people that visit your site, “Like” your pages, blog on your blog or leave a comment on your business forum, the more successful your business will be. Be creative and plan how you will set up your business blog. Plan and target your Social Media well and without a doubt you will be on the road to success.

December 7, 2012

The dark side of social media

Do you buy Nature Valley crunchy bars? We love them here at Lindop Towers.

But there’s trouble in the valley at the moment. Copywriter Anne Maybus of Clever Streak mentioned it this week in a Facebook group we both belong to. It’s scary stuff for anyone who uses social media to promote their business, which is why I wanted to tell you about it.

Around a week ago, a blogger accused Nature Valley of using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in their products. She didn’t give any evidence for this at all, just mentioned it as fact. A comment was made on the Nature Valley Facebook page along the lines of “why do you use GMO products in your bars?” and since then a flood of negative comments have poured onto the Nature Valley Facebook page.Take a look here: www.facebook.com/naturevalley

I would like to give you links to the original blog post but I didn’t bookmark it and now there are so many comments on the Facebook page I can no longer get back to the original one.

Does Nature Valley use GMO ingredients? I have no idea, but a quick Google search suggests there’s not much hard evidence that they do.

Here’s what’s scary though: one accusation from a single blogger with zero evidence has caused complete chaos.

What’s more, Nature Valley have done absolutely nothing about it on their Facebook page.

I don’t think they are blissfully unaware of the chaos, because they’ve gone from posting almost daily to no posts at all since 1st December. Personally, I think they are doing nothing until they talk to their legal team. Understandable in the old pre-social media world, but these days a delay like this is causing untold damage to their brand.

What scares me most is how Facebook users have blindly believed this claim and not bothered to check the evidence. If it’s on the internet then it must be true, eh?

So what does this mean for those of us running far smaller businesses?

Keep a close eye on your social media profiles.
‘Going viral’ is usually considered to be good for marketing, but it can also have its dark side. More on this next week in my review of the book The E-Factor: Entrepreneurship in the Social Media Age.
You need to respond promptly to any comments on your social media profiles, especially negative ones.
People have very short attention spans when they are online and many won’t bother to check the facts before taking action.
Be careful when making claims about other companies on your blog. I wouldn’t want to be in the blogger’s shoes when the lawyers get on the case. Especially since Nature Valley is just a brand of General Mills, one of the largest food companies in the world.

I’ll be watching how this pans out with interest.

What are your thoughts on this? Please do leave me a comment.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

April 2, 2012April 1, 2012

Social Media PR Strategy Simplified for Mumpreneurs

Introducing today’s guest blogger Prerna Malik of Social Media Direct and The Mom Writes…

Have you been struggling with a way to get much needed visibility for your business? Do you feel a limited budget means limited PR opportunities?

Well, let’s talk.

First of all, you don’t have to have a BIG budget to get visibility for your business.

Why?

Because we live in an age where social media rocks and learning to use social media can help you create a PR strategy that is simple, productive, effective and best of all, nearly free.

However, using social media to build, sustain and engage relationships can seem daunting to a mumpreneur who’s already juggling a LOT.

So, here are simple steps to take to create a social media PR strategy for your mom-owned business:

1. Know Your Goals

Begin by identifying what you’d expect to achieve from your social media efforts. You don’t want to spend your precious time and dedicated efforts faffing away on Facebook or Twitter. Do you want to build your email list, get media publicity, garner online reviews or land press mentions? Identify your goals and choose your social networks accordingly.

Twitter, for instance, is great for helping you connect with journalists via Muck Rack or creating your own Twitter Lists. The same is true for LinkedIn which can help you reach media professionals by doing a quick search and adding them to your network.

So, begin by writing down your goals for your social media PR strategy.

2. Know Your Audience

Once you know what you want your social media strategy to give you, take a good, hard look at where your target audience hangs out. You can do this by doing a quick survey of your customers if you have an existing mailing list, reviewing where your competition hangs out or monitoring the conversations on a few key social networks to begin with. Once you know where you’ll find your target audience, it is time for you to start creating a presence on those social networks as well.

3. Know Your Value Add

A strong social media strategy will include identifying how you would add value to your followers and network. What is your unique selling point or USP? Why should the media notice you? Why will reviewers want to test your products? Yes, this may take time but once you have it nailed, you’ll be able to cut to the chase and offer the media exactly what they want.

4. Know Your Resources

Finally, know your resources. If you’re a mumpreneur with a small baby and a growing business, you may not be able to schedule time on a regular basis for using social media. Could you hire a social media manager to help you do that? If blogging and guest posting is not your forte, do you really want to struggle with it? Outsource that and instead, focus on using Twitter and Facebook. Knowing your resources as a mom and business owner will help you trim the fat, avoid unnecessary overwhelm and create a targeted social media strategy that will bring you results.

Biography:

Want to chat about creating a strong and successful social media strategy for your business? Want to power up your home business while taking care of yourself, your home and family? Sign up for a FREE one-on-one session with Prerna or get her eBook, How to be a Work-at-Home Mom: The Happily Ever After Guide to Leading the WAHM Life and learn how to be a more productive, efficient and effective mumpreneur. Prerna Malik is the editor of The Mom Writes, a go-to, award-winning site for work-at-home mothers and the co-owner of Social Media Direct, a digital agency that offers affordable and effective social media and web content solutions.

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