How to Engage Your Audience Through Social Media
Did your social media traffic skyrocket at first but is falling flat nowadays? Don’t sweat it. A lot of hours and hard work have gone into perfecting the use of this not-so-secret weapon.
We all start with zero readers and zero traffic anyway and anyone can write a blog but it's what you do with it afterwards that counts.
Once you perfectly understand how Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram strategies work and which can benefit your business best, you will be an expert at handling them and many other factors mentioned down below.
Facebook, Google and Twitter
What works: Images, videos, calls to action, industry-related content, general share-worthy content.
What doesn’t work: Lengthy content, bland content, poor business/related/share-worthy balance.
Videos and images, which are mostly used for redirecting consumers to your website, are essential to catch the eye of social media readers, though video works a little better to hold the reader’s attention.
The main ways to get traction with your blog, to get your readers to back up your business is:
- Get them to go straight to your website or store
- Get them to like and follow
- Get them to share your content
Let’s illustrate that with a few examples :
Three people see your business posts about a “2 for 1 sale”. These posts just likely to be seen, and not shared. Once people start liking and sharing your posts, you’ll start to see new eyes on your page. In the case of a fitness coach, for example, try and get your readers excited to see and share those workout tips and you’ll have a better chance that someone who needs trainer will come across them.
Once you’ve gained the attention of your readers with a photo or video, a call to action is the ideal way to guide them to their next step. That being said, calls to action can be used for almost every type of post. These posts may not lead your reader straight to your website, they will, however, get you more likes and shares.
Packaged in with the importance of shared content is the name of your business. Every time your post is shared, someone new has the chance to see you.
That’s brand-recognition!
On the other hand, lengthy content, bland posts, and a poor balance of business/industry/shareable don’t work well on these media channels. People do not have the attention spans to read posts that are more than a couple of lines long.
Keep them short and concise! Don’t post bland, filler content like, “Happy Friday!” unless people have a reason to share it. “Happy Friday, here’s a hilarious cat meme” can improve brand recognition, but only if shared - use humour to your advantage.
Try to find your balance between business and shareable content.
What works: Images, videos, industry related content, general share-worthy content.
What doesn’t work: Lengthy content, bland content, business-related content, long texts.
Pinterest is ALL about pictures. People usually go on Pinterest to look for creative ideas. If your business provides projects, how-tos or even the means with which to make ideas happen.
For example, a hardware store will greatly benefit from Pinterest: once people get the ideas from you, they’ll come into your store to buy the necessary tools to get the job done! (Remember, brand-recognition!).
The best use of Pinterest includes non-business related content. Show people ideas that may lead them to your business, but don’t try to sell them right then and there.
Last but not least, the text attached to Pinterest posts is often ignored, so any applicable text should go into an infographic displayed as an image. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use any text. Although a small headline or message will suffice here.
What works: Images, video, projects.
What doesn’t work: Mostly everything else.
The whole point of this platform is to get users to follow you and talk about what you have to offer. This works best for restaurant accounts because your customers can post images of your food for their friends to see. This also works great for accounts posting about home improvements. Here, your business can post projects and progress pictures of what you’ve been working on. Seeing these images and sharing them can work well to compel the reader to seek you out.
Do not dismiss the reviews!
Now that we’ve covered the main social media channels, let’s discuss other ways they can be used. Facebook, Google, and other media channels support reviews. Reviews play a big role in a business, as they can make or break it. 92% of consumers now read online reviews and star rating is the number one factor used by consumers to judge a business.
You may be thinking “I can’t control what people rate my business”, and you’d be right. However, you can control how you respond to people. You can turn around even the angriest rater by replying to their review in a quick and professional manner. Check out our articles about how to respond to positive as well as negative reviews.
Listen to Your Audience
Social Media Listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to get a better hold of what customers are saying about your business. This is ideal to identify your customer's pain points and responding to their questions and complaints.
This phenomenon is bigger that social monitoring. The difference can be explained with this simple quote : "Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest".
The short and sweet of this is that you need to be researching your competitors and your peers. What are people talking about, liking, and sharing, and how can you get in on it? You’ll want to shape your social media strategies around what’s getting the best traction everywhere else. Get researching!
Increase the Quality and Quantity of Your Website’s Traffic
The importance of SEO should not be ignored. When you search for your business’ name or keywords related to your work, how high on the results page does it appear? The more you and your readers are mentioning your name and other keywords in relation to your business, the better your SEO results will be.
Finally, Measure your Results in The Long Term
Finally, take a step back and look at what you’re doing. Naturally, you’ll want to look for what’s working and what isn’t. Whether you’re counting likes and shares by hand or using Google Analytics to track the information for you, understanding your trends may just be the most important part of the process.
Find out more about social media and how it can help grow your business, book a consultation now.
Website SEO Must-Dos for a Higher Search Ranking
If you’re looking to create the best user experience possible, search engines are the way to go. Users rely on search engines because they provide the most relevant, clear and useful information based on the user’s search terms. The users also feel in control. According to Pew Search Centre, at any given day, 56% of internet users use search engines. And 87% of them say they have successful search experiences. In fact, the better user experience you create, the better the chances that that search engine will reveal your pages and your search ranking is higher. By practicing good search engine optimisation (SEO) habits, you can gradually work to increase your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) position.
Here are our top SEO practices to ensure SERP success.
1. Relevant Keywords or Key phrases:
Pick the most relevant words that best describe your business or services. To save time, you can use a Keyword Research Tool that can help you determine which words will help attract the most visitors based on popular search terms. These tools will give you lots of different keyword ideas you can choose from.
2. Catchy Title Tags:
Title tags are displayed on the search engine results pages. Their role is to describe what your website is all about, so they should be accurate and concise. If you want to be displayed well on the search engine results pages (SERPs), you should limit the title tag description to 55 characters. Keep title tags descriptive yet short to help crawlers and users determine the relevancy of your page. They are what the user first sees and what attracts their attention, pushing them to click, or not, through to your pages.
3. Keywords at the beginning of title tags:
Google puts more weight on the start of the title tag, so try to keep the keywords at the beginning.
4. A Killer Meta Description:
The meta description appears under the title tag on SERPs and gives users a chance to briefly learn about your company before clicking into your site. It is the search snippet that convinces users to click. Your meta description should be descriptive and appealing but not too long, aim for a meta-description length of 150-160 characters.
5. Good Quality Sitemap:
In short, sitemaps are used to simplify the navigation of a website. They are composed of the website’s structure, with the links to all the important sections and subsections. Make sure your website’s structure is up-to-date and easy to navigate. The better the site structure, the easier search engine crawlers can find and index pages. Aim for a three-click rule : customers should find what they need on your site in three clicks. As always, in this digital age, you can use a sitemap creator to generate a map in a few minutes.
6. SEO-friendly URL Structure:
URLs, or web addresses, are one of the most basic but important elements of both SEO and User Experience. They help search engine bots but also human users figure out page topic and relevancy.
These are the main rules to creating the best URLs for maximum SEO :
- Top Level Domain : using “.com” instead of “.biz” or “.pro”
- Keep your URLs short (3 to 5 words) and include your keyword in it
- Seperate the words in your URL using “-” instead of “_”
- Use static (lowercase letter) words rather than numbers
- HTTPS! Online security is a big deal nowadays
7. Outbound Links Improve Your Blog’s Ranking :
Outbound links are links on your site that redirect you onto another website. Most, if not all, websites have outbound links. In SEO, understanding and using outbound links is one step forward for your on-site optimisation. Regularly referencing and linking reputable and reliable sources shows that you’re a helpful internet information steward who is willing to share pagerank. On the internet, helpful sharing is caring.
8. Speed Up Your Website:
Search engines do not like slow pages as they know that users will not wait long for a website to load. 47% of visitors expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of visitors will leave your website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. To help you analyse your website's load speed, you can conduct a free website loading test. This test can help you make your site faster by identifying what about your webpage is fast, slow or too big.
9. Social Media:
Try to be as active as possible on all relevant social media platforms. Social media marketing plays a big role when trying to manage your online reputation. Strive to get the most likes, shares and links.
10. Video:
Users can find your business more easily if you share relevant and helpful videos on sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, DailyMotion etc.
11. Link Outreach and Get Backlinks:
Earn backlinks (incoming links to your webpage) by conducting PR content to get others to read your pages and link to you. The more quality backlinks your web page has, the more authority it has, and the more search engines will deem the page as relevant and useful.
12. Forums and FAQs:
Answering questions in forums, communities and FAQs, if done properly, can help to build your reputation as an industry expert. It relieves some of the burden on customer service, improves SEO and site navigation. It can also a possible opportunity to include your website or blog link if it is relevant to the answer.
Afterwards, it is crucial to perform a local SEO audit for your business. Find out more about Local SEO and how it can help grow your business, book a consultation now.
How does online advertising help a local business grow?
Digital advertising consists of a range of services, all of which work to promote a business online. More and more businesses are increasing the amount that they spend on online advertising as we are now able to recognise that it increases awareness and leads—it’s that simple.
With traditional media channels, quite often there is no way of tracking the effectiveness or success of an advertisement in terms of advanced data analytics. However, with digital advertising, companies such as Google and Facebook grant users access to these advanced analytics. This way local businesses know that their money is being well spent and that the digital advertisements are positively impacting their storefront.
When determining the success of an ad, besides social media monitoring, the significant factors will differ case by case. However, the main indicators of the success of an ad lie in the indicators listed below.
ROI measures of a successful campaign:
- Impressions: the actual # of views on an advertisement
- Clicks: the actual # of direct clicks on the advertisement
- Engagements: Social & landing page clicks
- Results: In most cases, results come in the form of a phone call or a store visit.
Most effective places to advertise
Through our team’s extensive work in the digital advertising space, we have come to the same conclusion as pretty much every digital advertising company - that the best places to spend money on digital advertising are Google & Facebook.
With digital advertising, not only is a local business visible online, but they are visible to the right people online. Platforms such as Facebook and Google allow for advanced targeting, which puts a local business in front of consumers who are more likely to convert into a sale.
In fact, Google and Facebook accounted for roughly 60 percent of ad spend in 2017!
The Benefits of Advertising Your Business on Google
Google, the world’s largest network, is the most efficient way to tell people about your brand. The two main reasons are reach and flexibility.
Reach:
Consumers use Google every day to look for local businesses, resulting in approximately 3.5 billion Google searches every single day.
In this day and age, or computer age, people are no longer relying on TV commercials or radio ads to find a business or a service. They are mostly relying on Google.
Furthermore, Google integrated native Gmail ads with Google AdWords in 2015 and made it available to all advertisers. This means that you can reach prospects using their Gmail inbox.
For these reasons, it is indispensable to adopt Google’s network capabilities to allow your business to get instant visibility from users looking for your services.
Flexibility:
Google allows the advertiser to spend whatever amount of money they want on advertisements, whenever they want. Thanks to these flexible options, advertisers are able to test what works and what doesn’t work for their business. Spend a bit, wait to see how your campaign is performing, and then reinvest in larger budgets for greater prospect reach.
The Benefits of Advertising Your Business on Facebook
Facebook is one of the main forces dominating the modern-day society. But you already know this because you (like me) check your Facebook every day, multiple times a day, and so do potential customers. The benefits of advertising on Facebook can be summarised to 2 words: Audience and Targeting.
Choose your Audience:
Facebook is the fastest evolving marketing platform and communication channel.The audience on this social network includes 2.38 billion monthly active users (MAUs) on average, at an increase of 8% MAUs year-over-year.
Those statistics are simply too big to ignore, and as a local business, you need to understand the fact that Facebook is an intersection in which you can find prospective customers. If this hasn’t convinced you yet then let’s talk about how often social media is being used.
According to a study conducted by Zephoria Digital Marketing, the average person spends nearly 20 minutes every day on Facebook, highest-traffic occurring mid-week between 1 and 3 pm.
This means you have a short period to make your impression, so use it wisely!
Use the Powerful Facebook ad Targeting Strategy:
Firstly, how does Facebook Ad targeting work?
You can target a specific audience on Facebook with many different ad formats and ad targeting parameters. This is every marketer’s dream so get creative!
Facebook ad targeting allows you to focus on users so microscopically that you can basically become a bit of a digital stalker. You will be able to target users by their interests, life events, behaviours, age, gender, location, and anything else that their Facebook profile may reveal about them.
That Facebook algorithm has allowed massive changes to be made to the local advertising landscape and is now one of the best environments for businesses to get the word out about themselves.
Lastly, by leveraging these two platforms, Google and Facebook, businesses will be able to take their advertising game to the next level and begin to rake in new revenue with enough data to back their investment.
More: How to Reach Your Audience With Paid Advertising.
To find out more about how we can help grow your business, book a consultation now.