Digital Marketing

 WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA? Social media is certainly the buzz of today, but what is it, how can it benefit you, and why do you really care? Glad you asked. First, let’s stress that if you think social media is a fad that’s going to disappear you couldn’t be further from the truth. Social media is a phenomenon and it’s taking the internet by storm. Those who were quick to jump on the bandwagon and take the time to understand social media marketing have already taken their businesses miles ahead of the competition. Over the next decade, we can expect social media’s role in marketing and business to grow by leaps and bounds. SO WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA? By definition (Wikipedia), social media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. SO HOW BIG is social media? It’s huge! To give you an idea of how huge here are some recent stats. There are more than 750 million active users on social networking site Facebook. There are more than 156 m

 Third Lesson - Getting Started with Email Marketing It’s time for your third lesson in the Getting Started with Email Marketing Crash Course. In your last lesson we talked about targeting, motivation and setting up your content schedule. Today’s lesson is all about brainstorming a list of email topics and setting up an auto responder series to market for you. An auto responder series is a great way to build a relationship with your new subscribers. As I mentioned in your last lesson, you don’t want to start emailing your list every day until they get to know you better. Setting up a series is the only exception to this rule, because it allows you to contact them in succession without making them feel like you’re bombarding them with unwelcome emails. As you create your series keep in mind that one of the most important parts of setting up an effective email marketing campaign is to provide value that will help keep your subscribers active and engaged. Figuring out what to write about

First Lesson - Getting Started with Email Marketing Email marketing is one of the most effective and efficient methods to connect with your audience on a consistent and personal level. Once you learn how to use it to your advantage it can help you reach new customers and close more sales than almost any other form of marketing. The first thing you need to do is identify your email marketing goals, so that you can create an effective strategy. For example, are you looking to get more traffic to your website or blog, so that you can increase subscribers and get more people into your sales funnel? - Do you want to drive more traffic to your sales page, so that you can sell more products and services? - Are you interested in making more affiliate sales? Understanding what your main goals are will help you when it comes to creating your email marketing campaigns. After you have determined what your goals are, the next step will be deciding how you’re going to deliver your campaigns. For thi

Treating Customers as Expendable One of the great benefits of selling on the internet is that you have access to over a billion people. Yes, BILLION. When you think of what fraction of the total internet population you need to convert to customers to make a living online, it’s miniscule – a fraction of a fraction of a percent! But the problem with dealing with numbers that large is that you can view any one particular customer as unimportant. You might think, “Well, it doesn’t matter if so-and-so is unhappy because there are 999,999,999 other people I can sell to.” In a way, that’s true. But in an even more important way, it’s not. When information marketers treat their customers as expendable, or easily replaced, you lose something valuable. You lose the trust of your market. And no matter how big the numbers are, the online world – particularly in any one niche – can also be a very small place. The time it takes for a bad reputation to be propagated is only a matter of seconds via Tw

 Mistake Number One: Aiming for Perfection When the Wright brothers took their first historic flight on December 17, 1903, they weren’t trying for perfection. They weren’t trying to offer great cocktail service or wireless Internet or 100 channels of TV aboard their flying machine. They just wanted the darned thing to stay up in the air for a few seconds! And a few seconds – twelve, to be exact – was all they got. And they became famous for it. Now imagine if they had been concerned about the extras – no, I don’t mean beverage service or comfy seats. But if they had wanted a crash-free landing, a three-hour (or three-minute!) flight, a stylish rig – they’d probably have never gone out to that sand dune in Kitty Hawk in the first place. They’d still be in the workshop, tinkering with the wheels or wing flaps. What Orville and Wilbur knew – and what information marketers would do well to take note of – is that perfection is overrated. In fact, it doesn’t exist. So waiting until your prod

 Integrating Instagram With Your Larger Marketing Strategy The key to success when it comes to Instagram marketing and indeed any social media campaign, is integration. That means that you need to think about how all the difference facets of your business are going to work together. In turn, that means thinking about your blog or website, Facebook account, Twitter and more. Because on its own, Instagram doesn’t typically make much money. We’ll see some ways it can in a moment, but for the most part, building an audience alone is not enough to run a business. The true measure of success when it comes to your Instagram account, is how many people you can direct from there to your online store in order to sell to. This requires you to have a large enough audience, but also an engaged audience filled with people who actually like your brand and want to buy your products. Therefore, you will at least need a website and ideally a checkout in order to sell your products if you’re going to cap

  Taking Beautiful Pictures (And Other Options) For all you can try and beat the system by approaching Instagram marketing in a smart and logical manner, at the end of the day there is simply no way to succeed without being able to create and share images and videos that people want to see. So how do you go about doing that? Taking and Editing Better Photos. We’ve already talked at length in our previous series about the importance of selling the value proposition with your content – of promoting the ‘dream’ that will mobilize your troops to buy and subscribe. So I won’t go into that in depth here, other than to say that you should consider trying to tell a story with your photos. Don’t just take a photo of a scene or an object, show it just after it has been used, show it in action, or show it in a context that raises questions.  Think about the Mona Lisa. People like it because there’s a story behind it: the smile. Try and get your audience engaging with your images through their tho

  Gaining Traction for Your Channel Now you have an account, it’s time to start growing it. You’ll begin with your very first post, and from there the most important thing is consistency. If you go two weeks without posting a single thing to your Instagram, then any momentum you build up will get lost. You’ll find that your posts don’t show so highly, and that you lose the subscribers you had previously gained. How often you post is going to depend on your goals, the nature of your content, and more. But the basic rule for this is to post pretty frequently. The ideal is one to three times daily, and the average for most businesses comes in at 1.5 times daily. You should consider the absolute minimum to be twice weekly, but you should definitely aim to go higher. In short, posting more frequently means creating more opportunities for new followers to discover your page. Not only that, but it means that your existing followers will feel more engaged with your brand as they keep seeing it

Instagram is a tool that will allow you to build brand awareness and brand loyalty in a manner that other channels just can’t match. Instagram should be considered an absolute focus for any marketing strategy then, but it becomes even more powerful when you combine it with a general marketing plan that incorporates other platforms and forms of media.  In short, Instagram could well be the missing piece of the puzzle for your online marketing strategy. If you have already conquered Facebook and Twitter, then Instagram may well be final frontier. Alternatively, many companies that have struggled to make a success of marketing on other platforms, may find that Instagram is the place where they have runaway success – and there are many factors that make this more likely. Here, you will learn how to do all of that and how to absolutely maximize the potential of Instagram as a marketing tool. You will learn: • The unique advantages of choosing Instagram for your marketing • How to set up an