The Effectiveness of Content Marketing through Social Media

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In the age of the Internet and the World Wide Web, you need to opt for social media-based content marketing to get the most out of your content. There are billions of consumers who engage with social media. The content-driven marketing techniques that you can deploy are copywriting, creative graphic design, photography, and audio visual content like animation or videography.

Top Reasons for Effective Social Media Content Marketing

When incorporated accurately, social media platforms are a fantastic place for customer engagement.

Social Media for Feedback & Recommendations

Social media is the vehicle on the internet that helps drive content to source hot leads. Social media offers a wider reach of audiences. Content marketing can develop brand awareness among different target markets. These demographics separated by miles and oceans share personal experiences with businesses through reviews on social media. These recommendations are considered powerful and trustworthy by the general public across the world.

High Quality Content Helps Engagement on Social Media

High quality, relevant and reliable content creates brand authority. It is imperative that social media content and business goals are aligned. Effective content marketing thrives when content appeals to the choice, preference and liking of your target audience. Make your content compelling and interesting enough to encourage your audience to share it across different platforms.

Social Media Creates Brand Awareness Beyond Boundaries

Social media is a cost-effective way to build brand awareness over time. Many companies use content like the company logo, strategic captions and infographics to lure specific audiences, raise brand awareness, increase sales and much more. Social media has the potential to create an impact that knows no boundaries. Audio-visual media adds a personal and professional touch to your social media content, making your brand relatable and identifiable with your audience. Good content will work fro you while you sit back and let your audiences move your campaign forward by sharing it on various social media platforms. That’s the expansive power of effective social media content marketing.

Summing Up the Advantages of Social Media Marketing

  • Reap the benefit of reaching out to the a wide or ultra-specific audience.
  • Leverage multiple social media platforms to share content with a variety of audiences.
  • Establish your company as professionals by sharing content relevant to your audience, business, and industry.
  • Create a clearly defined brand identity by aligning business goals with social media campaigns.
  • Study consumer feedback for potential areas for improvement and growth.
  • Gauge the impact and success of social media content marketing campaigns using analytics.
  • Leverage SEO techniques for content marketing to improve search engine rankings.
  • Use content marketing techniques to redirect or promote your website and other media platforms.
  • Use powerful and engaging creative design, infographics, photography, and videography to lure audiences.

 

Importance Of Web Presence For Small Businesses

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If you are a small business owner, with or without a brick and mortar establishment, it is time to launch your own website. A market study states that about 88% of  small U.S. businesses with a website find customers and leads more easily. 84% of customers think a business is more credible if it has an established website or some sort of web presence. A lead-catching, brand-distinguishing, sales-boosting website is essential for small businesses, especially those that would like to grow and scale.

A top-notch website needs thoughtful and innovative digital marketing techniques and superior design. A meticulously designed professional website is an asset that will continually attract visitors and turn them into potential leads.

Top 5 Reasons to Have a Professional Website

  1. Credible Website Begets Business Leads

A professionally designed website backed by cutting edge technology makes your business look professional and trustworthy. Digital marketing techniques will help you increase the number of visits on your website, thus creating an opportunity to get more business leads. Encourage customer reviews by featuring them directly on your website’s dedicated testimonial section. A website will invariably have a ’contact us’ and an ‘about us’ page for your customers to contact you and know more about your business from anywhere at any time.

  1. Build a Strategic Website to Find Customers

A strategically developed website helps you showcase your products and services effectively to a larger audience. Call-to-actions are a great way to make it easy for visitors to get in touch with your company to meet their needs.

  1. SEO Helps Rank Your Website Higher in SERP

Improving your business’ website ranking by leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques is a great opportunity for you to cash in and establish your place in the industry. For an effective SEO technique, web content is key. Helpful and enriched content creates a good user experience. The Google algorithm will bestow more trust on websites that help consumers therefore, they will rank higher on search engine results pages (SERP).

  1. Beat the Competition with Online Presence

A study states that 93% of U.S. customers spend hours researching online before buying a product or service. Your website is instrumental in influencing customers’ purchase decisions. Businesses with a website are better placed to catch a lead faster.  To be in the competition, you must have a place in the online marketplace and make the most out of it.

  1. Business Around the Clock

Although you may be bound to a brick and mortar business’ store hours, outside business hours, your website is still working hard for you when you are closed. With a website, your business is open 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Decision makers are often searching online for products and services during after-hours when they are not busy with life and work. You may lose out on that business opportunity if you do not have an online presence. With the help of a website, your business is working all the time.

Key Takeaway

Having a professional website is a strong case. Creating a well-designed website for your business is no longer an intimidating task. There are online tools and digital marketing companies available that can help you create a professionally designed website that will make your business a cut above the rest. Websites are an essential investment that will improve brand awareness and generate profitable leads.

 

3 Reasons Why Print Marketing Is Still Important

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There is definitely something in print marketing that makes it timeless. In the age of disrupting advertisements triggered by digital marketing strategies and techniques, print media marketing still holds power. Let’s delve deeper by unravelling the top three reasons why print media is going head to head with other marketing strategies.

  1. Tactile Print Marketing Perceived As Real

Print media appeals to the senses. We are inherently sensory living beings. We get motivated and inspired by listening, smelling, reading, feeling or just looking at the elements around us. We instantly connect to quirky, intriguing, and thought-provoking leaflets, pamphlets, brochures and other print advertisements. There is no denying that a physical book still appeals more to an avid reader than an electronic or digital book.

Moreover, print marketing adds tangibility to your media campaigns. A postcard, flyer, banner or magazine ad can stick around for a while for your target audience to see and remember. As the printed materials occupy a physical space, it creates a value of possession that can be leveraged in the long run. It registers and stays in the minds of your customers for a long time.

  1. Print Marketing Helps You Stand Out & Get Noticed

In an age of information explosion, much content goes unnoticed. Print marketing helps you penetrate the blind spots that are untouched and untapped by other forms of marketing. Print marketing helps present your brand in a communicative and meaningful way to reach a personal attention space.

It is considered more engaging as you physically interact and respond to the print marketing contents. Print marketing can also be viewed by specific target audiences based on placement. When print marketing is shared between consumers, it adds weight to word-of-mouth recommendations.

  1. Print Marketing Improves Consumer Trust

High quality brand representation through print marketing is a good indication that your brand is authentic and reliable. You can create better information retention using print marketing. This is because when we read printed text and content, we use our deep-reading ability that allows the information to sink in deeper and trust the information more. When reading or looking at print marketing content, we use our concentration power too. This helps us retain the information in our mind and memory that can be accessed later.

Print Marketing helps create target-specific trust. Print marketing channelizes your resources strategically and places them to target a specific group of audience. If you are in a specific business, instead of spreading the information across all business segments, you can specifically run a print marketing campaign only for your targeted business. For instance, if you are in the salon business, printed materials can be released only for salons in the targeted area. Consumers will believe in your campaign as a specialized, tailor-made offer made just for them.

Print marketing is not going to disappear any time soon as marketers consider this medium to be a strong and effective strategy for target-driven campaigns. Print marketing campaigns are easy to engage, personalize and stay relevant.

How Social Media Enhances Your Online Presence

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A good looking, functional, and mobile responsive website is a good start to developing an online presence for your business. A professional website is the central hub where potential and existing customers will go to find detailed information about your business. Many times, visitors already have an idea about you and will visit your website directly. But what about those that have not heard about you? How do you tap into this audience and increase your reach?

Marketing is the answer. Advertising your business through various mediums and strategies is how you increase brand recognition and awareness and convert leads to sales. Social media is a major type of digital marketing that in this day and age, seems quintessential for any successful company. Social media requires consistency, quality and frequency. When effectively executed, social media can propel your company upwards in search engine rankings hence, increasing exposure to a greater audience.

As a marketing company that offers both website design and social media management, 10 out of 10 times, we find that clients that have both a great website AND great social media presence, are far more successful in search engine optimization, converting leads to sales, and brand recognition. They receive more calls, more online contact form submissions, and product sales. We know these are facts because we constantly monitor their website and social media analytics. The numbers and consumer interactions speak for themselves. This is why we often encourage our clients to consider developing their social media platform with the development of their website, for the sake of their company’s success.

 

Benefits of Social Media

Consumer Trust

Consumers do their research – ALWAYS. The internet is an important tool before consumers make any purchase and commitment. Companies with positive and numerous reviews attract more new customers because they appear more trustworthy. Companies with multiple, active social media accounts also appear more trustworthy because they seem “real.” Trust is an enormous deciding factor for consumer decisions because the internet can be an uncertain place. Simply having a website is not always enough to convey your company’s trustworthiness.

Brand Personality

Be the voice of your company. With social media, you have complete control over your company’s content and reputation. Often times, website content is informational, professional, and to the point. Through social media posts, your company is able to explore vast topics, expand on your company’s products, services, and ideologies, and showcase other facets of your company. With social media, you are able to produce a variety of creative and engaging content such as infographics, interactive posts/polls, blogging, photography and videography. Apps and online tools are being created everyday – the ways to interact with your audience and set your company apart from others are endless.

Communication

Social media opens opportunities and improves communication with your audience immensely. Not only are you able to effectively speak TO your audience, but they are able to SPEAK BACK. Consumers are able to directly message your company, like, comment on or share your posts, and more. These interactions are so important. As mentioned before, they make consumers feel like they are working with a real, trustworthy company that cares about their consumers. These interactions also provide insight into which content is working and which content is not working so that you are able to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly.

Search Engine Optimization

You probably hear this term everywhere. But that is because it is actually important. Think about it. When you need a product or service, you do not always know where to go. So your first instinct is almost always to search the internet for answers. Now think about how many search pages you look through before you go back to the first page and choose from one of those search results – not many. It is key to be one of those higher ranking search results but how do companies get there? By developing a great online presence! The more consistently you post and more effectively you optimize your website with keywords, the more likely your content will appear in searches. The more people interact with your site and social media platform, the higher you will rank.

One of the metrics Google bots analyze in order to decide your website’s ranking are backlinks. How many other websites link back to your website? A high number indicates that you have something useful on your website that will be of interest to search engine users. Through social media posts, you can directly link back to your website and its various pages whenever you post! Therefore, Google bots will take notice and decide that your website must ultimately have some importance.

Advertising

Think of social media through advertising dollars. Offline, your company may spend advertising dollars on print advertising from mailings to newspaper ads to billboards. Online, social media is a form of advertising both free and paid. On the internet, you can still choose where to advertise and what demographic to target. However, with social media, advertisements are likely to reach a much larger audience, much more frequently, and at a much lower cost! So why not take advantage of this opportunity? It is a no-brainer investment for the success of your company.

 

Why SB Marketing?

Why hire a marketing company to manage your social media? We dedicate the effort, time and skill it takes to effectively execute a professional social media campaign. We offer a multitude of creative services and products all in one space! Need a logo created or a website designed? Need print advertisements designed, printed, and mailed? We do all of those and far more. From initial planning and designing to the production stage, we do it all. Having your company’s marketing campaign created and managed by one team is cost effective and efficient. We educate ourselves with your company’s needs and business goals and we create customized marketing plans to help you achieve. Let’s get people talking today!

The Importance of Branding

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One of the most important aspects of building up your business is branding. All the creative design, advertising, and reaching out to customers will not mean much if you cannot effectively boost the brand of your business. Understanding what branding means and how you can increase its potential means improving the bottom line of your business and making it more resilient.

What is Branding?

For decades, this was the use of the business name, slogan, symbol, and logo that provided instant recognition to the customer. Effective branding meant that a person could recognize a business by its logo, symbol, or even the design because it had been effectively advertised. The brand of a business gave identity and separated it from the competition.

Today, the business brand has changed somewhat thanks to the internet. This means that with the changing behavior of customers, so too must creative design be used to alter the brand so that it creates a positive mental picture for those who are interested in your products or services.

How Brands Work

The most important aspect of the brand is to separate you from the competition. To make your business recognizable to the public. However, there is more to effective branding than just letting everyone know about your business.

  • Creates Credibility
  • Connects to Customers
  • Delivers an Effective Message
  • Improves Sales Conversion
  • Imbues Loyalty to the Customer

All of these aspects are part of an effective business brand. However, to make it work you will need to know how to connect your brand to your target audience and get your message across.

Why Branding is SO Important

The better and more recognizable your brand, the better off your company will be in the day to day struggle of reaching new customers. It represents the foundation of your marketing efforts and one that reaches across all advertising campaigns to reinforce your credibility and authority in the industry. Because consumers respect an effective brand, it works for you all the time.

Creating loyal customers is the key to staying in business. This is because they will purchase your products or services again and again. Your brand will also create loyal employees who will see the value in the company and work harder to ensure that everyone succeeds. A good brand offers more than just a recognizable logo or symbol, but a basis for creating long-term benefits that your company will enjoy.

The good news about effective branding is that once it is established, it keeps paying benefits to your company throughout different marketing campaigns and changing times. It can also serve as inspiration in forging new advertising campaigns that help your business grow.

It takes creative design to come up with a proper brand, starting with being simple, yet different so that it is recognizable to customers. It helps if your branding efforts are related directly to the industry you serve so there is no confusion. By separating your company from the rest, the brand creates an instant identity that will serve your business well.

Get in touch with SB Marketing to start building your brand TODAY!

 

 

5 Strategies for an Effective Startup Marketing Plan

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Successfully marketing your startup will require employing several techniques so that your small business will grow. Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is just one of the many methods available for you to get your company off the ground. What follows are the necessary steps you must take to give your business the best chance at reaching out to potential customers.

1 – Understand Your Target Audience

For your marketing efforts to be successful, you will need to find and understand your target audience. A marketing campaign that is aimed at everyone will get no one, so you will need to find the group of people most likely to purchase your products or services and direct your campaign at them.

2 – Building Up Your Brand

Branding is everything today, from impressing your business name, logo, and website so that you separate yourself from the competition and reach out to potential customers. You will need to build a proper website, create an attractive, identifiable logo, and come up with a name that will help you build up the brand of your business.

3 – Increase Presence on the Internet

The good news is that social media has made it easier than ever to create a strong web presence for your business. You will need a website that is functional, attractive, and easy to navigate so that your customers will feel comfortable in shopping for products or services. This is where your SEO efforts will start to bring benefits as your website improves in search rankings. Building your social media presence means reaching out to potential customers, engaging with them, and creating more sales.

4 – Developing Your Blog

In addition to your social media strategies, do not forget to build up your blog. This means having regular scheduled articles that provide information to your customers while creating more leads for your business. You may need to hire additional writers so an aggressive schedule can be set. You should also consider getting material from other sites and writing on occasion for those sites to broaden out your reach.

5 – Create Videos

Videos have been the hottest type of internet marketing for years and their dominance shows no sign of diminishing. You will want to create interesting, informative videos about what you do, the industry that you are in, and to reach out to new audiences so that they stand a better chance of going viral.

+ BONUS! Additional Marketing Methods

Adding to your efforts is guerrilla marketing techniques which gain more attention to your business while costing very little to produce. You will want to incorporate an effective PR campaign that oversees your marketing efforts which should include online advertising, crowdfunding campaigns, and making public appearances that help bolster your brand.

Your startup will need all the help it can get so your small business can get off the ground. You will need to focus on effective SEO, blogging, and creating an effective social media presence while still using tried-and-true methods that include online advertising and guerrilla marketing techniques to reach your audience while keeping costs down.