Be a strategist this year
As I regularly work with many entrepreneurs and business owners, I often notice that most of them do not quite correctly shape the strategies of their digital campaigns. They know what to do – for example, create content, start a blog, use social media, and so on – and tick off subsequent items. The problem is that they don’t build a specific plan. For example, they can write a random post on their blog just because they haven’t posted it for a long time. Here and there, they can also optimize your search engine (SEO) activities if they have the time. But in the long run, this is not the best way to manage your digital marketing. Strategy creation not only helps to improve results but also saves time and increases the pace of business development. At the beginning of every digital marketing campaign – content marketing, social media, emails, etc. – you need to save time to plan the entire strategy carefully.In short, you need:
- Set specific goals that you want to achieve at a certain time– This will allow you to focus on what is important and help you decide what content to create to achieve those goals.
- Get to know your audience – understanding what they like and what content they prefer, allows you to create optimized content that will lead them to specific actions.
- ‘Spy on’ your rivals – look at the presence of competitors on the web (SEO, social networks, blogs, and other content) to understand what works and what doesn’t. Take the opportunity to better understand your niche and your audience.
- Choose your communication channels – where will you share your content? Where are your recipients?
- Plan content – create an editorial calendar for your content, social media calendar for social media, and so on to plan categories of shared content.
- Decide who will manage each campaign, as well as establish approval patterns for them.
- Determine which KPIs you will use to measure your goals – and don’t forget to measure them! This is extremely important because it can affect your success. This is the lesson I learned years ago when I found a quote from Warren Buffett that I got stuck in my memory: learn from mistakes. This is the best way to optimize marketing campaigns and ensure that you invest resources in what brings results.
Make the most of the new Instagram feature
Instagram recently released a new feature, one of the largest we’ve seen recently – one that should arouse interest in companies on this platform. Users can track hashtags, which means that from now on companies have a new way to upload their content to Instagram feeds. To get the most out of this feature, use the following tips:- Quality is extremely important – just because you use a hashtag that people follow does not mean they can see your posts in their feed. The TechCrunch report shows that Instagram will promote the best using an algorithm that selects content based on the quality and time it was published. It also means that you will want to share content more often to reach as many recipients as possible.
- Choose your time carefully – as the algorithm uses time as one of the factors that decide what posts appear in feeds, more important than ever is sharing new posts when their recipients are online. Experiment with different times to share posts to find out when most recipients are active.
- Avoid unnecessary hashtags- it is extremely tempting to bombard as many hashtags as possible (30), but it is very likely that your post will look … hmm, to sales. This could even make Instagram’s algorithm avoid you when searching for posts, after all, it is trying to make sure that no spam goes to the feed, and 30 tags look a bit like spam.
- Focus on more targeted, niche posts- The largest hashtags on Instagram have millions of posts, which makes your creations harder to find. In addition, they have a wide range, so even if you find yourself in someone’s feeds, it is very likely that they will not be your target audience. Instead, use more niche-targeted hashtags, usually consisting of two words, as the competition is not so strong but they are still popular enough to be followed.
Create better, more consistent customer experiences
Not only digital platforms are changing and evolving, but also customers. The most important change happening at the moment is that people expect better experiences (from English Customer Experience). They expect more consistent experiences by jumping between platforms. They want to be able to ask a question via Twitter, continue the conversation by email, and quickly retrieve the information sought.So, what can you do to be at the forefront of this trend?
Think about the chatbot – every month over 2 billion messages are passed between companies and private people via Messenger on Facebook. Many customers prefer this communication channel to talk to companies and ask questions. That is why there are 100,000 active bots on Messenger and this number will definitely increase in 2018. This creates a better experience for customers as well as for you.- Add live chat to your site – live chat is now available for large, medium and small companies, which can help generate more opportunities and leads for your company.
- Make the most of marketing automation – if you’re already using marketing automation, you’re on the right track, if not – well, it’s never too late to get started.
- Use marketing automation, not to save time, but to provide better, more targeted content that they need and exactly when they need it.
