Corona Virus has spread like an epidemic; the world is now battling with. The epidemic started in December 2019, when a group of people in the northern Hubei province of China showed the symptoms of an unexplained pneumonia-like condition, creating the apprehension of the emergence of a new kind of disease.

Soon after, scientists started studying the origin of the condition, and they managed to trace the source of the disease. Their findings established a link with the disease to the SARS virus that created havoc in the world 17 years ago.

With time, especially after 2020 setting in, the news of the virus created panic across countries and fuelled demand for information regarding the disease. As such, people turned towards social media for exchanging information and that rendered social media into an indispensable source of the information.

Despite social media turning into a vital information source with respect to the Corona Virus epidemic, it carries a darker side too that is doing more harm than good. That harmful side is nothing other than—spreading misinformation.

In parallel to the information on the disease, the incessant wave of misinformation on social media has turned into an infodemic, which an overabundance of information making it hard for people to find trustworthy sources. On social media, falsehoods are spreading faster than updates by government officials.

Now, let us have a quick look at the most prominent falsehood concerning the disease on social media:

Some Myths are:

• China origin food is contaminated with Corona Virus
• Corona Virus is a bio-weapon
• Corona Virus originated from some Chinese people drinking ‘bat soup’
• Corona Virus is man-made
• Home remedies can cure as well as prevent Corona Virus
• You should put on a mask
• Mails can be contaminated with Corona Virus
• Kids cannot get Corona Virus
• People affected with Corona Virus will die
• And so on

However, social media companies have not remained silent anymore; they actively sprung into counteraction.

They are actively battling the menace of misinformation spreading via their online platforms.

WeChat, the most popular social media platform in China, is putting tools to check out the facts before publishing any content related to the virus.

Other social media websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; are deploying algorithms to allow only the correct content related to the virus gets published. The algorithms check the authenticity of the content by verifying that with trusted sources.

Facebook also said in a recent blog that it will remove all posts with false information related to the virus. In a recent media interaction, Facebook also said that it will ban all ads related to Corona Virus that are misleading or aimed at profiting off from the panic, such as face mask ads claiming masks are a protection against the virus.

At the same time, the fact remains that no filtering algorithm is perfect. And people find new ways to spread false news, either to add fuel to the panic fire or to profit themselves from the panic.

Remarkably, social media is also not without some collaborative efforts despite being flooded with false information related to the Corona Virus. A section of scientists has openly published the Corona Virus genome, inviting researchers to brainstorm possible cures as well as solutions.

At the end of the day, the most powerful solution lies with the people themselves. They should refrain from spreading misinformation on social media to avoid the fear and panic that are going on. Instead, people should provide moral support to the ones affected by the Corona Virus on social media.

The post Battling Corona Virus Misinformation in the age of Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

No business, whether big or small, can escape marketing. While large businesses earmark big budgets for their marketing campaigns, small businesses have no other option but to forego that luxury and manage their marketing campaigns with relatively small budgets.

It is needless to say that small businesses need to be extra careful about the type of marketing strategies they adopt as they are mostly constrained by a small budget. They need to invest every penny wisely so that they derive the value for money and keep their businesses going.

To deal with the pressures of small budgets, small businesses can adopt the social media route to effectively market their products and services to bring in revenues.

It is due to efficiency and effectiveness; around 97 percent of the small businesses today prefer to market their products and services online through social media platforms. Social media for business has become a crucial marketing tool in today’s throat-cutting competition.

The emergence of a large number of social media companies is a sufficient indicator of the growing popularity of social media marketing among businesses, regardless of the size.

Enabling effective marketing without incurring heavy expenditure is not the only benefit of using social media by small businesses. Many other benefits make social media marketing a must for all small businesses. The following are some of the benefits:

 Presence of Your Customers

With more and more people spending considerable time on social media channels, you are likely to find most of your target audience on the channels. Also, newcomers to social media channels are increasing day by day.

Forecasts show that by 2021, more than 3 billion people worldwide will be using social media platforms. And, that has created lucrative opportunities for businesses, small as well as big, to promote their products and services online through social media channels.

Amazingly, there is no need for the audience to come to you, but on the contrary, you can go directly to your target audience to showcase your products and services using social media.

So, if you are yet out of social media to get in immediately, or else you will be missing out on the great opportunities of marketing your business offerings effectively and easily.

More Customer Engagement

Social media allows you to show the personalized aspects of your brand to your audience. So, they are likely to be more receptive to your messages.

On social media platforms, you have the freedom to be more conversational so you can speak more on your brand to your target audience. You can connect directly to your leads on social media channels rather than delivering one-way messages.

When you post valuable and informative content on social media, you will find an increasing number of people following your brand; and that throws an opportunity for you to pitch them for your products and services. You will also find people discussing your products and services on social media, enabling you to pick up valuable insights.

Social media engagement allows you to connect with your target audience in a personal way, and that helps you to sell your business offerings with ease.

Increase in Brand Recognition

Prompting your target audience to recognize your brand is an important marketing strategy. It works wonders. Enhancing your brand visibility, social media increases your brand recognition. Social media allows you to post compelling content to make your brand more familiar to your leads as well as existing customers.

Seeing your compelling content on social media platforms, people become aware of your brand and the associated unique selling propositions. As more and more people become acquainted with your business the chances of your products and services getting sold increase more than ever.

Increase in Inbound Traffic

Helping to get more inbound traffic to your business website, social media marketing has a direct impact on your search engine optimization efforts.

Your postings on social media help in bringing in more visitors to your website. You should, therefore, post quality content on social media platforms so that you can engage new leads to direct them to your website.

When new visitors get onto your website, you get the opportunity to convert them. So, keep on posting informative content on social media that adds value to your target audience.

Reaching Specific Audiences

Through social media marketing, you can target specific audiences strategically. Rather than posting a common message, you can post special messages targeting specific audiences.

To successfully post tailored messages, you need to firstly create a comprehensive list of your target audience, in terms of their age, gender, location, interest and so on.

Knowing these, you can create mind provoking content targeting specific people on social media. And that will help you in effectively reaching your target audience and driving more and more qualified leads to your website. It is due to the relevant traffic, you are likely to see increased conversion rates.

Cost-Effectiveness

Marketing through social media enables you to derive results even by cutting marketing costs—and this is one of the most notable advantages of social media marketing. For small businesses, it is a boon. Since, you only need to post content and converse with your target audience, investing lesser time might also give you valuable results.

You do not need to maintain expensive marketing teams to run your social media marketing campaigns. Regardless of the size of your budget, you can effectively run social media marketing campaigns to generate as well as convert new leads.

Improves Search Engine Rankings

Your social media presence is a big factor for search engines to consider your website in the search ranking. You should have a strong social media presence so that search engines find your website trustworthy as well as valuable, and the chances of search engines ranking your website higher in search results become high.

Having an active social media presence does not only help you increase the visibility of your website in search engine results but also enhances the likelihood of your social media profiles showing up on the first page of Google whenever visitors search for your brand.

Make sure that you publish informative and valuable content on social media to draw the interest of the visitors.

Improves Brand Loyalty

Small businesses, often constraint by budget, can leverage the power of social media to build brand loyalty among their target audiences.

You can effectively build relationships with your leads as well as customers to derive their trust and loyalty for your brand. The more you engage with your customers and prospects over social media, the more loyalty you will enjoy from them.

As the strength of your relationship with your customers as well as prospects increases, you can easily educate them about how your business is different from your competitors in terms of value. By working a bit on social media, you can turn them into loyal customers.

Spreads Word of Mouth Marketing

In many ways, social media has become an ideal platform for the word to mouth marketing. Nowadays, brands encourage people to leave behind their reviews and recommend their products and services to others. And such, recommendation helps businesses as consumers prefer buying from recommended brands.

Therefore, you should encourage your customers to leave behind their recommendations as well as reviews on social media to generate valuable word-of-mouth marketing to positively impact your sales. It helps you to build trust in your brand in your leads.

Knowing Customer Insights

Knowing the interests of your customers is very important for you to drive your business. And for small businesses, knowledge is particularly useful to develop prudent marketing strategies within a small budget. Social media is a powerful tool for you to gain such insights.

If you observe what your customers say on social media, you will become pretty acquainted with their likes as well as dislikes. You can also come to know the challenges your customers face and their concerns regarding your brand. You can use this information to improve the satisfaction of your customers.

Besides, you can also use social media analytics to know what type of content is popular within your target audience so that you can understand what type of content you should post to better engage them on social media.

Knowing the Competition

All businesses, whether small or big, should be aware of the competition level due to a simple reason—surviving in business. Social media provides you a reliable as well as a convenient platform to monitor the prevailing competition as almost all your competitors are likely to be present on social media.

This allows you to showcase your brand among the consumers and to educate them about the values your brand carries.

Besides, you can also project your brand as the best among all your competitors through influential social media content. Being present on social media helps you to generate more online traffic for your business website.

Targeting New Customers

Social media marketing has proved to be a boon to acquire new customers especially for small businesses, which usually do not have large marketing budgets. One of the good ways of connecting with consumers who do not know that your business exists is Social Listening.

By following the trending topics on social media related to your industry and checking out who is taking part in the conversation, you can easily figure out whom you can pitch for selling your products and services.

Also, you can engage industry influencers to recommend your products and services on social media so that consumers become aware of your brand and that will help you to acquire new customers.

Higher Conversion Rates

Using social media, you have a terrific advantage of connecting with your leads continuously by posting informative and valuable content.

And that improves the credibility of your brand and at the same time, it also improves your brand loyalty among your target audience. Posting informative, as well as compelling content on social media, allows you to build relationships with your target audience.

And that helps in more and more leads getting converted. Since social media is also a place for socializing as well as networking; it allows businesses to post conversational content, promoting their brands.

Quick Customer Service

Gone are the days when customers allow you a long time to solve problems related to your products and services. Nowadays, they want a quick solution to problems.

Staying active on social media is an effective way to understand the problems your customers face so that you can quickly initiate the necessary steps to solve the problems.

Most customers prefer to post the problems they face with products and services they purchase on social media. In this way, you can keep your customers happy and your brand positive.

Conclusion

By now, you have understood why social media marketing is indispensable especially for small businesses, which are usually limited by budgets. But, the other aspect you should know is the art of social media marketing and that is not as easy as it seems to be.

Running successful social media marketing campaigns requires prudence, skill, and experience; which you might not possess. As such, your social media marketing campaigns are not going to work, if you work on your own.

You, therefore, should avail of the top quality social media marketing services offered by a reliable company, such as TIS India. With a long history of offering top-notch social media marketing services, TIS India is the best choice for you to consider as your reliable  + partner.

The post Why Marketing through Social Media is a Must for Every Business appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Today, one of the major driving forces behind election campaigns is the widespread use of social media. The state of affairs during the campaigning stages of the recent elections and the subsequent results have proved beyond doubt that social media marketing has become a potent game-changer for elections.

Enabling politicians to reach a huge number of people without incurring any costs, social media has become an indispensable tool for organizing election campaigns. Let us examine the slew of advantages the social media offers to politicians for running their election campaigns.

One of the key advantages of using social media during election campaigns is the ease with which politicians reach the younger generation of voters, who form the major chunk in the social media user base.

Politicians can very easily interact to woo the younger generation of voters to support them in the elections. Politicians nowadays actively build their social media presence by creating accounts on various platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and other such online social media.

Using social media, politicians can interact with their prospective voters in a one-to-one model. It enables politicians to understand the sentiments of the voters and discuss important matters directly. What is more, political campaigners can tailor their messages following the specific sections of their audience with the help of social media.

Campaigning politicians can leverage the facility of posting different banners, images, and videos to people taking into account the age, geography and other factors related to the persons as mentioned in their respective profiles.

In this way, politicians can use social media to present their different images to different people—enabling them to present themselves exactly in the form the individual persons are looking for.

It is also needless to mention that election campaigns through social media are free of costs. Politicians do not have to spend any money to run such campaigns, unlike the other modes, which call for huge cash outgo.

The first impact of widespread usage of social media in election campaigning was perhaps felt during the 2009 presidential elections in the US. Barack Obama, who eventually stormed into the White House, earned the nickname, ‘First Social Media President’, due to his active social media campaigning before the elections.

It was during the campaigning stage of the 2016 presidential elections; Donald Trump followed exactly what Barack Obama did. Trump used social media heavily to propagate them would be policies, post convincing posts to fend off negativity as well as hate, and sought views from his audience. And the eventual result was: Trump defeated Obama to occupy the Presidential chair in the White House.

A similar social media dominated phenomenon made its presence felt during the 2014 general elections in India. Star campaigner, Narendra Modi of the BJP, who had defeated his rival Manmohan Singh of the Congress, had actively leveraged the social media to project the image of developed Gujarat as the example of his competencies to develop India in the lines of Gujarat. Narendra Modi was then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, a pretty developed state on the western coast of India.

BJP campaigners, during the 2014 pre-election phase, had extensively used social media to build the brand—Modi—as the most eligible leader, who is oriented towards development and is accessible to the common man.

Using social media, the campaigners for the BJP also projected a negative image of the then ruling Congress party as an anti-people and a corporate biased party, worthy of throwing out of power.

At the same time, Narendra Modi spoke to the people of the country through social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and many other websites as well as apps. And his incessant social media campaigns finally paid off as he had comfortably defeated his rival to become the Prime Minister of India.

It was during the 2019 general election also the winning party, BJP, extensively communicated with the people of the country during the campaigning phase supporting its policies already implemented, spreading the incompetence of its rival parties and projecting the Modi brand to lure the voters. Following the declaration of election results, Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India for the second successive term.

So, social media has become inseparable tool for election campaigning. It provides a reliable ground for politicians to air their views and connect with their audience. At the same time, social media also enables people to easily connect with politicians to elicit their views and agendas. In the days to come, the role of social media in deciding election results will only become stronger.

Politicians, therefore, can avail the services of a good social media marketing agency to promote them during their campaigning. There are many social media companies to choose from.

The post How Social Media Will Impact Elections appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

This is where retargeting can help. It just ties up the loose ends of an online strategy and helps the customers move deeper into the sales funnel towards successful conversion. Facebook is a platform that is brimming with customers. It is that one spot where the whole world is logged in, at some point in time or another.

Cashing in on this sea of customers will definitely fetch your business a lot of revenue. If not anything, you will end up generating leads which will come in handy in the long run. All you got to actually get down to doing is just offer what they like.

But for that to happen, you have to cater to a whole different spectrum of consumers. Only then you can get some interesting bids to go for. You have to retarget accordingly, in order to actually benefit from your retargeting tactics.

There are many companies out there using retargeting strategies and benefiting from it. These companies use the right bait, and lure in the customers who have not paid heed in the first attempt. If you are inclined enough to get only the best of services for your business, consider hiring our team of expert social media consultants who carve to provide awesome social retargeting solutions.

Just because something did not work out once, does not mean it won’t work for you again. A calculated attempt carries a higher chance of working out for you.

But to put effective retargeting in action, you need to properly understand what Retargeting on Facebook is.

What Is Retargeting?

Retargeting on Facebook basically is you, as a brand, attempting to place relevant ads before website visitors who did not convert on their initial visit to your site. What helps in doing this is this marvellous little thing called “cookies”.

Delicious as they may sound, they are informational tidbits that are placed on customer’s browsers when they visit a site. This cookie, quite like its literal self, lures in businesses to virtually follow a customer even when they visit other sites.

If you, as a customer, have seen an ad of a product your previously checked online popping up on a different site, then it is the doing of a cookie; not a ghastly endeavor.

Targeting therefore, helps brands loop back their customers if they could not convert them in the first attempt. It is like a second attempt, and a calculated attempt, the odds of it working out are still higher than the first attempt you make.

If you are interested in getting some tips regarding retargeting your Facebook ads, here’s what may help.

Essential tips for Facebook Retargeting Ads

1) Specific visitors, specific ads

There is diversity in content consumers as well. You might have a wide range of content consumers consuming different content on your site itself. Knowing that there exists so much of diversity, why would you show everyone the same, generic ad?

The obvious course of events to satiate the content needs of a diverse group of consumers is to segment your content. You can do this based on the topics of the pages your visitors most often visit.

Basically, it is showing your audiences just what they would like seeing. An example of this would be CrazyLister that segments its readers on the basis of the topic they choose to read.

If they choose a topic about how to increase sales on eBay, they may even get directed to a page that speaks more about eBay sales and more insights on those.

2) Retarget those visitors who showed interest in learning

There are various types of visitors on your site. While some visit for some seconds and leave, there are some that browse through your site for a while, and make no purchase.

These are the kinds of visitors who visited wanting to learn more. And technically, those are worth a bid.

To lure in such “learners” you can have dedicated pages that may help them gain access to information faster. A lucid “about us” page, or “more information” tab goes down a long way in satiating their hunger for more information.

When you have a lot to offer, you should put it out to those consume that sort of content. It basically goes as per the ideology “giving them what they want.” Once your customer is happy and knows that you offer what they are exactly looking for, chances are they might actually convert into potent customers who opt for your services.

3) Fetch back those visitors who enquired about prices

You may have noticed that a certain sect of your visitors have visited your pricing page. There may not be as many conversions as the number of visitors on that page. However, these are the customers you can retarget.

The central idea behind this is that people, who are visiting your site to check out pricing, are most likely to be potential customers. You have to ensure that such people do not miss out on being retargeted.

The fact is, people who check out prices are almost willing to buy something, but maybe the affordability was an issue. If you retarget them, preferably with an offer or discount, you might just effectively win them over. You would generate a lot of users even from outside of your intended domain.

4) Reach out to customers who almost signed up, but did not eventually

There also happens to be a bunch of customers who sometimes almost sign up for a service, but then turn back at the last moment. The very fact that the customers almost hit “sign up” means that they just need one small push this time around.

The good thing about retargeting these customers is that you would not have to try all that hard. Trying to coax them into signing up for you would be easy. Using hints like, “Haven’t signed up yet? Do it now” go a long way in pushing customers to buy or signing up for what you offer.

Creative ads are better than just visually appeasing ads. If you could not convert customers to sign up for your services before, try something a bit more creative this time around, and the charm might just work.

5) Get back to those who searched for your product

Customers are sometimes intrigued by the products you offer, but sometimes they don’t end up buying it. It may appear to be tricky, but then all you have to do is just segment your visitors based on the products the customers are frequently searching for.

If they see an ad that is relevant they are likely to be reminded of their prior experience they had with you. And with that, they might just be pushed to finally buy the product they were ideally aiming for.

6) Don’t be pushy. Timing is everything

Quite often, people overlook the time aspect. It is easy to focus on where people visited site. But it also matters when people visited your site. Bearing that in mind, you have to keep an eye out for “hot” visitors – ideally, they are customers who have recently visited your site.

if you spend too much of your resources gaining back “cold” customers, who have been on your site a long time ago, chances are, you might be starting from scratch.

Keeping a track of these hot visitors will go a long way, as your prior attempts to win them over would still be fresh in their minds. Frequency is important. How often you get in front of your customers without appearing too pushy is the key here. There is no point in wasting resources over some people who have long forgotten your site.

7) Don’t pay heed to irrelevant users

Retargeting people who are not going to surmount to much of your sales is actually a loss endeavour. You got to exclude those irrelevant audiences who hold a very chance of converting into something profitable.

The hard truth of websites is that not everyone is going to like what you offer. Wasting your resources on people who are adamant on not signing up for your services is a waste of time and efforts. This time and effort could be invested into something more productive, like getting more customers who are actually interested.

No matter how hard you try, people who don’t want your services will not opt for it. Another pointer to keep in mind is to not retarget those people who spent very little time on your site. That is because they would not like the products.

So your efforts are misplaced if you keep trying to win over someone who just does not like what you are offering.

8) Retarget within a short span of time

Time is of the essence when you are looking to retarget Facebook audiences. If you spend too much time waiting, then you might end up losing the recall factor among the audience, which would not go so well in your favour.

Retargeting through Facebook ads should ideally happen within 10-15 days after someone visited your site. During that period, there has to be several small and subtle rebuttals, so that a regular reminder is provided.

You cannot afford to be pushy. This will work negatively for you, and the customer might just grow sick of it. An important tip here is though about half of all web traffic is generated through mobile devices; only 20 percent of transactions take place on mobile devices.

It is not aggressive and pushy if you go about it subtly. You have to drop subtle hints, or even reach out with a quick discount or offer.

9) Retarget on the basis of Google or Bing searches

You got to set your hook in the seas that matter. Going for the big fishes would only happen if you search for them in the right place. Mostly, people log onto Facebook through Google or Bing as they are the most popular search engines currently.

Retargeting through these search engines will help you garner a good amount of conversion. You got to retarget on popular search engines that will actually offer you something in return.

Other smaller search engines are easier to run analytics on, but they won’t be as productive. In the end, you have to direct your time and resources to something that counts.

When you have searched for a product online on only one browser, you will find ads of it on the next website you visit. That is because the cookies are stored on specific browsers, and that is usually what businesses usually re-target.

Final thoughts

Retargeting is effective only if it is done right. These above tips are not all-comprehensive. But they are still enough to help you get your act right. When you re-target with the right strategy on Facebook, the chances of it working out in your favor are more.

Businesses make more progress when most of the audiences convert into potential buyers. Retargeting helps increase conversion rates, and consequently even increase sales. This is ideally what contributes to businesses doing well.

Statistics suggest that retargeting ads are 76 percent more likely to be clicked on than regular old displays. Sticking to generic ads time and again won’t get you anything new. In order to get more people, you have to offer newer ads that impress a wider range of people.

The right strategy is to go about it in a calculated manner. And to not be disheartened if it did not work out in the first try. Be creative, try newer things, post out newer and more creative ads, and you will see a greater number of people reaching out to you.

Sales will exponentially increase and isn’t it the whole point of an online business overall? When the sales go higher, in the end, you have more space to let out creativity. This will eventually help you gain more customers, and the business will thrive more than you expected it to. Such are the perks of retargeting on Facebook.

The post 9 Prominent Tips You Should Consider For Facebook Retargeting Ads appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The consumer brands vertical is betting big on video content marketing in the year 2018. Three of the biggest consumer brands in the world are leading the direction and news is that their video content marketing investments are gaining traction in the market. Let’s figure this out.

The Leonardo da Vinci of the smart phone industry, Apple has committed an investment of $1 billion for original video content marketing on its streaming platform. Second, PepsiCo has in November last year, opened a brand new video content creation studio in downtown Manhattan.

Third, Netflix, the video content streaming giant is reshaping the way video content is created, marketed and consumed in the ICE (information, communication and entertainment) space. Whether you are looking for a show on professional soccer, politics or the latest in fashion trends from New York’s greatest design labels, one platform has it all- Netflix.

Is there any data to back the claims that consumer brands are tilting heavily towards video content format in 2018? Is video content marketing a new buzz word or is it the next big thing in the content marketing and advertising functions of business? What are the drivers of live video content marketing? How do consumer brands stand to gain from spending hefty amounts on video marketing? TIS, the leading digital consulting company answers these questions and more here.

Data on Video Content Marketing Trends for 2018

In God We Trust. Everybody Else Must Bring Data to the Table.Marketing and advertising budget making in corporations across the world has evolved from a state of being outlay based on one of being outcome-based. The return on investment is a key metric.

User engagement is the second metric to look forward to. Third, surveys and feedback from respondents in the marketing industry are also important pointers in the direction. Here are the answers to the question that we have raised.

First, going by the news of Apple’s commitment of $1 billion dollars in 2018, let’s see what it means. HBO spends $60 million dollars per season of the Game of Thrones. Given that Apple commands a fair brand value for its streaming platform; speculation is rife that the return on investment must be shooting through the roof to make sense of the enormity of its numbers.

Second, analysts at the Search Engine Journal after integrating their Facebook live strategy have published data on average Facebook Live post engagement to be 178% higher than all their other Facebook posts.

Third, Hubspot reports that video content marketing is growing in popularity among marketers in the year 2018. They report that 48% of respondents in their survey have planned to add YouTube to their marketing arsenal and another 46% have planned to add Facebook Live.

Economic Drivers of Live Video Content Marketing of Consumer Durables in 2018

The economics of content marketing and advertising functions are reshaping the competitive landscape for consumer durable brands in the year 2018. While the story is an evolution and not an overnight cold turkey, there are numbers that prove that the change is actually happening at the ground zero level:

First, no less than 13% of the video content on digital media comes from love video streaming. Consumers love to watch the good old “physical evidence” of the 7P’s of marketing unfold on their devices and be a part of the journey. Live videos amplify the customer journey like nothing else.

Second, live videos are economical and do not require any up front commitment of outlay and resources for production as opposed to short advertisement films screened on television.

Third, live videos enable user participation unlike passive viewing only that is permitted on television and recorded videos. The authenticity and refreshing honesty of being a part of a revolution, a product launch or a trade show removes the feeling of being deprived of physical presence and obliterates the importance of physical spaces even further.

How Do Consumer Brands Stand to Gain from Investing in Video Content Marketing in 2018?

On a global scale, 2018 promises to bring big opportunities to consumer durables brand in a big way.

First, a greater number of people are moving towards smart phones from personal computers to access emails, websites and mobile apps to do more on the go. Portability adds wheels to video content marketing. Consumer durable brands can advertise anything, anytime, anywhere and at any place on smart phones that they earlier could not on television.

Second, smart phone screens are smaller than those of personal computers and television set. Users find it much easier to watch videos than read a textual document like a blog, web content, news or a social media post. Given that the key to advertising in the consumer durables vertical is user experience, the proposition hold promise and offers tremendous potential to be explored.

Third, major social media and instant messaging platforms are incorporating a live video feed feature. Facebook Live, Twitter Live Stream, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and Whatsapp have video streaming features that allow video content to be shared among communities. The fact that the total hours of YouTube viewing per day is no less than one billion hours says much on the tectonic shift towards video content distribution. Consumer durable brands can reimagine customer journeys with pop up advertisement banners, pay per click advertising services and paid social media marketing campaigns to measure and monetise return on investment while reaching out to consumers on their personal devices.

The writing on the wall for digital marketing companies is crystal clear. Video content is here with a bid to stay for big time. New frontiers of video content though in the nascent stages in the year 2018, shall begin to disrupt the marketing landscape. Virtual reality video content for example offers a great opportunity for consumer durables brands to associate with extreme adventure sports and lifestyle events to redefine consumer connect. Ecommerce brands can also leverage VR video content to showcase a wide variety of products to augment user experience. 360 degree video content is yet another immersive technology that consumer durable brands can leverage to showcase their products and brand associations at events of sports and entertainment. With so much on the platter, leading digital marketing companies can reinvent customer journeys and customer experience with cutting edge video content marketing in 2018.

The post Why Video Content Marketing is a Hit with Consumer Brands in 2018? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Digital marketing companies in India had waited for the Union Budget 2018 with baited breath. Given the trajectory of events, policy initiatives and economic reforms pursued by the Government of India in the last four years, the digital technology and consulting vertical in India was counting on this year’s budget to function as the compass to assess the short and intermediate-term measures being taken by the government to stimulate aggregate effective demand for digital transformation of corporate enterprises, brands and governance.

At TIS, the leading digital marketing company in India, we are cautiously optimistic about the slew of economic reforms announced by the Government of India in this year’s union budget while hoping that it points towards market development of a strong digital economy in India and consequently the growth of world-class digital consulting companies in India based on a value-based model. We share our analysis of the union budget 2018 from the stand point of the digital strategy consulting industry vertical.

Backdrop to the Union Budget 2018

It is a vote an account budget that allows the industry to see through the sustainability and stability of the major policy initiatives of the government going into the year 2019 and beyond. Second, there are significant challenges and opportunities on the road ahead moving forward towards realizing the full potential of gross value addition in the domestic economy.

A report published jointly by The News Line and NASSCOM projects the gross value addition (GVA) at US$ 1.8 trillion, of which new digital ecosystems may contribute 45-50% at US$ 905 billion, digital payments and eCommerce are likely to contribute US$ 15 billion, electronics manufacturing is likely to contribute the US $ 420 billion, telecom and media are likely to account for another US $120 billion and the IT/BPM vertical is likely to account for another US $360 billion in digital revenues by  the year 2025.

While this scenario augurs well for the digital strategy consulting companies and the information technology services industry vertical overall, there are issues to be addressed and not all of them may be resolved through budgeting alone.

India has only 150000 engineers skilled in building AI technologies. India has a severe shortage of engineers in these technologies, especially when countries like the US have a talent pool of 850,000 AI engineers.

Fiscal Outlay for the Digital MarketingIndustry in India

The digital marketing vertical in India has a lot to cheer about the fiscal outlay dedicated by the Government of India in the union budget 2018. The following highlights of the total fiscal outlay for the Indian digital strategy consulting industry hold promise:

• The budgetary allocation of Rs 3,073 crore (US$ 483.09 million) for the Digital India programme made for 2018-19 is a pointer in the right direction for the digital services industry. Corporate enterprises and start-up firms can look forward to optimistic signals on the growth of the digital services vertical.
• The Union budget 2017-18 has allocated Rs10,000crore towards Bharat Net to expedite the project of connecting rural areas with high speed internet. This is expected to augment market development for digital services in the rural areas, enable digital entrepreneurship and open new avenues for multilingual user interface and user experience design for rural markets.
• The budget has allocated Rs 2,500 crore benefits for UPI based payments and other digital payments, thus giving a boost to financial technology services. It is an indicator of the growth of the segment of financial technologies in India with a steady growth in demand for services of mobile banking, social media banking and mobile app store optimization services based on aggressive content distribution strategies, web development and mobile development services for the BFSI vertical.

Digital Infrastructure Creation in Rural India

The union budget of 2018 focuses on the creation of digital infrastructure in rural India. Wider and faster internet connectivity is an imperative to taking the digital transformation of the economy to the remotest corners of the economy and unleashing untapped value. Highlights of the digital infrastructure creation in rural India are as follows:

• Bharat Net project is being implemented by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to create network infrastructure for providing100 Mbps broadband to all gram panchayats (approximately 250,000) in the country in a phased manner by the end of 2018.
• 250,000 villages have got optical fibre connectivity under Bharat Net program.
• 100,000 gram panchayats have been connected with high-speed optic fibre network in the first phase of BharatNet
• The government will work towards connecting another 150,000 villages under Bharat Net initiative in the coming financial year.
• It will now scale it up by providing 500,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in rural areas to provide easy internet access to 50 million Indians.
• # DigiGaon initiative shall be launched to provide tele-medicine, education, and skills, through digital technology.

These above mentioned measures of digital infrastructure creation in the rural economy aim to open avenues of economic growth by bringing an additional 50 million Indians under the net of the digital economy, while stimulating the demand for customized content marketing, mobile apps development and UI & UX design services in the verticals of information, communication and entertainment (ICE), education, e-governance, tourism and health care.

Digital Payments Outlook and Insights from the Union Budget 2018

The union budget makes efforts to streamline the growth of the digital payments segment in India with an eye on moving towards a less cash economy, digital financial inclusion and seamless financial transactions. Major initiatives to augment digital payments include:

• Every individual enterprise in India shall be assigned a unique ID
• There will also be anAadharPay, which will be useful for people that do not have debit and credit cards, and net banking facility.
• There will be 10 lakh point-of-sale (POS) machines in the country and 20 lakh Aadhar-based POS by the end of the financial year 2018-19.
• Service charges have been withdrawn on railway ticket reservations through IRCTC and e-tickets.Cashless reservations in railways have gone up from 58% to 68% in the on-going financial year.
• The government is set to launch two new schemes to promote use of BHIM – referral bonus scheme for individuals, and cashback scheme for merchants. SIDBI will refinance merchants and businesses based on transaction history.
• A mission will be set up with a target of 2500 crores digital transactions for FY 2017-18 through UPI, USSD, Aadhar Pay, IMPS, and debit cards.

The road map in the union budget towards leveraging digital technology services has several implications on different verticals and thus by implicit logic on the demand for specific digital marketing services.

First, the assigning of unique IDs to corporate enterprises shall enable on-boarding of businesses into digital platforms for business, compliance and regulatory objectives.

This shall pave the way for enterprises that operate in brick and mortar format to move up the digitization platform to become click and mortar (CAM) enterprises, effectively stimulating demand for search engine optimized websites, social media optimization, and mobile application development.

Second, the launch of AadharPay promises to bring consumers at the bottom of the pyramid into the digital economy increasing demand for design and development of secure payment gateway integrated SEO enabled business websites in verticals like online retail, food & beverages, quick-service restaurants (QSRs), ICE, BFSI, healthcare, passenger transport, commercial freight, and pharmacy.

Third, the participation of SIDBI in ensuring cash back schemes for merchants shall incentivise online business development and sales by reducing shoe leather costs of dealing in cash, thereby allowing digital consulting companies to offer inputs into creating and maintaining digital portfolios of business like websites, apps, and social media properties.

Compliance and Regulation of Digital Payments

The Government of India has proposed to curate and secure the digital payments ecosystem in India with two measures that include:

• the establishment of a computer emergency response team for the financial sector that will work in close coordination with financial sector regulators and other stakeholders and
• Second, the setting up of a payment regulatory board in the Reserve Bank of India to regulate electronic payments replacing the currently existing Board for Regulation and Supervision in Payments and Settlements System.

R&D Initiatives and Training the Digital Services Industry Workforce

The union budget 2018 looks to address issues of skilling the workforce and augmenting efforts of research and development in cutting edge technologies with a specific reference to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Measures announced in the domain are as follows:

• A national program will be initiated by NITI Aayog to increase efforts in the area of artificial intelligence.
• Mission on Cyber Physical Systems will be launched by the Department of Science & Technology under which centres of excellence for research, training and skilling robotics, artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, big data analysis, quantum communication and internet of things will be established and promoted.
• The Department of Telecom shall support the establishment of an indigenous 5G Test Bed at IIT, Chennai.

TIS, the leading digital marketing service company in India looks forward to the union budget as favouring business growth of the industry, market development in the domestic economy for digital services like website development and design, hybrid and native  mobile applications development, user interface and user experience (UI &UX) and custom product development (SaaS) services. We welcome the initiatives to develop the potential of the domestic market of India while taking the movement of digital transformation of brands to rural areas in a big way.

The post Digital Marketing Companies in India Get a Big Push After Union Budget 2018 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

We live in a world of opportunities. With the right amount of investment, innovation and hard work, anyone can take up any business and make it a success. That is why you need to utilize even the smallest of the opportunity to make your business shine.

Speaking of opportunities, social media does not give you a small one but an amazingly large platform to let people know who you are and what you provide. Gone are the days when businesses needed little to no advertisement. A single large billboard or an expensive TV commercial is not going to cut it if you truly want to reach out to your target audience. Businesses thrive on a simple logic. If you don’t tell people what you are, they don’t buy from you. The more people know about you, the more chance you get to widen your profit margin. You need to get to ground level, understand the market and find out the best strategy to promote yourself to the masses.

This is exactly the kind of marketing opportunity that social media presents. And to salvage these capabilities, you need the right tools. You need to be effective in your social media campaign because you are not the only one doing it. Your competition is getting bigger.

Get a head start by milking out every single opportunity that social media can provide you. Following is a neat categorization of all the tools you will need and some excellent tools for your reference. Go through the list and equip yourself:

Content Curation Tools

While creating content may seem like the most important task, an even more difficult and important task is to publish them effectively. Content curation means the ways which help you to organize your content and publish the most relevant content depending upon the market forces.

You need to curate your content so that it remains consistent and trackable. Content curation also helps you in keeping your information sources updated. You could probably do this without the help of tools, but using tools makes the process more efficient and less time-consuming.

1) Buffer

Buffer is a simple and straightforward tool to schedule your postings. It integrates with your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+ pages. You can schedule all your postings to any social media channel from one place and save a lot of time with this tool.

2) Bundle Post

Bundle post lets you search, edit and schedule all your content from a single location. It works like a social media dashboard with the help of a browser plugin. It comes with a 30-day free trial period. So take your time to evaluate this tool and find out if it’s good enough to keep your audience engaged.

3) Babbly

Using Babbly is all about give and take policy. The USP of this wonderful app is – give a share & get a share in return ie.  share other content in order to get shares to your content. You can easily share your stuffs on multiple social media platforms at once with a simple click. It also has content scheduling options that let you schedule the exact time when you want to publish your content on Babbly and social media.

4) MavSocial

MavSocial is a free service that can help you save a lot of time on your social media campaigns. It makes storage, organizing, and scheduling of posts easy and free. It is a multi-service platform that provides various social media-centric solutions that are usually not available for free. So take some time to understand this tool and make the best use of it.

5) Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another content curation tool that comes with a 30-day free trial period. It is a peculiar tool that lets you maximize your social media presence by letting you join social conversations. It has great options to monitor these social conversations and makes you look good in front of your customers.

Your response time can be very easily accelerated using Sprout. It helps you manage your entire social media profile from a single tool and provides you with data to optimize your campaigns. It helps in the self-analysis of all your marketing efforts and is quite fast in its operation.

6) Clear Voice

If you are a perfectionist looking for refinement in all you do, you need a tool like Clear Voice. Clear Voice helps you refine your content and link you with excellent content creators who can lend their voice to your brand. This tool brings in a level of personal touch to your campaigns by letting you discover the most engaging articles and stories. You can then choose your own freelancers, create content and collaborate with them to publish the content.

7) CoSchedule

CoSchedule comes at a free 14 day trial period to test out its excellent platform to strategize your social media campaigns. If more than 10,000 bloggers and social marketers find this tool to be helpful, maybe you should give it a look too. It has a drag and drop option and a calendar view to plan your blog postings on WordPress and social media shares.

Monitoring And Sharing Tools

Till now, it has been all about scheduling and organizing your posts. But how will you know which content is bringing you profit and which one needs an extra push? To know that precisely, you need monitoring and sharing tools. Here are some tools you can check out.

8) TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an exclusively designed tool for managing your twitter activities. It helps you dive deep into your twitter feeds and gives you real-time streaming of all your feeds. It can also be used along with Buffer for a more detailed strategy execution. It is completely free and gives you access to a wide range of twitter specialized options.

9) Cyfe

As your online presence gets solidified more and more, you are presented with the new problems that come with the overwhelming data. Cyfe is one tool that helps you tackle these problems with a cloud-based solution. You can monitor and share all your data in real time without having to sweat yourself. It saves a lot of time concerns when all you need is your precious time to relax or make the next billion dollar decision.

10) Social Clout

Social Clout is basically a metric tool that taps into your social conversations via blogs, forums, and social media threads. Social Clout acts like a third eye and helps you gather insights whenever your brand’s name gets mentioned on Facebook or Twitter.

You get to know the actual responses and public opinion about your brand thereby being informed before you take any decision. You get to know where and what is that you are lacking and know how well you fare against your competitors. Now that is some information you don’t want to miss. Do you?

11) AgoraPulse

Agora Pulse is like a pulse monitor for your Facebook account. All about your Facebook page’s performance can be accurately monitored using Agora pulse. It helps you bring in a new dimension to your Facebook marketing by letting you learn what works best for you.

Facebook sweepstakes, competitions, quizzes and much more get a new level of deeper value with Agora pulse. Stay assured, you would never miss a comment, tweet or message again with this effective social media tool. You can easily sync all your new content and keep them under pending review until you glance at them.

Providing automated moderation and one dashboard for a range of social networking sites, this is a tool that you need to employ in order to save time.

12) Hootsuite

Hootsuite is both a scheduling and monitoring social media marketing tool. It gives you a big picture of all your social media activities in various ways.

You can schedule posts for future publishing, manage your social networks, listen to what your audience are saying about your brand, track your social media efforts, collaborate with multiple team members, and can connect with other applications like Marketo, Instagram, and Reddit through Hootsuite.

Analytical Tools

Do your marketing strategies always revolve around data and insights? Well, then these analytical tools are what you need to have!

13) Google Alerts

Google Alerts is free and fantastic. Discover which sites are your best friends and get alerts every time your brand receives a mention on social media. You can even choose to set Google alerts if certain keywords are being used on social media sites and forums. All for free!

14) Social Mention

This is another free gem of a tool that gives analytic insights in real time and organizes the social media data into a single stream of information. You get your popularity measured under categories like strength, reach, passion, and sentiment. It provides data from all major social networking websites on the go.

15) Quintly

This tool comes with a 14-day trial period. About an overwhelming 250 inbuilt metrics help you get the precise analytics on your social media activities and data.

You can have your custom dashboards where you can fine tune your analysis with a custom selection of metrics, reports, charts, live feeds, and many more exciting features. Quintly helps you refine your campaign with its goal specific design.

16) Keyhole

Keyhole is a free tool and you need not hesitate to use it right away. It boasts a real-time dashboard by letting you tap information via hashtags, retweets, likes, and shares. You can also be aware of the most popular people supporting your brand via Keyhole.

You can reach out to your important clients directly and be able to screen your best qualities in good light. The dashboard or Keyhole can be exported, printed and shared and hence be used for visually sharing your performance.

17) Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is available for a 30-day free trial period. It is an outstanding measuring tool that helps you get an overall insight on your online performance.

It has graphs, charts, comprehensive metric tables and everything else you need for visualizing your data effectively. You can export the data in CSV format or raw format. You can also schedule your tweets with Crowdbooster.

18) Facebook’s Audience Insights

Facebook Insights is dedicated to all your Facebook campaigns. It gives you the right insights about customers. While it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to read through every comment or Facebook reaction to your posts, you can get the benefits of doing that with Facebook insights. You can track every like, post reach with the help of the various engagement metrics provided by Facebook insights.

Content Creation Tools

While nothing beats the quality content provided by an expert content writer, but if you are in a rush and looking for some quick turnout, content creation tools should be your best bid. Here are a few tools which would help you in your endeavor of creating some speedy content:

19) Contently

You have got to give some credit if something has been created by people which creates the content itself. So obviously delivering quality content is the main goal of contently! Contently lets you create quality content at a large scale.

It empowers creators with technology to bring in unique and innovative quality to their content. Contently with its cutting-edge technology helps enterprises in creating, publishing and optimizing content at one place.

The services team of the Contently can help you in reaping the best out of your content marketing strategy by helping you tell the right stories along with their translation, localization and distribution services.

20) Storify

Nostalgia is the trend now. And evergreen stories and yesteryear storytelling are gaining traction with a lot of audiences. Storify lets you bring in the nostalgic feel to your blog posts and takes audience engagement to another level.

Breaking news to personal blogs can all be shaped to a beautiful narrative. You can make use of multiple editors, add multimedia content, and get real-time collaboration and real-time engagement with Storify. Another great thing about Storify is that it comes in a mobile app too, thus providing you the access on the go.

Lead Generation Tools

‘Lead’ is a term you give for a possibly successful business transaction. As you know, every lead presents a chance at growth and you definitely don’t want to miss even a single one of your leads. There are ways you can optimize and tune your social media efforts to get more leads.

These ways could include seemingly simple tweaks to your design or even keywords. These things could go unnoticed but when done properly, they could help you in increasing your profits by several percentages. Here are some tools that will help you generate leads effectively.

21) Socedo

Socedo is an automated B2B lead generation tool that helps you pinpoint your target audience and thus funnels your efforts in the right direction. It analyzes several factors and narrows down the matching prospects for an effective lead generation.

It does by helping you in discovering the best prospects, creating meaningful conversations, qualifying the prospects through automated processes and further experiments with the data so fetched to help you generate the best leads.

22) Rapportive

Rapportive helps you build rapport by integrating your Gmail account with your social media analysis reports. You get to view profiles right at your inbox and can also view all the latest tweets and Facebook posts from your inbox. It is compatible with various email services like MailChimp, BatchBook, and CrunchBase.

23) Social Pilot

Social Pilot is an affordable solution to connect to more than 200 social profiles from a single account. This is extremely helpful for individuals who need to maximize their business profits without having to worry about the posting limits.

You can do mass uploading of posts and can add brand information to every status you post. Social Pilot also provides you with suggestions to make your content more effective.

Tools For Beautifying Your Posts

Not all the content that you post are the same and not all of them are just text. You could have live content, interactive quizzes, slideshows and other multimedia embedded content which needs to be layered and designed effectively to produce the desired outcome.

Quality content that is presented jarringly is one of the ugly sights you can find on the internet. Make your posts beautiful with tools like Canva and Adobe Post.

24) Canva

Canva gives you a range of beautiful layouts and eye-catching designs to make your content look lively and engaging. If tugging the viewer’s curiosity and wanting them to have an engaging read of your content is your goal, then Canva is a good place to start. You are given photo editing tools, hundreds of fonts and wonderful designs. All you need to do is choose and execute wisely.

25) Adobe Spark Post

Adobe Spark Post lets you create high-end graphical posts within seconds. It can give the much needed professional touch and look to your posts. Resize your text, beautify your graphics, mix the themes and a lot more – just with a few clicks!

This brings us to the end of this never-ending post which could have gone endlessly, all thanks to the range of tools that we have with us today. Luckily, we owe a lot to these tools for the fact that they have simplified our marketing efforts tremendously.

However, the right choice of social media tools for your business in order to boost its traffic is very important. Thus, stop beating around the bush and get your hands on the best tools by hiring social media marketing experts who are habitual in achieving this feat.

Have you already tried any of these tools? Or do you think that we missed a few of deserving tools? Well, shout out in comments!

The post 25 Social Media marketing Tools for Your Business Maximizing Profits appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

According to an estimate made by Statista, the revenue generated by online travel booking amounted to $340 billion back in 2010. As a travel agency, you could do your bit to earn a part of such whooping amount by making those holiday-goers to choose and book their holiday through your company. Seems like the best dream you have ever had? Believe us, it is not a dream anymore! Travel SEO could help you fulfill your goals and milestones within a blink of an eye.

Growing Importance of SEO for Travel Industry

Allow the figures to do the talking. A recent study conducted by European Travel Commission concluded that as many as 78% of the trips were booked through internet amongst Britons. This is not it. There is a rise in the internet bookings by 47% since 2008. Hence, it is clear that more and more customers are relying upon online channels to fulfill their travel requirements and this trend is sure to get more popular, all thanks to the widespread use of smartphones and internet savvy devices.

If you are in the quest of discovering and exploring online in order to boost your sales and productivity, there is no better supplement than SEO. Search Engine Optimization, plays a vital role in your business growth if your business relies on online booking. While PPC advertisements already are doing well for your business, boosting your marketing efforts through SEO would only prove to be an icing over cake. If done correctly, SEO could help you dominate the first page of the SERPs, thus giving you the way to generate the maximum leads.

How SEO could help to optimize your travel website?

• Allows you to fetch more customers with reduced costs

SEO allows you to target customers for a range of keywords. Unlike other strategies (PPC, to name a few), targeting keywords in SEO is fairly easy and pocket friendly. SEO lets you target a large number of keywords along with their variations, for no extra costs. For example, if you are in the business of booking hotels, you might like to target keywords like ‘hotel reservation’ and ‘hotel booking’. But why restrict yourself? You could also try your hands on other related keywords like ‘London hotels’, ‘best hotels in New York’ and so on. SEO doesn’t restrict your keywords with a budget. SEO gives you the liberty to explore more and target a range of related keywords for no extra costs.

• Enhances visibility of your travel website

SEO basically deals with the website optimization such that it appears in front of the targeted audiences. For instance, if someone searched for ‘book hotel online’, and your website makes it to the top of the search results pages, the probability is quite high that you will end up making the deal. You automatically boost your business when you offer your customers what they are looking forward to having. This is how SEO blesses you.

• Builds great user experience

Though not directly associated with any SEO task, but a good SEO expert will always provide you suggestions for better structure & CTA planning in order to ensure proper conversions.

With current SEO Trends, a website without proper on page & structure will find it difficult to rank better in SERPs and hence forcing you to make changes accordingly, which actually helps you in building better user experience.

SEO is not just about pleasing the search engines, but the target customers too.

Now that you know the importance of SEO for the travel industry, it is the time that you know it inside out. Let’s explore the untouched aspect of SEO in detail.

The Basic Things You Should Know About Travel SEO

Travel industry undoubtedly is huge! With a plethora of opportunities for travel agencies and a potential untapped market, the industry still remains unexplored. If statistics are to be believed:

• Total contribution of travel & tourism to global economy- $7.58tr
• Number of international tourist arrivals worldwide- 1,087m
• Number of European tourist arrivals- 563.4m
• Global international tourism revenue- $1,159bn
• Global hotel industry total revenue- $457bn
• Average price of a hotel room in Europe- $185
• Average price of a hotel room in North America- $119
• Daily hotel rate in New York- $309.86
• Percentage of travel bookings made from the U.S.- 39%
• Online travel bookings revenue worldwide- $340bn
• Inbound tourism visitor growth worldwide from 2008 to 2017-In 2014, inbound visitor numbers to the Americas grew by 8.3 percent over the previous year. In the Middle East, they increased by 8.6 percent.
• On an organic basis, online agency bookings were up 27% year-over-year.
• According to eMarketer’s U.S. Digital Travel Metrics, 2013-2019, U.S. travelers will spend $177 billion 2016 in online travel bookings. By the year 2017 more than 30% of worldwide online travel bookings will be made on mobile devices

Among all these statistics, Google’s acquisition of ITA has increased the number of bookings online, resulting in a boom in the tourism industry but also making the pie that much harder to grab. If you want people to visit your site, you need to stand out, make a statement and give them a promise to satisfy their every need. Here we tell, how!

a) Keywords Research & Planning
It may sound like the strategy of yesteryear, but even today, when people want to travel, the first they do is Google their requirement. It pays to invest in keywords and draft content around those keywords to increase your websites ranking and garner those much needed web clicks.

But then again, here is the twist. You fluff the content with keywords and useless info – Google is all set to punish you. Punishment could be severe and may get your website blacklisted.

1. An optimum keyword density should be chosen to garner maximum eyes.
2. Avoid over-stuffing and over-optimization. Target 3-4 keywords per page.
3. You might like to target long tail keywords.
4. Try putting the keyword in the heading of the article, but make sure, it makes sense!
5. Use keywords in meta description, title tag and alt tags.
6. Choose your keywords wisely.
7. Have an eye over your competitor’s keywords and perform a detailed analysis.

b) SEO Copywriting & Content Optimization

With millions of tourism sites vying for attention, every destination is being covered by almost all the travel companies. In this jumble, the destination details and packages are bound to overlap, it is imperative for travel companies to invest in good copywriters to create engaging content which does not seem copied from the Wikipedia. Copied content hits the Google ranking of the web page and may prove disastrous to your website.
How do you do it? Simply understand that people come first over the algorithms. Write to engage the customers, and rest follows itself.

How does Google determine the rank of your website? Google displays the webpages in the SERPs based on the relevance and the authority of the page.

• Relevance of the page is determined by analyzing its content. The content is analyzed on the basis of various factors, of which keywords form a significant part.
• The authority of the page is determined by how many quality links the particular web page is getting.

Thus, in order to write content that sells, you need to create alluring, useful and appealing content targeting specific keywords which impart value to the readers.

c) Visualize Content That Enhance User Experience

A well-designed website is the apple of the eyes! But this is not it; you could further boost the user experience by making use of proper engaging images, videos and diagrams. Infographics serve as a wonderful attention catcher. This not only appeals and entertains the customer, but also helps you by reducing the bounce rate. Thus helping you earn some extra points from Google.

d) Blogging & Content Marketing

You have done your bit, marketed, captured their attention, and go them to your website, but you have not been able to close the sale. You don’t leave the potential customer there; you follow them and push them to come back to your site. This can be achieved using blogs, stories, real experiences and quality content on other sites and get them back to your site through links.

1. A travel blog could in fact serve as the wonderful way to implement the SEO strategies.
2. Try updating a blog two to three times in a week.
3. Choose topics that your audiences would find useful.
4. Adding more content to your blog on a periodic basis would keep the search engines interested in your website making them crawl the pages every now and then.
5. You could choose the blog topics targeting a range of keywords.
6. Create highly engaging content such that users would like to share them on social media and other websites. This would earn you the quality links, thus boosting the visibility of your blog and enhancing the SEO of your website – a win-win situation!
7. Make use of SEO plugins like Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin to ensure that you have properly aligned SEO strategies in place.

e) Link Acquisition From Reputed And Authority Sites
Links are what constitute your web page. Links from reputed and authority websites tell people that you are social and that you have got useful content that people would like to access from somewhere else. Link building is an effective off-page SEO technique that aims to increase your organic traffic.

Links could be earned by contributing high quality content on reputed and authority websites. More often than not, they would accept the offer. Do not forget to include a backlink to your website.

Content is the king, and high quality content is the key to success. Look for the opportunities through which you could contribute to highly reputed websites. Further, contribute some rocking content to your own websites. Make use of author authority and rel =”author”. This serves a signal to the search engines that you are known for producing useful content. Using rel=”author” would allow the Google to track your writings through the web, thus helping you earn the credibility and easy visibility.

f) Mobile Travel Marketing- Mobile Friendly Website

Mobile site is not a luxury anymore. Most of the users now browse and book from their smartphones. It is imperative now for the travel companies to have a website that is optimized for mobile users, to enable the mobile users to reach you through their mobile device.

You could either opt for a responsive website or choose to go for a separate mobile website meant to serve the people surfing your website on mobile. Whatever it is, make sure that you are providing the best experiences to your customers. In doing this, you are not only pleasing the customers, but are also making a soft corner for yourself in the eyes of Google!

g) Social Media Optimization

Based on a study, approx. 2.31B users are active in the social media channels. This is where the attention of the user. Social media do its little bit in promoting your content and in turn helps your content in getting indexed faster.

The number of likes, shares and retweets that you get is a clear indication to the search engines that your content is new, informative and engaging, thus fetching you some bonus points. This also helps you by enhancing your domain authority and by increasing the number of inbound links.

What is needed is compelling content to push the user to click on the link and visit your site. This would help you generate some non-search engine traffic. And in turn, Google will reward you with better rank.

1. Make sure you are not over promoting your website.
2. Post some engaging infographics and travel images.
3. Keep the ratio between promotional and informative content as 40:60. This would keep the users engaged without getting bore.

As a travel agency, you can trigger the process with Facebook. Facebook is comparatively easy when it comes to generating new fans. You could do it simply by targeting the existing clients. Enter the existing email list into Facebook and target a page promoting ad.

Work by building a like-minded community of travelers on Twitter. Engage with them regularly on a real time basis by starting some engaging travel-related conversations.

Instagram is another great platform for the travel industry. The location tag and hashtag feature available on the platform could help you in connecting emotionally with people.

Basically, travel agencies can make use of platforms that promote and boost visuals. Pinterest is another great platform is this regard. Create pinboards of content that seems engaging to you. You can further link that to Facebook and Twitter for enhancing visibility.

h) Local SEO – Find the Niche Directory

Local SEO is the perfect way that travel agencies can use for their benefit. Local search basically is a way used by search engines to present the most relevant results based on the location data. This makes sense. If you are looking for a travel agency, you would most likely prefer choosing the one in your locality, no?

To achieve this, get your travel business listed in the famous local listing. You could try Google local listing and yelp local listing, for example. In order to fetch maximum out of it, customize your on-page SEO a bit to fetch those local advantages:

Include a keyword along with your city/region with your landing page title tag, lading page h1 tag, landing page url, landing page content and in the landing page alt attributes

Another effective way you could build links to your website is by conducting a blog outreach and networking campaign. Connect with the fellow bloggers with a well-established fan base and who blog in your niche. Ask them to post a blog talking about your agency and or the services in their blog, and get a backlink from them.

i) Reputation Management – Get Positive Online Customer Reviews
Positive online customer reviews instill the confidence in your brand. Positive reviews speak of your good will in the market. Manage your reputation online by earning some good customer reviews. You could do this by asking your customers to leave positive reviews on popular travel forums. TripAdvisor is one of them. Make sure that the reviews are honest and left from genuine people. Further, also keep a close eye over the negative reviews and take all possible measures to address them.

These were some of the essential points that should be taken care while optimizing your travel website. But this is not it. SEO is an ever evolving industry. And thus it pays to maintain a pace with the changing algorithms and the trends.

Digital Trends for the Travel Industry in Next 5 Years and the Brands that are making use of them

Mobile
We need to understand how consumers are evolving and how much time we are spending on various media.

The above graph shows the comparison of the amount of time spent by an average user and the amount of ad spent by business owners. Where radio, TV, and the internet are concerned, the statistics have pretty much come on par with each other.

While on one extreme, there is print media where the advertisers are spending more for ads and the consumers are not spending enough time on print media, the other extreme focuses on the amount of time spent by an average consumer on mobile and the opportunity for the advertisers to that bar with the ad spend.

Invariably, the trend in the coming years would be to spend less on print media and more on mobile, which is understandable, as all media these days are accessed through the mobile.

YouTube, Facebook or even web browsing, all these are accessed by consumers through their smartphones. The next five years will see advertisers targeting their market through social media because that is where most of the mobile time is spent.

Earlier, it was a luxury to have a website that was mobile optimized, today, however, it is a necessity to have a mobile website as well, if not, you risk losing out on a big chunk of the market.

There is a travel agency in Ukraine by the name Pockettour that uses Viber, an app that is quite popular in Asian countries, to conduct business. The user can search, book and pay through this app. These guys have basically brought the whole travel agency into the user’s pocket and use an app that is found on the majority of the phones.

Video marketing

Based on the Google travel research at the end of 2014, it was found that 35% of travellers, 1 out of every 3 leisure travellers heading to a destination engaged with a travel-related video activity in the past 6 months and it was even more so for business travellers, which was one out of every two, or 56%.

What is a travel related video? It might be an ad on Booking.com or Tripadvisor.com. It could be a destination video that makes you just dream of going to the Caribbean or going to New York city or it could be a user-generated content about their experiences.

Watching this content has an impact. There was a research conducted recently by Rocket Fuel, which is a problematic marketing provider in the US and they looked at data and interestingly enough, they saw that the mere fact of being exposed to a tourism display or video ad meant that they were 6 times more likely to book a hotel at the destination city.

If you watched the whole video, you were 23 times more likely to book a hotel in the destination city advertised. So Video marketing does have a major impact. This root from the fact that we retain 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read and 10% of what we hear.

A great example of video marketing is the one that is used by West Jet. They released a thanksgiving video which they called “real-time giving”. Just after the video, they saw traffic increase by 100%, bookings increase by 77%, and revenue increase by 86% – and because of high views and lifts in brand perception, it has doubled down on its content marketing efforts.

Of course, not everybody has a budget that big to create a movie video, but you can always use social media to post short videos about your packages and travel destinations.

Remarketing
You know all the efforts that we do to get people to our website, AdWords campaign, send out newsletters, work on our SEOs to get visuals, yet 92% of the people who get onto a website never return, isn’t that dramatic?

When someone goes to your website, you probably have something you want them to do, whether its download a brochure, reserve online, call you or maybe fill in a form or subscribe to your newsletter. 96% who visit a website will leave without completing the call to action. Even if you are able to get the, down to the shopping cart to start the process, 70% of the people just do not complete their purchase.

The reason might be because they got interrupted or they found the process too cumbersome. So how do you get people to close in on a sale? This is where remarketing comes into place.

Essentially whenever a user comes to your website, he leaves. Then you push an ad to Facebook or a banner on the web or anywhere else on the web where he might find you to bring them back to your site.

Let’s say someone is checking out your hotel website and is looking for a spa or romance package. For whatever reason, they moved onto something else, you would want for that person to, later in that evening, when he checks his Facebook news feed, he finds your ad and comes back to your hotel and complete where he left off. This has been going on for years. But now it is a lot more democratize and has become easier over the years.

There are apps that will allow you to follow the visitors to your website, and allow you to push an ad to them. TripAdvisor uses this trend fairly well and keeps making its visitors coming back to its site to check their packages and destinations.

Wrapping up

In a nutshell, SEO could be the ultimate tonic that your travel business might need. With a huge number of individuals relying over internet to fulfill their travel-related needs, it is a golden opportunity for the travel industry to make the most out of it through proper SEO.

The key is to follow the principles and execute the strategy properly. Ultimately, it is all about nurturing the relationships, engaging the audiences and sharing the ideas.

Okay, it is your turn now, how do think SEO could affect the travel industry? Let us know in the comments. Also, do share the best SEO practices that bestowed your travel business with the ultimate boost.

The post How to Promote a Travel Website? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Facebook marketing is one of today’s most effective online tools at any business’ disposal. No matter how big or small your company is, or what size of budget you have to work with, Facebook can offer ways to reach your target demographic and increase sales. Since 85% of all social media originating sales come from Facebook, and the average value of a Facebook generated sale is $55, directing some adspend to the platform makes a lot of sense.

Facebook Advertising

Small business owners will find Facebook a powerful tool they can leverage for increased revenues and brand visibility. The site has over a billion active users and is one of the most heavily trafficked social media sites in the world. Many plugins and applications that have been created to supplement the core functions of the site; of these, the Power Editor is the most useful.

Statistics for Facebook sales are skyrocketing. Both sales originating directly on Facebook and sales from sites that receive traffic from Facebook are seeing increasing success. In fact:

• Ad clicks are increasing 70% year over year, and ad click-through rates are increasing 160%.
• Users bought $234 million  worth of virtual goods and gifts on Facebook during Q2 of 2014.
• Facebook’s user base grows by eight people per second, or 7,246 people every 15 minutes.

Businesses that target ads correctly can achieve incredible ROI. Determining your “most likely to buy” demographic is key to running successful Facebook Ad Campaigns. In 2015, several small businesses stood out with their leverage of Facebook to increase revenue, including:

• Mikes Bikes. This small business ran a back-to-school ad campaign targeting college students using Facebook’s Carousel. A $2,000 investment over 3 months raked in a staggering $40,000 worth of sales, and 1,400 clicks through to the company website.
• Six Month Smiles. A network of dentists sought to increase consultations for their fast tooth straightening system by targeting women aged 18-40. They used Facebook Custom Audience ads to offer a $500 discount on the program, and only spent $7 per lead to rake in over 11,000 potential patients’ contact information.
• This ready-to-eat food delivery service used Facebook’s Geo-Targeting and Look Alike Audience features to specify potential customers in its delivery range in Seattle. The company launch garnered 70% of its new leads from the Facebook Campaign.

Companies ranging from start-ups to big names like Land’s End, A&W, Heineken and Zynga also had success with Facebook Advertising in 2014/2015. 

Advertising Your Business on Facebook

While Facebook has a robust Ads Manager, with a variety of functions, using Power Editor is key to creating strong, targeted ad campaigns, running split testing, and taking advantage of reports.

There are three levels to the ad process.

1. Campaigns. All of your ad sets can be found within your campaigns.
2. Ad sets. When targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, develop an individual ad set for each before creating the actual ads.
3. Ads. The actual ads can be found within the ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary from ad to ad for split testing.

There are two potential methods for handling your ad campaigns. The first is the familiar Ad Manager, which is great for those new to ad creation. The second is the Power Editor, which provides much more control and more specific targeting for a higher ROI.

If you are already using Ad Manager, it’s simple to switch over to the Power Editor. Just install the Power Editor Plug-In (it works best in Chrome), and download your data to the Power Editor. This will port all of your existing ad campaigns and associated data.

Why Power Editor is the Best Choice

Creating ads and posts in the Power Editor gives you more flexibility than the simple Ads Manager does. You can create longer posts and headlines, create Unpublished Posts (or “Dark Posts”) that don’t have to be published to your page to test on audiences, and update or edit multiple ads at once (to change offer dates on AB split test ads, for example.)

You can easily drill down in the Power Editor to view campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads. You can also edit and compose ads in the Workspace, and create a pixel to track conversion rates. The Power Editor will allow you to track multiple objectives and conversions, and optimize your bidding to get the most out of your allotted adspend.

Depending on the action you wish to see taken, select what kind of conversion should be tracked. This could be a viewer:

• Liking the Page or Post.
• Visiting your website
• Making a purchase
• Submitting contact information
• Downloading a free gift

Once you have selected an objective for your ad campaign, add the name of your ad campaign in the proper field. Then you are ready for the most important step – creating an ad set designed to generate the most response and refining your audience for maximum ROI.

Refining Your Audience With Power Editor

The Power Editor is a tremendous tool for easily creating campaigns, ads, and ad sets (and for split testing ads), but where it really shines is in the targeting portion of the campaign creation process.

Facebook allows you to target potential customers in a wide variety of ways. The most obvious demographics break down by gender, age, and interests. The Power Editor allows you to target even more specifically.

• Device Selection is now an option. Do you want to target PC users, or refine your audience to target mobile users? Mobile ads typically have a higher ROI, and you can even choose to specify mobiles which are connected to wifi signals, all mobiles, feature phones, or specifically android or iOS devices.
• Local Audience targeting lets you zero in on Facebook Users by as narrow a specification as zip code. You can further optimize your audience by choosing to include or exclude people who already know about your business.
• Custom Audiences can be created by importing data from your own files or email lists, including data gathered from previous web traffic or visitors to specific pages or portions of your site. The tool can also be used to generate Look-Alike Audiences by searching other Facebook Users to pull out those who match your best demographics.
• Call to action buttons allow you to generate a “Call Now” option or a “Get Directions” option on mobile, driving actual foot traffic towards your brick and mortar location. When combined with a coupon code or special sale, this kind of add can increase day to day revenue exponentially.
• The Facebook Groups App lets you target those who have had contact with your brand before, and expressed interest in new product launches, sales, and more.
• Instagram Marketing can be managed via the Power Editor, allowing you leverage the highly visual image sharing platform and expand your reach with Facebook Ad integration.

Once an audience is created for you, you can save it in the Power Editor for reuse later, without having to go through the steps to recreate it.

Power Editor is definitely the strongest tool provided by Facebook to help you create effective ad campaigns that deliver increased revenue. Start using Facebook Ads as a major component of your online marketing plan, and see your business grow!

The post Enhance Facebook Marketing with the Power Editor appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Social media has radically altered the way consumers are able to interact with content. Hence, after social media, consumers want a comparably similar, intuitive, and interactive experience on the websites they visit.

This has led to a transformation in how “a good web design” is defined and hence how websites are now being designed.

Here are the “top 7” transformations in web design brought about by social media.

1.  Social Share Icons

Before social media, brand visibility and link building was the domain of online directories, forums, creating lead magnets, paid strategies, and direct blogging among others.

Now, social media has become one of the most important platforms for increasing brand awareness, generating qualified traffic, and consumer engagement.

As a result, social share icon have taken a prominent role in website design. The proper placement of the social icons, and the design of the social shares themselves can affect engagement and amount of qualified traffic to your social media pages.

2. Interactive Design for Social Media Pages

Before social media, website design limited how consumer could access content and how they interacted with other people. Social media revolutionized how content could be accessed, consumed, and shared, and how people interacted with one another.

This has affected how consumers perceive and judge a business. People expect similar type of content, interactivity, and experience when they visit other websites. Hence, you have to focus on creating quality design for your social media pages.

You have to create social profiles that grab the attention of your target audience, hooks them with your content, connects them to your message, and makes it easier for them to find further information about your business and follow it.

If your social media pages do not offer the same level of engagement, do not offer relevant information or content, or make it harder to follow your business, you will lose valuable leads.

3. Scrolling and Swiping

Before social media, long-from content was often the hot bed for over the fold ads and hence bad user experience. Hence, long-form page design was becoming a boon to visitors because it meant that a lot of content had to consumed/passed-over before they could get to the meat of the material.

Additionally, scrolling was seen as the failure of the website to readily communicate its message to the visitor. As a result, websites were designed to break the content into chunks, and hence multiple pages.

After social media and thanks to responsive website designs that re-align content (and font size) to make them viewable on devices, scrolling and swiping have become an essential part of the user experience. Coupled with parallax design, websites can now continue to keep their audience and visitor engaged longer.

4. More Visual Content Is Needed

Before social media, visual content (unique high-res images and videos) were rarely seen as essential components of engaging visitors. Stock images were readily used on website pages and in shareable content.

Social media engagement has fundamentally changed the structure of any content. Unique, high-resolution images and videos have become integral to the success of any piece of content. This places additional pressure on the website to:

• Readily load on the user’s device of choice,
• Scale the visual content so that it adapts to the screen size without reducing the user experience (a focus on responsive images and video embeds) and,
• Backend programming or installation of plugins that will load the content when it is required (for instance the popularity of lazy load plugins that prevents the page from loading all the images to increase loading speed).

As a result, websites have to be designed to be light on the user-side and heavy on the server-side, allowing faster loading times and richer user experience.

5. Greater User Interactivity

Before social media, consumers were dependent on how a website organized content and allowed interaction with that content. As a result, consumers did not have a single, standardized “sense” of what a good user experience and interaction meant. Hence, content organization and page and navigation design were primarily the domain of the business.

Social media has made access to information very easy. Simpler menus, content cards, intuitive interaction with content, and ready availability of multiple forms of content have made seamless interaction with content a core expectation on any other website.

Now web design has to focus more on the presentation of not just content but the controls that can be used to access the content available on site. This places a lot of focus on the design of the navigation pane and how menus are arranged and how each menu is categorized with further sub heads.

6. Non-intrusive ads

Before social media, website designs could easily remain ad-friendly and leverage their useful content to display ads over the fold and use intrusive ads.

After social media, website designs can no longer prioritize ad-displays and instead must prioritize user experience on their pages. Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.) are designed to be effectively used on smartphones.

How ads are displayed on these platforms has radically altered how consumers expect to see ads on any business website. As a result, the traditional obtrusive ads only increase bounce rates, forcing the website to focus more on designs that put content first and ads second.

7. Responsive Website Design

Facebook reported in June 2015 that on average, 844 million users were accessing its platform through mobile, daily. Facebook, along with other social media platforms are catering their mobile users by tailoring their apps so that their content is always displayed without compromising engagement or user experience as they migrate between devices.

They achieve this through responsive web design. A responsive web site uses fluid grid systems that allow them to sense the screen size of the device and automatically adjust their size and content so that the user can easily interact with it.

As a result, after social media customers expect websites to be responsive, automatically sense and readjust to their device’s screen size and hence offer them a seamless user experience across devices.

The post How Web Design Has Been Transformed By Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.