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.

The digital marketing world is constantly crossing newer milestones with each passing day. It is changing and growing continuously. In order to keep up the pace with the technological advancement of the latest age and enhance your business growth, you must integrate your marketing endeavours with the growing digital marketing trends in 2020.

Make your brand marketing more impactful and relevant by following these successful digital marketing trends to push newer boundaries in 2020

Digital Marketing Trends

1. Augmented Reality

The technology related to Augmented Reality (AR) is still untapped in more than one way and still in its infant stage. It offers great scope to your brand to get greater ROI with your digital marketing endeavours.

It is well-known that games like Pokémon Go that were AR-based became a major hit among the people in mid-2016. A large segment of manufacturers and developers are working to create wearable gears based on AR technology to enhance the user experience and creating value for their brand.

In the upcoming scenario, traditional advertisements will give way to AR-based 3D advertisements, allowing the users to stream 3D content directly to get an advanced experience. It enables the users to connect with your brand offering on a much deeper level emotionally.

It also enables your marketers to augment your brand awareness, leading the customers to test your products well before they move towards placing the orders.

2. Marketing Automation

The various mechanisms related to marketing are getting accelerated by data-driven technologies. Marketing automation enables marketers to establish better relationships with their customers by automating some of the repetitive tasks such as e-mail reminders, social media postings and leads generation.

It is especially beneficial for the new market entrants and small companies that are competing with the top-notch companies by saving their effort and time. Customers are attracted to the brand in a better way when they receive e-mails that cater to their particular requirements.

The process of marketing automation requires the use of software that is needed to be uploaded with the necessary data related to the user’s personalized data. It is a complex technology that can be better managed by partnering with a professional and experienced digital marketing company.

3. Artificial Intelligence

AI has been continuously making dramatic shifts in the digital marketing world for the developments of any brand. It is running parallel to any other marketing tactics and promises to offer you better marketing opportunities in the future.

It analyses the behaviour of your users by reading their search patterns on various social media platforms to enable the brands to understand the demands of their users better and offer them the services accordingly.

AI can solve the problems much more effectively than any human mind, and provides you a defined output without any definite possibility of errors.

Repetitive tasks can be better handled by AI bots that reduces the load of the employees, further enabling them to perform better. It allows your marketing team to develop a highly curated content that will be highly significant for the recipients.

4. Impactful Stories on Social Media

Social media platforms are ever-evolving and presenting the brands with unlimited opportunities to grow their business with digital marketing efforts. It enhances customer engagement in a big way.

Also, it enables marketers to keep the online audience updated with all the current developments taking place in your industry domain. It gives way to daily promotions of your brand by posting marketing content on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

5. Visual Search

Brand optimization with visual search is a great way to offer focused and defined results for your users. It allows the users to click a picture or upload a picture related to the product they are looking to find online.

It directs them to the items without any hassle. Even though it is in its nascent stage, it holds great potential to become a leading digital marketing technology to deliver perfect results.

6. Influencer Marketing

Under this marketing trend, brands use key figures to promote their brand offering among the online audience. Instagram is rapidly growing up the ladder to become a major source of becoming a platform used for influencer marketing.

As the network of social media is scaling up with every single day, there is a rapid increase in the number of influencers as well. Users tend to listen to these well-known celebrities and popular figures ardently.

With the increased use of hashtags and promotional content directed by the influencers on their social media handles, smart brands are taking the content reference from these mentioned posts, and locating the precise on-brand engagements, thereby enhancing their performance of better user engagements. It also plays as a great medium to enhance human-to-human connections and showcase your brand creativity.

7. Programmatic Advertising

An extension of AI to improve the efficiency of your marketing endeavors. Previously, ad industry was managed manually by publishers that controlled and ran the ad industry on the basis of hectic meetings with middlemen and unending negotiations.

With the multiplication of online publishers on a daily basis, it has turned out to be a challenge for the advertisers to keep up the pace with it. The solution is bringing in automation in the advertising industry to take better control over things.

It allows your brand to cut out the middleman and make the advertising procedure simply. Marketers are developing target-oriented ads that are produced by using and analyzing the personalized data of online visitors.

It has enabled the brands to promote transparency in their advertisement campaigns and curtail the instances of fraud, created by the middlemen. It also makes the process of advertising quicker that leads to increased conversions, better ROI and a decrease in the cost of spending. This digital marketing trend is definitely here to stay.

8. Video Marketing

It is one of the ever-growing trends in the digital marketing world. Over the years, visible growth has been seen in user engagements led by pre-made video posts and live videos.

It channelizes the information of a particular product or service to the audience in a much clearer manner, making a direct connection between the audience and your brand.

Directly dealing with the audience via Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels with the help of personalized messages and video content enables you to improve the consistency of lead conversions, thereby leading to better opportunities of your business development.

9. Use of Chatbots

It is a mode where you engage with your customers on a real-time basis via an instant messenger and provides solutions to all their queries related to your brand offerings. Over the years, many companies have agreed to the viability of integrating chatbots in their digital marketing strategy to add value to their business.

It also allows your brand to offer high-quality services to your customers at any hour of the day, and meet the expectations of your customers at every single time. It has been observed after research that almost 80% of the businesses are planning to incorporate the technology of chatbots in their marketing planning by 2020.

10. Voice Search

Technologies of Google Voice and Apple’s Siri have already made a big name for themselves in the digital world. Voice search provides precise answers to the customers without confusion, leading to the desired outcome for them.

Most of the successful marketers create a detailed voice script matching the customers’ requirements and offering creative solutions to their concerns. In the digital marketing world, people are looking forward to creating better voice scenarios based on surveys, internal data, and communications with real customers.

Not just the target audience, it is also hitting successfully with the new and emerging digital audience as well, especially in the small cities and towns.

To emerge as a successful marketer, you can very well explore the great potential of voice search for your marketing efforts related to brand promotions.

11. User-Generated Social Media Content

It has been on the trajectory of growth in recent years in the digital marketing world. User-generated content is any type of brand-related content that is shared by the brand audience on their social media channels like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Attention is better directed towards producing and promoting more and more user-generated content, as the targeted audience looks forward to getting validations from social and digital marketing platforms.

It also enhances customer engagements with your brand. It creates a chain of customers that bring closer the potential leads with the existing customers smoothly. It is a growing trend among the millennial generation and needs to be used to its full potential to get better access to lead conversions and brand promotions.

2020 will be all about enhancing the user experience by delivering better personalized, AI-driven and automated content.

To stay ahead in the competition, you need to get a better grip on generating custom content, integrating it well with audio and video enhancements to attract the attention of the targeted audience towards your brand in a seamless manner.

The post Top Digital Marketing Trends to Follow in 2020 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.

A consistent social media presence is crucial for increasing brand awareness and visibility, establishing and sustaining relations with customers, and building authority and loyal following. This requires regularly engaging with your target audience — with relevant and meaningful content. It also requires remaining abreast of the social landscape and competition.

With the explosive growth and expanding reach of social media, all of this is not possible manually. Here are 7 primary aspects of your social media marketing presence and associated tools for enhancing it.

1.Know Who’s Talking About You and Your Brand with Mention

Go for Mention, an easy to use better alternative for Google Alerts. Unlike Google Alerts that rank the mentions and may not let you know the results immediately, Mention alerts you the moment you receive a mention!

Generally, Google Alerts works by sending you an email when it detects new web pages, articles, and blogs in the top 20 Google Web Search, or the top ten results in either Google News or Google Blog Search for a query. Hence, as long as there is no different in the top results, notifications are sent. This limits your access to less ranked mentions you may be receiving on the web or social media.

With Mention, the alerts are generated whenever you receive a mention. Furthermore, you can monitor a range of platforms including Web, Forums, Videos, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, News, and Images among others. Then there is the robust reporting feature that lets you monitor the spikes in your online presence, to whom the spikes are attributed to, and how well have they worked in your favor.

2.Track and Monitor your Social Presence Oktopost

Don’t forget Oktopost, an all-round social media management dashboard. It intuitively displays and groups social messages, making it a lot easier to monitor the content. Some of the best features of this tool include:

• Tracking conversions on your social media posts, going back as early as 3 months back at the time of your sign up. Hence, even as you set up you already have previous data to look at.
• Robust analytics tools for social campaigns
• The ability to capture information on your social leads

This tool also allows you to easily share content with your audience. As soon you create a social content, the tool automatically creates campaigns for each content letting you track the progress and see the associated metrics for that.

3.Automate all your social platforms with Rignite

In a short time period, Rignite has become the mother of all dashboards for monitoring multiple accounts. It allows you to monitor and control multiple social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) from a single dashboard. Within Rignite platform, you can also remotely collaborate with your social media team without any hassle.

Do you have the content and want to schedule the next whole month in advance? Start with the “schedule Profile Groups” feature that lets your schedule multiple social media posts for all your platforms. Do you want to remain abreast of interesting content? Automate the curation process by connecting with Feedly.

The biggest highlight is the Campaigns feature that lets you set up New Campaign where you can schedule a range of activities including series of posts, promotions, discounts, contests, growing your email lists, and more!

In addition, we have the in-built analytics that measure what’s working on your profiles and what’s not. It allows you to easily monitor and measure different trends on those media channels.

4.Remain Abreast of the Firehose with Topsy

A twitter stream nearly 9 thousand tweets per second through its very own content pipeline it calls the Firehose. Making sense of the millions of tweets that stack up during the day becomes hard. This is where Topsy comes into play.

Topsy is a free analytics tool for twitter that allows you to search, analyze, and monitors tweets. It allows you to easily tweets, shares, links, videos, and photos for specific person and topics. This data is crucial for deciphering the trends and enhancing your outreach campaigns with blogger.

5.Compare Your Facebook Page with That of your competition with LikeAnalyzer

Remain abreast of your Facebook page and that of your competition with LikeAnalyzer. The tool lets you analyze any Facebook page and give you a score out of 100. Whichever page you choose, the tool offers valuable information, including:

• Posts by Page — Reports the post history; their timing; number; length; shares, comments, and likes per post; and level of curiosity it generates, among others.
• Posts by Others — Measures the effectiveness of your/brand’s handling of fan response to each post
• Page Performance — The overall performance of the page in terms of the audience size, likes, and other metrics needed to be successful

The end report is a treasure-trove of information and insights about how well your page is doing. What’s more is that the report suggests improvements. When done on a competitor’s page, it offers business intelligence that you can leverage to make your page better.

6.Find the exceptional content that your audience will love with Sway

Sway is a handy and powerful tool for automating your search for quality content. Simply add the topics of your interest, or relevant to your niche, and submit. The tool will scour the web, curate the best content, and bring you a daily dose of this content for sharing with your audience. The single dashboard comes free, but if you want to manage multiple accounts from a single place then the paid plan starts at $9 for two dashboard/per month.

7.Find out what is Trending, and the influencers sharing them.

Use BuzzSumo to find what type of content is being shared by people,, for researching your competition, trending topics and more. The platform is geared to find and weed out the pieces of content that are being shared the most, and who is sharing them! This is a great method of finding the influencers in your nice. Prominent features of the tool include:

• Content Discovery and Curation — Leveraging social search it tells about the content that is trending, will trend, and will resonate with your audience. Lets you easily curate and share it
• Content Alerts — Let’s you remain abreast of the trending content (set-up for competitors, authors, keywords, and even domains)
• Influencers and Outreach — Because using influencer is mutual, and better than paid ads
• Content Insights — Analytics reports for the trending content, and performance of your content
• Research and Planning — Offers tools for faster and better research and planning of content and your competitors

It is a great tool for remaining abreast of the market — content, competition, audience, and your performance amidst it all!

These tools will immensely help you to enhance your social media presence. However, it is always a good idea to take help from social media marketing agencies if you want more professionalism and effectiveness in your marketing strategy.

The post 7 Effective Social Media Marketing Tools to Enhance Your Social Presence appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

First comes the text messaging, then email and now social media platforms seem to take the control of the internet world due to which the social media marketing has completely revolutionized the concept of digital marketing in the past few years. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have become popular names in the world of social networks for driving loyal customers and leads towards your website. Simultaneously, the growing popularity of mobile phones and tablets has increased the use of mobile internet extensively among the younger generation.

Hence, the mobile digital marketing and mobile SEO concept has also grown in significance as they offer an enhanced user engagement experience to the audience from anywhere and anytime. It means you cannot afford to overlook the increasing trend of mobile social campaigns because your audience’s spectrum has expanded from the desktop and laptop world to the mobile world. You have to concentrate on driving mobile traffic as well, which has given birth to “Mobile Social Campaigns”.

Is There Any Need for Creating Mobile Social Campaigns?

While social media sites have groomed their monetization schemes, social advertisement practices are also evolving at a faster rate. Facebook records one billion active mobile phone users daily, which has forced this social media giant to use its full potential for unlocking the overall revenue by the means of enhanced visibility via mobile news feeds, since everyone loves to spend their time on reading news feeds.

With people showing more inclination towards Smartphones, tablets, iPads, and iPhones, social media platforms are also modifying the way digital marketing is carried online. In such cases, it becomes mandatory for the social media marketers to devise effective mobile social campaigns for ensuring maximum revenue through both desktop traffic and mobile traffic.

As a social media marketer, you must consider every smartphone consumer as an opportunity for you because you never know when you can reach a potential buyer through the mobile medium. While best practices for mobile social campaigning might be unclear for many of us, but checking or evaluating if these campaigning is going as per our expectations is a bit complex process.

Meeting Expectations Via Mobile Social Media Campaigns

While measuring or evaluating the social media campaign is not an easy task, but we can take the help of Google Analytics, which give us key insights of our website’s traffic via different sources, including, desktop searches, direct traffic, social media traffic, and mobile traffic as well. Being a social media marketer, you can also use the data of Google Analytics for shaping effective mobile social media campaigns to impress and drive better mobile traffic on your website.

It is not always necessary that your mobile social media campaigns will always yield results as per your expectations. However, there are some important metrics, which will help you in evaluating your mobile traffic generated through social media campaigns. The Google Analytics metrics will help in proving why your mobile social media campaigns matters.

Check Your Mobile Engagement Using Google Analytics Metrics

You must have a clear picture of how mobile your customers are and then only, you will be able to develop an effective mobile social campaign for your website. Checking the percentage of your website visitors in desktop vs. mobile will help you in understanding, whether your mobile social media marketing efforts are meeting our expectations or not?

• For this you must specify your website data range at the top of Google Analytics dashboard.
• Select Overview option of the Mobile section under Audience in the left bard of Analytics dashboard.

You can see the breakdown of your website traffic including mobile traffic, desktop traffic and tablet traffic, as shown in the figure:

You can compare bounce rate, session durations for examining the insights of your target audience and if you find bounce rate is higher for your mobile audience, then you can recreate your mobile social media campaigns for ensuring improved lead generation through mobile traffic.

Using Web Analytics for Understanding Key Takeaways of Social Data

You can easily parse and evaluate the mobile and desktop social data with Web Analytics. You can also understand about the latest trends followed in social media campaigning process and so that you can push your own mobile social media campaigns for branding your business.

The key takeaways of social media platforms across both desktop and mobile social data are:

• Social media platforms help in offering enhanced customer retention rate, thus improving the chances for long term public relationship development, re-targeting and customer support.
• Social media sites offer ‘soft value’ to the digital marketers which include better user engagement experience, loyalty of customers and awareness of their business brands across different platforms.
• Twitter is one of the popular social channels that move the traffic on the top of the funnel, hence devising mobile social media campaigns taking care of the Twitter lead generation rate can help you significantly in maximizing the chances of revenue generation.
• Facebook videos are also becoming popular and most of the social media marketers are leveraging Facebook insights for measuring the performance. Employing this technique helps them in revising their mobile social media campaigning efforts for better outcomes.
• Here is an example of Adobe Creative Team, which has conducted an evaluation on one of its mobile social media campaign for driving leads for the CC product and the numbers display a major difference between the consumers rate engaged through social and non social.

Social media marketers can also use the website re-targeting technique in its mobile social media campaigning process for reaching across various social platforms. An example of this is the Facebook exchange (FBX), which can bring back the customers on your website via cookie-based re-targeting.

Best Examples of Successful Mobile Social Campaign Brands

1.Burger Chain of Milwaukee

This popular burger chain efficiently improved its weekly sales by 60% since it has successfully created 24K followers over its Twitter account where it displays channel inclined offers to its customers.

2. General Mills- Hello Cereal Lovers

Hello, Cereal Lovers is a popular social media campaign launched by General Motors in an effort to improve their lagging cereal sales this campaign covers a large social presence across different social platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.

This campaign was successful in driving significant traffic through both desktop and mobile mediums to their websites, which eventually results in better leads and sales for them.

3. Breaking Bad –Name Lab

This critically acclaimed social media campaign over Facebook has not only dominated the airwaves, but it has resulted in huge success of a Facebook app, which has successfully garnered over 4.1 million impressions. The success of this campaign has proved that this type of user engagement works really well for ensuring success of your business over the internet.

Checking these experiences, you can also analyze your mobile social campaigns to see if the results are meeting your expectations or not. If your results are not up to the mark, you can rethink and recreate your social media campaigns to remain aligned with your other social media competitors. Mobile social media marketing has evolved recently and it is not going to see any type of downfall in the imminent years, hence, maximize your opportunities to gain maximum profit through effective mobile social campaigns.

The post Mobile Social Campaigns- Is Your Social Media Campaign Mobile Friendly? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Social media is a quite valuable tool for promoting blog content. In this age of the social web, getting people to notice your content is like asking them to spot a needle in a haystack. With thousands of posts per minute on social networking sites, it is a bit difficult for audience to find your content. One question must be popping in your mind that how can I cut through the noise and make my blog content better for social media? After in-depth research work, I have discovered efficient ways that will definitely make your content better for social media and help in effective social media marketing strategy.

Tips for writing valuable content for social media

For writing quality content to promote your business, 80/20 rule is followed by most business owners. 80/20 rule means 80% of the content you post on social media should be entertaining or informational, and 20% of content should be about business promotions, updates and events. This content marketing strategy is popular because if you share quality and informative content, your followers will be more willing to engage with your business-related posts.

It is easy to create 20% of business-related content, but the main problem comes when you write that 80% informative content. I have mentioned eight important points that you can consider to develop your content plan:

1. Know your target audience:

Before planning blog content, you should know your target audience and get answer of few questions like:

• What questions do your customers ask about your industry?
• What topics of interest do your customers share in common with them?
• What problems do your customers have that you can solve?

Answer of these questions will definitely help you in writing relevant and informative content and engage your audience to read your content.

2. Magnetize your article titles

By magnetizing your blog title, I mean it is important to make the titles unique so that it can pull people into your content. Do not write boring titles and make sure that the headlines you use are interesting, eye-catching, and clearly indicate what the content will be about.

Keep in mind that your article title should be short, crisp and catchy. Certain social media websites, like Twitter, limit the number of characters that can be used in a post. When people share articles, they often like to include their own commentary with it.

3. Give your content life with photos, graphics and videos

According to MDG Advertising, blog posts consist with images receive a whopping 94 percent more views than those without. Therefore, it is quite necessary to add fascinating, yet meaningful and informative photos in your content. You can find free photos on websites like CreativeCommons.org or Compfight.com and if you want to purchase photos, you can go to CanStockPhoto.com or Getty Images.

People love behind-the-scenes glimpses into other peoples’ lives, which is also true in business promotion content. If you writing business related content, you can share inner workings of your business’s life with photos and videos that give followers a better sense of your staff, your inspirations and your process. It is also a great way to share your content in Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and other visually-oriented social channels.

4. Add fascinating meta-descriptions

When you share a blog post on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+, they automatically pull in a description of the post. Most sites generate this description from the URL’s meta-description. These meta-descriptions are also very helpful for social media optimization, though they have no longer use in search engine optimization. Make sure that each blog post, web page, and landing page includes an enticing meta-description to attract social media users to check out your content.

5. Add social sharing buttons

As per recent study from BrightEdge Technologies, sites that include social sharing buttons generate 7x more mentions than those that do not include these buttons. If you add social sharing buttons for sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+, it will encourage your website visitors to share your content in social media. You can add these buttons to every landing page, blog article, web page, and other piece of content you create.

If you want people to share your content, you should position social share buttons right where any reader will find them. I typically like to put these social sharing buttons at the top or on the side (scrolling with the content) so they are hard to miss.

6. Create meaningful and strong quotes within the content

When you have something meaningful or interesting to say, you can make it easy for the readers to share the quote by offering a “click to tweet” link. This is one of the best ways to optimize your blog post. As this trick does not require a lot of work for the audience and it easily draws attention to the sharing option, readers are more likely to tweet your post. You can do this following ways:

• Go to ClicktoTweet.com and create your tweet. Generate and copy your link to incorporate it into your content.
• You can install Click to Tweet by Todaymade plugin onto your WordPress website. In the CMS, you can click on the Twitter icon in edit bar. After that, input the text you want people to tweet, and the plugin will create a box with your input text in it and a “Click to Tweet” link.

These quotes are not only helpful for getting audience to tweet your content, but also can be used as a marketing tool to capture readers’ attention.

7. Include a Call-to-Action

It is one of the effective ways to increase exposure of blog content on social media. You can ask people to share your content, but do not simply say, “Please share my post!” Instead, you should connect with your readers and make them want to share your blog post by focusing on how they feel or have felt reading your piece of content.

You can tell your reader exactly what to do by mentioning which social media platform to share on so you do not leave them with too many options. Here are some good examples calls-to-action:

• Loved these thoughts? Let everyone know these thoughts by liking this post on Facebook
• Do you share same views? Tell the world by sharing this post on Facebook
• Rise to the challenge and help spread the word by sharing this post on Facebook

8. Showcase Customer Quotes and Accolades

Social media networks are one of the best forums for word-of-mouth recommendations. If you are getting customers’ feedback via online review sites, email, or in person, you can highlight these comments on social media (if your customers are not sharing their feedback there already).

In addition to this, you can brag about accolades and an award you receive from other organizations and tag those organizations in your posts that will give you opportunity to be re-shared as well, which can get your business even more exposure.

The Bottom Line

Put some of these strategies to the test and I am sure you will see your engagement metrics improve in no time! Just try out these tips and let us know how these tips are able to make your blog content better. The possibilities for successful social media marketing through content are endless. If you want to enhance social media optimization of your content in a professional and effective manner that too in less time, I recommend you to hire experienced social media experts.

The post 8 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Content for Social Media appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

It is crystal clear in 2014 that social media now plays as significant or more a role in Google’s search engine ranking algorithms, as other commonly used traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, such as back-linking. However, due to the complexity and secrecy surrounding the vast amount of search engine algorithm updates that major search engines, such as Google have performed over the past year or two, including the Hummingbird, Penguin and Panda updates in 2013, it makes it just about impossible to know the exact amount of weight that social signals, such as Facebook likes, shares; Google + 1’s and Twitter Retweets and Shares are given in determining how high your website is ranked on Google’s SERP’s. That said, there have been numerous studies performed by top social media metrics and SEO firms, such as Quick Sprout (www.quicksprout.com) and Social Metrics Pro (www.socialmetricspro.com) where they have found that Facebook Likes/Shares, Twitter Shares/Retweets and Google + 1’s have the greatest impact on website’s SERP rankings. Nonetheless, in what follows I will explain the top 5 ways that you can leverage your businesses social media accounts to improve SERP rankings in 2014.

Use Google Plus, Google Plus Local & Google Places For Business To Increase Your SERP Rankings And Visibility

Since Google is the largest search engine on earth it is not surprising that Google +’s main social signals (i.e. Google page/post + 1’s) rank highly in their SERP’s. For instance, as Quick Sprout CEO, Neil Patel illustrated in a recent Social Signals Experiment Quick Sprout performed on six similar businesses in a medium sized city; one of the businesses surveyed showed a 14.63 % boost in their SERP rankings, due to obtaining 100 Google + followers. Whereas, Facebook Likes, Shares and Tweets accounted for significantly less increases in the six businesses SERP rankings. For example, one of the businesses surveyed in the Social Signals Experiment received 70 Facebook Shares and 50 Likes, which resulted in an increase of 6.9% in their SERP rankings. Moreover, Patel (2014) asserts that Facebook Likes/Shares, Twitter Retweets and Google + 1’s make a significant impact on increasing your businesses SERP rankings for low competition keywords.

In addition, having a professional and complete Google + Local business page is important for increasing your website’s SERP rankings, and especially if you are a local business owner, since Google reported recently on its Google Places Stats and Facts page that “20% of all Google searches are location based”. And also according to a recent study done by ComScore in 2013, 56% of mobile phone owner’s use their phones for local searches.

Furthermore, if you own a business that has a physical location you should definitely sign up for a free Google Places For Business account so that your customers can easily find information about your business, regardless of the device (mobile or desktop) or platform (Google + Local, Google Search or Google Maps, etc.), which they are searching on (see image below for example).

Businesses Should Focus On Sharing High Quality Multimedia Rich Content

Today with the ever-increasing use of social media apps, websites and increased importance of social signals influencing businesses SERP’s, it is absolutely crucial that businesses create high quality, multimedia rich content which is catered to their core customer base. For instance, I recently signed up for SEO website, Quick Sprout’s newsletter, in which they send me their latest SEO blog posts about every day or two, and which are typically very informative and media rich (i.e. including info-graphics, images, etc.). For example, Quick Sprout CEO, Neil Patel’s latest article How Social Signals Impact Search Engine Rankings (2014), which has a variety of informative and interesting looking gifo-graphics to demonstrate to the user what social signals have the greatest impact on SERP rankings and how best to optimize your businesses use of social media to enhance your SERP rankings. For instance, Patel (2014) asserts that “adding images to your social media posts increases your brand’s chance of social media engagement by 200% and that creating a contest will increase your chances of obtaining social engagement by 39%”.

Use High Quality Social Media Management / Analytics Tools

Using high quality social media management and analytics tools, such as Hootsuite in which you can manage and track the results of multiple social media accounts simultaneously on all of the main social media networks, including Facebook, Google +, Twitter and LinkedIn. And which in turn allows you to plan and efficiently promote your businesses key social media messages and content by automating your social media messages. Thus, allowing you to spend more time focusing on other more important aspects of your business, while still promoting your brand’s products and services on social media. And in turn, will if done in a strategic way, significantly boost your business website’s SERP rankings.

Take Advantage Of Facebook Graph Search and Twitter Search to Discover, Refine New Target Audiences

The introduction of Facebook’s powerful new Social Graph search feature in early 2013, allows social media marketers, online advertisers and business website owners to discover new target audiences by searching for more specific local, national, international businesses, interests, people, or combining certain Facebook Interest pages or people who like certain pages to come up with new and interesting target audiences for their social media marketing and advertising campaigns. For instance, instead of just targeting one certain group of people, based on their age and interests, such as Conservative 18-24 year-old Catholics from the United States, you could search for Catholic Conservative And 18-24 years old from the United States And University of Harvard Graduates. Thus, this clearly would give you an entirely different set of people than just Catholic Conservative 18 to 24 year olds from the United States.

Consider Using Photo-Based Social Media Services For Your Business

Although the active user base’s of Pinterest (over 70 million active users) and Instagram (150 million active users) are still relatively low compared to the main social media networks, such as Facebook (1.2 billion active users), Google + (300 million active users) and Twitter (over 259 million active users), these social media platforms can still have a significant impact on increasing your businesses brand awareness and sales via referral traffic to your website. For instance, according to a recent article by Craig Smith on Expandedramblings.com entitled (January 2014) By The Numbers: 50 Amazing Pinterest Stats : “the total number of Pinterest social referrals to commerce websites was 20%, as of September 2013”, which is pretty significant. However, as Smith (2014) points out: most Pinterest users (80%) are women and reside in the U.S. (60%), so unless your business target audience includes women from inside of the U.S; perhaps it would be more efficient for you to use other social media networks such as, Facebook, Twitter and Google + to enhance your business website’s SERP rankings on major search engines such as, Google.

Conclusion

Clearly in 2014 social media signals are playing an increasingly significant role in determining how the main search engine algorithms, such as Google’s Hummingbird algorithm rank businesses and individual’s websites on their SERP’s. However, as Patel (2014) and Yu (2013) point out; not all social media signals and authors are valued the same by Google. In fact there seems to be a growing consensus among SEO and social media experts, such as Patel (2014) and Yu (2013) that Google + 1’s of Google pages, Facebook likes, shares and Twitter shares and retweets are among the most highly valued social signals in determining websites SERP rankings on Google. Nonetheless, depending on the target audience of your current core customer base and the types of products and services you are selling, it is also definitely worth checking out Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest to see if they are the right fit for your business.

The post 5 Social Media Marketing Strategies To Improve SERP Rankings in 2014 appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Although I am sure there are many different templates and techniques that Social Media Marketers use when creating social media plans for their clients, I strongly believe from years of social media marketing experience that any well-planned and effective social media campaign starts with the following five essential ingredients, to ensure that it is as successful as possible. And thus, that the client receives a great ROI from the Social Media Marketer who they have recently hired to manage and plan their social media campaign or manage their businesses social media accounts in general.

1. Do Your Research

   Prior to meeting with the client that you are supposed to create a social media marketing plan for, a great habit to begin (if you have not already done so) is to do some preliminary research on your client’s current social media accounts, such as, Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc; so that you can get a good idea of the types of social media campaign messages, techniques they have used in the past and how many Twitter followers and Facebook friends they currently have. This way you show your client right from the start that you are a professional Digital Marketer and that you are serious about helping them develop an effective social media campaign that will garner great results for their business, including increased brand awareness, social reach, sales leads and sales.
   

2. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask Tough Questions During Your Initial Client Meeting

   Asking and preparing key questions related to developing a professional and strategic social media plan is crucial, since in order for you to write a detailed and professional social media marketing plan for your client, you will need to know as much about their business as possible so that the social media work you complete for them is as successful as possible and reaches the key goals that the client intends to reach, such as increased brand awareness via social media likes, follows, shares, mentions, retweets and engagement on their businesses main social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google + and Instagram. Furthermore, do not be afraid to ask difficult questions during the initial meeting with your client. For instance, you can ask them questions such as, What social media marketing techniques and strategies have you employed in the past? What are your main objectives for this social media campaign? Have you ever used Facebook advertising in the past, or if not, would you consider using Facebook advertising to increase your brand awareness, sales leads and sales for your business website?
   

3. Keep Your Client’s Key Social Media Campaign Messages To A Maximum Of 3 Messages/Campaign

   Aiming to keep your client’s key social media campaign messages to a maximum of three key messages per social media campaign will not only make it easier for you to remember these key messages, but also will make it more memorable in the hearts and minds of your client’s target audience. For instance, from May to July of 2013 I helped create a social media marketing campaign for a local Non-Profit organization based in London, Canada  and for this campaign (i.e. Conversation Club), which was a social media campaign primarily devised to increase awareness about the Conversation Club for Newcomer Canadians and post-secondary volunteers. And moreover, to increase volunteer enrollment in the Conversation Club by post-secondary graduates. So me and the Marketing Coordinator decided to stick to two main social media campaign messages, since the main target audience was only post-secondary volunteers and Newcomer Canadians. The key social media campaign messages included:

   • “Live Together, Learn Together”
   • “Make a BIG Impact by Joining Conversation Club Today!”

4. Employ A Variety Of Effective Social Media Campaign Tactics To Keep Your Target Audience Engaged

   Using a variety of social media campaign messaging tactics, including posting viral videos, info-graphics, facts, and inspirational quotes to your client’s social media accounts is essential in keeping your client’s key target audience interested and engaged. For instance, as part of Non-Profit organization Charity Water’s social media campaign for World Water Day, on March 22 2013, they used this call to action (shown below) to get people in India to support their campaign, which seemed to be quite effective with this tweet alone receiving 164 retweets and 21 favourites.

5. Create A Detailed Mock Up Social Media Campaign Schedule

   Another great way for Digital Marketers and Social Media Marketers in particular to impress their clients, is to create a detailed and custom-tailored social media mock up campaign schedule. The social media campaign schedule should be at least fifteen days long, so that your client can get a good idea of the caliber of creative and targeted social media messages that you are capable of creating for their social media campaign. And not only will it likely impress the client’s that you are working with on creating a social media campaign, but it will save you and your client a great deal of planning and discussion time later on when you might not have the time to come up with new social media messages for all of your client’s social media accounts. That said, I highly recommend that you use this social media campaign schedule as sort of a rough road map when you are working on your client’s social media campaign, as it is likely that you or your client might want to modify some of the campaign messages to better grab the attention of your client’s key target audience.

Conclusion

Although it would seem to many that there is not much planning or thinking involved in creating a successful social media campaign; the truth is that an effective and professional social media campaign takes quite a bit of planning, knowledge and research to ensure that your client’s main social media marketing campaign objectives and expectations are either met or better yet, exceeded. And one excellent way to better ensure that your client’s social media campaign objectives are met or exceeded is to create a well-planned, targeted and concise social media marketing plan and campaign schedule.

The post 5 Key Ingredients For Creating A Professional Social Media Marketing Plan appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

The great merge – this is going to be the recurring theme in internet marketing this 2013. As the internet browsing experience become highly multi-sensory, your strategies should touch on your audience’s different interest points almost simultaneously, hence, the need for integration.

Two online marketing executions that definitely need to be seamlessly integrated are content and social media. After all, Tweets, Facebook updates and Google+ posts are essentially pieces of content published on social platforms. An effective synergy between these two strategies will produce better results.

So, how do you integrate social with content? Believe us, it’s not rocket science. Here are a few easy-to-implement tips we culled to help you get started.

Align Your Content Calendar with Your Social Media Schedule

This is an example of how your social media posts can amplify the reach of your content (blogs, articles, podcasts, videos, etc.) marketing. Typically, you create social media posts at a much faster rate than your content development. This is perfectly fine. Just be sure that every time you publish a new piece of content, your social media updates are there to back it up.

Proofread Your Social Media Posts Just Like Any Piece of Content

A content marketing team usually appoints an editor that checks everything from grammar, spelling, syntax and construction. Implement the same level of meticulousness in polishing your social media updates. If you’re going to use social media to promote your content, you have to ensure that social posts are impeccable and free of basic errors. No one wants to read anything that is not grammatically sound

Use Social Media to Generate Excitement for Your Upcoming Content

This is one of the benefits of syncing your content calendar with your social media schedule. A few days before you publish, say, a new blog post, your social media marketing team can create a teaser to generate buzz and anticipation. This teaser phase can be done in two or three stages until you finally reveal what’s new. Your creativity is your only limit. Use media-rich materials such as photos and videos and intriguing one-liners.

Promote Content by Triggering Conversations

It’s pretty standard how social media marketers share their company’s new content in social media. It’s usually composed of a short summary, the link to the content and a thumbnail photo to accompany the link. However, don’t forget the social aspect of content sharing which is to spark rich dialogues. Yes, your followers can comment on a blog post or an article itself, but conversations in social spaces are usually more sustainable and the insights you get are extremely rich. Plus, it boosts your level of social activity which is good for SEO.

Integrated marketing communications has been around for years in the field of traditional or offline marketing (i.e. advertising and PR) and today, its value is being realized in the field of internet marketing. Try out the tips above and let us know how social media was able to amplify your content marketing and vice versa.

The post Integrating Your Content & Social Media Marketing Seamlessly appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.