Is Email Marketing Still Effective For Business

With Digital Marketing trends changing frequently, Many people still have questions regarding Email Marketing like:
Should E-mail marketing be included in Digital Marketing strategy for brands?
Do still business needs e-mail marketing?
Is it worth to spend on Email Marketing budgets?

The answer is YES to all this. The email marketing is the oldest form of Marketing and it is not dead, it is still considered to be the most effective way of marketing. Do read how you can succeed for your business by integrating email marketing and why is still important for business.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is an electronic medium through which you can communicate with your targeted audience by sending information through emails regarding your product/services which might be useful to them. Mails are sent to the group of recipients, it is a direct way of communicating with your prospects. Different types of emails which are sent are:

  • Welcome Mail to the newly user who registered to your email id
  • Promotional Mails regarding discounts and offers on products or services
  • Thank you mails on purchasing your products or services
  • Updates and newsletters of the company

    Some Facts that proves that Email Marketing is still effective

    Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media, according to a study done by McKinsey & Company.
    The same study also shows that the buying process happens 3 times faster than in social media.
    According to the Fourth Source website, 92% of internet users have at least one email account.
    People might not access social media too frequent or they might not have social media account but 99% of people will have email ids.
    Also with email marketing we can have direct contact with our customers which is one of the reason it is still effective.

How email marketing works?

The basic steps to run an email marketing campaigns are to take a permission from your customer to send them emails, built a list, segment it, create marketing campaigns choose a email marketing tool which suits your business type and goals and send the emails.

It is very easy for business to send mails to the group of people on regular basis but doing it in a correct way is more important to get most out of it.

Why email marketing is important to the brands/ Business?

Though email marketing is one of the oldest and traditional ways of marketing, it still has a huge benefit and great impact. It is still the most powerful way to connect to people.

It might happen that some people may not have account on social media but they will have email account.

  1. Low Cost Investment – The main advantage of email marketing is that it the low cost investment to the company, Other mediums like print media, TV, advertisements are too much expensive compare to email marketing campaigns. They are very cost effective and its benefits are also too vast.
  2. Measurable – While the companies are running the campaigns, they should have a clear idea of what they are gaining with their marketing campaigns, where they are lacking and what are innovative ways through which they can accomplish their goals. Business should have the clear view of all this. With E-mail marketing tools it becomes easier to measure the success of the campaigns and design strategy accordingly. With email marketing you can measure valuable insights like open rate, bounce rate, engagement with the content, subscriber’s retention. With so many tools email campaigns are highly and easily measurable which can benefit the business to gain their goals.
  3. Integration – Email marketing tools helps to integrate with the CRM, Social Media, web analytics systems. This helps the business to know their customers better and segment accurately based on their profiles. This makes them easier to market their products to the prospects and reach out by crafting messages rightly to the right audiences and maximize the Return on Investment
  4. Helps businesses to generate leads and drives conversions – The main focus of any business is to drive sales. With the email marketing it is easily achievable. You can be constantly in touch of your potential customers through a great content, deliver the information in which your audience is interested, share promotions, events, news updates. This increase engagement of customers with your business and helps business to nurture the relationship with your customers and increase lead generation which in turn helps business to drive more conversions.
  5. Builds strong relationship and brands trust – Through email marketing tools business can communicate at the personalized level. It allows the business to communicate with the individuals feeding personalized information. The personalized data such as purchase history, the interaction with the website can be fetched through the integrations and database and emails can be sent accordingly. Personalization helps to built stronger relationships and it also build trust for the brands. Email offers the most customized marketing solution to the business. 

Success of how email marketing will work for your business:

The email marketing will work best for you if you have taken care of the factor known as CRITICAL

  • Creative – Use a smart layout, this refers to the overall template, design, images, colors and also keep in mind that email are read on mobile too, so make the template user friendly.
  • Relevance – Always customize and personalize your emails and make it relevant to the individuals, do not just send the generalize emails, send it according to the interest and preferences of your customers
  • Incentive – The email should give a clear message to the user – What is in it for me. It should clearly highlight the benefits for the customer   
  • Timing – Time for sending an email, plays a major role. Know which timings works best, it is believed the emails sent in afternoon works well rather than overnight, send the emails accordingly.
  • Integration – Email marketing cannot depend on one channel, Integration with CRM ensures that you know more about your customers and accordingly you can plan your strategy.
  • Copy – While creating an email copy ensure that the tone you are using to communicate, the subject lines, the signature. This is one of the factors to get higher conversions in your business. Do test the different versions before sending the emails.
  • Attributes – the email header is of utmost important, check its attribute like subject line, to/from address, cc, BCC. This can factor into spam if not tested or handled correctly.
  • Landing Pages – Do not link your emails to the landing page, but link it with the most relevant page or offering page on your website. The links in your email should redirect your customer to the same page of what you are offering or giving the information to your customers.

Email marketing still remains the most effective strategy in 2020 when it comes to reach customers directly, attract, retain, update and want to stay loyal for your brand .

Learn the right Email marketing strategies that will definitely lead you to staggering 70% of growth for you business.

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How to combine Google and Facebook ads to increase conversions for brands

The marketing “rule of seven” is still relevant today — a prospect will have seven interactions with your brand before a conversion takes place.

In the noisy online space, a cross-channel digital advertising strategy can help you achieve these interactions by targeting potential customers with the most relevant content, on the right channel, at the perfect stage of their buyer journey.

This blog describes some of the key ways you can use search and social advertising used together to accelerate these interactions and drive conversions faster.

Uniting the power of  Google and Facebook    

There’s no denying that Google (and YouTube), and Facebook (and Instagram) dominate the digital space—they’re the world’s most visited websites and account for 59 percent of all US digital advertising spend.

While both of these platforms offer a variety of advertising options that span use cases from brand awareness through to conversion advertising, for the purpose of this guide, we’re focusing on Google’s search network and Facebook’s News Feed ads only.

Google Search Ads        

  • Excel for targeting people who are actively searching for your keywords
  •    Provide access to enormous search traffic, as Google owns 75% of all search engine
    market share
  •   Offer little control over who sees your ads, but a lot of control over what keywords
    your ads appear for
  • Traffic has intent to convert—users are actively searching for something— so click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates are high

Facebook News Feed Ads

  • Deliver sophisticated audience targeting options from Facebook’s large and diverse user base
  • Provide an opportunity to engage audiences before they know you
  • Offer a lot of control over who sees your ads, but viewers are not specifically looking for your product or service in their social feed
  • Have a very cost-effective cost per click (CPC) and daily spend

Google: Users have intent

When a pipe bursts in your home, which is the more likely scenario?
You visit your Facebook News Feed to see if any plumbing-related content shows up

You do a Google search for plumbers in your area

Google visitors have intent. They are actively searching for something—and while they may not know your brand yet, they have a pain point that you can target with the right keywords.

Facebook: Users are highly targeted

Facebook offers a different ad experience— because of the wealth of information it collects about your audience and their networks, it can serve up ads that are more targeted and more likely to convert.

In this example, Facebook knows that the user is Vancouver-based, has been to a Cirque du Soleil show in the past, and has friends who reacted to this post.

Each of these advertising types serves a different purpose—and is  delivered at a different stage of the buyer’s journey. If you want your digital ad campaigns to be as effective as possible, you need to stop choosing between search and social and start considering their combined role across the entire buyer journey.                                                   

Awareness

Facebook ads get your product or service in front of new audiences

Consideration

Users visit Google search to conduct their own research

Share insights across Google and Facebook to reach the “rule of 7”

Decision

Users visit both Facebook and Google to search for reviews, coupons, and offers

Re target Google search visitors with an offer via Facebook ads

Let’s understand the everyday tactics that will help you effectively use Google’s search network and Facebook’s News Feed ads together to capture your audience at the perfect stage of their journey.

  1. Build your brand with Facebook, close with Googlesearch
  2. Create consistent messaging across search and social ads
  3. Use Facebook to retarget users from Google search ads
  4. Align Facebook Audience Insights with Google search queries
  5. Use a cross-platform ads management solution

1   Build your brand with Facebook, close with Google Search

Facebook ads are a proven way to build brand awareness and put your product in front of new audiences.

Businesses of every size can use Facebook’s advanced targeting options to get the right content in front of the right people. The best part is that you don’t need a massive budget to be successful on Facebook—you just need to know your audience and tinker with your targeting options until you find the perfect blend.

Eventually, when they’re ready to move along the buyer journey from awareness to consideration, the people who saw your Facebook ads will go to Google to search for your brand.

Tips: Turn cold audiences into leads and drive awareness of your brand, product, or service—then close the deal when they decide to search for your brand—in two steps:

 Use Facebook ads to target an audience that has no awareness of your brand but has expressed interest in offers and brands that are similar to yours.

Run Google ads using your brand name as a keyword.
Running Google search ads for your own brand is an established best     
practice. It helps your new audience find you, and it also helps you stay competitive—in fact, it’s likely at least one of your competitors is using your brand name as a keyword (see how Asana has used Monday.com’s brand name as a keyword in the example here).

Don’t let your brand awareness efforts on Facebook go to waste by sending your audience straight to the competition on Google!

2   Create consistent messaging across search and social

The buyer’s path to purchase is no longer linear—the route people take to find out about your offering, learn about your brand, and ultimately buy something from you can be long and convoluted. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, marketers use an average of 13 tactics in their efforts to convert a lead.

Consistency of messaging is very important because people rely on  repetition to help with memory recall. Facebook is the perfect place to set the tone with compelling visual assets and messaging that you can then recall with consistent messaging in your Google search ads.

Tips: Be consistent with your messaging—people are just as likely to search Google for your offering, your tagline, or your Facebook ad headline as they are to search for your brand. Here’s how to do it:

Use insights from Facebook IQ to help with stronger keyword targeting—you can learn a lot from the creative used on Facebook to build stronger keyword targeting on Google.

 Test creative headline options. A catchy headline can be more memorable than a brand name and generate more direct searches.

 Consider using the headline as a long-tail keyword on Google to bring down CPC.

Drift promotes attractive visuals and a compelling piece of content to create brand awareness.

The user doesn’t register the Drift brand but searches for the title of the content and is served with the Google search ad.

3   Use Facebook to retarget users  from Google Ads

The previous two sections describe an informal—and for the most part, unmeasurable—form of retargeting. These tactics rely on people “warming up” to your ad on Facebook and then finding their way to Google to conduct their own search.

“Behavioral retargeting” is advertising targeted to potential cus- tomers based on their previous online actions. Retargeting takes the connection between Google and Facebook further and is a proven, effective technique to bring back potential customers who might otherwise drop off before continuing along the customer journey.

Tips: Use Facebook to retarget people who landed on your website from a Google search ad. Here’s how:

 Ensure your Google ads and Facebook ads are sending users to a unique landing page. All campaign links should have UTM parameters for this page.

 Use Google ads to retarget visitors to the page.

Set up a Facebook pixel for the same landing page and create custom audiences for additional Facebook ads targeting and audience expansion.

Try targeting the audience with a clear call to action such as a limited-time offer to create a sense of urgency to convert.

Prospect searches for “beach vacation” on Google. They click through a few sites—yours is one of them.

Retarget the prospect on Facebook to stay top of mind and move them forward in their buying journey.

4   Align Facebook Audience  Insights with Google search queries

The more customer insights you have, the better targeted and more cost effective your digital advertising campaigns will be.

Facebook Audience Insights is a useful tool that helps marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more, so they can make better decisions about content, ad spend, and timing.

It’s also a great source of insights for your Google ads campaigns. One effective tactic is to use Facebook lookalike audiences to find your new best customers. Lookalike audiences are a powerful way to improve Facebook ad targeting by using data points about your most successful customers to find new people who are likely to be good customers, too.

A lookalike audience basically allows you to target people who are similar to your ideal existing customers, making it one of the most efficient ways to optimize your ad spend. For example, if your search query custom audience is made up of just 1,000 people, you can build a lookalike audience using your list to target 10,000+ prospects who are similar to your original list.

Just because you didn’t convert the people who clicked on your Google search ad, doesn’t mean you won’t convert their lookalikes!

In a similar way, you can also use Facebook to find and connect with audiences with strong affinity towards competitors or businesses that are comparable to yours in some way.

(A word of warning: Don’t use heavily overlapped audiences! If you target the same people more than once, you’ll end up competing for them in different ad sets. You can avoid this by excluding the original audience set from your lookalike audience.)

Tips: Be insights-driven and apply Facebook insights to Google campaigns and vice-versa. Here’s how:

 Use Facebook’s Audience Insights to analyze your customer base and generate insights like age, gender, likes, purchase behavior, and interests.

 Use these insights to craft your copywriting strategy.

Build your lookalike audience in Facebook using a group of 1,000 to 50,000 of your best customers based on lifetime value, transaction value, total order size, or engagement.

 Create audience segments in Google based on engagement insights from Facebook for more precise bidding and targeting. For example, if women converted at a significantly higher rate than men during a Facebook campaign for a particular product, you could add female demographic targeting to your Google ad groups.

To use a similar approach for competitive targeting:                                                           

Use Facebook’s Audience Insights to analyze what competitors or businesses like yours are doing—you can get this information if your current audience is following these brands.

Bid on branded search terms for those brands or businesses. These companies are already attracting prospects via Google—and in some cases, the prospects are already solution-aware and ready to find your product or service.

5   Use a cross-platform ads management solution

There are several benefits to managing your search and social ads from one platform. First, you can unify your reporting across

Facebook and Google so you can compare and analyze your perfor- mance across channels in real time and easily reallocate budgets from underperforming ads to those that see the best results—even if it’s on another platform.

Second, with an ads platform that includes automatic data sync to connect your CRM to Facebook and Google for retargeting purposes, you can automatically send your Facebook leads to your CRM and feed to Google for further retargeting. The key thing here is to use a platform that automates this process for you, making it easy and efficient.

Save time, optimize your advertising budget, and simplify execution of your retargeting tactics by bringing your search and social ads together in a cross-platform ads management solutions tools like Hootsuite

Tips: Use a cross-channel ads platform to simplify the manage            ment of your digital advertising campaigns:

 Publish, monitor, and report against all your advertising campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and Google in one dashboard.

Take a snapshot of your ad spend and performance across Facebook and Google from one dashboard.

 Automatically sync leads from Facebook to Google to create new audiences.

 Reallocate your channel budgets depending on which campaigns are performing better on which channel.

Next steps               

Request a Digital Marketing online course demo

Learn more and in-depth strategy by enrolling for digital marketing course

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Effective Digital Marketing Strategies For Brand Success

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Digital Marketing Strategy can be defined as a holistic approach to create a comprehensive plan of action which helps the business to achieve their digital marketing goals.

What is the need for Digital Marketing Strategy?
In today’s digital era, where every brand knows the importance of their presence of Digital Marketing, no matter what is the size of the business whether it is small, large, startup, everyone is adopting different digital marketing channels for the brand presence.  For any successful implementation of digital marketing efforts every marketer should prepare an effective digital marketing strategy.  Let’s have a look regarding the effective digital marketing strategies that every brand must follow:

1. Set up digital marketing strategic business planning:
Create a well-defined business plan template to get an overview of your business idea and the essence of your product or service, break it down into key parts. Check out what are the key objectives you need to include in your business plan template. Below are given key points that you can include:

a. Identify the Problems:
List down –  What problems are people facing? List their top 3 frustrations.
Existing Alternatives
This can be a direct competitor to what you are offering or the existing ways people are employing to address their problems.

b. Solutions:
List down – How will you solve these problems? Write down a solution for each problem.
Identify Key Metrics for the solutions.
You can note the key points of how will you measure the success of your product or service? List the key metrics.
E.g. if your competitor is performing well in terms of brand presence on social media, then likes, reach, engagement of the post can be key metrics measured, you can use SEM rush tool to do competitor analysis and compare your brand with the competitor for any brand for all the channels in digital marketing

c . Unique Value Proposition:
List down – How will you turn an unaware visitor into an interested customer?
Create a clear and compelling one-liner message you want to send across.
Create High Level concept for your value proposition:
Identify how does your product or service fit into the grand scheme of things? Try to be innovative and prepare Unique Selling preposition

d. Unfair Advantages:
Identify what separates you from competitors? What makes you ahead of the pack? Look at the opportunity gap and identify how you will fulfill
Identify Channels
How will you reach your target consumers? Direct marketing, social media, ads, partnerships — identify the effective ways to reach them

d. Customer Segments:
Create 3 to 4 personas of the people you can help. Visualize these people who will turn to you for solutions.
Early adopters for your customer segment
Identify what are the specific characteristics of your early adopters?

e. Cost Structure:
What are the fixed and variable costs to launch your product or service? Consider the cost at each stage from setting up a website, hiring employees, production, marketing, and bringing them to consumers.
Revenue Streams for your cost structure
What money sources will grow your money? How will you generate income?
Show a pricing model of your product or service and include other revenue
sources, such as sales and subscription fees.

2. Find Your Competitive Position with a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis maps out your companies path towards your goals by identifying strengths and weaknesses (internal attributes) and opportunities and threats (external conditions). Uncover your company’s competitive position with these guiding questions. Use the blank framework on the next page to start filling out your own SWOT analysis.


Strengths – What advantages does your company have? What do you do better than anyone else? What are your unique selling points?

Weakness – What areas can you improve on? What does your company lack? What things do your competitors do better than you?

Opportunity – What changes in technology, policies, and social patterns can be a growth opportunity for the company?

Threats – What are the obstacles to your company’s growth? What changing factors can threaten your company’s position?





3. Visualize Your Company’s Weak Points with a Pirate Funnel
The Pirate Funnel is a customer-lifecycle framework by Dave McClure that shows what you need to focus on to optimize your marketing funnel. It is called a Pirate Funnel because the first letters spell out “AAARRR” for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. Use the blank framework on the next page to start filling out your own pirate metrics.


a. Awareness:
How will you introduce your company to your potential customers? Examples: impressions, click-through rate, visits, and social media metrics.

b. Acquisition:
Where are your potential customers coming from?
What channel is driving the most valuable traffic for your company? Examples: new leads, email subscribers, resource downloads, support and sales chats.

c. Activation:
How will your potential customers try your product or service for the first time? Examples: new trial signups, product sales, activation after app download.

d. Retention:
How many of your customers are you retaining? Why are you losing others? Examples: customer acquisition rate and customer churn rate.

e. Revenue:
 How can you increase revenue? What’s your monetization plan?
Examples: customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value.

f. Referral:
How will you introduce your company to your potential customers? Examples: impressions, click-through rate, visits, and social media metrics.

4. Position Your Product or Service with the 4Ps of Marketing
The 4Ps of Marketing illustrates how product, price, place, and promotion work together when a product or service is launched to customers. It is created by Neil Borden in the 1950s to demonstrate the ways companies use advertising and marketing techniques to convert potential buyers into actual customers. Use the blank framework on the next page to start filling out your own 4Ps of Marketing.


a. Product:
Product refers to the good or service you are offering to customers. What needs does this product fulfill? What frustrations does it address? What makes it compelling to customers such that they will believe they need to have it? It includes

Brand
Features
Packaging


b. Promotions:
Promotion is how you will get the word out about your product or service to your target customers. It includes advertising, public relations, and promotional strategies like

  • Ads
  • PR
  • Social Media
  • Email
  • Search Engine
  • Video

c. Price:
Price is what customers pay for a product or service and it takes into account the cost of production. Are there established price points for this product or service in the market? How will this price compare with competitors? It includes

  • Discounts
  • Bundling deals
  • Credit terms

d. Place:
Place refers to how and where your customers will look to see your product or service. It also considers how you will deliver the product or service to them. Will it be in a physical store or online? What will be the distribution channels? It mainly includes:

  • Stores
  • Website
  • Online
  • Marketplace

5. Establish Your Product’s Appeal with a Product-Market Fit Pyramid
Product-Market fit is a concept coined Marc Andreessen and refers to your start-up being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. Finding Product-Market fit is the difference between struggling to find customers and having them knocking down your door for your product. Use the blank framework on the next page to start filling out your own Product-Market Fit Pyramid.

a. Identify your target customer:
Use market segmentation and create personas to get a picture of the people you are targeting. No need to be precise. A high-level hypothesis is enough to start testing, and revise as you go

b. Know “undeserved” needs:
What needs do they have that are adequately met?

c. Define your value proposition:
How you will meet your customers needs better than your competitors? Of all the needs you can address with your product, which ones will you focus on?

  • Build only what is needed to create enough value for your target customers to validate the direction of your product.
  • Create a version of your product to test hypotheses with your customers. Apply user experience principles to receive feedback and to bring your feature set to life for your customers.

    d. Test it out to your customers.
    Ensure you are testing with your target market so feedback received will help iterate your product in the right direction. Making your test group answer a survey is a great way to ensure they possess the attributes of your target customer.

    6. Know the Stages of the Customer Journey with a Marketing Funnel
    A Marketing Funnel maps your company’s marketing activities at each stage of the customer journey. It starts with making your target audience aware of your solution, then guiding them through an evaluation process and finally leading them to make a purchase. Use the blank framework on the next page to start filling out your own marketing funnel.
    Marketing funnel will include the following key points:
  • a. TOFU – Top Of The Funnel
    Activities that facilitate awareness. Make your target audience aware of the problem you’re addressing and how you’re solving it
  • Social media post and ads
  • Email marketing
  • Promotional video
  • Press Release

    b. MOFU – Middle Of The Funnel
    Activities that facilitate evaluation. Convert those who are aware into leads
  • Discounts
  • Exclusive offers
  • Free trial
  • Event

    c. BOFU – Bottom Of The Funnel
    Activities that facilitate conversion. Guide the leads in making an informed purchase decision
  • Demo
  • Feedback
  • Success stories
  • Comparison sheets

7. State Your Company’s Mission, Vision, and Values 
Clearly defining your company’s mission, vision and values is a powerful way to align your team and reach your goals. Below are the points to be included for framework which will give you the idea of how to plan for it

  • Mission – It is the reason why your company exists. It is the visible and tangible effect you want your company to create for your customers and the world.
  • Vision – our company aspires to be in the future. It is how the world will look like once you’ve accomplished your mission.
  • Values – These are the guiding principles that will influence your actions to fulfill your company’s mission and vision.



    8. Clearly define your strategy planning with Strategy, Tactics and Execution
    A strategy, a list of tactics, and knowing how to execute them are integral in the attainment of your company goals. Use the blank framework on the next page to start filling out your own strategy, tactics, and execution
  • Strategy is how your methods, time, and resources come into play to fulfill your company mission and vision.
  • Tactics are the specific methods, resources, and techniques you will need to accomplish your strategy.
  • Execution is how you will employ the tactics you’ve chosen. It includes measurable outcomes, such as timelines and deliverable.

    9. Develop Deep Insights About Your Customers Using Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your target customers. These personas are based on market research and real data about the people you are targeting. Two to three buyer personas are ideal. The more detailed the buyer persona, the better.

Typically a buyer persona’s include following:
a. Demographics – Gender, age, marital status, employer
b. Buyers Journey – Awareness, consideration, purchase, advocacy
c. Buying Roles – Decision makers, influencers
d. Channels – Social media, other digital activities,non-digital activities
e. Sources of Information – Content that influences purchase decisions
f. Values and Fears – Values dependability, clarity, good UI, fast support Objects to pricing and poor value proposition during sales process

Not all audience is created equal. The need for a persona helps in:


• Targeting specific contents.

• Mapping content to the stage of buyer journey.

• Personalizing.

• Marketing to develop the correct pitch.

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How To Create A Social Media Strategy In 6 steps with S.M.A.R.T goals

About Social Media Marketing:

Social Media has become utmost important digital marketing channel for brands to communicate with their existing audiences and reach to new audiences. It is also has become an integral part for brands to share content, updates, information across social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Whatsapp being widely used and many other social media channels as well. Before diving in depth let us look some data for all these channels

So now with all these varied options available how do we decide that which Social Media channels to choose for our brands, how to succeed with Social Media to be on top notch with so many competitors?


The solution is planning a good Social Media Marketing Strategy for the brand with the right channel mix

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A social media marketing strategy can be define as a summary of everything you propose to do towards achieving the goals using social media. It involves rigorous planning and analyzing your effort too. It guides your actions and allows you to know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Every posting that is done, a reply, or like, and comment should be driving toward defined goals.

Let’s see how you can create a social media marketing plan in 6 steps :

Step 1: Create social media marketing goals and objectives

The first step to any social media marketing strategy is to determine the objectives and goals that you need to achieve
Having these objectives will also allow you to quickly react when social media campaigns are not meeting your expectations.
If goals are not set, you cannot have any means to gauge your success or prove your social media return on investment (ROI). Most Important thing to take into consideration is that as you write your goals, keep your audiences in mind. Choosing the proper social media goals can make a good impact on your business.

Step 2: Use the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework

When it involves setting social media goals, we recommend using the S.M.A.R.T goal framework—goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Let’s take a glance at each of the five qualities and the way they repose on each other.

Specific Increasing your social media reach, for instance , may be a great goal. But what does that mean, exactly? does one want 50 followers, 500, or 5,000? And on which social network? By having goals that are clear, specific, and not very generic interpretation, you will definitely save on time and energy , and obtain closer to your ultimate goals that you wish to achieve.

Measurable If you cannot measure what you are hoping to achieve , your goal is not specific enough and it likely that it is not really contributing to your business.
Maybe you would like to use social media as a channel for customer service. How will you understand that it’s working or not. A rise in tweets for your brand by your customers? Decreased phone queries and emails over the span of a couple of months? When it involves success, the numbers matter. Hence just do not measure to know you were successful—know how successful you were.

Attainable Have your social accounts contributed to the present particular metric within the past? Use that information to align with your goals that are within your reach. If you have been ready to reach a previously stated goals on, say, Facebook, you know that it can be done. Take the appropriate steps to attain.

Relevant If your goal is to focus on using social media to drive traffic to your website than, say for e.g. staying on top of your Instagram mentions. Ensure that your goal is highly relevant to your business’s success.

Timely Commit to a time-frame to succeed in your goals. By giving yourself a deadline, you will be easily able to less inclined to procrastinate.  This will keep you accountable.

Now let us understand S.M.A.R.T. goal with example:

Let’s say if one of your business goals is to drive more sales for your products —and you are using Instagram to showcase your products—then a simple, S.M.A.R.T. social media goal might look like this:
“We will grow our brands Instagram following by 100 new followers per week.”
Hence the above goal is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Remember, S.M.A.R.T. goals are only truly smart if they present all the five characteristics. If you are missing on the timeliness factor, for example, then it would be impossible to determine how successful a social campaign or strategy really was.

Step 3: Conduct a social media audit

Setting the social media goals and objectives is the first and the foremost step towards crafting a winning social media marketing plan. Next comes an audit part of your existing social channels. This will help you to establish baseline targets, and then set appropriate goals for improvement.

Step 4: Create or improve your social media accounts

Once you have completed with your social media audit, now it is time to work on your online presence. Choose which networks best meet with your social media goals.

Step 5: Gather social media marketing inspiration:

Not very sure that what kind of content and information will get you the most brand engagement? For better vision, you can look to what others in your industry are sharing and use social media listening tools to see how you can distinguish yourself from competitors and appeal to prospects they might be missing.

Step 6: Create a content marketing plan aligned with a social media calendar

Having great content that you can share with your audience will be the most essential part in succeeding at social media. Your social media marketing plan should include a content marketing plan

Your content marketing plan should easily able to cater the answers of the following questions:
1. What are the types of content that you intend to post and promote on social media channels?
2. Who is your target audience for the type of content that you are going to curate?
3. How frequently you will be posting your content?
4. What resources you have that will create the content?
5. What will be the execution plan to promote the content?

Example of the promotion calendar
Source: coschedule

Your social media calendar lists the dates and times you intend to publish on social media like Instagram and Facebook posts, tweets, and other content. It is the perfect place to plan all your social media activities—from images and link sharing to blog posts and videos—encompassing both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns.
Create the calendar and then schedule your messaging in advance rather than updating regularly throughout the day.

Ensure that:
• 80% of your posts should inform, educate, and entertain your audiences
• Only 20% of your post should directly promote your brand

Conclusion:
A great Social Media Marketing campaign can help a company build a strong online reputation, increase brand awareness, encourage traffic and sales conversions. Those who do not include a digital marketing strategy before initiating a digital campaign they cannot prosper. Hashtags also plays a major role use them in campaigns regularly. With hashtags, you can: Categorize posts , Grab attention ,Drive conversions , and harness the power of popular topics on social media

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Top Benefits Of A Digital Marketing Career

Before diving deep into the benefits of learning digital marketing, let us understand the fundamentals of marketing and why it is so important

What is Marketing and why it is so important?
Different people have a different understanding of marketing, some believe it is a mode of communication while others think it is more as a conversation with brands, or just advertising. Through a variety of experiences, everyone has built their own picture of marketing.
The heart of any business success lies the way they market themselves. Marketing is a process by which products or services are introduced, and promoted to potential consumers. You may have the best products and services but without marketing, none of your potential consumers will know about it. Key activities involved in marketing are:

  1. Create your product or service offerings: It is the process of working with the marketing team and develop the offerings which value your consumers.
  2. Communicate offerings: It is the process of briefing your consumers about your offers.
  3. Deliver your offerings: It is the process of providing your offerings to the customers in a way that enhances its value.

    There are 2 types of marketing – Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing. Let us understand the difference between these two:
Traditional Marketing Digital Marketing
Involves presence on Print Ads, Outdoor banner Ads, Ads on Newspaper, Television, and RadioInvolves presence on digital mediums like Websites, Social Media sites, Internet, Emails, Blogging sites
It lacks the ability to specific targeting of
prospects or potential consumers		It can specifically target people on demographics such and age, gender, location, and even life events
It is static in nature as people cannot interact 2 ways immediatelyIt is very dynamic in nature, you can have both ways, consumers can interact, respond and share instantly
Reach is local and restricted. Only bigger brands can afford the reach globallyIt has a broader audience reach. Anyone present anywhere in the globe can reach standard budgets
Advertising is costlier, you pay out to reach people who are not your prospects at allAdvertising is very cost-effective as you only pay when the audience actually views or interacts with your brand
It is very hard to analyze and measure the results of marketingResults are easily measurable in terms of views, demographics, clicks, visits, and sales
Running campaigns is not at all flexible and convenient as once you have run your campaigns if anything didn’t work well you cannot pause and improve. Once advertising on radio and television and message did not work well you cannot modify it. moreover, your budget is wasted Running campaigns is very flexible and convenient on digital marketing channels. You can instantly analyze of what went wrong and can pause the campaign anytime immediately, rework on it and again start running your campaigns instantly

Looking at the above benefits it is sure that more and more brands are shifting their approach towards digital marketing or online marketing.
Some more reasons why your brands should exist on digital marketing channels :

  • Your competitors are on digital marketing channels and creating awareness for their brands
  • You might be purchasing online, if not you must be researching for the products you want to purchase
  • You are active on social media as well, according to the survey people mostly spend 15 hours a day on social media channels
  • Must be viewing entertainment and news channels, where you also view brand ads

    Not only you – According to the survey in 2019 there were 5 million active users on the internet who consumes the information digitally, Hence brands understand this, want digital marketers to achieve brands success online and there is a huge demand for digital marketers professionals across the globe.

What exactly is Digital Marketing?
 “Digital marketing is an art and science of  promoting your brand online to your target  right audience with the goal of increasing sales and awareness of your brand”

Who can Learn Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is not rocket science, it does not require coding or robotic skills, you just need to have a passion to learn.
People with varied digital marketing professionals can take up digital marketing courses

  • Entrepreneurs – If you are an entrepreneur you can learn to boost your own business online – not enough time to do digital marketing on your own, then also you will be benefited as you will hire a digital marketer for your brand, you can track if they are carrying out digital marketing in a right way or not for your brand, you can also design a digital marketing strategy for your brand and see if it getting executed in the right way
  • Home Maker / Part-time job seeker – If you are a homemaker and if you want to earn income from work from home you can easily grab freelancing opportunities
  • Graduates – If you are a graduate and looking to grow your career then digital marketing is a good choice for you
  • Working Professionals – If you are looking for a job change with a good payout, you can learn digital marketing skills and get well paid and vast opportunities

    Digital Marketing is an opportunity for all… Below are some benefits you get when you choose digital marketing as career options:

    1. Digital Marketing is a “FUTURE”
    Over 10 Lakh jobs are available. It is the highest Growing industry which is most in demand. Big and small – all brands need digital marketing as digitization is the need of the hour
    2. Digital Marketing is Affordable and delivers higher returns
    Pursuing a digital marketing course is immensely affordable than any other professional course. Also, you get good payouts. The starting salary is 3.5 Lacs per annum.
    3. You can start your own business or earn as Freelancer
     One of the important benefits of this flexible career is that you can start your own agency with a surprisingly low set up cost or you can be a freelancer. Literally SKY is the limit.
    4. Digital marketing makes you agile and versatile professional
    If you choose career path or specialization in digital marketing, you just need to upskill yourself, i.e. you build on existing skills in order to make a switch, which means there are plenty of choices and ongoing learning new ones, where different skills fit together. You get a chance to work in various types of brands, maybe it travel, finance, software, or anything. You always need to find out interesting ways to engage your audience. This is the most dynamic nature of a job where you never get bore
    5. Opportunity to be more experimental and creative
    Unlike other professions, you never end up doing monotonous jobs, always you have to keep upgrading with new skills and be with the latest trends and technology in this field, every day it is a new challenge to find out new innovative ideas, also as a marketer you have a freedom to design unique strategies and be creative to convey the message to your audiences
    6. Benefit from more career choices
    There is a wide range of digital marketing jobs available and you get a variety of career options. Depending on your interest and skills you can select the role whatever suits you the best.
    • Website Developer
    • Blog Writer
    • Content Writer
    • SEO Specialists/Manager
    • PPC Manager
    • Social Media Manager/Analysts
    • Affiliate Marketer
    • Youtuber
    • Ecommerce Specialist
    • Inbound Marketer
    • Email Marketer
    • Digital Marketer Analysts
    • Digital Marketer Strategist or Consultant

What are the key components that you learn with Digital Marketing Courses?

WordPress Website and Blog Creation
Web development broadly refers to the tasks associated with developing websites for hosting via intranet or internet.
You will learn how to create a business, E-commerce, portfolio website and blogs using WordPress

Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or services and gain traffic and increase brand awareness.
You will learn how you can succeed your brand with social media

SEO – Search Engine  Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO, in short, is a  set of rules that can be followed by a website (or blog) owners to optimize their websites for search engines.
You will learn how to make your brand visible on the first page of Google by doing SEO

SEM – SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
SEM is a type of sponsored online advertising that is used on a wide range of websites, including search engines, where the advertiser only pays if a web user clicks on their ad.
You will learn the tricks of optimizing the campaigns to run ads with spending less budget on Google Ads

CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform,  and engage an audience, while also promoting your brand.
You will learn how to create and amplify your content on different channels

EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is a way to reach consumers directly via electronic mail. Unlike spam, direct email marketing reaches those interested in your business’ area of expertise.
You will learn how the art of convincing audience to open your emails and increase conversion through email marketing

MONETIZING ONLINE
Learn how to make money online by having your own digital marketing channels.
You will learn how can you earn through YouTube, blogging, website, Mobile Apps through Adsense, and how to promote other people’s brands and earn online through Affiliate marketing.

WEB ANALYTICS
It is waste to only do digital marketing and not measuring the performance of each channel in Digital Marketing. With Analytics you will learn how to analyze and succeed your marketing efforts.

Kick start your digital marketing career. Enroll now to one of the best digital marketing institute and shape your future

Still confused? about how will you benefited register for a free knowledge session and get your doubts clarified

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How brands can help through digital medium to their consumers during coronavirus pandemic

There is no doubt of many people during lockdown have discovered with many DO YOURSELF (DIY) projects, it can be cooking, baking, taking care of their fitness, making your own sanitizer, beauty and whatnot. A query like how to make a homemade mask is also on the rise. Many of us now are finding ourselves doing things that would have been never anticipated, and that too in just months due to the coronavirus.

Search Interests for “how to query” have spiked drastically globally, in the past few months. While with the Coronavirus turbulence people are mostly nurturing new skills and hobbies, we should not forget that right now the reality is that a normal course of life and business is no more a regularity.

All organizations are touched by this pandemic. If we talk about search trends and consumer’s behavior towards the brand, it has also been shifted drastically, In these times we as marketers play a major role in the success of brands. Especially marketer concern is to now look that at how we can make our brands to be more helpful to their consumers.

In these difficult times, it is very important that your brands should still exist in the mind of your audience and find new opportunities whether your brand is less affected, worst affected, or not at all affected. So the question is how brands can engage?

Below are the 4 behaviors of how people are searching and how brands can help them:

1. Assembling critical information and content consumer require
This requires understanding what people are looking for and providing clear and specific information about when, how, where, and when to get the things they need.
For e.g., if you are into retail/grocery business or food supply and relevant to your brand People try to find grocery stores online who are doing home deliveries as they wish to restrict their visits to grocery stores, as nowadays they are more concern about their health and safety, and as a marketer you know people are showing more interest in searching for things like free home delivery, fresh delivery, quick delivery (Also google trends shows these queries are on the rise) with this opportunity you can provide the information like delivery time, how can they take your order on call, or if you have an app you can promote the same through social media in your area.

A classic e.g. is of Ninjacart brand – It is an India based fresh produce supply chain. It is a start-up and it is offering subsidized rates on the provisioned items like fruits and vegetables to old-age homes, orphanages, and lower economic areas in India.
If you are in a fitness business or beauty salon, you can help people with lots of tips and help with useful information.

If you are an industry that is worst affected like travel you can train travel agents or travel employees on the various products through webinars. Knowledge is never wasted, so what if for some time your business is at a halt, knowledge will always be useful once things normalize. Brands should try to utilize time with upskilling, once the things resume there can be better productivity.

Tips through which as a brand you help your consumer with critical information and content
a) Acknowledge them with the new reality – Now it is easy to get their orders delivered they no more need to visit the store.
b) Give people credible, detailed, and current scenario information about how you are operating at these time – Providing more hygiene is at your topmost priority, Delivery methods, detailed guidelines of how they can order and so on.
c) Regularly keep your consumers updated about the communications through the website, blogs, social media channels even you can update the information on Google maps/google my business.
d) During these times of emergency be flexible with your consumers regarding the cancellations, refunds and provide the best customer services – This can be a long-term impact for your brand, you the consumer will always remember you for good deeds in critical times.

2. Discovering new potentials consumers and nurturing relationships
In the current scenario we are physically apart but not virtually. Thanks to the so diverse options we have to connect through the virtual world. Related to your industry you can identify what people are discovering about and you can nurture the relationships. For instance, on YouTube, you can provide your consumers “with me videos” (According to Google trends which have risen in searches on YouTube). Where people are filming with doing ordinary tasks like cleaning, cooking, also keeping themselves fit through yoga or workouts. Many celebrities and film making production companies artists are already involved in this type of activity, especially in India.

Even Singers releasing their playback songs video and creating YouTube channels. Recently on 14th May 2020, Asha Bhosle Ji released her YouTube channel – “Asha Bhosle Official”. Many spiritual leaders like Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Ji are conducting free Meditations and there are millions of people who connect with them throughout the globe. You can also think of how your brand can nurture the relationship with your consumers.

Another classic e.g. is “Study with me” – again this is the popular search term which is most searched on YouTube, especially in countries like Singapore, Hongkong, and South Korea.
Educational institutes can provide good learning videos, for e.g. nowadays people understand digital marketing, and hence the demand to learn digital marketing courses is in demand. Digital marketing institutes can help the brand to really people understand about digital marketing and also provide some important webinars on the same to boost their interest and really discover the new potentials.

Tips through which you can connect with communities and connections
a) Look out for the innovative ways through which you can connect with your consumers locally and globally.
b) Deliberate whether your brand can help with a role play in either creating or enhancing shared experiences virtually.

3) Praising everyday heroes who are serving us
We know many news channels are informing us of how our heroes are working for us endangering their lives that too day and night. It can be healthcare staff like doctors, nurses, frontline cashiers, or delivery people who are serving us even when everything is locked down.

For instance, you can take e.g. of HDFC bank releasing the official video “Hum Haar Nahi Maanenge”. They dedicated this song to the superheroes which depict strength, togetherness, and hope. You can view the video on – https://youtu.be/2VqBlZZ4H6E
They got a good response with 20 million+ views in 10 days, India is standing strong and saying “Hum Haar Nahi Maanenge”

Similarly, Hongkong HSBSC bank which ran the display on buildings giving thanks to unsung heroes. You can watch on – https://youtu.be/8wzp0KmWtYU

Tips through which you can praise the heroes
a) Look for people who are helping citizens in such critical times, find ways to support and celebrate them.
b) Show some gratitude and applaud, also consider some heroes who are in your locality or employees.

4. Taking care of others and yourself too.
As you know with this unpredicted situation people often experience boredom, anxiety, and uncertainty, help people to take care of their physiological needs too. You can provide various hobby tips like painting, music to conduct virtual games, quizzes, competitions which they can participate by collaborating them through webinar platforms, and watch parties. Show people that you care about their wellbeing.

Even if the situation normalizes it is difficult that people will immediately visit malls or movie theatres. You can conduct virtual events.

For e.g. the famous Viviana Mall in Mumbai is conducting various events like music nights, game nights

At another instance – Book my show conducting free events for entertainment and hobbies for an instance you can find Shamak Davar free different style of dance classes session on Instagram

HDFC bank also engaging their consumers with FIN-Gage campaigns where they are having many DIY short 3 min videos, competition, games, even they are giving away the prizes to the winners.

Tips for how brands can help the consumer to enrich their lives
a). With advanced technologies, you can have virtual collaboration all around the world.

Conclusion – We shall overcome, but still normal will not be as normal as previously it used to be, we have to find an alternative and life should move on. Connecting through Digital medium is the best way

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How Google Gallery Ads can be useful for your business

Google Gallery ads are interactive ads that contain a standard text headline and a display URL, it will also show swipeable image carousels— much like the ones users often see in their Facebook and Instagram feeds.

It is a proven result that with a Facebook Ads campaign spearheaded by carousel ads, they approximately achieved a 16x improvement. You can only view on mobile device top of the Search engine result page (SERP)

Google Gallery Ads

With Google Gallery ads – In addition to the ad’s headline, each individual image is accompanied by a tagline. The headline which redirects people to your landing page remains at the top of the screen as the user swipes through your carousel. You can include a minimum of four images and a maximum of eight, and each tagline has limitations of 70 characters 

Discovery ads are used to accomplish more effectively to communicate the value of your business.

Say for e.g. smartphone users in particular—turn to Google for information. When they  have problems, queries, or desires, they search on Google to learn more about the products and services. Whether you’re a hungover college kid looking for the best breakfast sandwich in town or an overworked business owner searching for an online advertising management software, it’s more than likely that you’re consulting Google for help.

How you will be charged for Discovery Ads?

Advertisers will be charged in two ways:

  • Cost per Click
    Every time when user will click on ads the advertiser will be charged
  • Cost per swipe
    If the user does not click on the headline but swipes through more then 3 images then the advertiser will be charged. If the user clicks on ads and also more then 3 images in that case user will be only charged once.

What are the benefits of Gallery ads?

Whether you’re aiming to drive sales or generate leads , gallery ads are designed to combine search with the creative display

  • The human brain processes imagery 60,000 times faster than text.
  • Consumers are more likely to retain content that incorporates visual imagery.
  • 55% of millennials say visuals are the most important part of shopping on mobile.
  • People recall 80% of what they see against 20% of what they read.

Who can benefit from using Gallery ads

Gallery ads are designed with consumer brands in mind, Both B2C and B2B companies can make effective use of them. Let’s start with B2C. Restaurants, gyms, hotels, car dealers, travel agencies, spas—if you sell something that lends itself naturally to visual images, you should give gallery ads a shot.

imagine you’re in charge of the paid search efforts for a web development company that helps small businesses build landing pages for their ad campaigns. As appealing and intuitive as your UI of the landing page may be, screenshots of it probably won’t make for the most appealing ad. but if you provide representations of the different benefits you provide—better Quality Scores, higher conversion rates, lower CPA—you could go a long way towards communicating the value of your product and branding your business as a friendly resource. So choose this feature wisely

From August 2019, gallery ads are only shown to limited advertisers, right now it is in beta version

Conclusion

 Adapt Gallery ads as soon as it is available, the earlier you use you will have a greater advantage over your competition. Getting early in the process will definitely get you good rewards.

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