5 Tips on How to Maximize Social-Media Efforts With a Small Team

No matter how small your business is, a good, strong social media strategy should be a vital part of your marketing efforts. An October 2015 study by Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults surveyed use social networking sites, which means that if your business doesn’t have a presence there, you’re missing out on two-thirds of the U.S. population.

With dozens of social avenues to choose from, though, social media management may seem overwhelming, especially for a small business. Below are some tools and tips to effectively manage social media for your business, no matter how lean your team is.

1. DEVISE A MANAGEABLE STRATEGY.

Before diving in and signing up for every channel with a social aspect, get organized and be realistic about your capabilities, looking at the following categories:

• Hours per week available for social media management: This will set expectations about what you should prioritize and how many channels you should manage. Critical tasks that should be taken into account for effective social media management include:
• Design: This includes not only signing up for and populating your page with the essential elements but working with a designer to optimize graphics for aspects such as profile banners, profile pictures, and images for shared content.
• Content creation: This includes strategizing and writing posts, as well as working across multiple departments to publicize promotions.
• Content-engagement monitoring and interaction with followers: If your brand experiences negative sentiment online, or you anticipate customer service needs through these channels, allot time accordingly. To keep customers engaged, your social media manager should also be responding to comments and answering questions.
• Analytics: Monitoring of analytics, which includes sales, followers, engagement and sentiment, is imperative to refine content strategy and adjust social media management tactics for your business.
• Determining your target audience: If your product is built for businesses, look at professional sites such as LinkedIn to focus on. If you’re a storefront, establishing a presence on Google+ is essential to ensure you are search-engine-friendly. Facebook is the behemoth social media mainstay, so it should be on your list of must-have social channels.
• Determining your message: Besides increased sales, what do you want to achieve with your social media presence? Do you want your channels to act as an additional form of customer support? Do you want to distribute engaging content in hopes of its getting shared? Do you want to make new connections with leaders in your industry? Deciding on your goals will shape the messages of your channels, which should be unique to each outlet’s specific audience. As a fellowEntrepreneur writer mentioned, posting the same content repeatedly leaves followers less engaged.

2. USE TOOLS TO SAVE YOU TIME.

Now that you have a strategy in place and know what social media channels you’ll use, what type of messaging you want to disseminate and how you’re going to monitor your successes and areas for improvement, you’ll next need to put your approach into action. Thankfully, social media monitoring tools save you time as you’re managing channels and evolving a strategy.

3. USE FREE ANALYTICS PROVIDED BY EACH CHANNEL.

Often, social media in-house analytics tools provided by social media channels, such as those outlined by Social Media Examiner, are some of the most effective ways to keep track of data. Facebook Analytics, for example, shows page managers everything from the number of visitors at varying times of the day to data on how many people carried out a negative action — such as unliking a page — when interacting with a specific post.

Pinterest analytics show you the type of content your users love the most, while Twitter shows you not only yours and customers’ top Tweets but impressions and engagement. Google Analytics will show you what channels are driving traffic to your website and resulting in sales. Explore the free analytics of whatever sites you’re using, and use those insights to craft better content and optimize frequency of distribution.

4. USE FREE TOOLS TO MANAGE MULTIPLE CHANNELS.

While you can use software such as Excel to keep track of messaging and ensure you’re creating unique content for each channel, a multi-channel management application can display multiple feeds at once, saving you the pain of logging into myriad sites and clicking multiple windows.

Free social media multi-channel management services, such as those endorsed by the experts here, include Hootsuite and Buffer; and pull networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, which can go into one easy-to-read window. Some, like Hootsuite, will even display additional data besides your channel content, such as interactions with your business from other brands.

5. MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA PROGRESS EASILY SHAREABLE WITH YOUR TEAM.

Since social media is, well, social, you’ll want to make your strategy transparent to your team. This will not only garner you insight and suggestions from the social media users who make up your company but will incentivize them to get involved and boost your engagement by participating on your social channels.

Free project management tools such as Trello and Slack, mentioned by Social Media Today, allow you to display tasks to your team, while also allowing for global discussion.

Social media may be free, but your time is highly valuable. Continue to refine and optimize your social media strategy to maximize results, while saving your business money by taking advantage of free applications.

 Source : http://bit.ly/2dEu6VS

3 Keys to Create Engaging Content for More Customers and Sales

One of the most exciting fields for startups right now is content marketing. This engaging way to spread the word about your business has continued to grow as different forms of content gain popularity. Though it all started with the typical blog, companies are now using various forms of content marketing like podcasts to drive more traffic.

This form of marketing is hard to master and with the dozens of verticals involved, it’s rare to come across a valid informational source. That is why Jason Quey started the Content Promotion Summit, an online event that is bringing together over 60 of the world’s best content marketers.

This free event that started July 25, was aimed at teaching the ins and outs of blogging, podcasts, public relations and more. If you’re looking to start with the basics, below are three keys to creating engaging content to get more customers:

1. Develop a strategy.

Every house needs a foundation. The same goes for your content marketing. Entrepreneurs creating a blog need to lay out a strategy that focuses on their goals.

As an example, Drift, a messaging app that helps you grow your business, utilizes their blog to create a voice around sales, marketing and customer acquisition. In under eight months, their blog has grown to over 30,000 monthly visitors without a budget, making their company a thought leader in messaging apps.

To develop your strategy, I suggest reading the Grow and Convert blog where Benji Hyam details the Google Suggested Search hack. This basically involves long tail search terms focused on how-to questions, comparisons, and questions.

2. Gain credibility.

You have the right foundation for your content strategy. Now you will want to know how to create the content to execute on that strategy.

There are different ways to establish credibility and some ways are better than others. Getting press attention, interviewing influencers in your industry, blogging on other company blogs and answering questions online are all ways to gain credibility.

As an example, at my startup Sourcify where we help entrepreneurs find the right manufacturer in minutes, we like answering specific questions on Quora that address the pain point we are solving. This not only gets us traffic but also boosts credibility as people upvote our answers.

3. Utilize social media.

Social media is one of the best ways to share your content. With that said, social media is all about engagement and far too many companies overlook this fact. Companies today post on social like they’re talking to a brick wall.

Hillel Fuld, one of the world’s top tech bloggers and co-founder ofZCast recently told me a story of when Gary Vaynerchuck explained the return on investment of social media. He described social media as being your mom. Mothers are always there to compliment their children and instill confidence. Social media is there to do the same for your customers.

Though content marketing may not show immediate results or returns, it is a must in today’s world of online marketing. By growing your blog or starting a podcast, you’ll see long term growth and gains that you wouldn’t have imagined possible. You could be invited to speak at major events or write for major publications, but if you don’t start now, who knows where your content could lead you.

 Source : http://entm.ag/2bC8CqZ

5 Impacts a Social Media Campaign Can Have on Your Brand

Despite the plethora of studies, statistics and reports showing that an effective social media campaign has a positive impact on building a brand, many businesspeople (including marketing professionals) remain in a foggy “I know I should be using social media, but I’m not sure how or why” state. According to one report by Social Media Examiner, 85 percent of marketers who use social media aren’t clear on which social media tools would work best for their business.

To see the big picture of how social media can specifically help you, consider these five impacts a social media campaign can have on your personal or business brand.

1. Enhanced brand recognition and thought leadership. 

It’s simple math: The more frequently you show up on social media, the greater your brand exposure and the more recognizable (and credible) your company, personal brand, product and business become.

For example, let’s say you want to get more gigs as a speaker for your industry’s top events and conferences. Today, most meeting planners start their search on Google. If you come up -- not once, but dozens of times -- as an expert, you’re more likely to be seen as a thought leader and invited to speak. You can’t buy that type of publicity. Well, actually you can, but it’s expensive. It’s much better to get it for free through the smart use of social media.

2. Increased trust through leveraged credibility.

 Let’s say a major influencer in your industry retweets you, links to a blog post you’ve written or interviews you for an article on their website. What does this say about your brand to their audience -- and yours? Fundamentally it’s a thumbs-up that proclaims “We have enough trust in your expertise to put our brand behind yours.” That’s leveraged credibility, and it helps create the kind of trust necessary for brand success. A 2009 study from Mext Consulting showed that if consumers trust a brand:

• 83 percent will recommend it.
• 82 percent will use its products and services frequently.
• 78 percent will look to it first for the thing they want.
• 50 percent will pay more for its products and services.

3. Competitive advantage in cold conversions. 

The third social media marketing bottom line for your business or brand is a competitive advantage in converting visitors who come to you cold via internet search (as opposed to through referral or personal contact) into members of your tribe. Let’s say a potential customer has narrowed the field down to you and one other competitor. If you have an active (and quality) social media presence (be it with a blog, Pinterest, LinkedIn or another channel), and your competitor has a weak social media presence, which brand do you think is going to catch their attention? And the answer is ... the one with the more engaging social media.

While this might not be the only criterion that will factor into their choice, we know social media does influence customers’ decision making. A 2015 report -- “Navigating the New Digital Divide” -- from Deloitte noted that customers who use social media to shop before or during a visit to a store are 29 percent more likely to make a purchase that same day. A 2011 study from the ODM Group showed that 74 percent of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchasing decisions.

4. Greater percentage of referrals closed. 

A decade ago, if you were looking for a consultant in change management to facilitate your annual off-site retreat, you’d call up a few of your colleagues and ask for some recommendations.

Next, with your list in hand, you’d call (most likely from your land line) each of the candidates, interviews them and ask to be sent (through the mail) some marketing materials. After perusing their various promotional pamphlets, you’d narrow it down to a few finalists and ask them to come in for a second interview. Then you’d make your decision and contract someone to do the job.

Today, if you’re looking for a consultant in change management to facilitate your annual off-site retreat, you search the keywords “change management consultant,” and more than 26 million results pop up. You can eliminate about half the results on the first few pages because you can tell at a glance they don’t match what you’re looking for (job postings, Wikipedia entries, white papers etc.) and are left with six to 10 others that seem to fit the bill.

Next, you click through to each potential provider and, if you’re a typical user according to the Nielsen Norman Group, you spend less than a minute on each site -- 59 seconds, to be precise. A few consultants make the case within that time frame for why you should stay longer, by impressing you with their:

• Obvious expertise
• Social proof
• Overall credibility
• Clear brand visuals and messages
• Content that shows competency
• Easy user navigation

Having identified one to three consultants who look promising, for each of these, you might look at their LinkedIn profile, check out their Twitter feed, view one of their videos on YouTube or listen to their podcast, read a couple of their blog posts or skim through an Ebook, and, just for good measure, search their names. Satisfied that they’re serious players in the field, you fill out the contact form on their website.

You get a response back and, via TimeTrade, vCita or other online scheduling software, you arrange a time to talk by phone. At the top of the call, they begin telling you about who they are and what they do. Politely, you stop them, saying, “There’s no need to cover all that. I’ve already searched you and been to your website. What I need to know is this: Do you have experience facilitating these types of off-sites with some of the participants joining remotely from China?”

You repeat this process with all the finalists, make your decision and contact your choice. They send you an electronic contract to sign and you send them a deposit on PayPal.

The moral of this story is that the nature of referral marketing has changed dramatically, and like it or not, social media has become a factor. Even when someone you know refers a potential client to you, they’re likely to begin the evaluation process online. Once you’ve passed that hurdle, then and only then will they feel comfortable enough to reach out and begin a dialogue.

5. More cash and customers. 

Finally, while social media is by no means a total solution to increasing your sales, it can’t hurt. In fact, research from social sales expert Jim Keenan showed that in 2012, nearly 79 percent of salespeople who used social media in their selling process had better results than their counterparts who weren’t using it.

The takeaway here is that social media can act both as a flag to alert potential clients to your brand and as a funnel to flow those same people into your website, where it then becomes your job to convert them.

 Source: http://bit.ly/2aVIMTV

4 Do's and 4 Don'ts for Businesses Using Social Media

As a business owner, you know the importance of social media as a way to make a connection between your business and customers. Whenever potential clients are looking for a new product or service, they generally start their search on social media, not only to learn more about your brand, but also to see what others are saying about a brand or business.

While more companies are creating social media strategies in their marketing, not every strategy is effective.

If you want to guarantee a more effective strategy, Caitlin Burns, a New York-based business strategist for media companies, has outlined a few social media tactics for brands to definitely use and ones to avoid.

1. Know who you are.

Understand your identity, your brand's identity and the voice of who is speaking on any social media platform. You’re the one who knows your product, production, company or brand best. Being able to communicate that is the first thing I recommend for clients so that on whatever platform they use, people have a sense of who is doing the speaking. The rest of the tactics come down to language and specific things that you might do to turn a phrase on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

2. Don't wait until after the fact.

You don’t want to find yourself without a sense of what’s coming next, or responding to controversy in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s coming from the same person who created a status update or tweet. You can get in a lot of trouble if you say one very appealing thing, but you can’t replicate it. Another problem is if what you say goes against what you do in the company.

3. Understand your audience.

It’s important to know who you’re targeting. What do they do? When do they live online? With a savvy social media expert, you’ll be able to figure these things out. Understanding your goals will allow you to see how your successes and failures are working -- social media allows you to see that faster than any other platform.

4. Don't make assumptions about your audience.

It is a mistake to think your audience is going to act a certain way just because you think they will. Treat your audience as a subject, not as an object. Your work on social media is a dialogue, a conversation between you and that individual.

Look at how your audience is changing. Learn about them by communicating with your social media team on a regular basis. They are the front-line people who can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t -- what people are really engaging with and what they couldn’t care less about. This is an opportunity to quickly understand how your brand is being received. 

5. Plan ahead.

Unless you yourself are a savvy social media strategist, it’s probably worth the energy and expense to bring in someone who is an expert. You need someone who is immersed in these platforms to help you measure your goals. Whether your team is very experienced or inexperienced in an application, a good strategy is going to put you in a great place to execute. 

6. Don’t assume that your presence on social media means you know everything about it.

Having a personal account is not the same thing as understanding the scope of what Facebook ads and Twitter-promoted posts can do. Because these platforms are refining and changing these specific things all the time, having an expert on call is going to save you a lot of heartache in the future. It helps to have someone whose job it is to stay up to date on what’s going on. 

7. Adopt a test and learn methodology.

Start out with your strategist and social media team to test the waters. Put out a variety of concepts to see what is working with your audience and what isn’t. The more you test out an idea and see if that hypothesis is validated by audience data -- which you can get very easily from social media platforms -- the better feature concept you’re going to be able to build. Learn what works and budget away from the things that don’t. 

8. Don’t get comfortable.

You want to make sure that you’re engaging in a creative experiment to communicate with other people. If I’m out with friends every Friday and tell the same story over and over again, I wouldn’t have friends to go out with on Fridays for very long. You want to keep engaging and developing partnerships with relevant communities. They can help you understand the broad strokes of all the things they’re interested in, which will help you keep your brand interesting. 

Finally, take a hard look at your social media strategy and make changes and additions where necessary. Always keep in mind that social media can potentially make or break your business. You want to use the strategies that drive people toward you and your business and make them come back for more.

  Source: http://entm.ag/29UYNI3

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6 Ways Startups Waste Money on Marketing

Marketing will be where the majority of startups spend most of their budgets. The average B2B marketer spends 42 percent of their budgets on marketing. Yet there are so many startups that don’t always get the results they want simply because most of their dollars are being wasted. If you are failing due to ineffective tactics and tools, this guide is going to show you some of the most common mistakes you may already be making, and how to turn things around.

Building a Following on Social Media

Your marketing budget should be spent partly on social media. But so many startups are convinced that building a following is going to lead to success. The problem with this is that social media reach is no longer what’s best for business. Facebook has seen organic reach crippled. Investing all this time into building a following is nearly pointless because what you’ll quickly discover is that you can have 100 likes on Facebook yet still make more money through advertising than someone with a thousand likes.

When only a fraction of your following will ever see your posts, building a following on social media is an entirely fruitless pursuit, so save your money.

Building a following remains important, but it should come through purchases of your products not through ‘like’ building campaigns.

Giving Up Too Soon

Startup owners believe that their product is so great that it’s sure to gain traction within a matter of days. Many small businesses begin with a twinkle in their eye and then realize they are not going to have an easy time.

Rather than persevering, they give up too soon. Many small business owners begin with high expectations and then when these aren’t met they believe it’s a problem with their business. You have unrealistic expectations if you demand that your business becomes a success within two years.

Not Understanding Your Audience

You can target any niche in the world with advanced marketing and advertising tools these days. To make the most of this you have to actually understand your audience, though. It’s necessary to have the image of your perfect customer, along with their likes/dislikes, and where they hang out.

If you are unable to understand your target audience, your targeting is always going to be slightly off. Conduct customer research before you start to waste your marketing dollars.

You Have No Idea How You Attracted Your Loyal Customers

The most loyal customers in your brand will be the ones who purchase every new product or service without question. These are the people you can rely on. At the same time, you need to know how you got them in the first place. It’s important for you to have a good idea for how you found your most loyal customers, so you can continue to replicate these tactics.

With most startups, the top fifth of your customers may account for up to 70 percent of your overall revenue, and this won’t change much as you grow.

Wagering Everything on One Marketing Campaign

Marketing is a game of trial and error whether you’re a small business or a large business. There are lots of things you can try and part of your growth period is to test out all these different tactics. But it’s difficult to do this when you’re wagering your entire marketing budget on a single campaign.

Don’t give yourself one shot to make your startup work. There’s a time and a place for this, but it’s not now. The best way to handle marketing as a startup is to start with extremely small scale tests.

Scaling up your marketing efforts should be done with extreme caution and only when you are sure that you are actually getting results. If it doesn’t work at a small level, it’s certainly not going to work at a higher spending level.

Not Tracking Your Results Well Enough

And then there are times where you are simply not tracking your results well enough. This tends to happen when startups gain a little bit of success in the beginning. They become so caught up in their success that they forget to track their results and compare them against the past.

Only by keeping track of your marketing results can you keep an accurate record of what works and what doesn’t. Without accurate measurements, you are going to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1VjevgT

What Are the Top Three Things an Angel Investor Looks For?

Today, I am starting a new column here at Small Business Trends. In addition to my regular weekly articles that focus on data-driven discussions of entrepreneurship, I am going to cover my experience as an angel investor in two new monthly columns. Below, we will focus on the top three things that angel investors look for when evaluating a potential investment in a startup company.

What Does an Angel Investor Look For?

A Business Addressing a Real Customer Problem

The first thing I look at when evaluating whether or not to invest in someone else’s startup company is whether the company is responding to serious customer pain point. Selling a new product in a new company is very difficult. But if the startup is addressing a true problem that customers have, it will stand a chance of succeeding.

For example, I recently invested in a company which produces a biosensor that allows growers of fresh produce to identify pathogens, like Listeria, in minutes, not days. Faster identification of pathogens saves both money and lives, both of which are important to growers.

A Company Offering a Dramatically Better Solution than Competitors

The second thing I look for is the company’s solution to the customer’s problem. The odds of the company’s success are much higher when the entrepreneur is offering a dramatically better solution than other alternatives.

For instance, one of my portfolio companies uses artificial intelligence to allow salespeople to develop customized openings for email messages. The company’s product allows sales people to create email messages with three times higher click-through rates than templated messages. And it allows the sales people to create the message in less than half the time it takes to do it manually.

A six-fold increase in the number of “click-throughs” per minute of crafting time is a major improvement to companies undertaking email sales.

A Business-Led by an Experienced Entrepreneur

The third thing I look for is startup experience. As someone who has researched and taught entrepreneurship for 25 years, I can tell you one thing for sure. Much of what it takes to be a successful company founder cannot be learned in school or working for someone else. It is learned by doing.

That is why I look for entrepreneurs who have started at least one previous business with a successful exit. The exit doesn’t have to be huge. But the act of building a company and selling it to someone else for a reasonable return on the entrepreneur’s time and the investors’ capital already puts a founder in rare company.

More importantly, that outcome indicates to me that the person knows several things that inexperienced entrepreneurs might not know. For instance, the founder of one of my portfolio companies, had three previous exits, including a company he sold in 2011. That experience was a big draw for me when I investigated financing the company.

There are many more things I will investigate before I make an investment decision — whether I like and trust the founder; whether the entrepreneur can sell; whether the team is complete; whether the company’s business model makes sense; whether the idea is scalable; whether the market is large enough ; and whether there is sustainable competitive advantage, among other things.

But if I had to list the top three things an angel investor looks for when making investments — it’s these three items identified above.

    Source:http://bit.ly/1SGWhPP

6 SOCIAL MEDIA TRUTHS EVERY BUSINESS PIONEER SHOULD UNDERSTAND

The modern business owner cannot assume a website is the only thing a company requires to tide through this digital era.

Two of the most volatile worlds collide when we mix business with the Internet. The former has to heavily depend on the latter to grow, stay afloat and survive in the competitive world of marketing.

Online marketing has become one of the most popular and efficient ways to not just reach new customers but also to understand and evaluate current trends and requirements. The modern business owner cannot assume a website is the only thing a company requires to tide through this digital era.

Social media is a powerful weapon in the field of marketing and is a double-edged sword at that. If used correctly, it can lead to enormous growth and positive publicity; whereas, if left unsupervised and unmonitored, it can be the cause for a downfall in no time.

There are a number of things one must keep in mind while investing time and money in online marketing. The few truths of the ever-changing world of social media, which one must abide by, are noted in this blog post.

Planning your marketing strategy

Out of the main giants of social media, the one that is often the most neglected is the one that may have the most potential if utilized in the right way. Google Plus must be used optimally when planning your online marketing strategy. It may still be in its infancy, even now, and is usually overshadowed by bigger fish in the social media field like Facebook or Twitter, but it has amassed a niche crowd in a short span of time.

Google Plus has the advantage of being linked with other Google services and will ultimately be able to provide your ad campaign with a wider audience with less investment of energy and resources.

Google Plus allows a company to start off its social media campaign in fresh light and with a clean slate. It has unique features such as “huddle” and “circles,” which allow for the grouping together of like-minded people, creating a ready consumer base for your idea/service/product.

Building your brand online

The reach provided to companies by social media platforms is unimaginable. Ranging from the youth right up to centenarians, everyone is taking to these websites and online portals to connect, share, debate and discuss events and ideas.

While it is not an easy task to get noticed and make a dent on the shiny, polished exterior of this world, once you do manage to crack the code to what catches the eye of your target audience, you will sail through. In order to do so, you have to be well aware of what makes your product(s)/service(s) better than your competitors.

Every day you do not use social media platforms, your rivals are getting the better of it and, ultimately, gaining from the exposure — not just in terms of reputation but also regarding consumer base and loyalty.

Building your brand online is the way to go in this day and age of flux. Review reporting is an ingenious method to gauge your growth and study trends which could become a rage in the future. This can only be done if you are a part of the cult that believes in social media advertising.

Increase your digital presence

Many people, if not most, who use the Internet usually have Facebook and/or Twitter and Google Plus accounts. This ready customer pool is always accepting of unique things or ideas that have potential.

Keeping your brand visible in these circles will increase your digital presence by multiple folds. Social media spreads across laptops, tablets and smartphones. This not only improves your visibility but also increases your reach. The number of people using smartphones has increased; and, simultaneously, the digital market has expanded.

Boost traffic with SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important aspect of maintaining your online presence. Many SEO experts say the easiest way to hide a dead company is in the third page of Google’s search results, and those words couldn’t be truer.

If your company doesn’t get listed on the first page then you automatically lose against your competitors who do. Once you begin to get clicks on your website and climb the rankings, your focus should shift to ensuring that the clicks are converted into actual customers. This will boost the traffic on your website and help your business grow.

Combine traditional and digital marketing approaches

While engaging in social media, the tertiary benefit is that your offline play becomes much stronger. This marrying of traditional and digital marketing is the key to a successful campaign.

The online strategy will increase your visibility and keep your product/service fresh in the minds of your target audience so that the traditional methods of advertising can build on a pre-established consumer base.

Grow your customer base

The biggest, and possibly the most underused, advantage of marketing via a social media platform is that every single share, like or comment creates a channel for your product/service’s page or post to be featured on the newsfeeds of thousands of people you didn’t even know had the potential to become your customers.

This vast untapped pool of virtual population can be used to not just boost click rates on your website but also, in the long run, increase the number of loyal and happy customers your company serves.

Engaging in conversations on posts over social media with those who take the time to give you an appraisal, and taking concrete steps to solve their grievances, will help you receive the goodwill of people you did not even know would stumble upon your post.

Social media marketing is a tough nut to crack; but once you realize how powerful a tool it can be and how gigantic the potential is, you will waste no time utilizing this approach as a main method of advertising. Social media has sealed its position as one of the most important ways to reach millions of customers — and with minimal resources and investment needed. It allows you to reinvent your marketing strategy every few months, or years; and the best thing about the Internet is that, although it can be ruthless at times, it is also very forgiving. You can’t help but be noticed when you use the Internet as a tool to grow your business if you do it right.

  Source: http://bit.ly/1UJgXN6

Why marketers can't ignore mobile and how they can integrate it into their strategies

Given the dramatic rise of mobile over the last several years — with even more dramatic growth coming, according to a recent Cisco report — marketers of all stripes should be integrating mobile into their marketing strategies. In the past five years alone, mobile has cemented itself as a strong marketing tactic. And with nearly two-thirds of Americans owning smartphones, it's clear that if advertisers want to reach consumers, mobile should be the first place they try. 

Cisco's Visual Networking Index white paper, which it released in February, painted a fairly bright picture for the mobile category, providing a global mobile data traffic forecast for 2015 to 2020. Some eye-popping data points about the rise of mobile include:

• Global mobile data traffic grew 74% in 2015, reaching 3.7 exabytes per month,
• Mobile data traffic has grown 4,000-fold over the past 10 years,
• And it has grown almost 400-million-fold over the past 15 years.

Going a step further, Cisco provided some milestone expectations for 2020:

• Global monthly data traffic will be 30.6 exabytes (compared to the 3.7 monthly exabytes at the end of last year),
• Mobile connected devices per capita will reach 1.5,
• A majority (75%) of global mobile data traffic will be video,
• And smartphones will account for 80% of mobile data traffic.

Given those numbers, it is more than clear that mobile marketing is a channel that simply cannot be ignored. It has already become a part of many other marketing channels including email, website marketing and search, among others.

Mobile is becoming such a critical marketing element, and Noah Jessop, head of data for Liquid PCH, told Marketing Dive that except for situations where businesses are selling high-value products, "where the shopper requires a large amount of information and coaxing before making their purchase," mobile should and needs to fit into virtually all marketing strategies right now.

"Mobile is critical — Google has finally noted that more than half of searches are conducted on mobile, and this will only go up as computing becomes even more ubiquitous," Jessop said. "The shift to mobile is only going to increase — and unprepared marketers will be left trying to catch up."

Making mobile part of an overall marketing strategy

One challenge with creating any marketing strategy is making budget and time decisions for the different marketing channels and activities involved. For instance, More time spent on email means less time for social media, and more money spent on paid search might mean less budget space for third-party creative talent.

Jessop pointed out the approach to mobile is no different than any other strategy decision. Though "there is no 'one-size-fits-all' when budgeting time and resources for mobile — the most important thing is to craft the connection with your potential customer in the best way possible," he said.

As many marketers are finding mobile to be the best connection with potential customers, Jessop advised marketers to watch out for two major challenges when creating a mobile marketing strategy.

1. When adding mobile to the marketing mix, don’t forget to optimize for mobile. He explained, for example, “Hollywood sometimes will spend 100% of their budget on mobile to promote a new movie opening. But the teams that make previews are still used to the old format — previews that open with a few seconds of black, a few seconds of title screens, as contrasted to the immediate, stackable experience that mobile dictates. In this case, Hollywood has the right idea of getting their advertising where eyes are going, but they’re leaving out a crucial component: making that mobile experience user-friendly.”

2. Be sure to recognize real-time opportunities to leverage the power of mobile. One way to achieve this, he suggested, is through a hyper-targeted, in-store mobile ad, which can serve as the best “real estate” for brands battling for attention in today’s hyper-connected world.

The value of mobile marketing

A key advantage of mobile marketing is the ability to reach people in different contexts, such as at the moment of price comparison in a brick-and-mortar location, or maybe just away from the office.

In the first case — the price comparison — Jessop said the mobile exposure can make it easier to “follow the digital bread crumbs” to figure out if the marketing message worked. He stated, “For example when we work with a retailer or quick serve restaurant on mobile marketing, we can connect the exposed mobile IDs to a panel of users who have opted in to sharing their location — and ultimately conclude if the campaign drove customers to the store.”

Reaching people away from the office is of value to both B2B and B2C marketers. Making a marketing touch point out of the office context might find someone who is more open to listening to the message.

“Rather than barraging the work inbox during the busiest part of her day,” Jessop said, “mobile paid media can be used to find the same executive during a weekend at home on her iPad.”

One important thing to remember, he said, is to "use the data you already have, about the customers who you know already love your product or service" — it might lead you to insights about potential new customers.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1RwlQm7