Archives for December 2013

The holiday season is almost upon us, show a bit of Christmas spirit by prepping up your Facebook page with holiday-themed updates. Why? Because almost everyone’s in the mood to spend more. A survey conducted by Mashable revealed that virtually 65% of people look into social media sites to find the perfect gift. You do not want to miss the perfect opportunity to market your business during one of the biggest holidays of the year.

Make the most out of your Facebook page by eliciting excitement! This can be done in a variety of ways including offering awesome freebies, holiday discounts, deals, events and business promotions! Rev start your marketing campaign just in time for Christmas, we’ve listed down practical ways to get people talking about your Facebook page during the holiday season:

Starting With Your Cover Photo

Your Facebook cover photo is the first thing people see when they check your page so it pays to make the photo as compelling or as inviting as you can. Your cover photo isn’t just there to draw attention, it’s a representation of your brand. It should reflect the season because it will motivate people into checking out your page often. Remember, people are looking into social media sites to find great deals and gift ideas during the holiday season so it’s worth keeping your page as fresh as you can to get people in the mood to spend more money on your business.

Build Your Own Giveaway App

Giveaway apps are easily the most popular way to compel people to participate in any reward program or contest you have for the season. Whether you are planning to offer Facebook-only contests for Cyber Monday or give discount coupons to giveaway for Christmas, an especially made app is a great way to simplify the mechanics and manage the entries of contest participants.

Highlight Popular Products

Here’s a clever way to market your products without looking like you are pushing it into people’s faces: showcase your star products in an app. This will do two things. First, it will grab people’s attention and second, it will help drive online and in-store sales. Marketing during the season isn’t just about offering irresistible deals or promos, you need to make it easy for people to actually purchase your products. An app that will direct interested people into checking out your popular products takes away all the guesswork of searching for the products online.

Roll Out Holiday-Themed Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to widen your network even further. We recommend trying this out at least once just to see if this will enhance your marketing campaign. If you are willing to explore the Facebook ads option, it’s important to start with the basics: drawing out your budget. You don’t need to spend a fortune on these ads especially if you are on the fence about the idea to begin with. Sponsored posts and sponsored stories are great ways to start. A word of caution, it’s easy to overdo these ads. If you don’t want to turn people off, do not bombard them with too much ads.

Christmas season is the perfect time to get people buying and Facebook is an excellent tool to help you cash in during special holidays. Fortunately, Facebook recently adjusted its promotional guidelines to give business owners more flexibility, in terms of how they want to run their promotional deals. From customized Facebook apps to offering giveaways, there are several ways to implement your marketing strategies effectively without turning people off.

One of the most glaring differences between large scale and small-scale businesses is that the former tend not deliver a more personalized shopping experience with customers. This is because they deal with so many people at a time that adding a personal touch with every transaction is seen as impractical.

The fact is, while many factors come to play to motivate people into making a purchase, offering personalized buying experience is one of those things that are often overlooked but makes a total difference when done right. Once you are able to make a more personal connection from your target audience, you will know that it’s well worth the effort. Today, we go in-depth on practical ways to add a bit of personal touch to engage your customers.

Thank You Videos

A nice, personalized Thank you video is one of the best ways to establish a better connection with your buying customers. Keep the message short and sweet. You can also give an inside look of all other offers you have to compel them to watch the video from beginning to end.

You can choose to address each customer by name and then read a general script. However, you can also create one video to address all customers to save recording time. Store your video clip on YouTube, Vimeo or via online file storage websites like Dropbox so you can simply send an email that will direct the customer to the Thank You video.

You can kick this up a notch by creating different videos for special events, like after the customer purchased special items during holiday sales, Black Friday deals or Halloween sale, Clearance Sale, etc.

Addressing Customers By Name

One of the quickest ways to establish customer loyalty is to address people by their name. You want to make a connection with people; you start by acknowledging customers individually. This isn’t exactly a new marketing technique but it’s extremely effective especially for small businesses. This gives customers the impression that they are dealing with a real person, not a bot.

There are great ways to get the names of people and one of which includes introducing a loyalty program. This rewards program will allow customers special discounts or freebies if he or she reached a specific amount of purchases.  The more registrations you get, the bigger your email list will be. You can use the personal information for future promos too.

Offering Members-Only Incentives

Imagine getting a nice freebie on your birthday or a discount on special days. Offering members-only incentives or sign-up promos is an excellent way to elicit a sense of urgency from people. Customers can simply complete the sign up form with their personal information to take advantage of the special deal. From here you can establish customer loyalty and compel them to buy your products at the same time. You can also run several limited-time-only promos while you’re at it.

While adding personalized shopping experience with customers may seem impractical for larger companies, small businesses stand to get their fair share of the market if they take time to engage with their customers. It’s important to make your customers feel that your company isn’t just about selling, rather, it is managed by real people who are out to resolve real concerns.

Marketing your business through social networking sites like Twitter may not seem like an effective strategy given that your “tweets” are limited to 140-characters but with over half a billion active users, it’s actually one of the largest social media sites out there, making it one of the best places to promote your business.

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty, let’s discuss what Twitter is all about. Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. Unlike Facebook where users can update their network with pictures, status messages and even polls, Twitter is mainly there to share information, the most stripped down kind there is!  As long as you are able to generate relevant, engaging content without sounding too “spammy”, you can use Twitter not just to market your business but also get your followers to promote your business!

For marketers, Twitter is an extremely useful tool to get the word out about their business. Unfortunately, even the most engaging content are left ignored by other users simply because marketers failed to observe some of the most essentials aspects of sending out tweets. And because millions of users are tweeting several times at any given day, making a name for yourself on Twitter can be quite a struggle. However, when done right, you can turn your users into your own personal marketing team. How? We’ve listed down ways on how you can encourage your network to spread the word about your business.

Getting People To Talk

Twitter may be hi-tech but social media is a great place to hold meaningful conversation with your network. Twitter, after all, rose from the ranks by being one of the most conducive platforms for real conversations between users. So how do you get your network to talk to you? How can you trade banter and share each other’s POV? It all starts by getting people to follow you. While the number of your followers may not be that much of a big deal, it does say a lot about your reputation on a specific market. Once you have established a sizable following, the challenge is to interact with them, particularly high profile individuals from your niche market, and getting them to engage you in a conversation.

Quality VS Quantity

Just like any other social networking sites, Twitter popularity is rooted in regularity. This means that in order to be relevant, you have to stay relevant. And you can’t be relevant if you only update your account once a week! Building and managing a social community starts at consistent flow of information between you and your network. However, the information has to be timely, fresh and engaging in order to attract attention.

A lot of people mistake quality for quantity. Posting too many tweets may not necessarily be enough to get you to keep in talks with other Twitter users. While quantity does matter, in terms of engaging others, choosing sharable content is still key. From giving your two cents on issues that matter to entertaining videos or blog posts, you will definitely benefit from Twitter by sharing quality content, things that people would want to read and watch.

Analyzing Your Marketing Campaign

It’s important to keep track of your marketing plan’s overall historic and predictive performance to ensure online promotion is going to the direction that you want. First, you will start by analyzing your old data i.e. pinpointing where your top followers are location and where potential users are located, and determining if you are getting any positive results from these users.

Next, analyze your data to find out the future growth of your business with a time constraint. By using old and new data, you will be able to predict the results you can expect within the next few weeks. There are great tools to help you analyze your marketing campaign. Some of the most popular includes Twitter Counter and MetionMap.

#HashTagIt

Hash tagging was developed during Twitter’s infancy. Today, it’s considered a norm with major social networks like Facebook and Instagram joining in to the hashtagging craze. But did you know hash tagging can actually help you promote your business? Hash tagging allows any user to promote themselves as niche users. Your feed with the hash tag will instantly be archived to other tweets with similar topics. So whenever possible, add a hash tag on your tweets to get more people to follow your tweets