In today’s digital world, it’s no surprise that social media marketing has become an essential part of any successful business’s marketing strategy. Social media marketing is a powerful way to reach potential customers and build relationships with existing customers. With the right strategy, you can use social media to promote your brand, increase sales, and boost your bottom line. Most people are on social so so should you.
To get the most out of your social media marketing efforts, it’s important to understand what social media marketing is and why it’s important. Social media marketing is the process of creating and sharing content on social media platforms to reach a larger audience and foster engagement. This content can be anything from written posts to photos and videos. The goal is to attract attention and engage with potential customers, build relationships, and ultimately drive conversions. A simple way to explain this is to reflect the happenings in your business to an interested audience to attract fresh customers.
When it comes to developing an effective social media marketing strategy, there are a few key components to consider. First, you need to determine which platforms are the right fit for your business and your goals. Each platform has its own unique audience and content requirements, so it’s important to select the ones that are most relevant to your business.
Once you’ve chosen the platforms you want to use, you’ll need to create engaging content. This should include content that educates and entertains your audience, as well as content that encourages them to take action. You can also use social media to showcase products, share customer stories, and respond to customer inquiries. The content you post can be adjusted to attract the customers you want; mention brands you work with, areas you cover and case studies.
Finally, you’ll want to measure your success. You can do this by tracking engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and views. You can also track the number of followers, how often they engage with your content, and what type of content they respond to. This will help you determine which tactics are working and which need to be adjusted.
Social media marketing can be an effective way to reach your target audience and drive conversions, but it requires a strategic approach. By understanding the basics of social media marketing and developing a strategy that works for your business, you can maximize your efforts and boost your bottom line. See our Social Media services.
Omnichannel AI
What does Omnichannel and AI mean?
Social media marketing is forming to be a more organised and structured process. Content is king still. There is such a demand for content to satisfy social platforms and for companies to keep up with the competition, we need more and we need to be more calculated.
Two top-line tips:
1 – Have a steady stream of content. A reflection of the company’s activities can be captured by talking with the team, collecting feedback from customers and sharing the company promotional text. AI can collect relevant content for any subject, edit it to fit your company and share it.
2 – Be selective about how we communicate online
Simply blasting out pretty graphics, funny jokes, and photos of the team do little. Content should be relevant, a reflection of the company’s activities, useful and continuously promote the brand uniformly. Your posts should tell the same story every time across all channels, cornerstone short and long descriptions will do the trick.
Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that aims to provide customers with a seamless and consistent experience across all marketing channels. This includes online and offline channels such as email, social media, mobile, and in-store. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to create a cohesive customer journey, regardless of the channels they use to interact with a brand.
Key components of omnichannel marketing
Understanding customer behaviour
To create a successful omnichannel strategy, it is crucial to understand how customers interact with your brand across different channels. This includes gathering data on customer preferences, buying habits, and channel usage.
- Creating a consistent brand image
A consistent brand image is essential for creating a seamless customer experience. This involves maintaining consistent messaging and visual elements across all channels, such as logo, colour scheme, and tone of voice. - Personalising the customer experience personalisation is key to providing customers with a personalised and memorable experience. This can include tailoring communication to individual customers based on their behaviour and preferences and offering tailored product recommendations.
Steps to implement omnichannel marketing
- Assess current marketing channels
To get started, assess the channels you are currently using to reach your customers and determine which ones are most effective. The main Chanels are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google My Business. The others have a much smaller coverage. Depending on the product to be promoted a Pinterest or TikTok may work better. - Develop a unified brand strategy
Develop a brand strategy that integrates all marketing channels and ensures consistent messaging and visuals. - Utilise data and analytics
Use data and analytics to understand customer behaviour and preferences, and to make informed decisions about which channels to focus on. Responding to successful search terms to add to the promotional text will boost further attraction of target customers. - Implement personalised communication
Personalise communication with customers by using data and insights to tailor messages, offers, and product recommendations. - Continuously monitor and optimise
Continuously monitor and optimise your omnichannel marketing efforts to ensure you are delivering the best possible customer experience.
In conclusion
Omnichannel marketing is a powerful strategy that can help brands create a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels. By understanding customer behaviour, creating a consistent brand image, and implementing personalised communication, brands can create a cohesive customer journey and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. The key to success is continuous monitoring and optimisation to ensure that your omnichannel marketing efforts are delivering the desired results.
To find out how Zedcomms can provide your marketing services please contact us.
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WordPress
WordPress
Why I always recommend WordPress.
When I first saw WordPress I was scared. The platform was modern, engaging, intuitive and free. The platform I was using at the time was by comparison dated and we were charged a licence fee to access it.
WordPress did have some issues though, it was primarily a blog so it had to have comment sections and looked like a forum. It had no real-time support, you had to wade through online forums and websites full of geek-speak to find a solution and the off the shelf free version looked terrible. Now it has evolved WordPress is fully customisable. The bugs mentioned above can be ironed out with plugins and coding adjustments. I recommend WordPress first to all my clients.
This formed into what it is today, a self-hosted WordPress website that can do pretty much everything 99% of businesses want it to do and a lot more. The ‘ lot more’ is where WordPress shines. Search optimisation is easy, adding modules and integrating social platforms is just great.
Because WordPress is the most used website platform it is vulnerable to hackers. WordPress websites are often targeted by hackers. To combat this you must update the plugins regularly, remove any unused plugins and update the themes.
Buying your first WordPress Website Tips
Pay a pro to set it up for you.
Host on a reputable server.
Add SSL security, better security and search performance.
Use a popular theme with high reviews.
Start simple, you can add fancy stuff later.
Add an SEO plugin.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing
Email blasts and bulk email campaigns are surely now a thing of the past. Hubspot posted the following with my comments. The way to market now is to attract prospective clients online, on social platforms, on Facebook groups and on forums. Email is a super communication tool once they are engaged. Learn more about our social management and social, SEO marketing packages here.
How to Prepare for the Apple’s iOS15 Privacy Changes [Checklist Included]
Apple recently began rolling out their new iOS 15 privacy features, including Mail Privacy Protection. This update is a big win for customer privacy, but may impact your marketing efforts and the metrics you see in our platform. In this post, we’ll walk you through everything we know so far, and provide a checklist to help you identify places in your HubSpot account that might be impacted.
Note: this post was last updated on January 6.
What’s the change?
Apple’s new mobile operating system (iOS15) launched on September 20 and will roll out over the next few months, and it includes several privacy-related changes. At a high level:
- Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing if and when a recipient opens an email in Apple Mail. It also hides a recipient’s IP address, so senders can’t determine their location.
- Hide My Email lets users share unique, random email addresses that forward to their personal inbox anytime they wish to keep their personal email address private.
These changes impact all email service providers that send emails to Apple Mail users.
What does this mean in the short term?
- Open rates may decline with no change in actual engagement. As a part of the changes, Apple will load tracking pixels on behalf of their users. In essence, Apple will be “opening” emails on behalf of their users. These opens will be caught by HubSpot’s bot filtering technology. Due to the nature of Apple’s technology, the bot filtering will unlikely be able to tell the difference between an Apple-bot open and a human open. As a result, email open metrics in HubSpot may decrease when human opens are bundled with Apple-bot opens, and any other processes that rely on open tracking might be compromised, too. Users can continue to use the open rate metric in HubSpot, but we recommend against using it for critical processes and reports. You can turn off bot filtering if you’d like to manually judge which opens may be human and which may be bots
- Realtime email tactics that rely on IP-based location will be less effective. For example, time zone sends that use IP addresses to identify location and align send times to each recipients’ unique location may no longer function for Apple Mail users.
- Email open activity may be spread across multiple contact records — even though they represent the same person. With “Hide My Email,” users can create fake, random email addresses to shield their personal email addresses from senders. In practice, this means that there may be several different “contacts” opening an email, even though just one person exists.
What does this mean in the long term?
While the new feature may change your marketing tactics and cause some short-term heartburn, it’s designed to create better experiences for all of our customers, and that’s always a good thing. Putting your customers first is what inbound is all about, and it’s a concept HubSpot has been championing since our inception. Put simply, when your customers win, you win too.
What should I do about it?
From a high level, keep doing what you’re doing. Stay the course with your marketing. Focus on creating great content and engaging experiences for your audience. As it relates to Apple’s changes, be mindful of your open metrics for email, with the understanding that they might look different moving forward. Shift your focus to other, more reliable metrics that better reflect actual engagement, like clicks and replies. And do an audit of your downstream marketing processes (e.g. list segmentation, automation) that rely on open tracking. Not sure where to begin? We’ve created a checklist of HubSpot tools that might be impacted.