Category: Social Marketing

Digital marketing can be a costly proposition for entrepreneurs building their businesses online. Reaching out to their target audience, creating campaigns with strong recall value and observing how their competitors are faring becomes a time, money and effort consuming affair. Making life easy for entrepreneurs are several free digital marketing tools available for use online that ease the task at hand. Entrepreneurs must know what these are and how to use them to their advantage. These free digital marketing tools are must needed for some essential digital marketing activities such as conversion rate optimization, marketing automation and personalization.

10 such free digital marketing tools for entrepreneurs have been written about below, their bifurcation done on the basis of the digital marketing analysis activities they help accomplish.

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Reviewing Brand Mentions and Latest Industry Developments 

• Google Alerts: A majority of marketers still swear by Google Alerts. It helps them review mentions of their brand, campaign hashtags and competitor names via entering keywords. The main reason why it is not mentioned that widely on social media platforms is because its core use revolved around analysis of sites.
• Talkwalker: The social listening service Talkwalker offers the free Talkwalker Alerts service that helps monitor mentions of one’s brand, hashtags and social media competitors. 

• Feedly: RSS was the rage 5 years ago at the very thought of ‘Feed’. Google Reader was found to be quite reliable till the search engine giant withdrew the service. Reader would help categorize sites and stay up-to-date with the latest digital developments. Cut to today, everyone prefers Feedly. So popular has it become, that the most popular posts can be seen through ‘voice of the crowd’. All these Feed readers are very helpful in helping scan through the latest news in different categories. 

• Zest: This is again very useful for digital marketing. It is a Google Chrome extension programmed to collect suggested content from users. 

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Managing Social Media Updates

• Hootsuite and Buffer: This becomes a no-brainer. These are the first two names that pop-up during conversations when the task is to post and review social media updates. These free digital marketing tools help keep tabs on competitors and influencers and in case you happen to use Twitter lists, you can also have a stream for each of these. An excellent SEO analysis tool, Hootsuite integrates most of the popular social media platforms and helps manage all social media accounts. 

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Finding Influencers

• Followerwonk: Followerwonk is the most commonly spoken of free service meant to find influencers via their Twitter bio. Though it has shortcomings, it is far better than reputation tools such as Klout, Kred and Peerindex that have slowly and gradually faded away into oblivion. 

• Right Relevance: Right Relevance helps identify both publishers as well as influencers, though it still is over-dependent on the text given out in the bio.

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Understanding Customer Search Behavior

• Google Keyword Planner, Google Webmaster Tools Integration: These still remain most reliable as far as driving the majority of visits, leads and sales for most online businesses are concerned. These offer best help to understand customer behavior when searching and formulating strategies and getting visibility, besides creating content and messages that help meet consumer demands. 

• Ubersuggest: This is also useful to summarize the Suggest/Autocompete behavior in various countries and to check your covering the main behavior. 

• io: A very viable alternative, it comes handy when trying to find out how local consumer behavior differs. 

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Competitor Site Benchmarking

Google AdPlanner for the longest time was most trusted for comparing the size of an audience and dimensions as well. The latest avatar of this is the Google Campaign Planner, highly useful to find out the size and quality of audience for partner and media sites. Alongside, there is the Google Placement Targeting Tool that helps in research and remarketing. SIMILAR WEB, is the latest rage or benchmarking. It offers free stats on all the sites including referrers. 

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Off-Page Backlink Analysis for SEO

• Majestic and Moz Open Site Explorer

These two names mentioned above are the most highly recommended ones for this particular digital marketing activity. As far as Non-SEO’s are concerned, the Backlink History works best for basic benchmarking of competitor success to gain backlinks, though link quality is not visible.

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for On-Page Markup Analysis for SEO

• Marketing Grader: This is most preferred to review on-page markup for SEO and is spoken of very highly within industry circles. It helps review headings and also mobile screen resizing. Other digital marketing activities that Marketing Grader helps out with include Competitive Benchmarking, Lead Generation, Mobile Marketing, Blogging and Overall Analysis. Entrepreneurs will have questions such as ‘is my marketing lesser than my competitor’s’, ‘will my marketing efforts result in leads’, ‘is my blog driving results’ and ‘what are the strong points of my marketing campaign’ answered. 

• Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Understanding Overall Online Marketing Effectiveness

• Google Analytics: This is one of the most critical digital marketing activities of all and warrants the use of a tool that is as high-profile as the task in hand is. Moreover, its Tracking Code Feature gives out an unbelievable number of metrics to the users. From the Google Analytics Hub, Google Analytics for Social Media Marketing works best to understand overall online marketing effectiveness. 

Digital marketing has time and again tested the brilliance and acumen of entrepreneurs and activities such as digging through data and fine-tuning one’s social presence becomes a little hard to do without external help. This comes in the form of these free digital marketing tools that save entrepreneurs precious time and money. Entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes will benefit highly by using these free digital marketing tools for their marketing initiatives.

Author Bio– Shaun is the Director of Virtual Employee Private Limited, a remote staffing & tech MNC, and is responsible for leading a team of more than 1200 experts from domains like IT, Content Creation, Digital Marketing, Designing. A law graduate from Brunel University, Shaun has been instrumental in creating a business model which is increasingly being seen by industry peers as a model for new organizations in the tech outsourcing domain.

Businesses and brands are constantly competing for attention on social media, and with all the noise and incessant messaging, how can you make your voice heard?

You have to find ways to cut through the noise and stand out like a unicorn in a sea of donkeys.

But how? By knowing how to standout on social media.

How to Stand Out on Social Media

Here, I’m revealing a few of my favorite social media marketing tactics that have helped me grow my businesses and stand out on social media.

1. Plan a content strategy and create an editorial calendar for your social channels.

Marketers are sometimes at a loss at what to post on social media.

Successful social media marketing doesn’t happen on accident — there’s a strategy in place, just as there is with a blog.

Look at the big picture and come up with social content that will resonate with your audience.

Map out seasonal content, as well as content related to events or launches your company is planning.

Work closely with your editorial and marketing teams to know what’s coming down the pipeline and strategize the best ways to promote it.

2. Invest in the right social channels.

It’s not just about what social content you share — it’s also about where you share it.

Not all social platforms are created equally, and where one business gets amazing engagement, another might fall flat.

B2Bs, for example, might do very well on LinkedIn, but not so hot on Instagram.

Meanwhile, B2Cs usually thrive on Instagram.

Find the platform that aligns with your audience.

Another unicorn social tactic?

Find the latest and greatest platform, and dive in — before your competition.

One prime example?

Facebook Messenger.

There are 300 million active monthly Messenger users, and you can communicate with them straight through Messenger in an engaging format that they prefer!

Whether you want to create customer service bots, bots that can schedule appointments, or bots to deliver key content, you can do it all on Facebook Messenger.

Since it’s relatively new, however, there’s little competition — which gives you a prime opportunity to get in and get ahead.

4. Always add visuals.

Whether it’s video or static images, visuals always up the engagement on your social content.

Hire a photographer to create a library of images for your brand to use, and/or invest in a high quality stock photography site — the kind that has images that don’t actually look like a stock image.

On a budget?

Comb through a license-free site like Pixabay or Stocksnap.io for unicorn visual content that won’t cost you a dime.

5. Create a consistent aesthetic for your social content.

Creating a consistent theme with your accounts helps you establish and grow brand awareness, especially on Instagram.

Practically, this means using a consistent color palette and the same filters to come up with a distinct feel and look.

This makes your posts look visually appealing to your followers and customers, and more — it reflects your brand’s image.

6. Know your audience and anticipate their needs.

Knowing your audience means you’ll know what kind of content they’ll find useful and want to engage with.

To that end, do as much persona research as you can so that you can thoroughly understand your customers and audience.

This will help every aspect of your marketing, including your social media marketing.

7. Pay attention to your social media analytics.

In addition to doing persona research, always look to your analytics to find out what’s working and resonating with your audience, and what isn’t.

Based on that data, you can move forward and create more content that’s in line with what your what’s already working and move away from the social content that isn’t cutting it.

8. Create a place where your visitors and customers can add their feedback.

Customers often rely on reviews and they appreciate businesses where they can leave their feedback.

According to Huffington Post, 70% of businesses that give the best customer experience use customer feedback?

Encourage feedback on your own social channels, and use it to inform your own service and practices.

Want Your Brand to Stand Out on Social Media? Try These 8 Tips [SmallBizTrends]

Facebook is bringing its Portal devices to the workplace for people to make voice and video calls. Workplace by Facebook delivered a number of upgrades as part of its Flow by Workplace conference being held today in Menlo Park, including the fact that Workplace now has 3 million paid users, up from 2 million in February. The 8-inch Portal Mini and 10-inch redesigned Portal smart displaycome out next week. Portal devices will be able to speak with up to 50 participants in each video call, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

As the split screen image above appears to illustrate, Workplace video calls will supply a shared work space, perhaps drawing on the same tech that will allow people to watch videos together with the Portal TV device due out next month. At launch, Workplace voice and video calls will not work with Portal TV.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to share additional details on how dozens of SaaS apps and integrations will work with Workplace Portal video calls.

Workplace video calls will work with a dedicated Portal app called Workplace by Facebook and will soon support Facebook Live, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

The Workplace-Portal offering appears to be Facebook’s first strictly enterprise pairing with first party hardware, and may help Workplace compete with Microsoft Teams, which currently offers AI-powered video call perks like automatic captioning and background blur.

The move also signals that Facebook could open up Portal for WhatsApp Business in the future, though the device currently has no WhatsApp Business specific features.

Portal devices making Workplace video calls can use Smart Camera to automatically frame video for up to 10 people and Smart Sound to automatically enhance volume to ensure a video subject is heard even when standing at a distance from the device.

Workplace is also introducing:

• Automatic video captioning for videos posted in the Workplace News Feed that functions much like Facebook’s News Feed. Live captions will initially be available in the language of the speaker so long as they speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, German, Turkish, Russian, Thai, Urdu, or Malaysian.
• Badges for rewarding employees for reaching milestones like community builder, expert, or mentor.
• Learning posts, a way for managers to highlight content that might be good for best practices, then share them with new hires, as well as thanks posts for acknowledging employee achievements.

There’s also Insights, an analytics platform that scores Workplace to measure engagement with posts, using sentiment analysis to label each post as positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment is predicted in part based on comments and reactions to posts.

Facebook is bringing Portal video chat devices to the workplace [Venture Beat]

Social media, and Facebook in particular, ranks among the greatest marketing tools ever devised. More than two billion users are active on the site, including men and women, as well as just about every age and ethnic group. If you’re looking for an audience, in short, you’ll find it here. And Facebook has gone out of its way to make life easy for any business wishing to maintain a presence on the network.

Facebook’s Page Manager offers an impressive depth of customisation – so much depth, in fact, that many SMEs end up drowning in options. It’s worth putting aside an hour or so a week to explore what’s possible, but to begin with, most of us simply want to know where the most important features are, and how we can quickly get the best from them. Here, we’ll look at exactly that.

Make Sure your Page Looks Great

• Set a Profile Picture
• Set a Cover Picture
• Include Contact Information

Your Facebook page is where the site’s users will come when they want to learn more about your business and what it has to offer. It’s critical, therefore, that it be as attractive and relevant as possible. If a user sees any of the placeholder graphics that your page comes with as standard, then the chances are strong that they’ll navigate away.

Your profile picture should be your business’s logo. Your cover photo, however, is what will take up most of the space on your page. It’s an opportunity to present your audience with more information, but too much text crowding the banner can look amateurish. Your online branding is a challenge which extends beyond Facebook; if you don’t have the right look, then consider bringing in a graphic designer who can take care of it for you.

Verifying your page will also lend your business a great deal more credibility. You can apply for verification via your business’s general settings tab.

Make the Right Posts

• Post Consistently
• Use Images
• Make posts Actionable
• Pin Important Posts
• Use a Calendar

To be visible on Facebook, you’ll need to upload the sort of content that people will appreciate. This means images, and often moving images. Even if your message is one that can be conveyed exclusively through text, the addition of a relevant picture, GIF or video will help it to ‘pop’ from a Facebook feed in a way that plain text never could. This has a proven impact on user-engagement.

The content you provide should come in a steady stream. That means regularly-spaced posts that can be digested in a few minutes. This will ensure that you’re kept visible. You can intersperse these posts occasionally with a more high-effort offering. This will keep your audience coming back for more. Particularly important posts can be pinned to the top of your business’s Facebook page, ensuring that new visitors see it first.

The most effective posts are those which contain a Call to Action: that’s a written (or spoken) instruction to do something. This might be to visit your website, to like or share a post, or to comment. When Facebook users are constantly engaging with your content, their activity will show up on other people’s feeds, and thus content that encourages engagement will spread more easily.

Planning new content in advance can help you to keep ideas fresh, and ensure that what you come up with is relevant to the other things appearing in everyone’s feed. A content calendar is a useful planning tool that’ll allow you to keep track of those obscure online occasions like National Book Day, while making it easier to plan high-quality content when business is slow. That way, you won’t have to think about what you’re going to post when things in the office get hectic.

Measure your Success

• Pay attention to the right metrics
• Decide your goals in advance
• Don’t be fooled by vanity metrics

Your approach to Facebook will evolve more or less constantly as you discover more about your customers and what they’re looking for. Changes in your approach to the site should be informed by reliable data – which Facebook provides in abundance.

Click-through-rate (or CTR) is among the more reliable measures of success. The average click-through rate will vary from industry to industry; retailers, for example, will have an easier time attracting clicks than education services.

Another important metric is specific to video, and that’s the number of people who watch more than 50%. This is more reliable than the related ‘three-second’ video view metric. A big difference between the two might mean that your video promised a great deal, but didn’t deliver on those promises.

‘Likes’ are at the other end of the scale. They don’t cost the user much effort to dish out, and therefore they’re not a very accurate reflection of what your customers are really looking for. Metrics of this sort are called ‘vanity’ metrics. It feels good when people ‘like’ your content, but it might not actually result in any substantial return for your business.

Boosting Posts

• Pay a little for the right sort of clicks
• Stipulate a Custom Audience
• Use paid posts to field-test ads

For a price, Facebook will present your posts to a highly-engaged audience. You’ll pay per click-through, meaning that you’ll get a predictable return on the investment. For smaller businesses who don’t have much time to spend devising a marketing strategy, this approach might be a winning one.

Facebook’s Ad service allow the business to create a ‘Custom Audience’, either based on arbitrary characteristics, or visitor data from your site. Using this data, it’s possible to make a ‘Lookalike’ audience, of people who share traits with those who are already engaging with your business.

One use of Facebook ads is quickly field-testing different posts, to see which can draw the most clicks in the shortest amount of time. This information can be passed to the people who are actually composing the posts. In the long-run, this can help ensure that the posts you’re making will be engaged with.

There’s definitely no shortage of social media video content on any of today’s top social networks. On Facebook alone, users watch 100 million hours of video content each day. Around 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

With so many videos being uploaded and watched on an hourly basis, it can be hard to ensure your business’ content gets the visibility it deserves. It’s worth noting that social media users don’t often seek out videos. Instead, they typically find a video to watch when scrolling through their feed or by looking at a video shared by a follower.

In order to boost your engagement rates, you not only need to understand how users find videos on social media, but also the types of videos that are most suitable.

Here are five types of videos that will skyrocket your engagement rates.

1. Product Video

Did you know that social media is one of the biggest influences when people buy a certain product? One study found that 74% of consumers purchasing decisions have been influenced by a business’ social media content. Since video content is the hottest marketing trend, it only makes sense to showcase your products on video!

Using a product video, you can:

• Introduce a new product
• Highlight the benefits of a product
• Demonstrate a specific feature
• Kick off a product promotion (i. discount, clearance items, etc.)

In essence, you can use a product video to advertise your offering. Videos tend to be better received than an ad that encourages users to make a purchase. Seeing a product on video in the raw is a much better way to entice sales.

2. User-Generated Content

Content creation takes a lot of time and effort. You have to research topics to see what your viewers like. Then, you have to check out the list of most liked YouTube videos for inspiration so that you can create videos that are more likely to get liked, shared, and viewed.

Every so often, you can give yourself a break and highlight some of your follower’s content. Hold a contest and ask users to submit a short video that involves your product. This could include a review, tips on using the product, or any other topic.

This allows you to gather user-generated content, which you can then post. Reaching out to brand ambassadors and influencers is another way to get some great content that puts your followers in the spotlight.

3. Interviews/Q&A Sessions

People are always looking to learn. Informative videos such as interviews and Q&A sessions are a great way to answer the burning questions that your viewers have always wanted to ask.

If you’re interested in creating your first ever interview or Q&A video, you may find it easier to record the first few videos. This allows you to answer questions that viewers have submitted ahead of time. As you get more familiar with this style of video, you could go live and answer questions in real-time.

These videos are a great way to interact with your social network. It also puts a human face to your business name and makes you much more relatable.

4. Go Live

Many of the top social media platforms allow live streaming features, and over the last few years, live video has grown in popularity. In 2018, there were 3.5 billion Facebook Live broadcasts.

What’s nice about live videos is that they’re 100% transparent. Viewers are able to interact with you in real-time, without all of the video editing and perfecting. There’s nothing more exciting and fun for your social media network than being able to see your business in the raw.

Just like other types of videos, live streaming also gives your business a human face, which is huge when it comes to improving your brand. This way, instead of buying followers, you can use live streaming to boost your social media numbers.

5. Behind-the-Scenes

Consumers are always curious about the inner workings of a business. Give your viewers a peek behind the curtain with a fun behind-the-scenes video. This type of video builds trust with your audience and allows you to create a connection.

Allowing viewers to see how your business operates gives you a great time to highlight your company’s culture. For example, you can record a behind-the-scenes video by sharing new products, taking viewers on an office tour, or going backstage at an exciting industry event.

Conclusion

Just like there’s more than one way to create text-based content, there are many ways to present video content on social media. The key to using video content is to figure out what your viewers prefer and then find ways to put your own spin on it. As a starting point, be sure to test out these five types of social media videos to see what your social following likes the best.