Branding Archives - Page 2 of 5

Macro vs Micro: Which Influencer Type is Best for Your Business

Businesses have long looked for the best strategies to push their businesses on social media. Long gone, for many companies, is solely relying on their social media accounts to promote their products and services – in comes the social media influencer.

A social media influencer is a user who has reliable traction amongst their audience. Generally, their followers (audience) engage with them regularly and value their opinion. Marketers love to leverage the fact that they can use an influencer to promote to a target market, while users are influenced by someone they can relate and look up to.

Influencer Marketing Global Spend & ROI

According to Mediakix’s influencer marketing spend study, the influencer marketing global spend is projected to increase to $10 billion by 2020!

Also, according to a survey conducted in 2017 by Celebrity Intelligence, for every USD 1.27 spent on an influencer, their ROI per influencer was USD 11.15!

So, based on Mediakix and Celebrity Intelligence’s data, you can see how much money is being dished out by influencer marketers and how much return they are getting for their investment.

For you marketers looking to implement influencer marketing, it is the right time to do so!

Now, before we get into the nitty-gritty of which type of influencer is best for your business, we will explain the two different types of influencer – a micro-influencer and a macro-influencer.

We’re in the midst of a consumer trust crisis. Between data hacks and manipulative advertising, mistakes on the parts of businesses have left consumers reluctant to trust. In the eyes of many, businesses are out to make money at the expense of their customers’ faith and safety.

According to research by Salesforce, roughly 59 percent of customers believe their personal information is vulnerable to security breaches, and about 54 percent don’t believe that companies have their best interests at heart. That said, trust in businesses these days is lower than ever before.

Businesses aren’t the only ones losing consumers’ faith. Marketers, social media stars, and bloggers aren’t always trusted, either. In general, the public is turning to friends and family above all else in an effort to seek out recommendations they can truly trust.

Brand Authenticity

The question is, how can we, as brands, build relationships with consumers who have lost all faith in marketing? The answer lies in becoming a transparent, authentic company. Here’s how you can do it.

Branded Content and Native Advertising

The preferences of today‘s generation are no longer the same as they were in the past. They have changed over time, and as a result, marketing has changed too. Traditional ways of advertising are no longer effective as millennials don‘t respond well to intensive selling techniques. They are more attracted to brands that provide a pleasant experience. Based on their skills, they build a relationship with the brands they like. It is more about relevant and meaningful connections than just buying something and forgetting about it at the end.

Brands do just that using branded content. In an era when the audience is blocking the 24*7 advertisement chase using ad blockers, branded content has become a saviour that has a positive impact on people.

Let’s know more about it in detail and differentiate between branded content and native advertising. Read More

Takeaways From Google Quality Rating Guidelines That Affect Your Website

Google Quality Rating

Google is king of the Internet search and that’s an undeniable fact. It channels a staggering 89% of all search engine traffic in the world. This means that if you want your website to be found on Google, you play by Google rules.

Building a website is much more than merely slapping together a few web pages and calling it a day’s work done. There are so many details you need to consider, from choosing the best web hosting available all the way to working on your SEO for search ranking.

The problem is that there are literally thousands of websites on the Internet claiming to be able to teach you how to do so. Some are legit, some might be halfway, and some might be outright scams. To work around this issue, let’s talk about Google’s Quality Rating Guideline.

Do you think to have a great product will drive in leads by itself? No, I’d rather say marketing your product is the most important thing to generate traffic.

Advertising platforms are capable of connecting you to the right people for your marketing messages.

But, reaching the right audience can be difficult. Instead of spending time thinking “how to attract more audience or reach the right professionals?” you must advertise yourself.

And what could be a better platform than LinkedIn?

Stats says – “LinkedIn’s lead conversions rate is 3 times higher than any other major ad platform. Also, LinkedIn’s audience has 2 times the buying power that of an average web audience.”

The other hard part when advertising yourself is reaching the audience that fits your ideal customer profile who would be interested in your business.

LinkedIn offers new ways to easily target the right audience – lookalike audiences, audience templates, and the interest targeting product. These measures will help you scale your marketing efforts and improve your ROI.

Lookalike Audience – This trait of LinkedIn combines the rich members of LinkedIn & company data with the search attributes of your ideal customer to find a new professional audience similar to your existing ones.
Audience Template – This trait of LinkedIn is for those who are advertising for the first time. LinkedIn has some predefined 20 B2B audiences that could prove worthy of your business.
Interested Targeting – Recently released by LinkedIn, this trait is a new way to reach members that match their professional interests. With more than 200 professional interest categories you can target a highly specific audience.

The most successful entrepreneurs follow a set routine every single day. Sounds ludicrous, right?

You’ve probably seen advertisements all over the place (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, the WWW) that talks about people working from home for just an hour a day making $100,000 or more.

Are those guys following a routine every single day?

A-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y!

Well, at least the ones that are making money are — the successful ones.

So, what are the successful entrepreneurs doing that you aren’t?

And what can you do to be successful like them?

For starters, you need to create a routine that works. One that keeps you focused and pushes you to be successful. Successful entrepreneurs get up early, put in a lot of work (especially in the beginning), and they don’t give up when things get difficult. By following a routine, they already know what to expect for the day. And when you follow a routine, you’ll know what to expect too. So, we’ve looked at several routines from successful digital marketers and we’ve come up with a 6-step approach that we feel will keep you moving in the right direction.

Here’s what you should be doing … Read More

Staying Small to Make it Big: How to Be a Micro-Influencer

An influencer is to Instagram, as fish is to water; nowadays, celebrities and marketers alike live and thrive on the photo-sharing social media platform better than any other place online.

And this really comes to no surprise. Over the years, Instagram has become home to a section of individuals who’ve figured out how to monetize content, attracting big brand and small businesses, and virtually everything and everyone in between.

In fact, recent statistics show that the buying decision of as much as 70% of millennial consumers is affected by the recommendations of their peers. The same survey shows that 30% of consumers across different age segments are more likely to purchase products recommended by non-celebrity bloggers because they feel they can relate more to these influencers than their more popular counterparts.

The numbers really do say it all: the Instagram influencer game used to be dominated by those with high follower counts, but such doesn’t seem to be the case these days. People are starting to turn to their peers for opinions, seeking insight and reviews from influencers who are low-key enough to be real and relatable.

These people, in social media speak, are micro-influencers.

It’s easy to fall into the temptation of lashing out when your business receives a negative review. After all, we too, have feelings! When we’re criticized, our natural instincts take over. You could either pick a fight or simply shrug it off as if nothing had happened. But nowadays, customers have the ability to broadcast their negative feedback with just a single click. So, what’s a brand to do?

Rather than addressing them, a lot of today’s businesses choose to turn the other cheek and ignore negative sentiments from customers. But we’re no longer living in a world where businesses are in control of what to communicate to their customers.

In fact, ignoring negative reviews might actually make matters worse for your brand.

However, bad reviews may not be as problematic as you may think. According to a 2017 study of over one million local reviews, the number of reviews you get has a direct effect on your brand’s performance on search engine results.

In the survey, high-ranking listings were found to have an average of 38 reviews, while the low-ranking ones have an average of 14 reviews or less. The gist of this is that the negative reviews you get are still added to the total quantity so the more reviews you get, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a vocal supporter of the left campaign, or if you just wanted things to remain the way they’d been since the United Kingdom joined the European Union in 1969, I’m sure it’s become apparent to all of us over the last few years that the uncertainty surrounding Brexit isn’t ideal for business.

Any assessment of the numerous studies that have been published since the 23^rd of June 2016, will reflect a broad consensus that Brexit is going to make the United Kingdom poorer by erecting barriers to trade, delaying foreign investment and stifling economic migration.

But should you be starting to worry if you’re running a small or medium-sized enterprise? Many people in this position are still wholly unaware of what Brexit means for them and their business.

In fact, regardless of a company’s size, Brexit, on the whole, has so far been synonymous with delay. This delay has inevitably caused economic uncertainty, and this uncertainty has prevented many enterprises from making pivotal decisions in their day to day operations; i.e. investing in new business opportunities, expanding their businesses’ premises or even just employing new staff.

The Financial Times have recently reported on this phenomenon, asserting that their research indicates that the United Kingdom’s economy is in the region of 1 to 1.5 percent smaller than it would have been if voters had agreed to remain. The Centre for European Reform thinks the Financial Times’ figures are far too conservative, instead of calculating that the figure should, in fact, be closer to 2.5 percent.

Scarily enough, for small and medium-sized enterprises, Forbes Magazine’s Bianca Cole made clear that it was likely them who were going to struggle most in the face of this economic slowdown.

According to the FSB, 99.9% of all private sector businesses were small or medium-sized enterprises; so, if Bianca Cole’s prediction comes to pass, the effects of Brexit could have a devastating impact of the livelihoods of much of the United Kingdom’s population.

With that being said, it’s not quite time to lose all hope and start building the Brexit bunker! There’s still plenty you can do right now to begin to safeguard your business from some of the potential impacts of Brexit.

Search Engine Optimisation often referred to simply as SEO, is now your most reliable ally and an essential tool in defending your company from the negative impacts of a Hard Brexit.

If you can implement SEO into your business’ online strategy for the next few years, it’s entirely possible that this potentially terrible situation could transform into the ultimate opportunity. Make sure you read ahead to discover some top tips on how SEO can help you and your business whether the Brexit storm!

You’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle AKA the 80/20 rule. It is used in math, game theory, and, of course, it has a peculiar application in business as a whole and social media marketing in particular.

Just in case, the rule states that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients.

What if someone told you that you can make this 20% into 50%, 70% or even 90%? You’d probably need to invest in a new pair of trousers with larger pockets in the brave new world of limitless opportunity.

Alas, math is math, and there is no going around it.

Or is there? Let’s take a look.

4 Tips for Building Brand Authenticity in a World Full of Distrust

How Branded Content and Native Advertising are Different?

Takeaways From Google Quality Rating Guidelines That Affect Your Website

BREXIT & SEO – What You Need to Know to Survive?