Tag Archives: social media marketing

How Contesting-Up Can Help You Improve Your Campaigns

Interacting with your audience is a key aspect of keeping them engaged and interested in your brand nowadays and one fantastic means of keeping connected is through contests. Contests give your audience something to do that is—ideally–related to your brand, it gets them interacting with each other and it gives you the opportunity to collect lots of valuable information.

Depending on how you decide to present the contest, various legal and technical preparations might be necessary, but tackling a complicated situation provides experience that will be valuable in launching more complex or large scale campaigns in the future.

During the course of the contest it will be necessary to deliver updates, respond to feedback, answer questions and—basically–remain in consistent communication with your audience. Communicating with your audience is something that should always happen regardless, but a contest can open up completely new lines of conversation and really push the level of communication further.

Once the contest has concluded you’ll be able to take a look at what worked and what didn’t so you can analyze this information and apply it to future contests and other campaigns. Alternating between contests and other types of campaigns can help keep things varied and interesting so that your audience won’t become disinterested. Additionally, contests always come with a prize and giving back to your audience regularly is the best way to ensure that they will keep on giving to you.

Why to ‘Gamify’ Your Website!

Back in the day, gamers referred to a very distinct subculture, but today almost everyone is a gamer. The gaming demographic is growing exponentially with each passing day and while games might not be suitable to every business, the concepts behind gaming can be applied to serve several purposes. This application of gaming concepts to experiences that may not actually be games is called gamification. These concepts include structure, an enjoyable experience, tactics that encourage participation, psychological motivators and rewards.

Examples include challenging people to collect badges or earn achievements after completing specific tasks and offering rewards in return, or setting up contests and competitions that take place in a virtual social setting.

Why, however, does this work? Why does this encourage people to do things? It’s simple—giving an experience a game-like feeling makes it enjoyable and allows people to both make progress and be rewarded, all of which are things that people psychologically desire and pursue. By giving users a gamified experience, you are catering to basic psychological needs.

While gamification is a powerful method, though, you must have a reason for implementing it. Blindly applying the concepts without a clear goal in mind will not achieve anything, so approach the idea as you would any other business decision. Create a plan that is designed specifically to reach your goal and determine just how much, technically, will be required to make it happen. In the end, offer rewards that will mean something to your users and you’ll end up with a new, interactive way to engage and reward those that want what you have to offer.

How to Get People to Care About Your Brand

When your product is a sleek, exciting gadget that blows its predecesssors generation away or a flashy new application that is exactly what everyone wants, creating hype is pretty easy. People are always looking forward, seeking the next big thing and trying to stay ahead of the masses, so consumers often obsess over promising new technology and beg for beta keys for the next big web application.

But what about the little guy—the guy who offers something that people really need, but that just isn’t that interesting? Marketing a product that people are bound to glance over is certainly challenging, but not impossible. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the need that must be fulfilled before any other is considered important is physiological needs—food, shelter, safety, social acceptance and all the other things that keep us alive as individuals and a species. With that being said, it would seem that the things that keep this need tended to—food, cleaning products and the like—should be really easy to market, right? Not so much.

Keeping this need filled is pretty easy in most of the developed world today, even if you are struggling, which allows people to almost constantly focus on higher “needs” which fuel things such as human curiosity. People constantly need things that are interesting or stimulating in one way or another, and dynamic products can easily market through this.

If your product fulfills a basic need, however, you need to determine what desire it can fill for your potential customers. Lysol, for example, doesn’t expect people to be interest in cleansing products and, instead, focuses on people’s desire to keep a clean home. By finding what people can achieve with your product that will matter to them, you can focus a successful marketing campaign with a lot of creative potential, as it will be based upon not only a product but a concept that people are already passionate about.

Two More Ways Advertisers are Responding to Digitization

Advertisers have leveraged both experimentation and the creation of content over ads as a means of adapting to the increasingly digital nature of our world and our lives, but the changes haven’t stopped there. Advertisers and marketers have not only needed to change the way they come up with, present and create content, but also the very nature of their roles and communities.

It’s all about collectives. Collectives are online groups that are all about passion—a passion for a specific topic that can drive the members of the collective to generate content and buzz. A lot of the power of content-creation lies in the hands of these collectives, giving them an incentive to build something that is theirs while remaining linked to your product or brand. User-generated content is an important aspect of earned media and creating a platform for the collective is the primary factor in earning that media.

It’s all about creative technology. Everyone wants to get one step ahead and this requires innovation, invention and creativity. This requires an ambitious, proactive advertising team and creative developers. Big companies and their agencies may be able to create proprietary tools and launch expensive campaigns that are unrealistic in comparison to what a smaller company can afford to do, but the great thing about creativity is that it can exist independently of a big budget. Create unique projects and find new ways to utilize existing technology.

Combining any and all of these methods can yield fantastic results today and help keep you well-positioned for the continuing digitization of marketing and the world as a whole. A creative campaign that engages your target community and makes the best possible use of the available technology will always be a strong campaign.

Two Ways Advertisers are Responding to Digitization

We are living in a digital world. Cell phones, computers, the internet, television—we interact with electronics daily, digital signals permeate our air and few can fathom communication without a battery or power source involved. It has changed the way business works, it has changed language and it has created its own culture. As technology continues to develop, marketing has had to change as well, and the steps marketing professionals take to prepare for an increasingly more digital world can be helpful to your own marketing efforts, as well.

Experiment. Marketing isn’t straightforward anymore and, as time goes on, it will continue to become less and less so. Traditional advertisements still have their place, but it will take more than a well-placed ad to catch anyone’s eye nowadays. Think of creative, non-traditional or even plain odd ways to launch your campaign. People constantly want to see something new, something different and something impressive. If you can deliver this and grab their attention, your marketing message will reach the masses.

Create content, not just ads. Whether it’s a magazine ad, short radio spot or even something as massive as a billboard, ads are—generally—static. You can come up with something compelling but once it’s out there it will probably just sit there unchanging. Regularly creating original content will consistently keep people engaged as opposed to catching their eye once. Video, blogs and articles, interactive content such as polls, live chats and discussions can, essentially, function as dynamic, engaging ads that evolve with your company and with your customers.

As technology continues to advance, adapting to and being prepared for future changes will continue to become more and more important. Creativity, however, will always need to be at the core of your campaign, and using this creativity to fuel experimental, engaging content will help bring you long-term success.

Why Earned Media Fuels Everything

When it comes to marketing there are three types of media—paid, earned and owned. Paid media generally refers to ads, owned media generally refers to anything that the company has control over—like websites—and earned media refers to media that others generate for you.

Social media, however, is changing everything. Owned media—such as websites Facebook, Twitter pages—can also be paid if they are established and run by agencies. Classic paid media—such as television and other ads—generally directs potential customers to owned media such as websites or social media pages. And if people don’t share this media it can end up being almost worthless, meaning that companies have to earn it.

Today’s consumers don’t just see ads and either buy or dismiss the product based on what they’ve seen. They review websites, hunt for reviews and ask around and—once they decide to make the purchase they search for ways to make the most of what they’ve invested in and then have the option to review it themselves. People are more likely to dismiss products that have little to no earned media around the web for those that are represented by lots of user-generated content.

This is why keeping your campaigns creative and interactive is important—you need this content. Offer people samples or trials in exchange for honest reviews; create engaging Youtube videos that people will share and discuss; encourage participation and communication via Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else communication is possible. If you or someone within your company or organization isn’t directly responsible for controlling the social media campaign, make sure that the agency managing it is doing all of these things and doing it well, because when your earned media is also paid it should really pay off.

Everybody’s Doing It

Peer pressure is usually a terrible reason to do anything in life, but when it comes to marketing your business you want to pay attention to what the other kids are doing. Any company doing well enough to be considered your competitor is bound to be marketing themselves and—since it’s 2011—social media marketing is probably a significant part of their marketing strategy. If you want to to stay ahead while getting your social media marketing campaign off the ground, you’re going to have to know what they’re doing and do it better.

Know what they’re doing. One of the benefits of social media marketing is that your competitor’s marketing plan is right in front of you. You can follow them, Facebook them, read their blogs and see what patterns are and aren’t working for them.

Improve upon what they’re doing. As with any aspect of business, you don’t want to simply do what your competitor does. You want to come up with something new and better or, at least, improve upon what you see is already working and set relevant goals for each facet of your campaign. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs and the plethora of social media tools out there are all a part of the same world, but still very different animals.

Stay ahead of the game. Not every social media tool may seem appropriate for your business and your campaign, but you would be surprised at how you can leverage some tools. Explore creative ways of spicing up your marketing campaign and find ways to utilize avenues that your competitors have ignored.

There is a reason everyone is using social media—it works. Your social media marketing campaign will need to go through constant evolution in order to remain effective and knowing what your competitors are doing will be vital to keeping this evolution going strong.

Accomplishments by Using Social Media for Marketing

Communication on social media websites is very easy and effective for marketing. This is what every online marketer agrees with. Small businesses have also adopted social media for success by increasing their marketing strategies through social media.

Successful businesses are pivoted on active and up to date marketers. This is why social media marketing is advantageous for business people. The first thing any business owner must do is hire an online marketer. The main step of course is to set up the domain and equip the marketer with the right tools and information needed. The main challenge is to get followers and keep them hooked on. Other than this there are advantages and accomplishments that come with using social media for marketing.

• Reaching Global audience: Social media is where the whole world comes within reach. You can contact people from all over the world through your PC. This has increased international trade and improved business and trade drastically.

• Affordability: Strategies for online marketing using social media marketing are cost effective. You barely spend more than 2 -5 % of the capital on access to social media interaction through internet use.

• Accessibility: Using social media makes it easier for potential customers and clients to access you and your business. This is why all small and large businesses need to improve their sales. Advertisements and interaction is the key to increasing accessibility.

• Specialized Skills Not Required: Anyone knows how to use social media websites. Even if you don’t, learning how to use it is easy and fast. One doesn’t need special training to be able to access social media websites.

• Increased Employment: As social media marketing is easy and doesn’t require specialized skills many people get employed. In most countries suffering from the recession social media marketing has helped a lot.

• Real Time Interaction: Social media marketing is all about communication. There is instantaneous interaction between buyers and seller. This saves time for both the buyer and sellers, and also saves marketers from wastage of efforts. People either buy your product or you get to talk to another potential client.

• Business Updates: Social media marketing keeps owner up to date with the latest trends being used for marketing. As you or the marketer look around, you will find up to date information on the latest marketing ideas and strategies. These help by increasing chances of selling your products.
Using social media for marketing is definitely an important and unavoidable aspect of business today.

5 Important Facts about Location Based Social Media

Those businesses which seek to provide Location Based Services (LBS) for social media and networking need to consider some facts. These will enable such companies to maximize their out put with mobile strategies. This is where Socialpda ensures availability and accessibility by taking the following into account.

1. Location is not the only Factor for LBS: The first priority for companies working on mobile services for social networking should be their services. The main challenge is to offer mobile services which have high customer satisfaction before its availability can be worth the while for customers. Once the services are good, customers will not make location a limitation. Additionally, ensuring availability of services regardless of location will become much easier for companies.

2. Local User Adoption and Marketing: Companies offering mobile services for social networking need to focus on local user adoption and marketing strategies. When it comes to advertising using mobile services you need an estimate of the number of locals to target. Campaigns for marketing are mainly geo targeted and therefore having the right estimate about the number of people targeted is very important.

When it comes to advertising the most important aspect of LBS is to target a large number of audiences using mobile services and succeeding with more than 50% percent. Knowing the number of audience marketers will get to access is very important. This helps mobile companies know which location to target for marketing.

3. Battery Life Matters: LBS are dependent upon battery life. It is important to bear in mind that GPS is what keeps updated information on the user’s location on the network. The constant feedback from the phone to the GPS is what exhausts the battery faster. Therefore the phone brand and manufacturers matter when it comes to LBS based social media and networking.

4. Location is becoming a Tug or war: In the near future mobile operating services will most likely fight for locations and maps to offer their services. For example some renowned mobile companies have already purchased mapping company Placebase. Additionally, Google (the SEO king) has started providing mapping features on Android devices. Therefore location for LBS will become a tug of war for most mobile companies in the near future. Furthermore, the need to stay updated with the latest is the main demand of users on social media networks. Their need of mobile services and demand for better accessibility keeps growing.

5. Location Based Inventory is important: White Pages is a major source of information for LBS and to promote social networking and media. They are a major requirement for mobile service providers. Recently it was announced by one of the giants of mobile services that iPhone applications now have limitations. They will be restricted from the access to the privilege of advertising alone. Now there is need for customer benefit and functionality to access user location.

Therefore in the near future LBS will be making a lot of money for mobile based social media networking through Socialpda and like sites.