Tag Archives: social media

This is a guest post from Kevin Payne.

As marketers, we’re tasked with finding the best balance between paid and organic ways to generate leads for our businesses.

You’ve probably explored nearly every single platform and strategy to build your email list with highly qualified leads, including social media ads and content marketing through a blog or podcast.

But there may be one platform you haven’t leveraged yet, and it may surprise you: Pinterest.

In this blog post, we’ll tell you the whys and the hows of organic lead generation with Pinterest. Keep reading because, soon, you can maximize this free platform to grow your audience, scale that email list, and ultimately make more sales.

Want to own engagement in the face of algorithms and ads? Get the guide.

Why use Pinterest to generate organic leads?

If you’re wondering why exactly Pinterest can be of help you as a marketer, there are essentially 3 major reasons.

Pinterest isn’t social media: It’s a visual search engine

First, Pinterest is actually not considered a social media platform. It’s a social platform, true, but it works very differently than network sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Instead, Pinterest works exactly like Google. In other words, it’s a visual search engine.

Pinterest users navigate and use the platform similarly to Google: They create a search query and view the ones that appear most relevant to their search.

The main difference is Pinterest search queries don’t depend too highly on things like domain authority in order for your posts (in this case, pins) to be seen.

If anything, Pinterest’s algorithm favors fresh content over old ones, making it one of the best platforms for any business that already engages in any form of content marketing.

Pinterest users’ search intent is often transactional.

Search intent is an important factor to note when you’re deciding if Pinterest is the right platform for you.

Pinterest itself emphasizes that their users have the intention to purchase even before they decide to go on the app, where their platform becomes a place to “window shop” or collect and save photos, products, and articles online.

We also see this finding supported by a consumer study by Pew Research, which showed that users on Pinterest belong to a demographic that made an average of $75,000 annually.

Discover more research with our millennials vs. Gen Z study.

Pinterest users are ready to purchase, and many of their search behaviors indicate the same.

Source: Optin Monster

Consumers themselves say branded content makes Pinterest more useful.

Under its Business page, Pinterest has reported findings from their customer research that show that over 70% of their users find branded content on the platform useful.

Pinterest users are generally more accepting of branded content, even if some of the pins they’re seeing are promoted pins or the equivalent of an ad on Pinterest. In fact, 61% of users claimed they were able to discover new brands from these promoted pins, while half made a purchase after seeing one.

How to use Pinterest to generate more leads for free

Convinced that you should start a Pinterest marketing strategy? Look no further than this post because we’ll show you how to get started step by step.

1. Sign up for your Pinterest business profile.

When you create your account on Pinterest, be sure you’re signing up for a Business profile. This gives you access to many helpful features, including rich analytics to track your pins and conversions, as well as the possibility to create ads on the site.

Source: Pinterest

2. Claim your domain and other social accounts.

On your Pinterest business profile, you have the option to claim your website and other social accounts like Instagram, Etsy, and YouTube.

By claiming these, you’re able to get important attribution and analytics from pins and images associated with these accounts. For example, if a user pins a product photo from your ecommerce store to one of their Pinterest boards, Pinterest attributes these pins to your website or Etsy account.

Claiming your Instagram account also lets you auto-publish new Instagram posts into a dedicated board on your account. And claiming your YouTube channel also attributes pinned videos on Pinterest to your account, allowing them to auto-play if users are scrolling past them on the platform.

3. Optimize your profile for SEO.

When you’re setting up your Pinterest profile and unless you’re a big-name brand already, you should be optimizing for SEO. Pinterest users may be able to find your account simply from the keywords you include in your display name and bio.

Pinterest’s allowance for display names is longer than other platforms, so include as many keywords as you can.

For example, an SEO agency on Pinterest might include keywords like “SEO Agency,” or “Rank Higher on Google” next to their business name.

4. Set up 5-7 branded Boards.

Create 5-7 boards on topics that are related to your niche. If your business sells products, you can create boards on different product categories (e.g., fall fashion, winter boots for women, style on a budget, etc.).

These branded boards are what can entice users to follow your account. But they’re also the place where you’ll be pinning your content that leads users to check out your blog or lead magnets.

Five to seven branded boards are good enough to start, but, over time, as you notice more related sub-topics emerge from your content, you can add as many new boards as needed.

5. Enable Rich Pins.

Before you start pinning content, you’ll want to enable Rich Pins on your account. What Rich Pins do is read meta-data available on your content, be it blog post titles and excerpts, product descriptions and prices, and even links to download an app.

Rich Pins can give viewers of your pin additional context that can lead to better click-through rates and conversions.

Source: Simple Pin Media

6. Design long pins.

There are generally different post sizes that perform best on specific platforms. On Facebook, it might be landscape posts. On Instagram, square photos perform best. On Pinterest, you’ll get the best results with long, vertical posts.

You can experiment with varying lengths, but Pinterest recommends starting with a 2:3 ratio of 1,000 x 1,500 px.

There are different ways you can use long pins to get more leads for your business:

Blog posts

Blog post pins generally include a captivating headline and subhead that compels users to check out your post. You can combine high-quality stock images with text and a short CTA that encourages click-throughs.

Be sure your pin directly links to a specific blog post and not somewhere else like a homepage or service page. So, if a pin headline was all about how a personal injury lawyer could get more clients, it’d need to redirect users to a blog post precisely about that (see below).

Source: Rankings.io

Lead generation pages

Alternatively, you can design pins that link straight to a lead generation or sales page. Similar to the previous section, make sure that whatever is on the other side of your pin is reflected on the pin itself.

So, if, for example, a pin is all about how to take your business digital, the landing page you redirect to should point to that, either to a free lead magnet or a CTA to book a discovery call (see below).

Optimize these lead generation landing pages so they’re easy to browse and skim, but also clearly show users how it relates to the pin that led them to said page.

Example of an optimized landing page.

Source: Lolly Co

Product pages

Run an ecommerce store? If you take vertical product photos, you can instantly pin them on your boards and increase your chances of getting repins at the same time.

Here’s a great example from this product page on Spruce. The business uses long product photos that, if they were to appear on Pinterest, can attract attention of users. And, if they’d enabled Rich Pins, then users would automatically see details like price, availability, and even product descriptions.

Long product images also perform great on their own on Pinterest.

Source: Spruce

7. Test pin designs and layouts.

As with any marketing channel, you’ll want to experiment with different pin designs and layouts to see which styles perform best. You can test designs that stray away from your typical branding or create layouts that highlight different elements first.

Here are some ideas on how you can test pin designs:

  • Size: Experiment with extra long pins and standard 2:3 pins.
  • Colors: Check if your brand colors pop enough on Pinterest or if using off-brand colors work for you.
  • Photos: Some pins like this one can do great without any photos on it, while others like this one may need photos to attract attention.

8. Optimize your pin descriptions.

Pins can be discovered organically if they appear as a search query result. Because of this, optimize your pin descriptions by sprinkling in niche keywords.

Be sure not to work these keywords organically into your descriptions instead of keyword dumping; you still want to tell users what your pin’s all about to encourage the most click-throughs.

For local businesses, use local SEO keywords that increase your chances of getting discovered by your community. For example, if a user in New York were looking for a local custom bouquet store, they might type in “custom bouquet New York” in the search bar.

So, if your competition wasn’t already optimizing for local SEO, you’d have a big head start.

Source: Blogging Explorer

9. Use different hashtag groups.

Pinterest allows up to 20 hashtags per post. Make the most of these by compiling possible hashtags for your content. As you explore the platform and look at other accounts in your niche, you might find new niche-specific hashtags to use as well.

Also, keep a rotation ready for different content categories or post types. So, if you have hashtags specific to Facebook marketing, for example, you’ll want hashtags that are specific to Instagram marketing as well.

One of the benefits of using hashtags on Pinterest is that they work a lot like social media feeds; fresh content shows up first, so, if you’re pinning in a timely manner, your pin will appear first for that specific hashtag.

Top results for the hashtag #facebookmarketing

10. Follow industry leaders and people in your audience.

By following other industry leaders and related niche accounts on Pinterest, you’ll be able to have a never-ending supply of content to curate on your boards. This shows Pinterest users that you’re saving content relevant to their needs and preferences, getting you more followers in the process.

To get more followers quickly, consider following people in your audience. You’ll find them on other similar accounts to yours. Following them is one way to get their attention, so, as long as you’ve got a significant amount of branded and curated content on your profile, they’re more likely to follow you back.

11. Request access to contribute to group boards.

Group boards are great for getting in front of larger Pinterest accounts’ followers. You’ll know a Pinterest board is a group board when you see collaborators’ icons on the lower left side of the board.

To determine a quality group board, make sure that it has a relatively good amount of followers and at least a few other collaborators.

12. Remember the 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 rule on Pinterest recommends repinning other people’s content 20% of the time you’re on the platform. While you’ll want to promote your content more often, it’s best practice to curate, so users see that you collect and share highly relevant content alongside your own.

13. Pay attention to your SEO performance outside Pinterest.

If a few of your blog posts are already ranking on search engines organically, you can create pins based on those blog posts’ keywords.

While Google and Pinterest users may have different search habits, there’s still the very real chance that your Google users are searching for the same thing on Pinterest—but, with Pinterest, you just get higher chances of getting discovered even if you aren’t on the first page of Google just yet.

If you’re not sure how your current SEO strategy is performing, do SEO tests. These will also help you get the best results in future SEO campaigns because you base your next steps on real data.

14. Automate your pinning strategy.

There are several Pinterest-approved third-party integrations that let you publish to Pinterest on autopilot, saving you the manual process of uploading and repinning. Apps like Tailwind or Planoly can help you schedule pins and content for weeks and weeks, and the native Pinterest app allows you to schedule pins for an entire month.

Want more resources on building a marketing strategy for your small business? Browse the collection.

Wrap up

Have you ever considered including Pinterest in your pool of marketing channels? You may just be surprised by the amount of leads this platform can generate. To start seeing results, you’ll need to implement best practices straight away. Be sure to refer back to this step-by-step guide that shows you how to use Pinterest to get thousands of new leads for your business for free.

Kevin Payne is a content marketing consultant that helps software companies build marketing funnels and implement content marketing campaigns to increase their inbound leads.

This is a guest post from Dmytro Spilka at Solvid.

When it comes to digital marketing, very few strategies are as effective as social media campaigns in terms of boosting your traffic and attaining a strong ROI.

Today, SEO can account for much more than just locating and promoting specific keywords, and can help put you on course for the organic results you need online.

When it comes to social media marketing, your audience will be the key to a lot of the decisions you make. It’s vital that you know who your audience is, so you can actively look to appeal to them in an engaging way.

Fundamentally, social media marketing can bolster your SEO strategies and become a key player in driving conversions within your site.

There are plenty of platforms out there when it comes to social media, so which one is best at targeting audiences effectively?

Read on to see how LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook perform in terms of targeting features:

The value of social media targeting

Advertising takes on many more traditional forms and, when the topic is discussed, the first image conjured up is usually old-fashioned images of billboards or television commercials. When thinking of effective advertising, our minds are rarely cast onto the pages of social media.

However, it’s on the likes of Facebook and Twitter that advertising can really offer a fresh dynamic to marketers. Social profiles tend to offer a great opportunity for target marketing because of the wealth of information they provide marketers. Essentially, users can be targeted based on their interests, behavior, demographics, location, and even operating system for portable devices, among many other metrics.

Online advertising is a fast and cost-effective method of catering directly to your target audience. With almost three billion users, there’s plenty of audience to target online too.

There’s no better way of appealing directly to the audiences that you value the most than through advertising via social networks. Social media leverages specific filters that conform to market trends and target audience analysis, which significantly boosts the number of relevant clicks your campaign attracts, as well as sales.

In the case of platforms like Facebook, advertisers can target users based on their behavior on the network, as well as the groups they follow and their specified location. Advertisers can fine-tune the audiences they’re targeting with specific audience features, including targeting the company database or a decidedly similar audience.

Elsewhere, Twitter offers a large array of categories and allows marketers to select users and brand profiles for target marketing. Due to the platform’s follower-based framework, it’s much easier to see the likes and dislikes of active users, which can certainly be seen as a strength for some brands.

(Image: Marketing Charts)

The raw data shows that social networks are a leading source of inspiration among users looking to make a purchase online.

Behavior targeting, or interest-based advertising, operates by analyzing large swathes of users’ internet browsing patterns. As a result, marketers can build ads that cater to all users who behave similarly, on the educated assumption that they’ll be more receptive to the advertising material. This form of marketing is wholly transparent, safe, and even empowers internet users by delivering only the most useful and relevant content to them.

This form of marketing works by grouping users together based on their previous internet surfing actions and ads are delivered based on their shared interests. This action is also strong when it comes to retargeting users, and the collated date of audience members can be used to create look-alike audiences on Facebook ads manager too.

So, now that we’ve explored some of the key assets of social media targeting, let’s take a deeper look at what some of the world’s largest social networks have to offer, in terms of targeting features:

LinkedIn targeting

(Image: MarTech Today)

LinkedIn is certainly the most significant platform online today when it comes to giving marketers access to an audience of executives, decision-makers, and key personnel within a company.

Advertising on LinkedIn offers access to over 500 million users—80% of which are key members of their respective businesses. There’s around nine billion pieces of content published on the pages of LinkedIn each week, so targeting is essential. Luckily, this particular network offers a wide range of features to access audiences.

Source: LinkedIn

One of LinkedIn’s most successful targeting features comes in the form of Sponsored Content. These are the native ads that run in the LinkedIn feed across numerous devices.

Sponsored Content is the easiest way for engaging your target audience on linked in, and is particularly flexible in the type of ads it supports. Marketers can show off your company culture through the medium of videos, testimonials, text-based content, and more.

(Image: LinkedIn)

Creating sponsored content on LinkedIn is straightforward too. Simply make sure you have an account set up and click “create new ad” to set up a sponsored content campaign.

Another excellent LinkedIn targeting feature comes in the form of Sponsored InMail. The beauty of LinkedIn comes in the form of its excellent messaging platform, and Sponsored InMail helps marketers to make the most of this function and advertize strategically.

Source: LinkedIn

To set up Sponsored InMail, there are plenty of great options that help users to select the type of campaign that best suits them.

(Image: LinkedIn)

After this step, set up the sender of your ads and begin work in crafting your subject line and message content. LinkedIn even offers users the chance to add a personal address on each email sent to ensure that users will feel that much more valued. It’s even possible to set up a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form to collect quality leads from your ads.

Source: LinkedIn

Finally, LinkedIn Text Ads make for an excellent, more cost-effective and discreet way of targeting users. They appear on the right-hand side or top of a feed and allow marketers to use space to create a PPC or CPC campaign.

This can also be done with relative ease, as long as you have an accessible LinkedIn profile. Simply select “set up campaign” to begin crafting your Text Ads content.

Twitter targeting

While Facebook is primarily a social network-focused on community, and LinkedIn is heavily business oriented, Twitter truly is a global product. Users are free to interact (and, in many cases, argue) with somebody on the other side of the world with relative ease.

This makes Twitter’s Geotargeting feature particularly powerful for marketers. This means that local and international businesses alike can effectively advertise to the right people at the right time based on their nation, region, city, postal, or zip codes. Twitter’s wide array of different regions is helpfully broken down online too.

To set up Geotargeting, simply navigate to the “targeting” section of your Twitter Ads interface when creating or editing a campaign. Simply type in the area you’d like to target in the search bar. If you’re planning on targeting multiple areas, simply press the “Import Multiple Locations” button.

Source: WordStream

Twitter also has an excellent feature that lets marketers target users who’ve already interacted with their company online. This is particularly useful, as it indicates that they’ve already shown some form of direct or passive interest in the company.

Tweet Engager Targeting lets you choose whether you want to showcase your ads to people who’ve fully interacted in your brand or simply viewed previous tweets, and there’s a dropdown option to help users to decide which ads to display to targets too.

This can be actioned within the retargeting section of your Twitter Ads interface, and currently stands as a fairly unique feature across social media.

Source: WordStream

Finally, it’s worth acknowledging Twitter’s Tailored Audiences feature for targeting users. Because of the social network’s follower-based framework, it’s easy to categorize users based on their interests.

With Tailored Audiences, it’s possible to target users based on a mind-boggling array of metrics.

Facebook targeting

(Image: Facebook)

Arguably Facebook’s most exciting targeting feature comes in the form of Lookalike Audiences. This is a way of reaching new potential customers who are likely to be interested in your products because they’re similar to your best existing customers.

Lookalike audiences are built on users who have a significantly similar range of interests, demographics, and locations as your existing customers, meaning that they’re more likely to be interested in your company too—sociologically speaking.

To set up a Lookalike Audience campaign, you need to ensure that you’re the admin of the page or pixel you’re creating it from. Simply click on “Audiences” on your Ad account and then “Lookalike Audience” before selecting your source data.

Another significant Facebook feature comes from its strength in Demographic Targeting. With demographic targeting, you can set up precision-based campaigns that’ll save you money.

As you can see from the image above, Facebook even provides a useful gauge that can show approximately how broad or specific your campaign will be.

With Demographic Targeting, you can tap into the wealth of information Facebook has on its millions of users and build ads that focus on their age, language, gender, relationship status, level of education, type of work, device, location, interests, and plenty more metrics.

To perform Demographic Targeting, simply use your Facebook Manager account and press “+ Campaign.” After setting your marketing objectives, you’ll be asked to select your audience. Use the metrics on the right-hand side of the screen to help you fine-tune your potential audience and create a sample size that’s both affordable and effective.

As with any marketing campaign, the ultimate goal is to see which ones work and bring the desired conversions and identify those that are draining the budget.

Source: Finteza

WordStream and AdEspresso are helpful tools to manage and optimize your Facebook campaigns. Similarly to the aforementioned tools, WordStream can help track conversions and optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns.

It’s also important to set up Google Analytics goals to be able to see where conversions are coming from, be it trial signups, digital downloads, or direct purchases.

To do that, go to Conversions > Goals in your Google analytics dashboard.

Which is best for your business?

When it comes to deciding which social network is best to launch your targeted ads, it’s important to note that these platforms play to their strengths very well in terms of marketing.

LinkedIn’s professional outlook is palpable as Sponsored InMail helps to maintain a level of business-like formality to the act of advertising.

Whereas Facebook is well aware of its massive user base and lets marketers whittle down millions of audience members accordingly with huge metrics based on an array of variables.

Twitter, on the other hand, prioritizes its more global outlook with Geo-targeting functions that can place products and services under the noses of the audiences who matter most.

As a marketer, it’s important to take a look at the type of campaign you want to launch, and judge each social network on these merits. Remember that marketing often involves being in the right place at the right time, so take the time to make sure that place is the best social network for your campaign.

Dmytro Spilka is the Founder and CEO at Solvid, a creative content creation agency based in London. Dmytro is currently a contributor for Entrepreneur, SEW, ClickZ, TechRadar, Social Media Today, WooRank, SEMRush, and ITProPortal.

This is a guest post from Kevin Payne.

If there’s one business that benefits from omnichannel marketing most, it’s ecommerce.

Because ecommerce owners want to deliver seamless experiences online, and to do that, you’ll need multiple channels—ones that aren’t redundant in messaging and visuals. That’s where omnichannel marketing comes into play.

Read on to discover the many benefits of having an omnichannel marketing strategy as an ecommerce business. Later on, we’ll take you through the 10 steps you need to get started today.

The importance of creating an omnichannel marketing strategy

Based on numerous omnichannel studies and reports, here are a few compelling reasons for why omnichannel marketing should be your next big focus.

  • Brands who employ omnichannel marketing enjoy 90% higher customer retention rates and 18.86% higher customer engagement rates (see charts below)
  • Average order value of stores using omnichannel marketing were 13% more than single-channel marketing
  • After interacting with 3 or more channels, customers purchased 250% more frequently than those who interacted with only one channel

Build an Omnichannel Strategy For eCommerce Stores because omnichannel strategies work better than single channnel, according to this graph

Image source

What this shows us is that omnichannel marketing not only lets you maximize on reach, but also boosts engagement and sales.

Steps to build an omnichannel strategy

Convinced that you should be employing omnichannel marketing in your ecommerce business this 2020? Here are 10 steps to build your own omnichannel campaign.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

Because omnichannel marketing marries both offline and online channels, it’s important to keep your website and store ready for different devices, especially mobile. In a report on mobile ecommerce trends, 79% of smartphone users made a purchase using a smartphone in the last 6 months.

Fortunately, the best website builders on the market can let you not only optimize your store for mobile but also your entire website.

By optimizing for mobile, you don’t lose out on potential sales or leads, as it’s easy for customers to view, browse, sign up, or purchase from your site.

Determine which channels your customers are frequently using

Creating an omnichannel marketing strategy doesn’t mean jumping on every channel available to you. Instead, it means meeting your customers where they are—so you should only invest in the channels your customers use.

In this recent survey, for example, Instagram (73%) was the most-used platform for Gen Z adults, while Facebook remained the top choice for millennials (74%), Gen X adults (68%), and boomers (61%).

Revisit your buyer persona to determine which channels are best for your omnichannel campaign. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new and emerging platforms, but be sure to constantly evaluate results to see if it’s worth continuing.

Map your customer’s journey

As you build your omnichannel campaign, it’s important to map out your customer’s journey from one platform to the next to see that you leave no gaps or awkward encounters.

Create a step-by-step customer journey with our guide

For example, after opting into a lead generation form for a discount lead magnet, you can present your discount code as well as product recommendations, right in the same email. When a customer clicks on one of the products that interest them, they’re taken to a page on your store called New Collections.

And if they decide not to purchase right away, you can also follow up with retargeted ads.

You can have several journeys all in one campaign. But here’s the most important question: How does each channel stand on its own, possibly lead to another channel, and ultimately get customers to purchase?

Example of a simple customer journey using multiple touchpoints and channels.

Image source

Match your content with the marketing channel

Next, it’s important to keep your content relevant to the marketing channel. For example, photos and videos do well on Facebook and Instagram, influencer marketing videos can be done through TikTok or YouTube, while longer text-based content will do well for blog posts or email newsletters.

Omnichannel marketing isn’t just about repeating the same message over multiple channels. It means making the most of different channels so that they lead customers through a journey that eventually convinces them to make a purchase.

As you keep up your campaign, you’ll also see which content forms do best on which channels, so you can adapt future posts accordingly.

Segment your audience

When you conduct lead generation for your online store, it’s important to segment customers right away using behavior-based data and triggers.

The data you gather from these leads and customers can help you craft better, more relevant emails, which in turn can help you also be more accurate in your targeted ads.

Here are some ways you can segment your customers in your email list:

  • Gender
  • Geo-location
  • Previous purchases/interests
  • Loyalty
  • Previous engagement (cold or warm)

Take advantage of shoppable posts

Shoppable posts are now a feature on popular social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. (Newcomer TikTok is also currently testing shoppable video ads on their platform as well.)

When you use ads or create posts on these channels, be sure viewers are able to instantly check out or learn more about the product by redirecting them to a product page.

Instagram lets you create Shoppable posts and even Shoppable Stories.

Image source

Provide cross-channel customer support

One-third of customers reported that they would consider switching companies after just one bad customer experience. This points to the importance of customer support and how it helps build upon the customer journey.

Make sure your brand can handle customer support on multiple channels, such as email support and social media messaging. For a personal touch, allow customers to call you on your company phone or even write a letter.

Train your support staff to be friendly and warm as well. It’s important to have a playbook for different scenarios and circumstances that might arise, such as requests for refunds, complaints, or even getting good feedback.

Invest in your marketing stack

To successfully create an omnichannel marketing campaign, you’ll want to have a great marketing stack to help you track your campaign goals, analyze your both ongoing and previous campaign results, and run your campaigns with ease.

You’ll need a mix of both online and offline tools to help you create a truly well-rounded marketing campaign. Here are just some of the things you may consider investing in:

  • Powerful website, landing page, and ecommerce store builders that let you customize your pages easily while integrating with other popular tools
  • Easy-to-use email marketing software that lets you build, design, and track personalized campaigns for your ecommerce customers and leads
  • Social media scheduling and analytics software for easy campaign management and tracking
  • On-ground displays, posters, in-store experiences for offline marketing strategies

Keep your customer’s data sacred

Next, because omnichannel marketing is about multiple channels and a streamlined, seamless experience for your ecommerce customers, keeping customers’ personal data secure has to be top priority.

By entrusting you with their personal data like email addresses, postal addresses, and their complete names, customers expect that you use this data wisely.

Many customers appreciate and, in fact, prefer when content and promotions are personalized to their preferences and interests. So that’s one way you can use this precious data you have on them for both your business’ and your customers’ benefit.

Keep your CRMs and databases secure. Update any software and tools you use on your website constantly. And use the best security tools that will keep any malicious web attacks at bay.

Make testing a habit

And last but not least, always make testing your campaigns and tactics a habit. The beauty of doing digital marketing and online campaigns is that much of your data can be tracked, allowing you to glean better, more useful insights.

Start by testing simple variables in your email campaigns, such as campaign subject lines or opt-in forms for lead generation. You can also test post formats on your social media campaigns, or use different CTAs or landing page designs on your website.

In the example below, for example, you’re testing whether a multi-step contact form (in this case, 2-step) would work better against a contact form that’s already displayed onscreen.

Because each test would measure conversion rates against each other, the result you’re measuring for a test like this one is for the number of completed forms versus the number of page visits.

Example of a split test for a sign-up page.

Image source

Specifically for your ecommerce store, consider using different product page layouts. Or experiment with different button text, such as “Buy now” or “Add to cart.” You can even do split tests on scarcity tactics, such as testing different “only X left” counters or using a countdown timer for a promotion.

Learn about our Countdown Timer feature here

The more data you collect, the better you can estimate which tactics will do best in your next campaign. From there, you’re able to create newer experiments that help you get even better data.

Wrap up

With omnichannel marketing, your ecommerce store can:

  • Deliver more seamless experiences for customers from on-ground to online levels
  • Build more brand awareness and personalized experiences
  • Increase customer loyalty over time
  • Meet customers where they currently are

Whether or not you run a completely online store or do offline retail, an omnichannel marketing strategy can boost your leads, sales, and customer loyalty with a rich, consumer-first experience.

Omnichannel doesn’t just make use of several marketing channels. It instead makes the most of them. Create your own omnichannel strategy using the steps outlined in this post, and keep testing to get the best results.


Kevin Payne is a content marketing consultant that helps software companies build marketing funnels and implement content marketing campaigns to increase their inbound leads.

This is a guest post from Andie Katschthaler at Walls.io.

You may not be familiar with the term “user-generated content” or UGC, but UGC is all around us in the marketing materials we consume.

Even resources we don’t necessarily perceive as user-generated content often help companies sell more products.

This can include a product review, a star rating on Amazon, an unboxing video, or social media posts about products.

UGC is everywhere, and it’s up to brands to find it and harness it in their marketing.

Bonus: Below we’ve listed a few additional (but lesser-known) types of user-generated content:

  • Tutorial videos using specific products
  • Blog posts
  • Product unboxing videos
  • Animated GIFs

Has your business ever used these? Let us know in the comments below.

Sustainable British clothing brand Lucy & Yak is resharing a snapshot of a customer wearing a Lucy & Yak coat:

This Instagram post perfectly encapsulates what user-generated content is: using customer photos to market products.

Source: Instagram

What exactly is user-generated content (UGC)?

UGC is defined as any content created by the users of a website, a product, or a service, whether it’s posted on social media or anywhere else online.

But what’s the big deal about user-generated content? Why are we so into it? Where can you collect it, and how can you make it work for your brand?

User-generated content is authentic, and buyers trust it.

Brands love content created by their users for two main reasons:

  1. They get to reuse great-looking content and share it as part of their own marketing efforts.
  2. By sharing UGC created by happy customers, brands can convince potential customers to buy.

Simply put, the trick behind UGC is that people trust other people most when it comes to making buying decisions. Whether that’s actual in-person recommendations by someone they know or an online review by another customer—potential buyers rely on social proof.

According to a 2017 survey by TurnTo, 90% of U.S. consumers say their purchasing decisions are influenced by online recommendations. Plus, our own original research found that social proof is important to both millennials and Gen Z buyers.

This graph shows why user-generated content is important for buyer decisions

And some consumers even prefer UGC to original brand content, which is often seen as too pushy and promotional.

The younger the consumer, the more important UGC becomes. Gen Z buyers want to support brands that resonate with them, which often means authenticity and transparency.

How to collect user-generated content

Having user-generated content to use in your marketing is great. But, to have it, you have to first collect it.

It may sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to get UGC is to ask. Request reviews and ratings from your fans and customers, and incentivize when you can.

Ask customers and newsletter subscribers for reviews.

The most straightforward way of getting reviews is to ask people who’ve just bought something from you to review it, for example, in an email set to arrive at a reasonable time after purchase.

For example, trendy mattress and pillow brand Casper sends out post-purchase emails asking buyers to review their purchase:

This Casper email asks for UGC by asking customers for reviews

Source: Really Good Emails

Another group of people that can create great user-generated content is your newsletter subscriber list, even if they haven’t bought from you recently.

You can publish the reviews you get on your own website, ask people to review your brand on aggregators like Capterra or G2, and even use tools like Reevoo, Olapic, Stackla, Mention, or Livefyre to collect reviews.

Create a fun hashtag campaign for great content.

If you’re looking for content other than reviews, a hashtag campaign can be a great way to motivate and collect user-generated content.

Come up with a good campaign idea and create a hashtag campaign around it. Promote the hashtag and ask your fans to take part and share it.

The Birkenstock website features a section dedicated to the #MyBirkenstock hashtag, encouraging shoppers to share their pics and embedding a gallery of posts shared with the hashtag:

Birkenstock has a hashtag-related UGC site section: #mybirkenstock

Source: Birkenstock

Be clear about what you want people to create, whether it’s images, videos, or written content. People want to know the guidelines for creating content for a brand.

The better you explain what you’re looking for and how you’re planning to use it, the better the content you get will be.

The #KidsInTheKitchen hashtag campaign by NatureFresh™ clearly lays out what kind of content they want to see and how to submit it:

Give people steps to provide user-generated content, like NatureFresh.

Source: Kids in the Kitchen

Reward the best submissions with exciting prizes to motivate users, creating content that you can use in your campaigns later on. Incentives are a great way to coax content out of fans.

Collect existing brand-related content posted by your customers.

Sometimes, you get lucky, and your fans are already creating great content about your brand, without you even asking. Don’t miss out on it and monitor social media for mentions of your brand and your hashtags.

Use a social media monitoring tool to keep an eye on your brand mentions or a social media wall to collect any posts mentioning your brand, your hashtags, or defined keywords on a social wall.

You can repost or share the great content you find this way as well.

How to put UGC to good use

Now that you’ve collected all that great social proof, it’s time to put it to good use. You can even reuse UGC print ads, but the most common placement for fan content will likely be your online marketing efforts.

Convince your website visitors to buy.

Imagine a potential customer browsing your online store. They’re already on your website. They like your product or service.

They’ve looked at all the specifications and information. But somehow they’re still hovering over that buy button.

To get them to click on it, you’ll have to convince them that you really are the best. And that’s where your UGC comes in.

Strategically place reviews from other customers on your website or your online shop, or collect the best posts from social media and embed that on a section of your website.

You can even connect UGC to ecommerce using a social wall, by linking directly from the posts on your wall to the corresponding product in your shop.

Here’s an example of how beyerdynamic—an audio equipment manufacturer from Germany—is collecting user-generated content on a social wall to draw attention to the brand’s products.

They collect user posts which mention beyerdynamic, embed them on their website and then link each post created by their customers to relevant products in their online shop.

This is an example of a social wall that features examples of UGC. User-generated content is anything buyers make about your company.

Source: beyerdynamic

Turn your newsletter readers into customers.

You can use your newsletter to recruit reviewers but, similarly, email is a great way to garner reviews as well. So include UGC in your abandoned cart emails to lure customers back and entice them to finally buy.

Adidas includes user reviews in an abandoned cart email:

Adidas shows how you can use UGC reviews in your automated emails.

Source: Really Good Emails

When you introduce a new product or service, share what others have said about the product or your brand. It livens up the email and acts as social proof for future buyers.

Keep sharing that social proof on social media.

Social media is a great and logical place for sharing content posted by fans, and it’s effortless to reshare the posts.

Retweet content happy buyers have posted, include Instagram reviews by fans in your own Stories, or feature great user contributions on your Facebook page.

Here are two brands cleverly using UGC in their Instagram Stories: On the left, mara_seaweed reshares a post by a fan showing off their lunch made with the product.

On the right, oVertone shares a review by a user and includes a CTA encouraging people to sign up for the product’s waitlist.

These examples show Instagram Story UGC examples

Source: Mara Seaweed Instagram & oVertone Instagram

Just remember: with all your user-generated content, make sure you ask for permission from the creator before using it.

Wrap up

User-generated content can do great things for you. Use it to your advantage.

What existing fans have to say about your brand provides social proof for potential new customers. It shows that your brand is worthy of their time and effort. And that means you get more customers and more conversions.

You can collect user-generated content, such as reviews or social media posts, by asking your customers to share content.

Try asking them for feedback in your newsletter, collect reviews using an aggregator, or create a whole hashtag campaign built around visuals created by fans of your brand.

The clearer you are about the type of content you wish to see, the higher the quality of the submissions will be.

Then, use your social proof on your website, your emails, your social media channels, or even your print ads to show potential buyers how awesome your brand is.

Andie Katschthaler is a freelance copywriter and consultant living in Scotland. She has been the head writer behind the Walls.io blog for more than five years, helping people learn about how social walls can elevate and enrich their marketing efforts. You can connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

While it’s hard to believe we’re already compiling the list of 2020 digital marketing trends, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of predictions, innovations, and technology, so your brand can be prepared to meet customer demands.

Digital marketing is a complex industry with tactics ranging from email and social media to SEO and PPC. As a result, digital marketers are faced with a daily challenge of keeping their brand at the forefront of customers’ minds.

Have you thought about updating your 2019 marketing strategy with new trends? As you start deliberating your new objectives and KPIs for 2020, it’s crucial to evaluate what worked and what didn’t in the previous year, so you’re able to evaluate what new trends would be successful. Not only will this help you stay proactive, but you can also better estimate your budget and resource allocations.

6 2020 digital marketing trends to follow

Read on to discover some of the digital marketing trends you should consider implementing to grow your brand as we go into the new year.

1. Voice search

“Alexa, what time is The Joker playing tonight?”

“Okay, Google, how many people use a smart device in their homes?”

Voice technology is going to take off in a big way, due to more consumers purchasing home voice assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo. In fact, 66.4 million adults in the US currently own a smart device, and 26.2% of the adult population are influenced by the responses a home assistant gives them.

As more consumers begin to rely on these devices, brands need to adapt their digital strategy to accommodate this growing need. Why? If you’re looking to stay competitive, it’s estimated that 50% of all searches will be done through voice technology by 2020.

Consider the following voice-technology tactics for your strategy:

  • Utilize relevant question keywords in website content
  • Incorporate feature snippets into SEO campaigns
  • Update long-tail keywords to shorter keywords
  • Create a Google action or Alexa skill that is centered on your products or services

2. Shoppable posts

Social media continues to be a huge part of online marketing and, in 2020, it’ll become a major shopping hub. Currently, 60% of Instagram users find new brands on the platform and 70% of Pinterest users say the platform helps them discover products.

Why are consumers flocking to this functionality? With the rise of influencer marketing and our want-it-now mentalities, shopping on social media is convenient and eliminates the need to ever enter a website or storefront.

The social platforms are catching on too and are making it easier for ecommerce sites to sell their goods via social media. Shopify already offers plugins with this capability, and Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest all allow shoppable posts with native integration. It’s relatively easy to tag your products in the image and allow customers to shop directly from your feed. Not only is this a great way to earn exposure, but you can also drive traffic to different product pages to boost your search rankings.

 J.Crew utilizes Instagram shopping feature

Source: Instagram, J.Crew

3. Augmented reality and virtual reality

Immersive technology like augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) has continued to grow in popularity with digital marketers, and 2020 will be no exception. However, while VR held the top spot for a while, it’s predicted that AR will outpace the technology by 2021.

AR provides customers with a unique experience of a brand’s products or services from the convenience of their cellphone. As mobile continues to grow in usage for customers, AR gives you the ability to interact with your customers in a fun way that enhances your brand’s value.

Why should you consider AR? Take a look at these reasons:

  • Your customers can try your products before buying them, like clothing, makeup, or home products without needing to walk into a store
  • Your customers are able to experience a physical location—like a stadium or coffee shop—without leaving the comfort of their homes.
  • You can distribute branding materials or presentations with interactive features like videos.

Overall, utilizing immersive technology will build a buzz around your brand that’ll deliver an unexpected experience to your customers.

4. Interactive content

Instead of opting for reading or watching content, you can develop material that requires your audience to directly participate in your desired action. In turn, you’re able to better entertain, educate, and engage your audience to drive results through emails, websites, blogs, or anywhere else you’re looking to connect with your customers.

This type of content is appealing because it’s fun, competitive, and gives customers instant and personalized results. For digital marketers, not only isinteractive content a way to build new conversations with your audience, but you’re also able to persuade them further into the sales funnel.

While the type of interactive content you should create widely depends on your audience, consider the following examples:

  • Quizzes
  • Calculators and tools
  • Maps
  • Timelines
  • Slideshows
  • 360-degree videos
  • Games

Taco Bell delivers interactive game in email

Source: Really Good Emails

5. Social messaging apps

If you’re looking for new ways to communicate and offer better customer service, turn to your social media messaging apps. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and more are becoming popular ways for businesses to stay in touch with their customers. Facebook Messenger alone is experiencing 2 billion exchanges between users and businesses on their app.

Customers are enjoying this experience because it’s convenient to directly connect with businesses instead of picking up a phone and it’s extremely personalized. And, in 2020, this kind of personalization is the key to building relationships with customers.

In the upcoming year, brainstorm how your business can better utilize this social feature, including:

  • Educating followers about your brand
  • Promoting new product launches
  • Inviting followers to upcoming events
  • Providing customer support

Customers can order pizza on Domino’s Facebook Messenger

Source: Facebook, Domino’s Pizza

6. User-generated content

Are your customers growing tired of overly branded content? Is your content’s engagement decreasing? In 2020, the average consumer wants to feel a real, human connection to a brand’s products and services while scrolling through their social feeds or inbox. User-generated content is assets that are produced voluntarily by the brand’s customers like Google My Business reviews, Instagram photos, unboxing YouTube videos, and more.

User-generated content provides authentic and trustworthy information about your products and, therefore, increases your overall credibility. Why? People still look at friends and digital sources for validation before making a purchase decision. In fact, 78% of buyers agree that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

 Casper designs emails with user-generated content

Source: Really Good Emails

2020 digital marketing trends: honorable mentions

When it comes to digital marketing, your strategy can extend into multiple channels and tactics to reach your yearly objectives. However, no 2020 digital marketing trends list would be complete without mentioning a few of our favorite runner-ups. Take a look at these strategies that aren’t going anywhere in 2020.

Video

Consumers actually want more video content from brands, and video marketers are seeing more qualified leads from their video content. Video will continue to be an important part of your digital marketing strategy in 2020 for social media, emails, PPC, and more.

SERP results

Have you heard of Position “Zero”? As Google continues to shift its algorithm, the position “zero” is the new coveted spot in the search engine’s rankings. This spot utilizes feature snippets and other SEO tactics to provide the user a question about their search inquiry and a link back to the website for more information. If you’re looking to rank #0 in organic search results and boost your CTR, optimize your website with feature snippets moving forward.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has experienced huge growth, and brands will still continue utilizing it in 2020. However, instead of opting for expensive celebrities with thousands of followers, brands are turning to people with a smaller social following to reach a more targeted audience. These micro-influencers drive a 60% higher engagement rate than their counterparts.

Chatbots

Over the past few years, more companies have integrated chatbots onto their website to offer a faster customer service experience. Chatbots will continue to become more sophisticated and handle complex tasks thanks to artificial intelligence (AI).

Wrap up

Are you ready to start kicking your 2020 digital marketing strategy in action? Remember, when selecting which emerging trends are right for your brand, consider your customers first. With a customer-first approach, you’ll be able to deliver personalized experiences that not only entertain your audience but also convert them into loyal brand advocates.

Consider our roundup of the top digital marketing trends for 2020:

  • Voice search
  • Shoppable posts
  • Augmented and virtual reality
  • Interactive content
  • Social messenger apps
  • User-generated content

Another way to boost your engagement and conversions in 2020 is email marketing. With Campaign Monitor, you can bring your brand to life and deliver personalized communications to your customers. Ready to give it a try? Sign up today for free.

Having a solid social media strategy is crucial for any marketing team. However, choosing the best social media sites for nonprofits tend to be more difficult. Many marketers know that Facebook and Instagram are all the rage, but do they work the same for nonprofit organizations?

The short answer is yes.

We recently ran a study into the state of small business and, while a significant number of our participants were in retail and marketing, there were a decent number of participants that worked in nonprofits.

When we asked our pool of participants where they saw their most significant opportunity to build brand awareness, social media took the cake.

Small businesses, nonprofits included, rank social media as their best opportunity to build brand awareness.

Check out the rest of the guide here.

Why social media matters

If email marketing is the most effective of all digital content, then why should nonprofits utilize social media in their digital marketing strategy?

Social media allows nonprofits an additional channel to connect with and build relationships with their target audience. People turn to social media for quick information, making it a great tool for communicating one-on-one with your audience, especially when they have questions that need addressing.

Possible donors want to know the people behind the nonprofit, so having a social media presence can also build trust amongst your audience members.

Social media pages allow your audience to contribute and get questions answered easily.

Source: American Red Cross/Facebook

The best social media sites for nonprofits

When trying to determine the best social media sites for nonprofits, there’s no one correct answer. What it all boils down to is where your nonprofit’s audience is hanging out the most.

However, several social media platforms are worth looking into. Read on to learn about the top four.

Instagram

With around 500 million daily active users, Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms being used by brands worldwide. With that many active daily users, it’d be difficult to ignore the potential that Instagram could provide a nonprofit, as far as brand awareness.

With 64% of Instagram users falling between the ages of 18 and 29, this is a platform that suits the average nonprofit demographic, and for those that target ages 30-49, this is still a viable option, considering that particular age range makes up 40% of all Instagram users.

Instagram is one of the most frequented social media platforms, making it a top contender for nonprofits.

Source: American Red Cross/Instagram

LinkedIn

Once known as the Facebook for professionals, LinkedIn has been gaining traction when it comes to marketing efforts for brands in many industries, including nonprofits. In fact, Classy ranks it as one of the top three best social media sites for nonprofits.

LinkedIn is an incredible source when it comes to building your nonprofit’s credibility. Those who turn to this platform are looking to connect and develop their professional networks, and nonprofits could benefit immensely from partnering with business leaders worldwide.

While the value of a LinkedIn “share” may not be equal to that of a Facebook “share,” it counts where it needs to: in overall credibility.

Anyone can share a Facebook post, and it doesn’t hold much weight when it comes to building your credibility. However, when a business leader shares your post on LinkedIn, your audience knows you mean business.

LinkedIn is quickly becoming a favorite social platform for nonprofits.

Source: American Red Cross/LinkedIn

Facebook

As far as the top social media platform for adults goes, Facebook takes the cake, with a total of 68% of adults using the platform, only being topped by YouTube. If your nonprofit is looking to target a more mature audience, this is where you’re most likely to find them.

Facebook may seem like a slightly outdated platform to many, but it shouldn’t be discounted. In fact, it’s not only one of the easiest platforms to navigate, but, when it comes to regular communications between nonprofits and their audience, it’s hard to beat Facebook’s messenger app.

Facebook’s fundraisers feature also makes it easy for people to create fundraisers for their favorite nonprofits, allowing them to share amongst their friends and make donations directly through Facebook.

Reddit

It may shock some to see Reddit listed under the best social media platforms for nonprofits due to their strict community guidelines against promoting for monetary gains. However, what most neglect to investigate is the possibility of raising awareness on the platform.

Globally, Reddit is the #19 most visited website, while, in the United States, they rank at #6. As of 2018, there were approximately 330 million Reddit users. That’s a lot of eyes that could be looking for your nonprofit.

While promoting for monetary gains is frowned upon, there’s a time and place for everything, and nonprofits tend to be the exception to the rule, especially if they’re active within the community and providing valuable content to the platform’s users.

Reddit is less popular due to their strict regulations on promoting for monetary gains. However, there are exceptions for worthy causes.

Source: Reddit/Red Cross

Other noteworthy social media platforms

While these are 4 of our top choices for best social media sites for nonprofits, there are still plenty of other platforms worth considering, including:

  • YouTube
  • Snapchat
  • Twitter
  • WhatsApp
  • Pinterest

Choosing the best social media sites for your nonprofit

Just because there are so many social media sites out there, that doesn’t mean you should set up a profile with each and every one of them. Instead, you want to focus on one or two options that would best suit your social media strategy.

So how should your marketing team go about choosing the best social media sites for your nonprofit? By taking the following three steps:

1. Define what role social media will play in your nonprofit’s marketing strategy.

Simply having a social media profile doesn’t mean the work is done. Your nonprofit needs to have a social media strategy that integrates with your overall marketing strategy. What’ll you be using your social media for?

  • Driving donations?
  • Customer service?
  • Spreading brand awareness?

Remember, not every social media platform is created equally. So, once you’ve narrowed down the role your social media will play in your larger marketing strategy, you can start narrowing down your list of possible platforms.

2. Define your nonprofit’s target audience.

In order to pick the right social media sites that’ll garner your nonprofit the best reach, you need to be able to define your nonprofit’s target audience. When defining your target audience, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

  • Which gender is most affected by your organization?
  • What age range will your nonprofit cater to
  • Does your ideal donor have a certain job title?
  • Does your ideal donor have a certain level of education?
  • Does your ideal donor make a certain salary?

Questions such as these will help you visualize who your target market is. Another way to help you define your target market is to check out who your competition is targeting.

Once you have this information nailed down, you’ll be able to target specific social media sites that cater the most to your audience members.

3. Set SMART goals for your social media strategy.

As with any other aspect of your team’s marketing strategy, you need to make sure you’re setting SMART goals. These are goals that are detailed down to the letter.

SMART goals are detail-driven, ensuring your ability to reach them in a timely manner.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Once you’ve got your goals defined, you can better target how your social media presence will fit into your overall marketing goals.

Wrap up

Having a solid social media strategy means you know which platforms are best suited to your nonprofit and where your audience is most likely to be hanging out.

If you’re unsure of where to begin, we suggest researching the following social media platforms to see if they fit into your SMART goals and overall marketing strategy:

  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Reddit

Need help building your nonprofit’s social media strategy? Be sure to check out our quick guide on how to create an effective social media strategy.

This is a guest post from Klara Malnar at Mediatoolkit.

Whether you’re a social media marketer or an email marketer, chances are, you’re producing content constantly. But coming up with new ideas can get challenging, especially when you consider the content overload your customers experience day-to-day. Luckily, that’s where media monitoring can help.

Read on to discover how media monitoring can help you deal with a lack of inspiration and improve your content strategy.

Content creation

When you’re creating marketing content, it’s important to keep it short and precise. This is especially true for emails, since subscribers often scan emails, trying to immediately understand the purpose of the email (and whether or not they should respond to the CTA).

It’s also vital to keep the following question in mind when you’re creating content (of any kind): “Why would my customers want to know this?”

Since people use social media to express their opinions on numerous topics, it’s only logical to use media monitoring to find out what people think, want, and expect from brands and their marketing communications.

What’s media monitoring?

Media monitoring is the process of tracking mentions of your keywords across the internet. Instead of endlessly googling relevant keywords, simply use media monitoring tools and get all the results in one place to gain valuable insights into customers’ thought processes.

To make things easier to understand, we’re going to explain how to use media monitoring tools for newsletter content strategy in the food industry. There are various media monitoring tools available, such as Mediatoolkit, Brandwatch, Nuvi, and SentiOne.

How does media monitoring work?

This process is fairly simple. The first thing you need to do? Brainstorm all the keywords relevant to your brand, then add them as queries. Additionally, when creating content, you can add keywords of a topic you’re interested in writing about: This can provide tools for further research.

In this example, we’ve put a simple query setup that tracks keywords such as ice cream, pizza, and burger.

This is a screenshot of what media monitoring looks like in practice.

Source: Mediatoolkit

List of mentions

In the screenshot above, the list of queries is on the left and the list of mentions is in the middle. Here, you can use media monitoring to scroll through mentions and see what people are writing, whether it’s about your brand or other keywords you’ve chosen.

Mentions alone can spark inspiration because you may come across keywords being used in contexts you haven’t thought of before.

For example, while scrolling through the mentions of pizza, we noticed many referenced pizza with pineapple. Since this is clearly relevant to a broad group of pizza-eaters, a restaurant could make a newsletter dedicated to this subject alone.

Time of day

Media monitoring can also show you the right time to send announcements, depending on the content topic. Did you know that the query “ice cream” has the largest number of mentions at 11 p.m.? Apparently, several people are in the mood for a late-night scoop (or two).

If you’re a marketer for an on-demand delivery service, this information could be of use to you. Simply set up queries for each service you offer and discover the right time to send relevant emails and announcements (e.g. a late-night ice cream email).

This graph shows when people are searching for the term "ice cream"

User-generated content

Promoting user-generated content is another way to make your email marketing interesting. Since media monitoring tracks mentions of everyday social media users, you can easily contact them and ask to use their photos for marketing purposes.

Find out how you can employ user-generated content to appeal to Gen Z customers.

For example, why use generic pictures of food when you can use the ones your customers have taken? A lot of brands are now turning to user-generated content because it’s much more appealing and personal than an artificial stock photo.

You can even make a contest for the best photo taken by customers. You can also engage your customers to share their own tips and feature those along with the photos.

Questions

Like user-generated content, you can look for customers’ questions and dilemmas. You can use this information to update your FAQ page and create a newsletter that’ll answer those burning questions.

This also works for social. Consider adding the “ask” option to your Instagram stories to collect questions from readers and customers.

This is an example of the "ask me anything" feature on Instagram stories. Combine this with media monitoring for relevant content.

Source

Since people like to have the right information right away, delivering those answers straight to their email and social feeds is beneficial, because it shows your customers that you care about them and you’re willing to help.

Reviews

People often check online reviews about a service or a product before they decide to engage.

Why not use media monitoring to find great reviews about your business and compile them together in one newsletter? It doesn’t hurt to brag a little. With media monitoring, you can catch every online review there is.

This is great, especially since people often mention brands without tagging them. Without a tag, chances are the brands won’t see the review.

For example, a restaurant can claim they have the best pizza in town, but with customer reviews to corroborate the claim, the restaurant becomes much more trustworthy.

Trending topics

Use media monitoring to find topics that are trending in your industry and about your business. This way, you can write about topics that are current and relevant to your audience, increasing the likelihood that they’ll read and engage.

For example, something great might happen: Maybe a well-known influencer tweets about your business and recommends it to their followers. When followers start retweeting and commenting, the number of your mentions will spike.

Because of that, you’ll receive a Spike alert informing you that the number of your mentions has grown unexpectedly high, which suggests an audience you can engage with right away.

Learn how to own your engagement by reading this guide.

However, Spike alerts can sometimes be bad news. Mistakes happen in every industry, and corporations can often overcome bad press. But for local businesses, mistakes can drastically affect sales.

For example, even one bad review for a restaurant can do a lot of damage. If something like this happens to your business, at least you’ll know right away with media monitoring.

With the right information, you can immediately react and send your customers a newsletter addressing the issue. It’s important to tell your customers that you’re aware of the issue, apologize, and reassure them that you’re doing everything you can to resolve it. By doing this, you’re showing your customers you care.

Wrap up

Next time you think of postponing content due to lack of ideas, turn to media monitoring.

Establishing and maintaining a relationship with your customers is one of the most important parts of any business, and incorporating media monitoring into your strategy will make relationship-building easier. Whether it’s content creation, researching new markets, or crisis communication, monitoring what’s going in your industry is a smart long-term decision.

While media monitoring provides you with valuable information, a good email marketing strategy translates that information into messaging tailored specifically to fit your customers’ needs. Since email marketing remains the most effective way to nurture leads and has the highest ROI, creating the right personalized content strategy will get you a step closer to achieving your goals.

Learn how to use email marketing for lead nurturing here.

Klara Malnar is Content Creation Intern at Mediatoolkit, a SaaS company that developed one of the most advanced media monitoring and social listening tools. She recently obtained a BA in Communication Studies and has a particular interest in topics like media literacy and fashion.

Digital marketing involves plenty of moving parts: Facebook pages and advertisements, ranking in search engines, creating and promoting content from your website, staying in contact with your loyal followers, so forth and so on.

And let’s not forget that the rules, trends, and expectations change on nearly a daily basis.

According to Reuters, businesses spend about $100 billion on digital marketing globally annually—a figure that increases every year.

Keeping track of all the pieces of your email marketing strategy is a challenge, but with the right tools of online marketing, you can reach the right audiences and improve your ROI.

Vital social media tools of online marketing

Organic social media reach may be continuously declining, but as long as your audience uses social media, so you should use it, too. However, that doesn’t mean using every single channel indiscriminately.

Instead, study your ideal audience and find the social media channels they prefer. Take a smarter approach to social media with these tools of online marketing.

Facebook Audience Insights

The Facebook Audience Insights tool helps you drive the best results from every paid post you run on Facebook.

You can choose unique demographics or even create a look-a-like audience to target people similar to the followers your page already has.

To top it off, the Audience Insights tool can help you learn more about your own audience to create content they’ll love. By clicking over to “Page Likes” on the Insights tool, you can see the top pages your followers Like in different categories.

Facebook audience insights tools of online marketing

Source: Facebook

Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter’s Advanced Search will have you rethinking using Twitter for business. You can easily search by date, phrase, hashtags, location, and more to see what people are talking about.

It’s an excellent tool for identifying future trends before you write your social media posts. You can also find new accounts to follow and interact with in your industry in order to build brand awareness.

WhatsApp Business

Let’s be honest: People today would rather text than write an email or pick up a phone.

Sure, you could add a live chat to your website and take full advantage of Facebook messenger, but many people prefer to text on channels with better encryption like Telegram and WhatsApp.

WhatsApp’s more than 1.5 billion active monthly users send a whopping 60 billion messages per day.

Setting up a WhatsApp Business account can help you communicate with your audience and answer questions instantly if that’s where your audience is.

Vital email marketing tools of online marketing

How long do you spend checking out each post in your social media feeds? Probably a few seconds at the longest. The truth is people are averse to advertisements: Reuters found that roughly half of all internet users have installed ad-blocking software.

Email marketing is different. 61% of people prefer email marketing over other channels like social media because, by providing an email address, people have granted you explicit permission to contact them and they can end the conversation at any time by clicking “unsubscribe.”

Here’s the catch: You have to earn your place in each subscriber’s inbox through consistent valuable and relevant content. These tools of online marketing can help you do just that.

Automated customer journeys

Automating your emails really works: Automated campaigns like ones made through Campaign Monitor have an 86% higher open rate and a 196% higher click-through rate.

Why? Automated emails are highly relevant, and they show up in each subscriber’s inbox at the right time. Whether your automated campaign gets triggered by the subscriber’s place in your sales funnel or a specific milestone, you’ll create content tailored exactly to their interests, concerns, and questions.

You’ll start by mapping your customer journey and creating unique content for each stop along the way.

Your goal is to demonstrate value and earn your place in the inbox with interesting, educational, and valuable content.

Welcome emails, onboarding, birthdays, behavioral triggers like viewing product pages, transactional emails—these are all examples of automated campaigns with exceptionally high open rates, and engagement potential.

Campaign Monitor customer journeys and tools of online marketing

Source: Campaign Monitor

Insights and metrics tracking

With social media, your insights are limited. Sure, you can see reach and engagements, but that only answers a few questions about your audience and can only inform your strategy so much.

With email marketing, you can essentially put names and faces to online behavior.

When you check your advanced metrics through Campaign Monitor, you can see exactly who opens your emails, who clicks your links, who your best customers are, and so much more.

There’s no veil between you and your audience, and all the information you collect belongs to you—not Facebook or Google.

Surveys and audience feedback

Email is much more personal than social media. You can use this to your advantage with surveys and requests for feedback.

When people subscribe to your email list, you can prompt them to answer a few multiple-choice questions about their expectations for communication and the topics they want to learn about in your emails.

You can—and should—break your subscriber list into segments to create personalized surveys in addition to the personalized content you usually send your individual segments. For your most engaged subscribers who always open and click your emails, you can ask them what they love in your emails. For subscribers who open your emails but haven’t converted into customers, you can ask what’s holding them back.

You could also send out automated review requests a few weeks after a customer purchases a product in order to build that relationship with your subscribers.

Integrations

When you choose a comprehensive email service provider like Campaign Monitor, you can use it to integrate your marketing efforts across multiple platforms easily.

With Google Analytics, Salesforce, and similar services you can keep track of your customers, keep track of each platform’s results, and find new areas for improvement.

Personalization

Personalized emails provide 5.7 times more revenue than generic campaigns. Email marketing provides countless hyper-personalization opportunities through dynamic content, segmentation, and behavioral data.

Segmentation is a perfect place to start. Instead of sending the same email to your entire subscriber list, break it up into segments based on age, gender, location, job title, parental status, and any other information you have that’s relevant to your content. You can then create relevant campaigns for each group.

Here’s an example of a highly personalized and automated survey campaign from Adidas that went out five days after the customer completed her purchase.

 Adidas review email personalization tools of online marketing

Vital search engine optimization tools of online marketing

Don’t get frustrated if your Google rankings aren’t amazing right off the bat. It takes time to prove that your content is worthy of making the first page of search results.

The tools of online marketing below can help in your pursuit of that coveted first spot.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must-have for monitoring your organic traffic—but simply logging into your account and checking stats isn’t enough.

You also need to take advantage of Google’s advanced API capabilities by integrating your Google Analytics account into WordPress, Campaign Monitor, and all of your other digital marketing channels.

SEMrush

A comprehensive keyword research tool like SEMrush or KWfinder is crucial for optimizing your search engine presence.

These tools can also help you track your position, backlinks, and keep an eye on your competitors.

Yoast

Every WordPress user needs the Yoast plugin on their website to support their SEO efforts.

Without a plugin to help you track your SEO potential as you write, you’re really just making a lot of guesses. Plus, you can preview how your post or page will look on social media or in search results.

Vital content marketing tools of online marketing

Content marketing isn’t just important for SEO; it helps demonstrate your value to website visitors and current customers.

Use these tools of online marketing to build your authority and gain a loyal following online.

Authoritative and relevant blog posts

Pumping out as many blog posts as possible without giving much thought to quality or nuance won’t help your Google ranking or your business.

As a general rule of thumb, check out the top-three ranking pieces for your keyword. Use these to draw inspiration and figure out how you can add a new angle or update information.

Google rewards websites that create content people want to read. And that content should be well-researched, over 1,000 words, interesting, and mobile-friendly.

Guest posting and syndication

Platforms like Medium or industry-specific blogs provide a much longer half-life for your content than social media. Plus, you have a chance to reach fresh audiences that otherwise may not come across your thoughts or website.

Multimedia content

One-third of all online activity is spent watching videos, and 51% of people say they listen to podcasts at least once each month.

Think back to your schoolhouse days when the teacher explained different learning styles: Some people are visual learners while others learn better through listening.

Instead of investing in audio, video, and visual format and hoping something sticks, figure out which format your audience prefers by keeping an eye on your engagement.

Wrap up

The right tools for online marketing can help you stay organized while building relationships with leads and current customers.

  • Use social media to your advantage but not as a final solution.
  • Prioritize channels you completely control like email and your website’s content.
  • Personalize email marketing content as much as possible.
  • Use automation to save you time and resources.

At the end of the day, you want to stay in contact with your customers and build your brand. With digital marketing, you have two choices: spend a ton of money on flashy tools or build a comprehensive strategy focused on long-term growth.

Ditch social media algorithms and start building your email list. Check out how Campaign Monitor can help you create personalized customer journeys for every stage of the sales funnel.

We talk a lot about the value of email marketing. After all, email marketing is the king of the marketing kingdom, with a 3800% ROI and $38 for every $1 spent. Email can help lead prospects down your sales funnel and encourage existing customers to spend more time with your brand.

However, email marketing isn’t the only way marketers are getting traction in the digital space. Content marketing, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, and social media are all helping marketers achieve their goals.

In fact, during a recent study, we asked small businesses where they felt their biggest opportunity to build brand awareness was, and the top two places were social media, followed by email marketing.

State of SMB marketing graphic

There’s more power when these tactics are used together, so, in this post, we’ll explore how you can integrate your email marketing efforts with a social media strategy. The two can complement each other to take your marketing to the next level.

Why the most successful brands have a holistic view

The most successful brands are able to integrate all branches of their marketing together to create an amazing customer experience. These brands have a holistic view of digital marketing and believe that email and social media work best when they’re used together.

When a company has a holistic approach, the connections are seamless. Whether a customer corresponds with the brand on Twitter, gets help troubleshooting through customer support, or walks into a brick-and-mortar store, the customer feels that they’re getting a consistent experience.

However, many brands don’t provide this experience, and it can negatively impact marketing efforts. When marketing teams are siloed, communication breaks down, and it’s hard to integrate new initiatives.

It becomes more difficult to run and promote campaigns, and team members become frustrated because they feel they’re limited in what they can do.

Why does email marketing still work?

If social media is higher up on marketer’s lists for gaining new prospect, then why is it that email marketing is still so heavily suggested?

To put it simply—because email marketing still works.

Seventy-two percent of consumers still prefer to receive promotional content in their email inbox versus 17% who prefer seeing it on social media. When it comes to making a purchase, 4.24% of individuals who visit a site from a link in an email promotion are likely to buy something, as compared to only 2.49% who click a link from a social media site.

How is email used in digital marketing?

Email is only one of many channels that can be utilized in a marketing team’s digital marketing strategy. As with any other channel, email requires a strategy of its own that follows a pattern similar to the following:

  • Identify your target audience.
  • Know what your audience’s pain points are.
  • Address their needs, not yours.
  • Follow up on comments/questions/concerns.

What makes email different than the rest of your digital marketing strategy? It’s just a different channel used to reach your audience.

What are the benefits of email marketing?

The benefits of email marketing are simple, and you have the most potential to reach customers that genuinely want to hear from you.

Marketing materials should only be sent to prospects once they’ve opted in to become a subscriber, so you’ll only be sending to people who genuinely want to see your content in their inboxes.

Integrating your social media marketing with your email marketing strategy

If your brand is struggling to provide a seamless digital experience, you should consider integrating your email marketing and social media efforts.

Campaign Monitor has made it simple for brands to incorporate social media into their email strategy. It’s as simple as drag, drop, and customize.

Assess where you stand with your team.

Before you can start sending your social media following requests to sign up for your email newsletter, you have to assess where you stand right now.

If you have a separate social media team, start by meeting with them. When you do, ask the following questions:

  • How are we already integrating email marketing and social media?
  • What social media goals can I help you reach using email?
  • Do you have any ideas for how we can use social to reach our email marketing goals?
  • What resonates on social media that doesn’t seem to do as well in email?
  • What resonates in email that doesn’t seem to do as well on social?

Having answers to these questions can help the two teams work together to develop a plan for moving forward.

Get calendars in sync.

You might already have an email marketing calendar, but does it effectively loop in your social media team? Is your social media team using a calendar that you don’t have access to?

Sometimes, teams wind up doing the same work twice simply because they’re not aware of what the other team is doing. For example, your social media team might have a comprehensive holiday calendar that could help your email efforts. Alternatively, you might have a holiday calendar that your social media team could leverage.

Integrated calendars can help ensure that everyone is on the same page and has an idea of when campaigns begin and end. Calendars can make it easier to work together to promote initiatives and can help you schedule without conflict.

Using a calendar tool can make coordination easier. Here are a few favorite options for marketing calendars:

  • Project management tools such as Trello and Asana
  • Editorial calendars like CoSchedulePercolate, and Kapost
  • Google Sheets or Google Calendar
  • Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Outlook

Show off social profiles in your emails.

Once the email marketing and social media teams are on the same page, you can begin to figure out ways to further support each other.

Email marketing can help increase engagement on social media by reminding subscribers that your brand has an active social community.

Fruit of the Loom encourages subscribers to engage with their brand in a fun and interactive way through this email:

Fruit of the Loom social media email example

Fruit of the Loom explains the benefit of social media to their brand and what you’ll get from the two main channels they use. They also have a contest to win a product of your choice when you follow the brand on Facebook.

This strategy not only helps increase engagement on social media, but it also gives subscriber’s value, and can help keep them even more connected to your brand. By focusing on the promotion of one social network—rather than three or four—it makes it easy for subscribers to make a decision about what action to take, such as following your brand on Facebook for updates.

Encourage people to sign up for your email lists via social.

You can promote your brand’s social media profiles in your emails, but you can also encourage social media followers to sign up for your mailing lists.

One of the best ways to do this is through the use of Twitter Cards, which allow subscribers to sign up for an email list without ever leaving the social media platform.

Here, Moz encourages Twitter followers to sign up for the Moz Top 10, a bi-weekly email of curated articles.

Encourage Email List Sign Ups via Social Media

The Barista Bar uses the same strategy to encourage followers to sign up for their Coffee Club, which requires an email address.

 The Barista Bar - Encourage Email List Sign Ups via Social Media

Just as you use Twitter Cards to promote your email initiatives, you can use your Facebook page to promote joining your email list, as well.

To do so, add a subscribe form to your Facebook Page. (It’s a simple setup process—just follow these instructions.) SXSW uses this strategy on their Facebook page to encourage their social fans to subscribe to their mailing list.

SXSW - Encourage Email List Sign Ups via Social Media

You can also remind social media followers of the cool stuff that happens on your email list, encouraging them to join. For example, Birchbox teases the benefits of signing up for their email list in many of their Facebook posts. Here, they share that people on the email list get exclusive offers.

Birchbox Facebook subscribe

Upload your subscriber lists to social networks.

One of the absolute best ways to integrate your email and social media marketing strategies is to upload your subscriber lists to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media networks.

You can use these uploaded subscriber lists to follow subscribers on social media, run promoted social media campaigns to those who are already interested in your brand, or simply create a customer list.

Facebook’s Custom Audience Feature is particularly good for this, and is used as a tool to increase your success using paid reach.

Uploading your subscriber lists will help put a name and face to your email subscribers. It’ll also help you listen to them. What’re they gabbing about? What’s interesting to them? What’re they sharing? Knowing more about your subscribers can help you craft better emails as well as better social media posts.

Retarget ads on Facebook and Twitter to interested email subscribers.

Ads are expensive, so you want to be deliberate about where you spend your funds. Retargeting those who are already interested in what you have to offer leads to better conversion rates and eliminates the chances of sending out irrelevant ads.

To set up a retargeting campaign to hit interested email subscribers, you’ll install a tracking code on your website. If you send an email to subscribers that leads to your site, you can then target ads to only the people who clicked to that page.

To set up a retargeting campaign to hit interested email subscribers, you’ll install a tracking code on your website. If you send an email to subscribers that leads to your site, you can then target ads to only the people who clicked to that page.

You can build this specific segment of your audience even faster by using Rebrandly URL Shortener. This tool adds your retargeting pixels to the links you share on social media.

With URL shorteners, you can retarget people who are interested in your social media content but have yet to visit your website.

Create a community through custom hashtags.

Social media nowadays seems to be all about the hashtag. If you use the right one on Instagram or Twitter, your post can go instantly viral. Heck, even Facebook and LinkedIn are catching on and integrating the use of hashtags on their platforms as well.

While using popular and trending hashtags is a great way to join a community of like-minded individuals, brands would be wise to try and coin their own hashtags to set their community apart from the masses.

Take country star Carrie Underwood, for example. She has a wildly popular fitness clothing brand by the name Calia by Carrie. Instead of using generic fitness hashtags, they have a unique one that they use to stand out amongst the masses: #StaythePath

This Instagram collection shows how to integrate email marketing with a social media strategy

Source: Instagram

User-generated content brings your brand to life.

The ultimate way to bring your social media marketing and email marketing strategies together is with user-generated content.

People have certain brands that they flock to, for whatever reason, but, when it comes to gaining new prospects, having user-generated content on both your social media and in your email marketing messaging is the way to go.

As great as celebrity endorsements can be, most people would rather choose a product based on the reviews and testimonials left by their fellow consumers.

While social media is a great way to get these customer reviews and testimonials, you can easily share them with your subscriber’s list to help you promote your brand’s products without sounding too “salesy.”

Wrap up

Marketers are finding more and more ways to integrate email marketing with other efforts. There are many ways to connect email and social media, including:

  • User-generated content
  • Creating brand-unique hashtags
  • Sharing your social profiles via email, while promoting your subscriber list on your social pages

If trying to marry these two popular strategies together seems a little overwhelming, then we suggest you take a step back and work on building one strategy at a time. Focus in on your email marketing strategy and learn why it should be the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy.

This post was originally published in May 2016

Article first published June 2016, updated June 2019

Many of the world’s best-known publishers like BuzzFeed, VICE, Reddit, Fashion Magazine, Apartment Therapy, and Rolling Stone use email marketing as a highly effective and engaging strategy to grow their audience, increase brand awareness, reach subscribers, and promote and sell everything from books and magazines to online subscriptions and ad space.

Modern publishers are looking to drive traffic back to their websites so subscribers can consume new content, make purchases, or continue their subscription through things like email courses. Emails provide a direct path for them to stay digitally engaged.

In this post, we’ll review how three publishers grow their audience and drive results using email marketing.

Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy is a lifestyle and interior design community sharing design lessons, DIY how-tos, shopping guides, and expert advice for creating a happy, beautiful home.

In their mission to help people make their homes more beautiful, healthy, and organized, Apartment Therapy’s newsletters are the perfect way to curate and deliver their most engaging content to their subscribers and drive traffic to their sites.

 

Apartment Therapy partners with complementary brands for giveaways, like an epic shopping spree. To be entered for a chance to win, it’s as easy as providing your email address. Since partners promote these programs to their audiences, giveaways have become one of their most successful tactics for acquiring new subscribers.

 

We’re growing our audience and delivering content at a remarkable rate, thanks to Campaign Monitor – Ashley Anderson, Director of Audience Development

Apartment Therapy - Ashley Anders Director of Audience Development

Apartment Therapy’s sister brand, the kitchn, aims to inform and inspire every aspect of home cooking with recipes, lessons, product reviews, and kitchen design tips. They’ve seen massive success using email courses to share this type of content. These automated classes have open rates and click-through rates of over 50%, which means more and more subscribers are visiting their website and engaging with their brand.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed is a super-popular site where you can consume content about nearly any topic, from pop culture to puppies, parenting, and everything in between. Their content goes viral on a continual basis due to their engaging delivery and unique style.

To feed the wide needs of their subscribers, BuzzFeed has over 20 email newsletters that are catered to subscribers’ specific interests, like Health and Beauty as seen in this example email, that shares content about healthy snacking:

Segmenting their audience by interest is a smart bet for BuzzFeed, as research shows 56% of subscribers will opt out of your email list due to irrelevant content. In other words, publishers can’t send the same message to everyone, so segmenting content that’s created for specific interests is the best way to go.

BuzzFeed also puts email automation to work. The site offers a four-week “Get Fit” class to subscribers. Each week, an email with a new workout routine gets delivered to subscribers’ inboxes.

As we’ve seen in the Apartment Therapy and BuzzFeed examples, courses like these give publishers increased brand exposure, but, beyond that, they also offer subscribers something of value that benefits them.

Publishers can use email automation to schedule these “courses” to arrive every week or day at a certain time. The ability to schedule these emails ahead of time provides a consistent delivery schedule and keeps subscribers engaged in a way that doesn’t require a publisher to manually create and send the emails each time.

For BuzzFeed, email is one of the top five referrers of website traffic, and visitors from email spend three minutes longer on the site than visitors from other channels.

Campaign Monitor gives us the tools we need to create, send, and test more than 20 email newsletters and gives us the data we need to keep improving them.  – Dan Oshinsky, Director of Newsletters

BuzzFeed-Dan Oshinksky Director of Newsletters

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone, as a magazine, has rocked content for nearly 50 years. They continue to drum up excitement and keep their subscribers current about the latest music news, movie and album reviews, TV show recaps, politics, and pop culture happenings via their website. They use email marketing to drive visitors to the site to consume and engage with their latest news.

Publishers have found that one of the best ways to engage subscribers and drive traffic to a website is to give subscribers a sample of their best content. Publishers create a roundup of four or five of the best, most current pieces of content that are on the site and send subscribers a sample.

Rolling Stone’s weekly newsletter offers engaging snippets from recent articles and encourages readers to click through to the site to read the rest.

Rolling Stone’s weekly newsletter offers engaging snippets from recent articles and encourages readers to click-through to the site to read the rest.

By curating their content in this manner, they drive traffic right to their website door.

Knowing the potential of their newsletter list, Rolling Stone advertises complementary events, tickets, and other items in their newsletter to monetize it and drive revenue, while still providing a benefit to subscribers.

Email best practices for publishers

Publishers have a lot to keep up with, when it comes to their email marketing. Generally, audience building isn’t as much of a concern as making optimal use out of every piece of content. Publishers can send out their messages to millions of eager recipients, but how do they get the most out of each effort?

As mentioned, publishers often favor a cyclical approach. Email marketing for publishers involves having great content by default, but it’s about driving audience members through certain actions with each piece. For example, emails drive them to sales pages, sales pages to review sections, and so forth.

Best practices involve, first and foremost, optimizing content for engagement. While some smaller mailing lists set out with the goal of simply informing or audience building, publishers see their goals shift because of their audience size.

Utilize split CTAs to increase engagement.

Going for profitable engagement is one of the main ends of content marketing, in general. However, publishers should be trying to generate engagement at all times.

One way to do this is by splitting calls to action. With a much larger audience, they don’t have to worry as much about funneling all traffic towards one action. They can split it with links connected to multiple blogs/articles, various product pages, or a combination of the two.

One way to do this is by splitting calls to action. With a much larger audience, they don’t have to worry as much about funneling all traffic towards one action.

Source: Campaign Monitor 

This example shows how Buzzfeed focuses on filtering traffic back to their blog. However, they can offer some variety. Not only do they have enough content to do it, but they can likely benefit from this tactic. Prompting multiple blogs usually means prompting multiple CTAs within, and maybe even getting eyes on ads on each page.

As we can see, the process would already be in motion no matter which link the individual chose to follow. If each blog contains an opt-in offer for the email newsletter, even first-time viewers could cycle back to the email list from this content.

Publishers aren’t just going after engagement in the traditional sense of the term. They’re intertwining all their platforms and channels together in an effort to get the most interaction out of each.

Creating diverse content that adds value

Publishers should also try to focus on variety in their content. By doing this, they ensure the journey from channel to channel won’t become stale. The risk publishers face is promoting the same content and channels so often that users feel like they’re seeing the same thing over and over again.

By focusing on variety and diversification of content, publishers can keep audience members engaged whether they’re newcomers or return viewers that have been subscribed for years.

Wrap up

Publishers are using the power of email marketing to grow their audience, reach subscribers, and boost their revenue. Use the tips in this post to write your own email marketing success story like the publishers we’ve featured.

Just because you’re a publisher doesn’t automatically mean you’ll never engage in audience building. Great content is conducive to audience growth, but the way you engage your audience is also critical. You want to cycle traffic through multiple channels, and even use multiple CTAs, when the situation allows for it. Doing so helps you get more inventive and grow your audience more effectively.

As you grow your list, channels, and overall content, make sure you understand how to prepare for growth ahead of time.

Some small business owners and marketers view social media marketing as the lifeblood of small and medium business (SMB) marketing, believing that other forms of marketing—email, in particular—can’t connect them with their audience as well as Instagram or Facebook.

Other small businesses aren’t willing to invest the time needed to build an audience on social media, citing data that suggests email marketing is still the strongest tool.

Who’s right? Is one better than the other?

There’s no doubt that email marketing is more powerful than ever. That’s not to say, though, that there’s no merit in utilizing social media platforms, particularly when you integrate your digital marketing platforms.

Read on to discover some social media facts that’ll prove how effective this form of marketing really is.

Social media facts that prove its impact on SMBs

Social media marketing is proving to be one of the most impactful types of marketing tools available to small-to-medium sized businesses.

As an SMB, you have to take two things into consideration every time you create a marketing strategy: time and money.

Granted, every company has to cater their efforts to their available resources. Nevertheless, SMBs have to do this more strategically and stringently due to their limited resources. They don’t have a huge marketing budget or a staff of hundreds or thousands of employees.

Therefore, they have a limited amount of time and money to invest in their marketing efforts. Every part of their marketing strategy is deliberate—and it has to provide them a high ROI.

Many SMB owners and marketers were ecstatic, then, when social media marketing arrived on the scene. This was an affordable way to get in front of thousands, if not millions, of people.

How has social media impacted SMB marketing? Let’s look at some social media facts.

Social media is the equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing in the digital age

Word-of-mouth marketing has been one of the best ways for businesses to build their reputation and earn a profit. It’s easy to think that times have changed because we live in the digital age. However, social media platforms are, in essence, word-of-mouth platforms.

When a brand provides excellent customer service, a person is highly likely to share their experience with their friends and family. Where do they spend much of their time conversing with friends and family? On social media.

Customers are even more likely to share bad reviews with others online, both as a way to vent their frustration and as a way to forewarn others about a certain company or product.

How does this affect you?

Online reviews and testimonials are a great opportunity for you to gain exposure and build your customer base. Even bad reviews are an opportunity for growth. How so?

When you receive a bad review, you have an opportunity to make things right with the customer. You can directly respond to their complaint post, addressing their frustration and letting them know that you’re willing to discuss how to make things right with them. Not only can this diffuse the situation with the irate customer, but it can also put you in a good light with anyone else following the post.

Additionally, online reviews can boost your Google rankings.

social media marketing examples

Increased exposure in a shorter amount of time

Building an email list takes time. Getting a higher Google ranking with content marketing takes time. Every type of marketing requires time to see results. Fortunately, all of your efforts combined can help speed up the process, and, if done right, social media marketing can put your efforts into overdrive.

The reason for this is two-fold.

First, you have the potential to quickly reach thousands, if not millions of people, worldwide.

Second, depending on which platform you decide to invest your time in, you can end up with high-quality followers. The types of followers are ones that are:

  • Loyal to your brand
  • Invest in your products/services
  • Are willing to spend their time reading/watching your content
  • Not as likely to cause you to have a high bounce rate

One of the best social media sites for these types of results is YouTube. Video marketing statistics are incredible. Video is quickly becoming the preferred way to market to an audience.

For good reason too: People love videos. In fact, according to HubSpot, over 50% of consumers want to see more video content from the brands they love.

Video content is engaging and entertaining, plus the viewer gets more information in a shorter amount of time. It’s always important to remember that the way a consumer gauges whether they’re going to be loyal to a company or not is by the value that the company provides to them. Videos allow you to attract more attention because consumers can get more content in a shorter amount of time.

Your social media presence puts a face to the brand

Consumers don’t want to support a faceless brand. They base their buying decisions, in part, on the reviews and testimonials of others, but also on the personal connection they feel with a brand.

Every brand has a personality. Yours can be expressed through the content you make available to your target audience.

While written content can convey your personality adequately, you can take things to the next level with video marketing. Videos allow you to put a face to the brand. When consumers see who’s behind their favorite brands, their attachment grows.

Humanizing your brand goes way beyond a fancy logo and regular blog posts, or even regular social media posts. Adding video content into your marketing strategy will boost your results.

Videos can be:

  • Used alone on a video social media site like YouTube or Vimeo
  • Used added to social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest
  • Added to your website and/or blogs
  • Added to your email newsletters

video marketing statistics video example

Source: Really Good Emails

Is social media the end of email marketing? Eye-opening email marketing stats

Social media is a great way to market your business. It’s affordable, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming, and you have multiple platforms to choose from.

Due to the extended reach you get from it, many business owners wonder: Is social media the end of email marketing?

The answer is simple: absolutely not.

Here are just a handful of email marketing statistics that’ll make you rethink the idea that email is dead.

  • Ninety percent of emails are delivered to the correct subscriber’s inbox, while only 2% of Facebook fans see the posts of companies they follow in their news feed
  • The number of email accounts vastly outweighs the number of Facebook and Twitter accounts (combined)
  • Organic growth from email marketing is higher than social media marketing, as is the overall conversion rate.

With so many people active on social media, why is email marketing still so popular?

The main reason is that it allows you the opportunity to develop a one-on-one relationship with your audience.

Think of your social media followers as a group of acquaintances, while your email subscribers are your friends. You may interact with acquaintances from time to time, but you have great conversations with your friends regularly.

Your subscribers subconsciously view things the same way. They may like a brand on Facebook or Instagram, but that doesn’t automatically mean they’re willing to invest their time with them. If a certain brand is really special to them, though, they’re willing to share their email address. It’s an investment in the relationship.

The companies that deliver content to their inbox are those whose opinion they value and that offer them a tremendous amount of value.

Most SMB owners and marketers view email marketing as the easiest and most effective way to market their business.

We’ve listed just a couple important email marketing stats, but it’s clear that email marketing is definitely alive and well. In fact, it’s an essential part of every company’s marketing strategy.

However, that doesn’t mean that social media marketing and email marketing should be viewed as competitors. Rather, they should be viewed as complements.

One does not and cannot replace the other. They’re different tools entirely, partly because you interact with your audience differently on them. Ultimately, you’ll get a higher ROI by integrating them than you would by using them independently.

Wrap up

Today, we’ve presented some social media facts that prove it’s an effective marketing channel. Some important facts about social media marketing and how it relates to SMB marketing:

  • Video content can help you achieve more in less time and it humanizes your brand
  • People are more likely to share both their good and bad experiences with a brand on social media
  • Social media marketing can save you a lot of time and money, especially when used in conjunction with other marketing tools and strategies.

Also, don’t forget: Social media and email marketing aren’t competitors. They can (and should) be utilized in conjunction—otherwise, you’re missing out on a great opportunity for a higher return for all of the time, money, and effort you invest in your marketing strategy.

 

Would you like to learn how to easily integrate social media marketing with your email campaigns? We’ve created an integration guide that’ll help make the process so much easier.