6 Secrets Behind Social Media Marketing

Add the Secret Sauce to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

With so many methods of marketing in which business owners have to figure out, one of the most en vogue and ever-expanding ones is that on the social media front.  There are well over two billion active social media users around the globe—a staggering number that represents nearly a third of the planet’s population!  Think you need to focus on social media marketing now?  Let’s dive into six secrets behind social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Tips:

It’s likely you have at least one social media account, whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or other.  If you have one, potential clients have at least that many, but odds are, they have more.  In this article, we’ll run briefly through social media marketing tips that can greatly enhance your business.

You Had A Business Plan.  Have A Social Media Marketing Plan:

You had to start your business with a plan of attack.  No bank would’ve given you a loan to get that business off the ground otherwise.  While you’re not asking for startup money, having a social media marketing plan is paramount into breaking into this arena of promotion.  You can’t just go about it willy-nilly.  A smart hire of a marketing specialist, if you can afford to pay for the position, is ideal.  Figure out what it is you want to accomplish via social media, how you’ll go about efficient marketing, and research the ways in which to measure success using tools like Google Analytics.

Peanut Butter On Ripped Bread:

What does that mean, you ask?  It applies to the theory of not spreading yourself too thin.  You may think hitting every potential customer out there on every different platform is a good idea.  It isn’t; at least at first.  Don’t overextend yourself with too many places to have to be active.  It’s far too much work.  Figure out who your demographic is, and hit that/those platforms hard.  When you get the hang of it, then add different accounts as you see fit.  Remember, you have enough on your plate that eating peanut butter on ripped bread is not in your best interest.

Quality Trumps The Numbers. Just Ask Google:

Quality content when using social media marketing still rules.  You can tweet 1,000 times, but 10 effective messages on Twitter will still yield better results, and have a higher likelihood of being shared with more people that may be interested in your product.  Also, those 1,000 tweets may be seen by 1,000 people, but if they’re not interacting with your content in the right way, Google will actually penalize your SEO ranking.

Social Media Marketing For Small Business:

You’re a small business owner.  You’re not Coca-Cola.  You’re not Home Depot.  It allows you to connect on a more personal level in your content.  When you do that, you become a face, a person, not a conglomerate that has grand ideas of world domination.  Do your best to be genuine and respond to all comments and inquiries on your social media outlets.  Humanize your brand.  Build relationships.  You can ask questions, put up polls, link to other sights, and more.  People want to feel like they mean something, and that you’re listening.  This kind of authentic relationship building will go a long way in boosting your business.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Sales:

OK, a picture may not necessarily translate into that exact number of sales, but you should use visuals as often as you can when posting on social media.  Show your product.  Show yourself.  Show your place of business.  Show happy customers.  Show anything (in good taste).  Showing visuals is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than simply text.  Make sure to be consistent with your brand, logo, and the colors that go along with them.

Adapt, Adjust, Acclimate:

As tough as it may be to simply keep up with social media and post on a regular basis, you’ll have to be ready to adapt its ever-evolving, ever-advancing world.  Remember when there was just MySpace?  Seems like a long time ago, but now there are a myriad of outlets.  And those outlets are constantly striving to stay ahead of their competitors by adding new facets to pique the interest of today’s social media society.  Like an acorn into a tree, grow with the changing times, and the increase in your business will be indicative of a job well done.

Blue Interactive Agency is adept at handling social media marketing issues and we are ready to aid you in understanding how to increase traffic to your site(s), how to be mobile and smart, and in best practices for social media usage.  Don’t hesitate to reach out us at (954) 613-2476.

Improving Your Email Marketing Campaigns

A guide to improving the implementation and results of your business’ email marketing campaigns

Those of you who don’t regularly check emails, raise your hand… No one? Let's face it, we all do, and pretty much daily, if not multiple times per day.  That’s why email marketing is such an effective tool to reach customers and grow your business. When done correctly, it’s one of the most successful things you can do as a business owner. That’s a very general scope, so let’s focus our gaze a bit tighter on the how to go about improving your email marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing For Small Business      

Email marketing for small business has many facets to it. One of the first to consider is having great landing pages to direct your subscribers that offer great information relevant to the email. Why are landing pages so useful? They allow your email to be more concise and don’t clutter up your web page. They’re great destination pages that customers who really want what you’re offering in the email can head to.  It’s kind of like a present waiting for them should they decide to click to the landing page. When you email subscribers (we’re about to get to that segment of the buying population), make sure you’re delivering specific information that gets them to your site, as well as linking them to your landing page.  Just getting them to your web page isn’t enough. There’s a momentum factor that keeps them going farther with your landing page. You don’t want to lose out on that flow.

Viewers Into Subscribers, Subscribers Into Customers

Getting viewers to become subscribers is tremendously beneficial to accruing business.  How do you get viewers to become subscribers? You can acquire massive amounts of subscribers via gated content. Gated content is that which only subscribers can access. It gives them a feeling of exclusivity and importance. There is real value in it, because many people like getting extras that come with “membership.”  You can offer up discounts, guides, free services, or any number of incentives that can give a little push for viewers to become subscribers.  If that doesn’t seem to be working as well as you hoped-- ask. Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  When you post a blog, which you should be doing regularly, you can always write something to the effect of, “If you like what you just read, check out more by subscribing to my feed.” One bonus with subscribers is when you post a blog, they receive an email notification, which gives them a reason to go to your page. You don’t have to keep reminding them you just blogged.

Personalize Your Emails. Connect With Subscribers

Try to find out about subscribers; maybe it’s their favorite football team or most hated food.  That’s enough to personalize and customize your emails.  Don’t write one generic email for the masses. Draw them in on an individual basis.  Research has shown click-through rates increase by as much as 35% when you gear a personal touch in your emails. You may also obtain personal information based on a “like” or comments directed on your blog. Customers love to feel special, that they’re connected to you.  It empowers them.  When they’re empowered, they purchase, and you win. By allowing to select products or services they are interested in, you can easily tailor different messages to each customer subset.

Improve Email Marketing.  Make it Mobile-Friendly

If you’re reading this, you may very well be doing so from a cell phone.  Face it-- we’re always on our phones.  They’re accessible, where computers live in designated spots.  So, you can improve email marketing efforts by making your site, blogs, and emails mobile-friendly.  Content that looks good on the cell phone may encourage consumers who might simply be waiting for their oil change to subscribe.  More than a third of cell phone users utilize that device rather than their laptop or desktop.  It’s a huge population you need to be hitting.  Find that segment of consumers where they are at the moment, not where they might be while watching TV after work.

Remember, 91% of consumers say they check their emails at least once on a daily basis.  Data has also shown email resonates nearly eight times better than social media.  And it nets you twice as much ROI on pay-per-click.  It stands to reason that an effective email marketing campaign will boost your business demonstratively.  If any of this sounds confusing, don’t waste time scratching your head.  Blue Interactive Agency is at your service to enlighten, enable, and empower you to grow a healthy, robust email marketing campaign.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to BIA at (954) 779-2801 and get your business on the fast track to bigger bucks.

Online Marketing Services for Small Businesses

Utilizing Online Marketing Services to Boost Your Small Business

Owning a business is tough.  It’s not a 9 to 5 job.  You don’t just clock in and out.  Everything is on your plate.  The fate of the business is solely in your hands.  It can have you in the office at 4:00 AM and out at midnight.  It can keep you up at night.  It can stress you out beyond belief.  You’re in this all alone.  Or are you?  There are hundreds of online marketing services for small businesses at your disposal.  Are they wearing a cape and possessing the power to stop a speeding bullet?  No.  But if you utilize them correctly, it might feel like they are superheroes!

Online Marketing Services and What They Have To Offer:

 The internet, as you undoubtedly know, is a very powerful tool.  Consumers of today are not like they were in the past.  They don’t hop in the car and bounce around from store to store to find what they’re seeking.  They do it online.  Online marketing services can provide you with some major entities to help start or grow your business.  They can be found…by looking online, of course.  Some of the services they have to offer can help you see much more expedient results in your marketing efforts via responsive website design, search engine optimization (SEO) marketing, search engine marketing (SEM) strategies, and more.  They succeed when you succeed.  They give you peace of mind when you lock the store doors at the end of the day.  They are there to help you sleep better at night.

Responsive Website Design.  Look Sharp, Be Sharp:

 There’s nothing more immediately unsettling for a consumer than to go to a website and see it look unprofessional, as if a 12-year-old did it for a school project.  Your page should pop, catch the eye, make an instant impression.  Responsive website designs are crafted to provide optimal viewing, clear and easy navigation, and an engaging interactive experience.  They are created to look spectacular regardless of the device they’re being viewed on.  With so many people using their smartphones to look at websites, responsive website designs perform at a capacious level.  The bonus is that they won’t need to be updated whenever new technology comes into play.

Small Business SEO:

 SEO marketing is a tool of critical importance.  It can mean being seen by potential clients or being left out in the cold wondering why no one is coming through your doors.  The average person today has a very limited attention span.  Think of the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”  It’s been a highly successful campaign.  It doesn’t read, “Just Go Ahead And Do It To The Best Of Your Ability.”  That’s not catchy.  Point being, consumers want to find the website they’re looking for quickly.  They don’t want to take the time to go the second or third page on Google when searching.  SEO marketing helps enable your website to make it on the first page, in the top 10, or even higher.  Applying SEO marketing strategies such as keywords, blogs, and backlinks make your site more relevant to the consumer, and search engines reward that with a more prominent position on search engine pages.  For small businesses looking to get noticed and compete with bigger, already-existing brands, small business SEO is an extremely important method of targeting customers, in which online marketing services can provide you assistance.

How SEM Strategies Can Be Highly Effective:

 SEM strategies can leave you numb at first.  Your head will spin, and it might leave you wondering why you didn’t pay more attention in math as a high school senior.  Don’t fret; the online marketing services for small businesses will help you get a grasp on it, and go through all the details on how it works.  In short, SEM is also known as pay-per-click advertising.  As the name suggests, you pay for every click a viewer goes to your website.  This can be a very enterprising method for entrepreneurs.  The cost per click is determined by the relevance and popularity of the keywords you choose.  It’s valuable and productive even if you’re on a budget.  Set the budget for yourself (the online marketing services will help you determine what’s realistic and feasible), and you bid for SEM status based on what you can afford.

Blue Interactive Agency is a premier online marketing service ready at the word “Go” to aid, teach, and deliver high-caliber results with the varying methods of marketing.  We want you to get some sleep!  Don’t hesitate to inquire about any of BIA’s services by calling (954) 715-5436.

How to Increase Your Organic Search Ranking

Don't Settle With a Low Search Ranking. Get Up There With these Organic Search Ranking Tips

So you’re a business owner, and you want to attract potential clients to your company. Maybe you’ve advertised in the paper, maybe on radio, or even Craigslist. You’ve come to realize that a very large percentage of people begin their search for goods and services online. After all, the internet is where society lives—whether it be while sitting on the sofa looking at the laptop or on cell phones. You’ve begun the process of getting your website on Google, and now it’s time to ramp up your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in order to boost your ranking. Here are some SEO Marketing tips to help you learn how to effectively increase your organic search ranking. It’s a vital key to success, as 90% of the links people use to search are in organic form, not paid!

Organic Search Ranking and Your Domain:

It all begins with your Domain; typically, the shorter, the better. They’re easier for people to find. For example, let’s say your name is Al and you own a car wash. The title “Al’s Upscale But Affordable Car Wash and Auto Spa Emporium” won’t have the same quick-hitting effect as simply “Al’s Car Wash.” It’s much easier to remember for people browsing the internet, as well as being more predominant with Google’s very detailed and stringent algorithm used in search engine optimization.

But each of your website’s pages should be longer to contain the appropriate keywords in your slug. What’s a slug? It’s that part of the URL that comes after the main domain (www.blueinteractiveagency.com) to show what page you are on. So for example when you go to the page about website design, you will want the slug to be “/website-design”, so the whole URL will read https://www.blueinteractiveagency.com/website-design.php

Define and Research Specific Keywords:

When coming up with your list of keywords, put yourself in the shoes of those who search for your product or service. Think about the words or phrases people you want to attract would use—and use them in your content. If you come up with a lengthy list, that’s fine. But when you do, use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to see what words will be most effective. Choose the ones that are most relevant, and that are rated high in traffic results. That’s a fairly obvious path to take, but utilization of the tools Google has out there can make a massive difference in your organic search ranking. This part of SEO marketing also aids in attracting not just a high volume of clicks, but clicks by those who are really ready to make a purchase. These consumers represent what’s known as qualified organic search traffic.

Create Compelling, Rich Content:

This doesn’t mean to write in such a high-brow manner that potential clients can’t understand it and want to leave your page immediately. It refers to writing content that hits home to future customers. Compelling language that grabs the attention of your viewers is a critical way in which to draw more business. You want website visitors to be interested in what you have to offer, right? That’s rhetorical. The more they’re interested, the more conceivable it is they’ll share it and link it. Great content has a much stronger shot at going viral. When that happens, more people obviously see it—AND, the aforementioned Google ranking algorithm rewards viral content.

Blog, and Blog Often:

It may sound a bit tedious, but continuing to blog on your website keeps fresh new ideas in the forefront of the people’s minds you want at your storefront. Blogs can have an immediate and lasting effect on building relationships with your clients. Don’t simply promote your business in blogs-- entertain, show personality, ask questions and ask for feedback. When you blog, you can also throw it up on social media, and that’s a major bonus. If you write a blog and post it on social, those who read it may very well share it, thus increasing your business. And not to belabor the point, but when you frequently add new content to your site, the Google algorithm recognizes that. It sees continual development of your site as having more value to the viewers, and your ranking will rise as a result.

Make Your Meta Description Count:

The meta description is a tag, in essence. It serves as a very brief description of what your site is all about. It gives the viewers a tease, like scenes from their favorite TV program’s next show. It pulls them in. It’s compelling. It gives them ultimate reason to click on your link. What do you get when you arouse curiosity for a person to click? More clicks. A well-prepared, well-executed meta description can persuade someone to head to your site, where they may be on the fence as to which link to visit. You win that battle, you attract more viewers. Just make sure you err on the side of caution. While it may seem tough to balance that AND write whatever you can to engender more clicks, Google doesn’t like false advertising or content that leads the consumer astray. Use best SEO marketing practices when writing your meta description.

Organic Search Tips:

There is a litany of ways to go about boosting your organic search ranking. The above are just a few ways to accomplish that goal of being on the first page of a search engine, being in the top 10, and even reach the apex to the very top. Do your research. A boost in organic search ranking doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, patience, and work. But stick with it, and the dough may flow.

Blue Interactive Agency will professionally and exuberantly assist you with a wide array of small business SEO services, and can certainly aid even large, multinational corporations in the ways to achieve a higher SEO ranking. Feel free to reach out to Blue Interactive at (954) 779-2801.

How Inbound Marketing Can Help Your Business

How Tapping Into the Power of Inbound Marketing Can Boost Your Business

You get home from work, head to the mailbox, and discover that 80% of what’s in there is advertising of some sort.  You somewhat affectionately refer to it as “junk mail.”  It doesn’t interest you, almost irritates you, and it likely has a one-way ticket to the garbage can.  Then, you sit down for dinner with the family for the nightly bonding experience, when the phone rings. It’s a telemarketer on the other end.  You’ve gone from slightly irritated to very annoyed.

You’ve just experienced outbound marketing from the consumer perspective.

Let’s say your workplace is a business you own, and the light bulb just came on—the realization that what just took place during dinnertime is the method you’ve been utilizing.  You now understand you have to change things up.  You don’t want to enrage potential clients.  You want to entice them. Inbound marketing can help your business.
What Exactly Is Inbound Marketing? 

Inbound marketing is a fairly new concept in communicating with possible future customers.  As opposed to the on-the-edge-of-obsolete outbound marketing, which floods consumers with unwanted advertising-- inbound marketing lets those who are interested in your goods and services find you.

Now, you can’t just sit there and wait.  Those customers are not going to just knock on your door and hand you money.  There are certain inbound marketing strategies you need to enact to ramp up revenue.  Many businesses have put into play inbound marketing strategies (such as content marketing, social media, email, and search engine optimization) as essential tools for B2B and B2C interaction.  Why wouldn’t they?  And why wouldn’t you. A recent study indicated that use of inbound marketing has shown an increase in marketing ROI up to as high as 300%.  In addition, it can reduce lead acquisition costs as much as 60%.

How To Get Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Up And Running

Start a Blog.  Use SEO practices.  Make the connection.  Your potential clients all begin as strangers.  They move to the visitor stage, then leads, and eventually customers, who you hope will continue to buy your product and spread the word.  When you are blogging or placing ads, make sure to use keywords that fit the description of your product in an ideal fashion that will attract viewers.  Remember, web visitors will start the buying process online with words and phrases that indicate exactly what they’re searching for.  This is paramount to obtaining and piquing interest.  If they’re not interested in seconds, they’ll move on, and your business will be a distant memory faster than you can say, “Poor SEO execution.”  In blogs and ads, use content that is rich and relevant to what the customer desires.  Grab them quickly.  Make them want to click on your site.  Make them happy they did decide to visit your page.  This is free marketing, free advertising.  Know this: 90% of the links searchers click on is organic, not paid.

This Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

The utilization of inbound marketing is a long-term commitment.  Watch for trends and make sure your keywords are up to date.  Put a plan of analytic usage in place to see what’s working and what might need tweaking or even overhauling.  You might have nailed it initially, but things change and so do people.  Don’t rest on the laurels of early success, and don’t get dismayed if customers aren’t lined up around the corner after the first day you’ve begun inbound marketing.  It’s all a process to achieving greater revenue.  But make no mistake—cramming advertising down people’s throats is no longer an effective method of marketing.  With the inbound style, you’re simply putting your product in front of those who are looking for what you have to offer.  And by doing it right, it can be a convincing and powerful tool to locking up future business.

There are literally hundreds of Inbound Marketing Services at your fingertips.  Perform a search, as would your potential clients, to find what you’re looking for.  Blue Interactive Agency is one such company that will vivaciously assist you with any inbound marketing needs you have.  Don’t hesitate to call at (954) 779-2801.