Marketing | Michelle Pircher

Content Marketing Social Media Social Media Marketing

Instagram and Marketing

June 18, 2015

Most people overlook the potential of using Instagram to promote their brand. You can post pictures of anything that is related to your brand which has the potential to strengthen your brand’s image.

Let’s look at a restaurant for example. You could post pictures of the interior of the restaurant, pictures of popular meal choices, or specials of the day. If celebrities come to dine, snap a picture (with their permission) and upload it. Or even snap pictures of everyday diners and ask them for their usernames so you can tag them in the pictures. You could post pictures of the staff out in the community helping out, or even of them out buying fresh ingredients for the days’ menu.

The list is endless on what you can take photo’s of and post, it’s up to your creativity and imagination to come up with different ideas that will engage followers and encourage new followers.

Here are a few things to know about Instagram and how to make it work for you:

Instagram is visual

As the old saying goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Our brains are mostly visual so we tend to remember more of what we see rather than what we read or hear. Looking through pictures on Instagram is effortless and many people check it out during their free time.

Hashtags

Hastags are important to each post because they allow users to find your pictures in a search as well as placing the image into different categories. This in turn will increase your audience by making it easy for people to discover you and become new followers.

Tagging ability

Along with each picture you can tag people and add a location. Going back to my example of the restaurant, this allows followers to know the restaurant location as well as where you are when out and about working with the community.

Interactive

Instagram allows you to interact with your audience. People can both ‘like’ and comment on your pictures. So it is important to monitor people’s comments and respond back. Don’t forget to include their name in your response so that they will receive a notification of your mention.

Contest tagging

Because Instagram is so easy to use and has over 300million users, it’s worth considering incorporating Instagram into your next contest. It is as easy as getting people to upload an image on a particular subject that links to your business and asking them to tag you in it. Not only does it get people interested in your brand, they have fun in the process.

Instagram is linked to other Social Media Platforms

It is easy to link your Instagram account to both your Facebook page and Twitter account, taking the effort out of having to update all three accounts. Or if you prefer different content on each you can easily promote your Instagram account on either of the two of them to attract more Instagram followers.

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Content Marketing Social Media

Combining Content Marketing and Social Media

May 10, 2015

The way brands and products are marketed these days has changed a lot since people turned to digital methods rather than the previous traditional forms of advertising. It is now possible for consumers to skip through advertising, making it harder for advertisers to reach or connect with their intended audience. This has forced advertising and marketing agents to find other ways to get their message out. A way to do this is via content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a way of promoting your brand and educating consumers in a way that motivates them to learn more, rather than be turned away from annoying advertisements. It is a different approach that encourages consumers to be more interactive with your website as well as enticing them to keep returning. It is important to keep existing customers happy and keep them engaged as they will in turn help you by sharing your content with others. Word of Mouth (WOM) is now more important than it was before, because consumers have the power to share and like articles with others that are linked to their social media accounts. This in turn generates more traffic, or visitors in other words, to your website.

Why is traffic important?

Traffic to your website is important as it increases brand exposure and has the potential to increase sales. Website traffic helps build an online community allowing a higher exposure rate for any marketing campaigns you create in the future. As Ortigas puts it, ‘It doesn’t matter if you have the best website if nobody knows about it.’ In other words, if you spend all that money on an amazing website, you will want as many people as you can to use it.

Using Social Media to Increase Traffic.

One of the most effective ways to increase traffic to a website is with the use of social media. The hype of social media only continues to grow, so why not use it to your advantage. Users are spending an increasingly amount of time on social media so it makes sense to attract new users in from where they spend most of their time.

Let the Content do the Work.

If you continually create engaging content, you will soon find that consumers will keep returning to your website. Combine it with marketing your content on relevant social media platforms to target potential consumers, you will entice users to visit your site, and you will soon see a dramatic increase in your traffic flow.

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Social Media Social Media Marketing

Why Social Media Marketing?

April 14, 2015

Social media has to power to reach a larger audience than older traditional methods of marketing and advertising. Facebook has 1.32 billion monthly active users, Twitter has over 271 million monthly active users, and Instagram has 200 million monthly active users, ranking them some of the favorite social media platforms in use today. It is estimated that Americans spend about 3 hours a day on social media, and companies like Facebook are using tracking software to keep track of users’ browsing habits which allows advertisers to target people with a more personalized marketing pitch.

Some of the benefits of social media marketing include; increased exposure, increased traffic, encouragement of loyal fans, marketplace insight, generated leads, improved search rankings, business partnership growth, improved sales and reduced marketing expenses. When you think about the potential of using social media for marketing campaigns, and for a fraction of the price, it is hard not to steer towards this new trend.

In the past, using more traditional methods of advertising, advertisers used to spend big dollars on campaigns in order to create reach. The main mediums include TV, print, outdoor displays, radio etc., and although these are still used today, it is not as necessary to spend the same amount of money and use such a variety of mediums for a campaign. I am not suggesting to stop using these methods all together, because they still do work, but use them along with a social media strategy to help create the reach needed. It is all about creating unique content and sharing it through the appropriate channels. The more followers you attract to your pages, only increases exposure and traffic as more people share and ‘like’ your content.

The important thing to concentrate on is how to keep existing customers, and how to use them to spread your campaign instead of the old focus on trying to attract new customers. If you keep your current customer happy then it is easy to reach out to them, and through word of mouth they will do all the work effortlessly simply by liking or sharing your campaign.

Image source: Vector Stock

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