Modern Imprint | Back to School — Marketing
September has arrived which means school is back in session. For marketers, school is always in session as digital marketing is constantly evolving. Marketers have to be on top of the latest industry trends.
Here are some courses each marketer needs to pass to have a successful Fall Semester.
SEO
Every website needs SEO — we know that. However, startup businesses don’t know much about SEO other than that they need SEO.
Business 2 Community published an article about SEO for startups and how it can benefit their business.
Two studies showed:
With consumers leaning more towards organic results over paid results, SEO is becoming more important for businesses and a key part of their marketing strategy.
For a startup to have SEO success they need to focus on Local SEO, Voice Search and various On-Page and Off-Page SEO techniques. But most of all, don’t look for quick fixes and invest in a long-term strategy that will bring results that will last.
Social Media
Who’s on social media? Just about everyone except, maybe, people over 80 years old. What does this mean? This means that the vast majority of people walking this earth are on social media. These same people are influenced by social media. Your business needs to have a presence on social media.
Influencive.com posted stats that show:
- More than 77% of businesses use social media for sales, marketing, and customer service.
- 73% small businesses use social media
The strategy for social media marketing isn’t too complex; it’s rather straight-forward.
- Establish Your Presence
- Be Active
Establishing a presence on major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. Creating and optimizing your profiles. This includes: business name, filling out the about section and uploading a business logo. For Twitter and Instagram, include hashtags in your about section. For Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, pin a post to the top of your page that best represents your business or promotes your product. YouTube you can set a feature video.
Being active is simply producing good, quality content. Post short videos for those mobiles users with quick attention spans; long vertical videos for IGTV users. Sharing informative content that will engage users to comment. Creating interactive posts that will generate user participation, ie, polls.
The more activity on your social channels, the more awareness of your business to consumers. This will lead to more followers and potential new customers.
Mobile Marketing
SEO creates visibility. Social Media creates awareness. Smartphones are what people are going to search and learn about you on.
Fundera.com provided these mobile statistics:
- 77% of Americans own smartphones
- The average American checks their smartphone 52 times per day
People are glued to their phones (if you’re not looking at your phone, take a look around you) and this makes mobile marketing that more imperative.
SEO and Social Media are two effective and affordable forms of mobile marketing. Other forms to implement into your mobile marketing strategy are: mobile-friendly website, emails, and text messaging.
Mobile-Friendly Websites: People are more prone to use their smartphone or a tablet over a laptop or desktop device. If a website isn’t mobile-friendly then a business is more likely to lose out to a competitor that has a mobile-friendly website. Google even released a statement about this years back:
“We will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”
What’s good for businesses is if you use Wordpress, Wix or Squarespace, their designs are responsive. They will automatically format on a smartphone or tablet device. If you have an HTML site, you can create a custom landing page that passes the Google Mobile-Friendly Test.
Another thing to lock down: making sure your site loads fast. How to know? Take the Google Mobile Speed Test.
Email: What’s one of the first things people usually do when they check their phones? Who emailed them. Some may say this type of marketing is outdated or even dead, but it’s not. Email still has a value and, if done correctly, can be a useful marketing mechanism.
Oberlo.com broke down the data:
- ROI — For every $1 you spend on emails marketing, you can expect an average return of $32
- Business Growth — 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention
- High Open Rate — The average open rate for a welcome email is 82%
- Power of Personalization — Emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates
For businesses that have a giant customer base it’s a great way to keep their customers up to date on their latest products and services, plus special promotional offers or rewards programs. How many of you have signed up for an email list so you can receive discount deals or alerts of new items that have just been released to the marketplace? That’s the great effect of email marketing: the direct communication between businesses and consumers.
Text Messaging: It’s quick, it’s instantaneous, and with people checking their phones just about every second of the day, your text will be seen. Here is a stat to consider courtesy of Blue Compass:
“text message marketing has the best engagement rate of any marketing medium. 90% of text messages are opened and read within the first three minutes of receiving them.”
This is good enough reason to add text messaging to your mobile marketing strategy. Do your homework on which platform to run your marketing campaign on and consider giving it a try.
__
For SEO, Social Media and Business Consultation Services, email: info@modernimprint.com
Find us online @ www.modernimprint.com
Connect with us on Social Media
