NEW! Instagram Stories Chat Sticker

Have you heard of the new Instagram Stories Chat sticker? This handy new feature allows you to start a group chat with your followers directly from an Instagram Story. As a brand, this is another tool you can use to stir up engagement on your Instagram account in addition to polls, questions, and more.

It’s easy to get started using the Chat sticker – click on the Sticker button in the upper right-hand corner, name your chat, and post to your Story. That’s it! You’ll start to see chat requests come in, and then you can accept or decline the requests. Those who are accepted will enter a DM chat room and the conversation starts. You can add or remove people at any time and end the conversation at any time as well.

It’s important to note that your Instagram Stories Chat sticker chats have a maximum of 32 people (including yourself) but no minimum. Once someone is added to the chat, they have the ability to invite other Instagrammers into the chat as well. Make sure you keep the “Approval Required to Join” button on in order to keep control of who is in your chat. You can also add titles to your group chats, which will make it easier for you to keep them organized.

The Chat sticker is great for making plans with friends, but you can also utilize it for your brand or business. Here are some strategic ways you can use the Instagram Stories Chat sticker…

• Exclusive Deals: Spark your Instagram Story viewers’ interest by offering exclusive deals through chats! This will encourage your followers to keep an eye on your Stories so that they won’t ever miss out on a deal. Offer a special 24-hour discount if they join your chat or free gift with purchase, and then offer the code or link in the group chat.  

• Events: Are you hosting an event? Start a Story Chat sticker to share details of your event and answer any questions attendees might have. If you’re putting on a workshop or class, you can use the chat to send out a ticket link, give out important reminders, share what is needed to be prepared, and more.

• Sharing Content: In an Instagram Story chat, you can share links, photos, and important information about your product/brand/business directly to your followers. If you’re having a new product launch, tease it to your Instagram audience in a chat. Have a tutorial on how to use your products? Share it in a chat!

• Q&A: Host a Q&A session with your brand’s Founder/CEO/President. This gives your audience a more personal connection and insider look into your business, in turn making them loyal clients and customers.

• Customer Feedback: Looking for feedback on a new product or ideas that your company has been tossing around? Form a small focus group by using a Story chat sticker and get more information from your customer (beyond posting a poll on your Stories). This is a great way to get customer insights, feedback, and reviews.

• Niche Groups: Using chats is a great way to organize your audience by interests, behaviors, groups, etc. For example, create a Story Chat for influencers that you work with so you can share important information or promotions with them. They can also interact with each other and form a mini community under your brand.

How are you incorporating the Instagram Stories Chat sticker for your brand? Let us know in the comments below!

Influencer Marketing: A Vital Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Working with influencers isn’t a new concept. According to Sprout Social, over half of purchases are made due to social influence. Influencer marketing involves working with key individuals that have influence over potential buyers to broadcast your brand’s message or product. Instead of paying for an ad to those potential buyers, you pay or trade with an influencer to get the word out for you.

Influencer marketing has been slowly shifting from a PR method to a media channel, sneaking its way into marketing strategies and budgets. Influencer marketing works hand in hand with content marketing since your brand needs to create content for the influencer to share. Research has found that conversions can increase from three to ten times when brands share content through influencers in their industry.

In the old days of influencer marketing, brands could give free products to influencers to evaluate and promote the brand. You’ve seen this tactic used through YouTube reviews, tips and tutorials for makeup, technology and more. But GroupHigh, a blogger and influencer marketing firm, surveyed influencers in 2015 and 69.7% of those surveyed preferred monetary compensation for each post, compared to 11.5% who said they would still prefer free products.

Who are influencers? While you mainly think of them as celebrities, don’t forget people like mom bloggers and emerging internet sensations because they can have a large buying influence on their audience. Look past the numbers. Sometimes a page will have 500,000 fans but no engagement, while another page has 5,000 fans that are extremely engaged by liking, sharing and commenting on the influencer’s content. The numbers aren’t always cut and dry; smaller niche influencers can have more value to your brand. You need to dig a little deeper to find out where the most beneficial relationships are for your business.

Interacting with key players in your industry and building strong, organic relationships is still important. Personal connections that are built over time are always the strongest, which will ultimately convert into long-term advocates of your brand. Pick a small handful of influencers so that you don’t create an oversaturated marketing environment. Your small set of influencers can produce big results if you choose them wisely and focus on cultivating those relationships.

So should you drop your paid advertising in lieu of influencer marketing? No, but you should evaluate your advertising dollars and migrate some towards buying an audience of influencers, especially if you are trying to connect with millennials. A study from PageFair found that as many as 22.7% of browsers are using ad-blocking software, and even if your ad gets past that software, millennials want more depth and authenticity. 53% of millennials surveyed said that user-generated content has an influence on their purchase decisions, meaning that they are more likely to trust peer recommendations than brand advertising. Add influencer marketing into your strategy for a more robust marketing plan.

Finding your influencers. Most brands already have some knowledge of who influencers are in their industry. What pieces of content are you already sharing that is relevant to your brand? The writers of that content could be your influencers. Do you know of influential people already posting about your brand? It’s time to connect with them on a deeper level. Use your social media tools to search for influencers, such as hashtags and keywords.

Once you’ve found your influencers, it’s time to connect. Start by following them on social media. Retweet their content on Twitter or share it on Facebook. Add in your comments about why you think what they’re doing is great. Comment on their Instagram posts and follow their blog. Participate in same conversation circles.

Make yourself known to your influencers and perhaps an organic relationship can be formed and they will be intrigued by your product. After you’ve taken the initial steps in connecting, reach out via social media or email and explain the marketing connection you’d like to make.

People don’t trust marketers, but they trust influencers. Influencers can help open up your potential customers’ minds to your brand and let you in. The question is no longer “do we need an influencer marketing strategy” but “what is our influencer marketing strategy?”

Turn Your Followers Into Customers Using Content Marketing

If you’re ramping up your social media and content marketing efforts, you’re on your way to better brand presence online! But does a large following and high website traffic translate into higher sales and more conversions?

Not necessarily.

Content Marketing Institute reports that 76% of B2C marketers report using content marketing, yet only 37% say their strategy is effective. There are several techniques you can use to effectively leverage your content to turn prospects into customers. Here are six ways to craft your content for conversions.

Example of a Customer Profile

Create Customer Profiles. If you don’t know who your potential customer is, how will you know what they want in order to convert them? It’s essential to understand exactly who your target market is through factors such as age, profession, interests, income, gender and problems they need solved. What are their pain points and what are your solutions to help them solve the problem? Start creating content based on solving these problems.

Blog. Does your brand have a blog that lives on your website? If not, what are you waiting for? A blog is a great way to get potential customers onto your website, which in turn increases the chances of those people converting into customers. Make your website a user destination where consumers can come for information, tips, advice and more, as well as adding in links that take them directly to a point of purchase. Make sure your blog isn’t purely promotional or else users won’t return, and always end with a call to action.

Offer Exclusive Promotions. Everyone wants to be in some sort of secret group or club, and everyone loves feeling special. Offer certain products or discounts that customers can’t get anywhere else other than through your social media marketing. Let your followers know that they can be the first to get insider information if they sign up for your email list or that you’re running limited time offers only to your social media followers. Have a sense of urgency in these deals by letting customers know it’s available for a limited time or perhaps there is only a limited quantity.

Gated Content. Gated content is a great way to build your email list, but it has to be done correctly. Gated content is anything from eBooks to white papers that contain valuable content in which a user needs to complete a form to access. You’ve most likely come across gated content before; maybe you’ve tried to download a social media strategy guide, but you had to submit your name and email address to get the download link.

Gated content has to be attractive to your readers and also contain valuable information, or else your followers won’t give their email address in exchange for a download. You might be giving away some valuable information, but you also gain valuable information in return. You get some insight on your previously anonymous consumers that you can use in the future to market directly towards them.

Turn a Negative Experience into a Positive One. What are common questions and complaints you get about your services or products? Create content that revolves around how you turned angry customers into raving fans. Maybe there is a common problem that customers find when using your product but it has a simple solution. Maybe the problem was simply a customer error but chances are that more than one person will come across the same dilemma. Turn these complaints and concerns into blogs in case you have followers that might not be customers yet due to these same questions.

Testimonials. Use storytelling to provide testimonials to your potential customers. You don’t want to post a simple 3 sentence paragraph of a current customer praising your brand, you want more in-depth testimonials that tell an actual story and show results. Don’t box all of your testimonials into a dedicated page, instead showcase them throughout your website as sidebars so that potential customers will organically see them while browsing.

Engagement Over Follower Count

Are you still buying fake followers and worrying about the amount of fans you have online? Back away from the keyboard and keep reading!

Which scenario sounds more beneficial to a business: a Facebook page that has thousands of fans that like the page but don’t interact/purchase/have a strong tie or a Facebook page that has consumer comments, shares, conversations and sales?

While having fans and followers is important (no one wants a Facebook page without any fans), engagement should be the priority. The heart of social media is social, a back and forth dialogue in which everyone is involved. Are you a megaphone or are you a two-way conversation?

More engagement on your page equals more brand awareness. When your fans comment or share your posts, your brand awareness expands to their online connections. At the same time, your updates will continue to populate their News Feed the more they interact with your page. The goal is to turn that fan who engages with your page into a brand ambassador who endorses your brand and ultimately becomes a lifelong customer. The key to brand awareness is always keeping your brand name at the top of your consumers’ minds. Keep your fans involved in your brand by asking their opinion, which is a great way to get more engagement on your page.

In a media-saturated world, the highest demanded content will be delivered first. If you consistently have low engagement, algorithms will pick that up and continue to punish your page reach. It’s time to come up with a new social strategy if you’re not getting any comments, likes or shares. Test out different types of content to see what works and what doesn’t; remember that Facebook favors high-quality content. Connect with influencers in your industry, give them interesting/relevant content and ask them to share it.

Pay to play. If you’re not paying for a wider reach on Facebook, you haven’t unlocked your page’s full potential as a marketing tool. Paid ads aren’t a cure-all; if your content sucks then you’re wasting your money. But if you’re producing original, high-quality content, paid advertising is a great supplement and method to casting out a wider net. Don’t sit around waiting for customers to contact you. Instead, use Facebook Ads to identify your target audience and show them what they’ve been missing.

Run a contest. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Whether you’re asking for email addresses, testimonials, opinions or photos, make sure that your prize is worth the price of entering. People are more likely to follow your page if they know there are incentives for keeping up with what you’re posting.

Engagement will grow your audience. Your brand will organically gain followers once your engagement increases. Growing your audience this way will gain quality fans instead of a large quantity of “fake” fans. A fan does you no good unless they ultimately turn into a customer, and engagement will help create loyalty and strengthen the ties between your brand and your fans.

The Power of Real-Time Engagement on Social Media

In our technologically savvy world, your customers can communicate with your brand at all hours of the day through social media channels. Your customer is now only a tap of a button away from interacting with your brand, whether good or bad, and what you might not know is how fast a customer expects to hear back from you.

According to Search Engine Watch, 70% of Twitter users expect a response from brands they reach out to and 53% want a response in less than an hour. That number jumps to 72% when they’re issuing a complaint.

Stay Active

Keeping up with social media in real-time can become a daunting task if your brand is not actively monitoring your pages. But constantly monitoring your social media pages is crucial to building relationships with your customers. Your competitors are just a quick online search away if your customers do not receive feedback within a short time frame.

Social Media Engagement

Only one in four businesses report feeling confident in their social media engagement plan. Social media engagement is not just a one-time interaction with a customer, but an open line of communication over a period of time. Social media engagement is all about how your brand uses networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to create a great customer experience. As soon as your customer decides to engage with your brand over social media, they put their trust into your brand to solve their problem.

The Struggle is Real

Many brands struggle with social media real-time engagement because it can be overwhelming to keep up with the influx of messages and comments. For 51% of brands, real-time engagement on social media is their biggest challenge. In 2015, seven in eight social media messages to a brand went unanswered within 72 hours.  These numbers are staggering. If your brand is unresponsive to a customer, you risk losing that customer. Use social media monitoring software, such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite, to stay on top of mentions and posts from your customers, or hire a firm to take the online customer service off of your hands.

Stay Relevant

Your brand must focus on staying relevant in the eyes of your customers. The greatest marketing message delivered at the wrong time is still a bad marketing message. If you catch your customer in a buying moment or a considering moment, you have more of a chance to get them to buy from your brand if you give them the right information at the right time. Reaching out to a customer when they have a specific question or comment can increase brand loyalty and possibly spark the chance of a future purchase.

Delivering real-time and personalized communication at the right time is essential if you want customers to come back to your brand. With the right real-time engagement plan, it is possible to fulfill all your customer’s expectations and even turn a negative experience into a positive one.

The ROI of Digital Marketing

We know you need to measure your marketing efforts, because why else would you be spending marketing money on an online strategy? You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting new results. But do you really understand the value of digital marketing?

First, it’s important to define value. Value is an action taken when it supports your business goals. Value isn’t always about lead generation and sales, it can be about building a brand identity, creating conversations or even customer support. The value of digital marketing will be different for every business.

So before you can determine the ROI (return on investment) of your digital marketing efforts, you need to define the goals of your strategy and campaigns using KPIs.

What are your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that help track the success of your digital marketing efforts. Here are ten examples of KPIs that businesses use to determine their online performance.

• Engagement: Engaged customers tend to be more loyal to your brand and come back for repeat purchases. While social engagement is usually what people think of in terms of engagement, broaden this KPI to include website engagement such as bounce rate, time spent on the site and pages per visit.

• Brand Awareness: You might be surprised at the amount of campaigns run simply for brand awareness. Although it is a difficult KPI to measure, you need your potential customers to be aware of your brand in order to grow. These can include brand mentions, social following increases, clicks on your posts, etc.

• Traffic Sources: From organic to paid to email to social, where is your traffic coming from? Even organic traffic isn’t free, you have to spend money to increase your organic traffic. Organic traffic helps potential customers trust you, and you can’t put a price on trust. Paid traffic, such as a PPC campaign, can require a fairly high monthly budget, but is easily measured.

• Website Traffic: Who is visiting your website? Where are they from, how did they get there, how long do they stay on your page? Of all of your website traffic, how much of it converted? Finding out more about your website traffic can help you determine what your potential customers want from you, which is essentially the basis of marketing. Some website traffic metrics to watch include sessions, users, page views, pages per session and session duration.

• Reach: Digital marketing reach refers to the amount of unique views or visitors your marketing campaign gets in a given time. Expand this even further to figure out what percentage of these unique visitors fall into your target audience. While you want a wide reach, it only matters if you’re reaching people who are potential customers.

• Landing Page Conversions: A landing page that doesn’t generate conversions is useless, so is it converting customers? If you’re getting high traffic but a low conversion rate, it’s time to reevaluate your landing page and make some changes.

• Influence: How influential is your brand in getting prospects to perform an action? Influence drives people to download your content, buy your products, join your subscription service, share recommendations and more. This can also include any influencer marketing your business is running.

• Social Media Channels: Social media allows you to distribute your content and interact with current and potential customers, so of course you need to be able to measure it. Most platforms have their own analytics you can download to see how you’re performing, so pick out the measurements that are meaningful to what you’re trying to accomplish.

• Sentiment: Look beyond the “likes” and take a look at how people are responding to your marketing efforts. Connecting and engaging with your target audience on a personal level can help you analyze the feelings behind the words and gage the emotional response. How are they commenting on your content? Is your content something they find worth sharing to their network? Is the feedback positive or negative? This can help determine if your marketing efforts are driving your desired actions and if your content is resonating with your customers.

• Lead Generation: Leads equal sales opportunities, which (if nurtured correctly) turn into sales growth. Determine which channels generate your best leads and give you the most bang for your buck. Cost per lead, quality, conversion ratios, traffic and sales outcomes are all metrics that contribute to analyzing your lead generation efforts.

As you can see, it’s not always about leads and sales. Your marketing efforts can be about building a brand identity, creating conversations or customer support. Building brand loyalty is an important part of your online presence and an integral part of growing your business.

If your marketing strategy is centered on sales, it’s time to break out your math skills. ROI can be (broadly) calculated through a simple mathematic equation:

(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost – Average Organic Sales Growth = ROI

Breaking it down a little bit further, what is the cost of your customer acquisition? This is the cost of bringing in an individual potential customer for a sale, which can be calculated with this equation:

Total Marketing Investment / Number of Customers Acquired = COCA

What is a customer worth to your business over a customer lifespan? This equation for the lifetime value of a customer is helpful when determining your future business goals and marketing strategies.

Revenue x Gross Margin x Average Number of Repeat Purchases = LTV

Ultimately, your KPIs help determine the ROI of your digital marketing efforts. Once you measure your KPIs, it’s vital to take action based on the results.

Remember that digital marketing is a long-term process. The first month of your efforts might fall flat but build over the next few months, or even years. A marketing campaign is an investment into your business’s success which needs to be measured, monitored and tweaked over time. By continually measuring your KPIs, you can find out where your marketing dollars are profiting and where they are being wasted.

Lights, Camera Action: Why Your Business Should Go Live

“Going live” on social media can seem scary and intimidating. But live streaming has plenty of benefits to make it worth conquering your fears!

According to a study from Salesforce, 80% of brand audiences would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts.

Why Live Stream

Here is a statistic that will persuade you to go live: live videos get more than double (135%) the organic reach of a photo post. When a brand is live-streaming, users know that it is happening now and they can engage with the brand in real time. For example, while on Facebook Live, users can comment, ask questions, post reactions and communicate with other viewers. This helps brands gain immediate feedback as well as answer viewer questions/comments/concerns.

All of these reasons will help your brand build a stronger relationship with your viewers, helping turn viewers into loyal customers. This humanizes your business and makes you stand out from the crowd.

Reasons to Live Stream

There are several ways you can utilize live streaming for your brand marketing. Host a question and answer session to inform the public about your company and find out what questions your customers might have. Tease an upcoming product launch to get your audience excited about new goods or services. Or simply show people a look “behind the scenes” so that they feel like an insider.  You can even live stream an event such as a concert, conference, performance, demonstration or interview so that your viewers don’t have to leave home.

How to Live Stream

There are several options for your company to live stream, including Facebook Live, Instagram Live, YouTube Live and Periscope (for Twitter). The most popular, Facebook Live, has the largest potential audience with both desktop and mobile capabilities.

Remember that most viewers have a short attention span, so catch their attention right off the bat to keep them interested. Since this is a live stream, you don’t want to read a script but it is important to be prepared. Write down three to five bullet points prior to your live stream and remember these while you’re on camera.

Quality over quantity; keep your live stream short and to the point so that you don’t lose your audience’s attention. Most importantly: be yourself and have fun! Has your business hosted a live stream? What did you find that worked or didn’t work for your brand?