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Marketing With Instagram

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Instagram, with an estimated 150 million monthly active users, has emerged as one of the most rapidly-growing mobile applications ever, and its growth continues to accelerate. With millions of consumers already active on the platform, the benefits of Instagram are easy enough for marketing pros to imagine. But you’ll have to be proactive to maximize your visibility on Instagram; yours is not the only company using it as a marketing tool.

Instagram is not just about selling. In fact, using your Instagram account only to sell, sell, sell is a predictable way to lose the interest of your Instagram audience. You’ll need to kick off engaging dialogues, listen and respond to your followers, and post thought-provoking, inventive images that fire your followers’ imaginations. Here are some tips for mastering Instagram:

  • Make sure the Bio section at the top of your profile page is complete. Tell visitors who you are, what you do, and where to find you. Add a little something extra to encourage visitors to learn more about you.
  • Link your social media together. If you post a blog that already has some followers, embed your photos and videos from Instagram. Capitalize on Facebook’s integration of Instagram to reach both audiences. Making your Instagram account visible on your Facebook page inevitably increases dialogue and sharing.
  • Post quality, interesting visuals. Your photographs don’t have to be professional, but they do need to grab the eye and express some aspect of your company’s mission or vision. Give readers something they’ll find personally fascinating or intriguing; you want followers who “bond” with you. Most photos should in some way reflect the lifestyle of your customers. Don’t be afraid to use video, too.
  • Follow your followers. Reciprocation not only expresses gratitude for their support, but it opens new opportunities to be noticed by other Instagram users.
  • Consider hiring a social media marketing firm to create and coordinate your Instagram account and all of your internet-based marketing efforts. You’ll save hours every month, and you’ll know that your work is in the hands of marketing professionals on the Internet’s cutting edge.

Those Abandoned Shopping Carts

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A recent study found something that may be disturbing to many online marketers. The study found that when consumers shop online, 75 percent of the shopping carts they initiate are abandoned before the sale is finalized. If you’ve brought a consumer to the place where he or she is about to make a purchase, you don’t want anything to get in the way. Let’s look at the reasons why users abandon their shopping carts and see if we can remove any obstacles that stand between customers and finalized sales.

1. Buyer’s remorse: It’s that feeling you get after making a big purchase when you first ask yourself, “Do I really need this?” Online, however, buyers have plenty of opportunities to get that feeling before finalizing the sale. It’s human nature; it’s the same reason you see out-of-place abandoned items near the checkout lines in retail stores, and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

2. Just window-shopping: Kids like to pretend they’re superheroes, and we really like putting those designer dresses and jackets in our shopping carts. But your kid isn’t really a superhero, and a lot of people just like to pretend they’re wearing those designer clothes. According to Women’s Health magazine, window-shopping can be a harmless fantasy that “releases mood-lifting endorphins, boosts your immune system, keeps your brain nimble, and even fulfills basic social needs.” Online window-shopping floods the senses and stimulates the imagination, and no credit card is needed for that.

3. Tax and shipping: Sure, that “Breaking Bad” t-shirt looked great online when it was listed for $14.99. Then some tax was added, the shipping charge was calculated, and your effort to identify with a TV character was just a whim that you quickly forget. Increasingly, online retailers are working to soften the sticker shock by calculating tax and shipping charges before you begin checking out. Since those charges can’t be eliminated, this is probably the best approach

4. The Great Coupon Code Hunt: You’re about to check out, and you notice it: Enter Coupon Code Here. Thus, the Great Hunt begins. You open tabs. You conduct searches. “Error 404 File Not Found” is burned into your brain. You can become so obsessed with finding the coupon code that you actually forget about your purchase, or you become so frustrated that you decide to quit the whole thing. Here’s a situation online retailers can actually do something about. Studies show that you are far more likely to make a sale when your coupon codes are easy to find. Coupon codes are a special incentive to buy, and customers genuinely appreciate them.

PoachIt is using a new approach; if customers don’t like a price, they can sign up for alerts when the item is reduced or goes on sale. Innovative thinking like this is the way social media marketers can avoid some of the built-in obstacles to online retail buying and selling.

Brand And Reputation Management

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The most valuable elements of your business are your brand and your reputation. Reputation is simply the public’s perception of your brand. Once tarnished, a business reputation is hard to repair. Some people still refuse to buy Tylenol, for example, because of a Tylenol product-tampering scare that happened more than a quarter-century ago.

You may work hard to repair a damaged reputation, but the public (and media) may find it hard to forget even the slightest negative incident. Especially today, consumers online and actively sharing their experiences with various brands, reputation is more important than ever. You may distinguish yourself or your business with prompt delivery, a quality product, or outstanding customer service, but if you carry a negative reputation, these distinctions may be of little help. Reputations can take months and years to repair; some remain damaged forever.

The internet makes it easy to monitor and track discussions about your brand and reputation. The internet also provides literally hundreds of forums and opportunities to spread grievances both minor and major; facts, unfortunately, can play little if any role in the internet rants and slanders that may be initiated against you and your business. For these reasons and others, reputation management services have grown significantly in recent years.

Public relations agencies now offer reputation management as a value-added service and as a way to measure and track an ad campaign’s success. Other companies do nothing but create strategies for fixing or re-establishing a brand’s reputation. Is reputation management necessary? The overwhelming consensus is, Yes! While not every business can afford to closely monitor its reputation, here are a few strategies everyone can use to influence and keep abreast of developments:

Position yourself. Develop and promote the positive reputation that you want for your brand. If there’s negative online talk about your business, at least you’ll be out there defending it.

Use Google Alerts. Google Alerts is free and notifies you whenever something is posted online about your brand.

Listen, learn from, and engage consumers. If they’re complaining, find out why, and repair any damage. If feedback is positive, give your customers more of what they want. Try new things or you’ll risk decline; there’s a reason McDonald’s is always adding new items to its menu.

Punch up your online profiles. Does your brand have its own Facebook page? Should it be on Facebook, LinkedIn, and both? Social profiles are free. Revise those profiles, and share content that helps with your positioning.

Deliver on promises. If you make a promise to a customer or employee, keep it. Nothing creates scorn for a business faster than failure to deliver on a promise.

Tumblr And You

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Tumblr hosts more than 130 million blogs. In May 2013, the website received more than 5 billion page views. Bloggers can post text, pictures, videos, music, and links. Tumblr’s popularity is rapidly growing. If you’re not yet taking advantage of Tumblr, it offers professionals and small business owners a fresh opportunity to introduce your products or services to new customers. Tumblr is easy to use, and signing up is straightforward; simply enter a username, a password, and an e-mail address.

Your next step is choosing an appropriate and eye-catching design for your page. Scores of themes are available for Tumblr; some themes are free and others may be inexpensively purchased. Most themes for Tumblr allow for extensive customization, and all the themes can be installed quickly and easily.

Now you’re ready to start posting. Post content that will establish your audience’s trust in you and keep them returning to your page. Along with your own posts, you’ll want to choose which other blogs on Tumblr you’d like to follow. When you find another blog post that you want to share with your audience, you can do that with Tumblr’s reblogging feature. You’ll quickly see that pictures are predominant on Tumblr – half of Tumblr’s posts are photos or other graphics, so you’ll want to start taking and looking for interesting, relevant pictures to share with your audience.

Tumblr is popular internationally too, and using the right pictures can help you reach across the language barriers. Post pictures of your product being produced and used, or your team and your services in action. Work for consistency. Whether you post once a week or several times a day, your Tumblr audience should know when to expect your next post.

Some observers expect that Tumblr will soon rival Facebook and Twitter, so if you’re not already taking advantage of Tumblr, this is the time to start.

LinkedIn For Law Firms

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LinkedIn drives more traffic to law firm websites than all other social media sites put together. Several recent surveys indicate that nearly two-thirds of the traffic to corporate websites from social media sites is coming directly from LinkedIn. Based on that figure, LinkedIn is probably driving much more traffic to your firm’s website(s) than all other social media sites combined, and for a number of reasons.

Firstly, LinkedIn is widely perceived as a reliable source for information about professionals and firms. Secondly, a lawyer’s LinkedIn pages will usually land near the top of a user’s Google search for an attorney or law firm. And thirdly, someone making a referral is likely to send a link to the attorney’s LinkedIn profile. Additionally, most attorneys now routinely print a link to their LinkedIn profile on emails, business cards, and other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Be sure that you’re taking advantage of everything that LinkedIn offers. Make sure your profile is thorough and complete, and update frequently. Otherwise, you’ll probably miss potential traffic to your site.

While the importance of LinkedIn can’t be overstated, professionals and small businesses should also note that Twitter’s influence is up significantly while Facebook seems to be in decline. Twitter generated 14 percent of all visits from social media sites to corporate websites, up from 4 percent only two years ago. While Facebook generated 17 percent of all visits from social media sites to corporate websites, that figure represents a huge drop from Facebook’s 30 percent figure in 2011. Visits from Flickr, YouTube, and Google+ are virtually nonexistent. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook now generate 95% of the traffic to corporate websites from social media sites.

The takeaway for attorneys and law firms is clear; for the best results from social media, take full advantage of LinkedIn and start taking advantage of Twitter.

Attracting And Keeping Your Audience

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It goes without saying that your blog posts should cover the topics that your audience finds the most interesting. If you’re looking for ideas and you’re unsure what topics are popular, or if you’re unsure about how to find out, here are some tips for keeping your current readers and for attracting new ones:

Follow the Leaders – What are people reading? Find the blog posts that are achieving high readerships for the leaders in your field or industry. Scan through their Twitter and Facebook feeds for the posts and topics that draw the most readers and receive the most likes.

Just Ask Your Readers – Solicit feedback. Ask readers what topics interest them the most, but be specific. Compile a short list of topics and ask your readers to pick from the list. Solicit their comments too; find out why readers are more concerned with some topics than with others.

Determine What’s Already Working – Facebook Insights can tell you how well your individual Facebook posts perform. When you find your most successful posts scan over them. What elements do your successful posts have in common? What distinguishes your successful posts from the unsuccessful ones? For Twitter, Sprout Social is a useful tool for determining which of your tweets have the most success.

Keep narrowing your focus – When you’ve determined what topics interest your readers, write extensively on those topics. Then determine which of those posts have drawn the most readers, and write more about the specific topics that those posts discuss.

Grammar and spelling count – Probably no blog is perfect. Occasionally a misspelled word or a typographical error will slide past even the best writers, editors, proofreaders, and webmasters. But consistently poor writing and multiple spelling mistakes will drive away your readers. Many professionals and small business owners hire a ghostwriter or a social marketing firm to provide their blog’s readers with high-quality writing and attention-grabbing ideas and topics.