Creative Ideas to Improve Social Media Marketing

Social media has been around for a decade now, so it should be easy to figure out how to leverage it, right? Not so fast. New ideas? Definitely not that new, but they are very creative. There are recommendations on how to improve creative ideas everywhere you turn.

Social media works the way the grass grows. You rarely see it working, but every week you must mow the grass.

Before we start, let me ask you a question. What is your most creative idea to change social media marketing? We would love to hear it. Please share it in the comments at the end.

How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that social media marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.

What is the importance of social media to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Marketing? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line goal is relationship building.

In the ever changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media marketing tactics? Here we define social media community engagement as the process of gaining website customer traffic, attention, interaction, and ultimately relationships through social media sites.

In part it is true, but things get complicated by all the misinformation circulating about social media marketing. From leveraging tactics to tracking issues, you are bombarded with conflicting messages, including whether social media marketing is worth using at all.

Here are 10 ideas we use most often with our clients. We believe they are the ones most critical to the success of your social media marketing:

Define target customers

It all starts with knowing who your customers are and knowing as much about what makes them tick as you can. Without this step, most of the other steps become just a shot in the dark. So spent a lot of your time on this action. Keep in mind that you can’t be everything to everybody … not all customers are alike.

Choose best channels

Once you understand who your target customers are, you’ll need to study which social media sites they use most frequently and to what end. Social media takes a lot of time and energy, so you need to know where your time will be best spent’

Share unique content

Your content goal is simple … be as helpful as you can and/or be entertaining, or else be ignored. If you are going to put in the time and energy, you don’t want to be ignored.

Listen and engage

Listening comes first and foremost to understand what customers are saying about their needs and perhaps about you. Once you have heard, then engage in as near real time as you can.

Your personality and voice

This one is pretty simple, but takes lots of practice in the beginning. Be YOU and be consistent. Remember customers deal with people and not businesses.

Don’t be a robot

As we said previously, social media marketing takes a lot of time and energy. There many goog tools in existence that will help in the workload. But keep this in mind … customers take note when it seems they are dealing with a robot. Don’t be that robot.

Be part of the community

Remember you are dealing with consumers that are part of a community not part of the audience. Pay special attention to adding value in that vein.

Commit to a plan

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there, as the saying goes. Know your objectives and establish the best plan to get them accomplished. Remember this plan needs constant iteration.

Emphasize social

One of your key business objectives is to build relationships with customers. That end game results in customer advocates and trust. This process takes constant attention to being social on a very consistent basis.

Measure results

This entire social media marketing process is a constant iteration. Establish a few key measurements and pay attention to how well you are doing.

Analyze, correct, iterate and learn

Analyze your measurement results, and continuously make corrections, iterate, and most importantly, learn.

The bottom line

There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true or true for you and your business.

Always do your research, and continually try to improve. Social media marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.

There is more opportunity to fail in social media than to succeed if we treat it like any other marketing vehicle. Social media requires us to get away from being promotional and sensational and instead treat our customers with special attention. Special attention to being social, building relationships, and creating trust.

Tips & Tricks on How to Properly Reach Your Target Audience

Every single company must determine exactly who their target audience is and how you reach your target audience. It is thanks to them that you are able to make money from your various goods and services, given that someone uses it.

Therefore, creating strong relationships with these individuals is paramount throughout every single marketing initiatives that your organization undergoes.

The biggest hurdle will be determining exactly how you can form an emotional connection with them and consequently inspire them to purchase what you have created. The good news is that there are numerous options available for how this can be done, and here are a few tips and tricks that outline exactly how this can be achieved.

Defining who they are

Before you start marketing or promoting anything brand-related, you must first determine who your audience is. This will depend on the type of products that you create, and you must strategically consider which age group would most benefit from what you have created.

Who will be the consumers that want to purchase the items off of store shelves? This is furthermore important for online purposes, as everything you do will have to be search engine optimized and keep in mind what people would search for if they were looking for your business.

Social media marketing

Many people spend a lot of their time on social media, and it is for this reason that marketing on these various platforms is the perfect opportunity to reach a large number of your audience members. Moreover, it allows you to be easily found online should someone want to search for your company or its various products or services.

For social media marketing to work, though, you need to ensure that you are using social media platforms that your target audience is active on. For instance, if you are targeting male millennials, only 34% of 18-29-year-old males use Instagram, as opposed to 80% of males who use Facebook. If you want to target females, however, 53% of females are on Instagram, making it a viable choice.

innovative ways to reach customers — Innovative ways to reach customers.

Perfect products

You have determined who your audience is and have started marketing to them online, but you must also deliver on the various promises that you make with your products. At the end of the day, everyone wants to be able to purchase an item that is high quality and works properly.

If they find out that they have wasted their money on something that does not work, your company’s reputation will suffer, and it will be hard for you to rise above those problems, especially depending on how widespread the disappointment is. It is for this reason that rigorous testing is necessary, and it is easier than ever to do this. If you create technological gadgets or products, you can implement Altium’s CircuitStudio to design PCBs, in other words, the components of the device can all be properly put together to work efficiently.

Storytelling

Learning how to be a proper storyteller and form an emotional connection with your target audience is key if you want to be remembered. At the end of the day, your business wants to be unique and shine brighter than the competition. Determine what your tone is and stick to it throughout all of your branding efforts.

It would even be worth your while to hire a copywriter for the job as well and have them be responsible for the content that is produced on both your website and social media platforms so that the voice remains consistent.

Business and Marketing: Do You Want The Secret Sauce? … 6 Free E-Books

I’ve been providing my readers and subscribers free (hopefully useful) information for years now, and today I’m changing just how I do that. Two of the topics will be creative business and marketing as well as internet business marketing.

What we see depends on what we look for.

For some time now marketers like us have been using content, like eBooks, to convince visitors to subscribe to their email list.

Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.

For the most part, this has been a fair way to trade information and learn.

Today, I’m going to change the model a bit.

Instead of offering the odd eBook or webinar every month or so I’ve created the Digital Spark Marketing Learning Center Content Community so you can have it all whenever you want.

It’s fast, free and convenient.

I believe this is a much better way to both offer and consume content. I think you’ll be pleased with just how much content we have waiting for you.

Here are 6 Remarkable free E-books that you can access today or anytime you desire.

business marketing examples — Business marketing examples.

How to Use Content Marketing … a Free E-book

Have you seen statistics on the amount of information available today … doubling every 18 to 24 months? Amazing isn’t it? So if you are thinking of a strategy to use content marketing, be prepared to generate top quality products.

Why? It is simple. Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish! It is not surprising then that the battle over content marketing is getting more difficult every day.

All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and each one of us who creates content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think and act much more competitively.

How to Create Effective Brand Marketing … Try This E-Book

As marketing types, we confess to having a visual bias when it comes to an expression of creative branding. We tend to experience a brand primarily through our eyes, by watching how it draws us into its world. And when we’re working with clients on a small business brand marketing project, one of our first steps is to create a book of selected pictures and graphics that create a feeling of the brand’s character.

Do you express feelings and emotion often with your customers? Are you aware of the ways you are can influence brand attention? Well, remember this: the more feelings and emotion you express, the more attention to your brand. And the more influence it can create. Not rocket science is it? But without it, you will be losing attention to your brand.

As long as it’s positive, there is no such thing as too much brand attention. If you play your cards right, you can roll all of that great attention into growth for your company.

How to Build Value Propositions and Taglines … Check Out This E-Book

What would you say is the most important element of marketing for your business? Not a trick question, but one that many of our clients miss. It is how to build value propositions in our opinion. Like Jack Welch says, if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete. It is that simple. Save your money and time.

We have found many businesses that cannot articulate how their business is truly unique.1 What analogy to this situation stands out in our mind? Trying to win against your competition without good business differentiation is like trying to sail with no wind.

There are two ways to win in a competitive market:

Achieve sustainable lower cost (and therefore price) than your competition for the same products and services (very difficult, if not impossible)

Deliver more value, despite equal or higher price

There is obviously not one answer that fits all in the question of customer choices.

Business and marketing … How to Win Word of Mouth Marketing … Review This E-Book

You can’t say it. You have to get consumers to say it to each other.

At its core, building winning word of mouth marketing is simply to spread ideas that help your business or cause. It’s putting material out there that by its very nature attracts attention and discussion.

Perhaps the most objective way to look at the practice of this marketing is to examine the research of some highly intelligent folks who have dedicated years to deciphering the common elements of viral content.

Is this guidebook, I’ll dissect some of my favorite research from an associate professor at the Wharton School of Business, as well as examine some classic word of mouth marketing examples to see what lessons can be had from some very successful campaigns.

business marketing ideas — Business marketing ideas.

A How to E-Book for Creating Winning Advertising

Stop interrupting what people are interested in, and be what people are interested in.

It has been said that advertising is the price to be paid for being unremarkable. That may be true, but I have noticed, despite the growth in on-line marketing, that even remarkable businesses also advertise the old fashion way. It is a key component of your marketing campaign, for awareness or consumer education of your value. Lots of helpful information in this guidebook that will assist in creating winning advertising.

According to Nielsen, there are 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. And Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish!

We check our phones 150 times per day. We check our email up to 30 times an hour. And the amount of information in the world continues to double every 18 months.

All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and everyone of us who creates content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think and act like publishers.

Ever written an ad for print advertising, or thought about it? I’ve done marketing for my clients in small businesses for the past 4+ years, and I’ve learned a few things about making advertising look professional even on a tight budget. Many small businesses don’t have a lot of time or resources to have ads professionally made. So what’s a small business to do?

If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the noise? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?

Business marketing examples … Small Business Social Media Marketing … a Valuable E-Book

The networked consumers know more than most companies about their products and services. Whether the facts are good or bad, they tell everybody about what they know.

Have you had this experience with networked consumers? Certainly, motivates you to know about small business social media marketing, doesn’t it?

“Social media” is a way for people to communicate and interact online. While it has been around since the dawn of the World Wide Web, in the last ten years or so we’ve seen a surge in both the number and popularity of social media sites. It’s called social media because users engage with (and around) it in a social context, which can include conversations, commentary, and other user-generated annotations and engagement interactions.

Publishing content has become exponentially simpler over the last several years, which has helped skyrocket the use of social media. Non-technical web users are now able to easily create content on a rapidly growing number of platforms, including those that are owned (hosted communities, blogs, etc.), rented (social networks or third-party communities), and occupied (commenting, contributing, etc.).

For businesses, the shift in web consumerism and the accompanying rise in social media brings excellent opportunity. The real magic lies in the ability to grow lasting and scalable relationships with your organization’s customer base through social media. Whether your business is listening and engaging or not, customers are having conversations relevant to your operations. It’s better to be part of the conversation, right?

The bottom line

I hope you find our free guidebooks as valuable as you do the learning center. We encourage you to drop us an email to let us know what you think.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

13 Extraordinary Marketing Lessons from Taylor Swift

Learning from 2 of the Best Marketing Strategy Case Studies

Visual Content … 13 Remarkable Marketing Examples to Study

7 Secrets to the Lego Blog Marketing Campaigns … Effective Marketing?

14 Jaw-Dropping Guerilla Marketing Lessons and Examples

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

These Graphic Design Tools Pay the Best Dividends for Visual Design

Seth certainly knows a lot about the attention shortage, doesn’t he? That is why he has written so much about being remarkable. Do you want to create more interesting visual content? Are you looking for new ways to present your message to gain more attention? Then these graphic design tools should be of interest to you.

We don’t have an information shortage, we have an attention shortage.

Seth Godin

Today’s marketers are using visual content to capture their readers’ interest and attention. We all know that visual content is a big deal on the web today.

It is clearly expressed on social media platforms, plastered on blogs and online articles, and dappled throughout websites. From images, videos, and animation to presentations, infographics, and charts, visual content has become a huge component of online marketing.

Why Stand-Out Visual Content?

What makes visual content such a powerful marketing tool? Part of it has to do with what goes on inside our noggins when we process visual information.

When we take a look at an image, our brains decipher all of its visual elements simultaneously and store them directly into our long-term memory.

How amazing is that? We can instantly interpret and remember what we see. Compare that to how we process text and it becomes clear why imagery has the upper hand in delivering a quick and effective message.

Related: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement

As we read the text, we process it in a sequential manner and then store the information in our short-term memory. According to Dr. Lynell Burmark, author of Visual Literacy: Learn to See, See to Learn, this process is 60,000 times slower than processing visual information.

In today’s fast-paced, on-the-go world, taking the time to read everything is just not cutting it. The demand for quick and easy information is mounting and visual content is stepping in to satisfy it.

I often get asked about the tools I use to shape up my blog so I’ve decided to list them all here. I’ve been building different kinds of websites for years now and obviously, I’ve tried a ton of tools along the way. Some of them are fantastic, and some of them just plain suck.

To ramp up your social media marketing, you need to be a little more aggressive with your marketing. BUT you can’t do that alone. We all know that it takes a lot of hard work, time and effort to do it well.

So you need to find the right tools to help you get more work done faster while providing quality content for your audience. In this article, I’ll show you 12 of the best free tools you can use to create strong visual content for social media.

Visual content could mean anything from an image, a photo, a meme to a video, or a presentation.

There’s got to be a grain of truth in it to support all the most rapidly growing image platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, to name the most popular. And just after Facebook introduced its timeline design change, Facebook saw a 65% increase in engagement.

And if you have interactive content such as videos on your web page, congratulations, your visitors will now spend 100% more time on your website than before.

With smartphones and tablets becoming more common, this trend is only to continue.

But, I hear you cry – how in the world are you going to accomplish awesome graphic design? Hiring a graphic designer is out of the question for most small to medium businesses. So for those of us that aren’t artistically inclined, this can be a significant challenge.

But not to fret. You simply need to find the right tools to help you get more work done faster while providing quality content for your audience. In this article, I’ll show you x of the best free tools you can use to create strong visual content for social media.

Graphic design tools … Canva

No Adobe Photoshop? A non-graphic designer? Canva’s here to save you! Canva is for creating imagery with few if any design skills required.

Use this tool to make creative graphics for your posts and even cover photos for your social profiles – in minutes!

This is our favorite graphic design tool, hands down. Why may you ask? There are three important reasons in our minds. First and foremost the tool has fantastic capabilities to handle most of your graphic design needs.

Second, it is incredibly easy to use. And finally, they have built 20 or so instruction sets that teach you about graphic design while using the tool. We have found no other tool with these advantages.

Canva lets you upload your own images. It saves your work as you go, so you don’t have to worry about losing your content.

Here is an additional idea to save further time. Create design templates for images and re-use the template.

Quozio

This tool is for creating inspirational messages and quotes. Although it’s not as versatile as Canva, it serves a purpose and does it quite nicely.

It’s a quick app where you can cut and paste a quote of your choice. It also offers a handful of cool backgrounds you can use. It is perfect for social media graphics.

IconFinder

My #1 go-to resource for free quality icons. You always need something as simple as a useful icon visual.

Jing

My favorite tool for taking screenshots and screen videos. It is available for Mac and Windows.

GoAnimate

Video can sometimes be difficult to put together but it’s so worth it. One of my favorite tools for video is GoAnimate which is for video animation. You can easily create video animation videos for a very low cost.

Piktochart

Infographics are in high demand because they’re an easy way to present data or help you persuade customers with more detailed messages.

The best infographics share a lot of data in a digestible format, but creating one can be daunting. Piktochart simplifies the process by offering free and premium templates and graphics and icons you can drag and drop into your infographic.

Creating this kind of visual content is less painful when you can adjust text size, font, and color to create a professional, visually appealing infographic. Lots of cool themes to choose from! In fact, I use them when I need inspiration for my designs.

Visme

This tool, formerly Presenter, brings your visual ideas to life. It’s your one-stop-shop for all-things-visual such as infographics, banner ads, call-to-action banners, presentations, mobile and web animations, carousels, etc.

You don’t have to download any software to start – just create an account, log in and start creating awesome designs.

There are millions of free images (Visme is integrated with Flickr) to use along with beautiful Google fonts. You can also upload your own images and experiment with them.

The best part? Visme is based on HTML5, so all your visuals work on mobile platforms.

This tool is ideal for Eye-catching presentations and both infographics and data visualization.

ThingLink

ThingLink ‘s fun, dynamic, visual format draws attention to your updates.

You can add text or multimedia overlays to any of your photos or images, but what makes this tool more interesting than others is that the results are interactive. Viewers hover over icons to watch a video, listen to an audio file, link externally, complete a poll, and more.

A great brand use example is Home Depot. They use ThingLink images to share a room and home décor DIY suggestions and tutorials.

For example, they overlaid a photo of a DIY Sawhorse Table with the prices of all the pieces you’d need to make it and links to a blog detailing the process. The links become visible when you hover over the image.

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is great for both beginner & advanced image editing. A lot of social media marketers swear by this one and some even call it a free substitute of Photoshop.

This tool lets you add overlays, effects, and text to your images. It is ideal for touching up photos and creating visuals for social media.

Vine

You certainly cannot leave videos out of the equation when talking visual, can you? Twitter’s Vine app released in January 2013 boasts of 13 million users already. With Vine, you can create 6-second looping videos and put your message across.

The fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world says much about video marketing. Every day, 100 million users watch an online video.

Creating videos with Vine is easy and simple – just sign in with your Twitter account and get started. It is an ideal tool for simple how-to’s and brand awareness using looping videos

Tagxedo

Use Tagxedo to create a word cloud from your web, social, blog or other content. Word clouds aren’t just a great way to present content in a new way; they offer new insights into that content with a quick visual analysis.

The low-hanging fruit here is blog posts, speech transcriptions, important news articles, etc. Just enter the URL, play with the font, color, and shape, and you’re all set.

You can use word clouds to showcase both personal and business content. Depending on the relevance of the content to your audience, this 5-minute process makes a pretty strong statement.

The bottom line

Social media moves quickly and your content design has to keep up. The demands of a market that’s evolving by the minute heighten expectations for fresh, quality content on a nearly impossible scale.

Take advantage of these free tools to satisfy your audience’s appetite when you share content on social media.

What do you think? Have you used any of these tools?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.

It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

10 Brand Awareness Tips to Help You to Stand out in a Crowded Market

So, your business is in a crowded market and you’re finding it hard to grow and expand. You’ve tried a few different things to increase your brand awareness, and while some have worked, you mainly wasted your resources.

Standing out in a crowded Market?

Well, there are a few brand awareness tips that are proven to be successful, even for businesses or brands located in the most crowded markets. In this article, we’ll break down 10 of them, as well as give you a guide on how to make the most out of each idea.

Now then, let’s get started!

1. Invest in Your Brand’s Website

For some businesses, a website isn’t at the top of their priority list in 2020. And while a website may feel like something you needed to have last decade, and not today, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, your website should be the center of your brand’s advertising efforts. So, if you want to improve your branding, look at your website and consider investing in it before using resources on anything else.

2. Master Search Engine Optimization

Of course, driving traffic to your website is key if you want to get the most out of it. And search engine optimization, or SEO, can help you do just that.

Mastering SEO isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, but it is possible if you’re somewhat savvy with websites. With that in mind, if web development isn’t your cup of tea, consider investing in the help of a professional to get the best results.

3. Start Teaching Others With a Blog

People use the internet every day to find information about a wide variety of topics. Regardless of what niche your brand is in, you can help provide some of those people with the information they’re looking for by creating a blog.

Blogging is a great way to drive users to your site and establish credibility in your field. It’s also something you can do in-house, which means it’s affordable, too.

4. Focus on Social Media Marketing

While websites are still very useful, social media marketing continues to grow in popularity each year. So, if you aren’t already, pick a few social media sites and get active on them ASAP.

Looking for the best way to use social media marketing for your brand? Try making and sharing infographics.

If you’re doing orthodontist marketing, for example, you can create infographics about oral hygiene with braces. That way you clients, and even potential clients, can look at you as a credible source for useful information.

5. Get Involved in Your Community

Sure, the internet is a big and wonderful place that is perfect for growing your brand. But if you’re a local business that thrives on customers in your area, you need to be active in your community.

Finding affordable ways to get involved is easy, too. Something as simple as sponsoring a youth sports team or participating in a holiday parade is more than enough to show off your brand at a local level.

6. Listen to Your Audience Better

Once you start advertising in new and creative ways, you’ll quickly realize that your audience is talking back to you. If you pay close attention and track your data carefully, you’ll realize that your audience is telling you what they want from your brand.

For example, if you have a blog, some blog posts will do better than others. A good idea is to create more blog posts similar to the ones that have had success in the past.

That way you can grow your brand and give your audience what they want at the same time!

7. Take Care of Your Employees

If your brand is just yourself, or maybe one other person, taking care of your employees isn’t an issue. But if you have a team of people beside you, it’s important that you take care of them and keep your working environment a positive one.

It’s simple: happy employees are more productive. And if your team is happy, they’ll most likely outperform your competitors and their teams, which is what you want.

8. Don’t Forget About Your Existing Customers

If you’re trying to grow your brand or business, you can get lost in your attempts to gain new customers. And if you aren’t careful, you can forget about your existing customers, losing them for good.

It goes without saying, but it’s much easier to build your brand if you aren’t replacing your customers, but instead, keeping them on board and adding to them. So, find creative ways to make your customers and clients happy, like referral programs, so you can expand faster.

9. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

We touched on this earlier, but if you aren’t skilled in a particular area, it’s a good idea to reach out to a professional for help. Doing so will allow you to get the most out of your branding efforts, helping you be more competitive in your niche.

10. Be Genuine

It may sound simple, but being genuine and honest with people goes a long way. By not lying to your audience, you make it that much easier to establish a relationship with them and keep them around for years to come.

Odds are not too many other brands in your niche, if any, have this boxed checked. By being the only one to do so, you can stand out in a positive way.

10 Branding Tips for Businesses in a Crowded Market

Well, there you have it! Those are 10 branding tips for brands or businesses in a crowded market! So, as long as you keep these ideas in mind, you should be able to grow your brand much more easily going forward!

Remember, it’s important to listen to your audience and use your resources wisely. Your audience will tell you what they like, and what they don’t so you won’t have to overthink things.

That, along with being genuine, is the key to growing your brand and carving out your own piece of a crowded market!

Looking for more advertisement and marketing ideas? Check out more of our blog!

How To Generate More Leads Using Digital Marketing

The digital era has brought significant changes to the traditional ways of doing business. As a marketer, it is important to keep up with the trends to generate more leads using digital marketing.

Marketing entails connecting with your audience in the right way, right place, and at the right time. Generating more leads in online platforms should not pose a challenge. After all, in the age of digitization, most probably, you are spending much of your time online.

What is digital marketing?

Basically, digital marketing refers to all forms of online marketing. It involves the promotion of products/services through various forms of electronic media, especially the internet. So, a good number of business owners can attest to the fact that digital marketing overpowers the traditional forms of marketing in a significant way.

One impressive feature of digital marketing is the fact that it works for any industry. You can see the results much faster than it would have been the case with offline marketing. A company can grow its client base in a short time because of the interactive nature of digital marketing strategies.

Best ways to generate leads in digital marketing

It is obvious we live in a digital world, and it only makes sense if your business gets an impressive presence in the digital space. In essence, the future of marketing in the current world is in digital marketing.

So, how will you be able to generate more leads for your business in the digital space? Below are two powerful ways that can help you popularize and drive conversions for your business.

Quality content

When it comes to digital marketing, quality content creation is of high essence. Even all Google algorithm such as Penguin or Hummingbird point out that content is a crucial metric while filtering search results. There are so many ways to present content to market your business.

For instance, if you are creative, you can come up with the content on any topic and then skillfully link it to your business.

Some of the best-known ways to present content including but not limited to;

Blogs

E-books

Case studies

Question-and-answer articles

Forums

News and updates

Images

Banners

Videos

Podcasts

Infographics

Microblogging content

Social media marketing (SMM)

You cannot ignore the power of social media when it comes to digital marketing. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and the like offer the best chance to drive traffic to your sites or businesses. People will not hesitate to share and like something that adds value to their lives.

If you have taken good care of your social media strategy, you may want to look at some great influencers too. Providers like tapinfluence.com have confirmed that many brands have seen success with influencer marketing channel.

It is one step ahead of your social media marketing and will definitely reach to a good number of social media users. Just remember to be original and constant. Soon your efforts will reveal through increased sales.”

The bottom line

Digital marketing is a dynamic medium, and so you should be open to new trends as they come in. You should also be willing to test different marketing strategies to know the one that specifically works best for your business.

Good web analytics tools can help you track the performance of your business. This could be very useful in your future marketing plans for your business.

Every single company must determine exactly who their target audience is and how you reach your target audience. It is thanks to them that you are able to make money from your various goods and services, given that someone uses it.

Therefore, creating strong relationships with these individuals is paramount throughout every single marketing initiatives that your organization undergoes.

Defining who they are

Before you start marketing or promoting anything brand-related, you must first determine who your audience is. This will depend on the type of products that you create, and you must strategically consider which age group would most benefit from what you have created.

Who will be the consumers that want to purchase the items off of store shelves? This is furthermore important for online purposes, as everything you do will have to be search engine optimized and keep in mind what people would search for if they were looking for your business.

Social media marketing

Perfect products

You have determined who your audience is and have started marketing to them online, but you must also deliver on the various promises that you make with your products. At the end of the day, everyone wants to be able to purchase an item that is high quality and works properly.

Storytelling

It would even be worth your while to hire a copywriter for the job as well and have them be responsible for the content that is produced on both your website and social media platforms so that the voice remains consistent.

I’ve been providing my readers and subscribers free (hopefully useful) information for years now, and today I’m changing just how I do that. Two of the topics will be creative business and marketing as well as internet business marketing.

What we see depends on what we look for.

For some time now marketers like us have been using content, like eBooks, to convince visitors to subscribe to their email list.

Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.

For the most part, this has been a fair way to trade information and learn.

Today, I’m going to change the model a bit.

Instead of offering the odd eBook or webinar every month or so I’ve created the Digital Spark Marketing Learning Center Content Community so you can have it all whenever you want.

It’s fast, free and convenient.

I believe this is a much better way to both offer and consume content. I think you’ll be pleased with just how much content we have waiting for you.

Here are 6 Remarkable free E-books that you can access today or anytime you desire.

How to Use Content Marketing … a Free E-book

Have you seen statistics on the amount of information available today … doubling every 18 to 24 months? Amazing isn’t it? So if you are thinking of a strategy to use content marketing, be prepared to generate top quality products.

Why? It is simple. Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish! It is not surprising then that the battle over content marketing is getting more difficult every day.

All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and each one of us who creates content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think and act much more competitively.

How to Create Effective Brand Marketing … Try This E-Book

As long as it’s positive, there is no such thing as too much brand attention. If you play your cards right, you can roll all of that great attention into growth for your company.

How to Build Value Propositions and Taglines … Check Out This E-Book

We have found many businesses that cannot articulate how their business is truly unique.1 What analogy to this situation stands out in our mind? Trying to win against your competition without good business differentiation is like trying to sail with no wind.

There are two ways to win in a competitive market:

Achieve sustainable lower cost (and therefore price) than your competition for the same products and services (very difficult, if not impossible)

Deliver more value, despite equal or higher price

There is obviously not one answer that fits all in the question of customer choices.

Business and marketing … How to Win Word of Mouth Marketing … Review This E-Book

You can’t say it. You have to get consumers to say it to each other.

At its core, building winning word of mouth marketing is simply to spread ideas that help your business or cause. It’s putting material out there that by its very nature attracts attention and discussion.

Perhaps the most objective way to look at the practice of this marketing is to examine the research of some highly intelligent folks who have dedicated years to deciphering the common elements of viral content.

Is this guidebook, I’ll dissect some of my favorite research from an associate professor at the Wharton School of Business, as well as examine some classic word of mouth marketing examples to see what lessons can be had from some very successful campaigns.

A How to E-Book for Creating Winning Advertising

Stop interrupting what people are interested in, and be what people are interested in.

According to Nielsen, there are 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. And Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish!

We check our phones 150 times per day. We check our email up to 30 times an hour. And the amount of information in the world continues to double every 18 months.

All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and everyone of us who creates content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think and act like publishers.

If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the noise? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?

Business marketing examples … Small Business Social Media Marketing … a Valuable E-Book

The networked consumers know more than most companies about their products and services. Whether the facts are good or bad, they tell everybody about what they know.

Have you had this experience with networked consumers? Certainly, motivates you to know about small business social media marketing, doesn’t it?

The bottom line

I hope you find our free guidebooks as valuable as you do the learning center. We encourage you to drop us an email to let us know what you think.

Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

We don’t have an information shortage, we have an attention shortage.

Seth Godin

Today’s marketers are using visual content to capture their readers’ interest and attention. We all know that visual content is a big deal on the web today.

It is clearly expressed on social media platforms, plastered on blogs and online articles, and dappled throughout websites. From images, videos, and animation to presentations, infographics, and charts, visual content has become a huge component of online marketing.

Why Stand-Out Visual Content?

What makes visual content such a powerful marketing tool? Part of it has to do with what goes on inside our noggins when we process visual information.

When we take a look at an image, our brains decipher all of its visual elements simultaneously and store them directly into our long-term memory.

How amazing is that? We can instantly interpret and remember what we see. Compare that to how we process text and it becomes clear why imagery has the upper hand in delivering a quick and effective message.

Related: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement