If you are serious about creating an effective digital marketing strategy, the best thing to do is realizing the most common mistakes people make and avoid them. So be informed, avoid the common mistakes mentioned below: 1. No Clear Campaign Goals This is one of the biggest mistakes digital marketers make. They simply avoid establishing an analytics goals way before starting off with a campaign. When it comes to tracking the success of a digital marketing campaign, defining goals is crucial. Right from sales goals to completion of forms, calls, sign ups, and many more, you must make sure analytics tracking is properly set up for achieving these goals. When you don't have measurable objectives, it is very challenging to measure ROI or net benefit of a specific campaign on product/service sales. Defining and communicating objectives clearly is crucial. 2. The Quick Fix Fetish It is important to understand that there is no quick and easy way to obtain excellent results from digital marketing. Right from SEO, social media or PPC, you should put a lot of time and effort into any digital marketing strategy. The more hard work you put in, the better. Research and careful studies will help you to avoid potential penalties related to various “quick fix” strategies. Remember all that quick fix plans are seen as spam by Google. 3. Failure in Targeting the Right Audience Regardless of complete efforts put in towards creating excellent content, most marketers ignore the importance of taking the much needed extra step to promote it to the target audience. The secret lies in promoting the right audience at the right time. 4. Not Giving Enough Time Have you even thought of giving your digital marketing campaigns ample time? First and foremost, you must learn and practise only ethical digital marketing techniques. And once everything goes by the ethical rules, it is time to evaluate the reason behind why it is taking so long to take a decent top position at Google. Remember that decent position at Google, engagement with social media etc. take a good amount of time. Being in a hurry and using unethical practises will get you penalised for spam. Exercise patience and keep working towards your goal. You will definitely gain long term benefits. 5. Not Having A Mobile Responsive Website Why should you shirk away from having a mobile responsive website? The present age is about mobile friendly devices. Your potential and even existing clients prefer using smartphones than their desktops. It is not wise to make your visitors click on your ads on their smartphones and eventually get turned off due to an absence of non-responsive website. Make sure you get the problem fixed as soon as possible. This should be done prior to considering any digital marketing campaign. Now that you know about some of the biggest mistakes most marketers make while indulging in digital marketing technique, it is time you avoid these and make the most of this powerful strategy.
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A lot of retailers are underestimating the power of Instagram especially when it comes to generating sales on their website. This is due to the casual picture posting practices and absence of any direct link to purchase. The retailers can just include a bio link. However, despite all of the assumptions doing the rounds, Instagram presently boasts over 400 million users (enormous!). This is much more than Twitter. This is not all! The app is growing at an amazing pace of 93 per cent month-on-month. The number is definitely way higher when compared to any other modern day social media platform. Since social media is a crucial component for any company looking forward to boost their brand value, Instagram must be considered very seriously by business owners. Now the question is how can you best use Instagram for your brand and generates good amount of sales? Listed below are 6 easy, essential and highly effective tactics you should employ: 1. Create an Optimized Business Account on Instagram Since you are going to do business on Instagram, it is important that you create a separate business account. This should be different from the one you use personally. Marketing is about reaching out to target audience. And they are interested in your products. So instead of posting your selfies under Eiffel Towers, post what you have to offer them. The idea is to post only what's relevant to your business and client interest. Start by placing a link to enhance the traffic amount to your site. Instagram allows its users to help their clients click over their website through bio. In fact, this is the only way to lead a click over to your website directly. This is placed under your name and description at the top of Instagram page. Here, you should include a link to your online shop. Since it is your business account, it is important that you keep a consistent name and picture. This helps you to stay recognizable by your clients. If you change your name and photo regularly, your clients may get confused and do not trust you at all. The Instagram name you choose should be relevant or same as your business’. An informative bio is a must. Try including your business name with a brief description of what you do. 2. Use Attention-Grabbing Pictures Instagram should have beautiful, impressive images that speak volumes about your business. Make sure the images are creative and attractive. These should help your brand reach a position it deserves. Focus on using the right size and photos that tell a story. When using colors, make sure you use those that reflect your overall brand personality. Use free photo editing tools to add filters and textures to your pictures. 3. Use Expert Tools for Selling As already discussed, you must include a link in your bio to your business website. This boosts sales prospects. Additionally, you can use tools improves the click through rate for your followers. Use of these tools increase sales. Some of the tools allow you to turn Instagram pictures into attractive shoppable images. If your potential clients click the link in your bio, they will be taken through to a page comprising of all of your products. You may even use social sharing apps that will allow potential customers to buy purchase a product sans leaving the app. 4. Hashtags are Important Of course, Instagram is about Hashtags. These help business owners get found. Use of right hashtags helps you to get and stay connected. All you need to do is use hashtags properly and they will help you find the right audience. You can easily expand your reach with right hashtags. Most retailers these days have built their brand and community via using hashtags on Instagram. Now the question is what hashtags to use. There are certain factors to consider in this respect. For instance, you must emphasise on what’s trending and makes apt sense for your brand, your competition, and brand and products represented by your company. In case, you are looking for some great ideas for hashtags, use advanced tools such as hashtag search by Iconosquare. Remember that Instagram allows for around thirty hashtags for each post. These include hashtags posted in the comments and even the caption section. Hence, you must exploit this opportunity. 5. Collaborate It is important to join hands with those who love your brand, use them and even talk about them. Focus on inviting them to share their pictures on Instagram accounts. This is an easier process to undertake. You may either invite individuals who have already established themselves in the Instagram space. Encourage them to share photos of your product that have been used by them. Another way is to feature those who use your products on Instagram account everyday. Try and experiment implementing both strategies. Once you know what works for you, simply stick to it. One of the reasons this works is because people usually relate to people like them. When your existing or potential customers see normal people (not celebrities), just like them, using your products, clicking pictures with them and adoring them, they won't mind spending money. 6. Use Sales Enhancing Apps Yes, it is super easy to make the target audience to buy from you on Instagram. All you need to do is use some powerful apps such as Soldsie, Spreesy that work towards turning social networks into single-click sales points via their brilliant comment selling features and a lot more! There you go! Hope the above listed easy, effective and powerful tips on how to use Instagram to generate more eCommerce sales help you! The prime motto of sales is closing the deal. Unfortunately, the change in era and demands among customers has made it very tough for sales professionals to get results merely by relying on cold calls. Also haphazard prospect visits won't serve as criteria to meet sales goals any more. Sales professionals and managers must focus on accessing the best available sales planning tools. These tools are made for helping them boost sales productivity. It also helps with a closing number of deals. Listed below are 10 excellent sales tool options to help you organize your sales process and even plan calls, routes, etc. with greater efficiency: 1. HubSpot Looking forward to a sales platform that handles all of your requirements well? HubSpot is one amazing tool that fits the bill. HubSpot is considered the cream of the crop under the category of sales and marketing tools. You gain access to features that boost all aspects of your inbound sales strategy. For instance, there are a variety of email tools you can access such as access to email templates and sales content. The tool helps you to collect data related to visitors. HubSpot comes with a tool for every type of company and sales professional. 2. Axiom An Axiom is specifically a sales performance company aiming at enhancing sales through better learning, coaching, and selling. They offer high quality account planning and management tool. These strengthen the association through a more holistic view of account planning and management. This facilitates for setting objectives and strategic initiatives. 3. LinkedIn Sales Solutions LinkedIn has over 450 million registered users, scattered across the globe! Working as the largest professional network, it is certainly full of sales opportunities. A number of tools are provided by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. Sales Navigator is one of the most popular choices. With this tool, LinkedIn can make sales prospecting easier than ever before. This is definitely something most marketers look forward to. The tool helps in several ways, such as receiving custom lead recommendations, providing Access to an advanced search to find the right leads for your business, InMail usage for contacting any LinkedIn member, a special dashboard for measuring and tracking results for social selling and real-time sales updates for customers and prospects. You can also get a free trial for this tool. 4. LiveHive for Salesforce The tool offers you real-time insights on the interest level of prospects precisely based on their engagement with your emails and documents. These are beautifully synced with Salesforce and the alerts allow you to know precisely when a prospect interacting with your email or document. 5. InsideSales.com The tool ensures brilliant sales lead management. It offers various options including Platform, Lead and Accounting Scoring, Opportunity Scoring, Predictive Forecast, Sales Communications, and Email and Web Tracking. Each of these products is worthy of appreciation and supports you if you are seeking assistance in more than one area. Email and web tracking tool is a great option. Developed on data science, the tool goes really well beyond anything that you may have relied on in the past. This tool is very powerful and ensures a real-time view of clicks on email links, email opens, web visits and a lot more. The tool lets you understand how leads are interacting with your website and emails. Data will be presented in real-time to allow changes on the go. 6. Mindjet The tool is equipped with a Project Director to keep everyone in sync. This makes it possible for the whole team to create living plans that adapt with varying sales cycle. It comes equipped with some brilliant features including drag-and-drop editing, virtual whiteboard, and organization charts to help with a centralized account plan, making planning of sales a collaborative venture every time. 7. ToutApp If you are seriously interested in turning a number of sales prospects into customers, trust ToutApp. It will help you equip yourself and the rest of your team with powerful sales tools required for reaching all of your goals. Among several dynamic features, the tool also offers the ability to create a “pipeline playbook,” replete with data that you and your team require for staying in touch with a contact all through the sales process. The feature ensures various ways to boost your pipeline. For instance, you can benefit from integrated email and phone activities which makes it easier than ever for sales professionals to schedule various meetings and communicate with other team members. The tool will help with sales campaigns. With this, you will not face trouble staying consistent with your approach to prospecting. Overall, ToutApp facilitates you to stay in touch with sales campaigns including email and social media and phone to make sure everything and everybody are on the same page. Additionally, ToutApp offers email, website as well as tools for tracking document. This is important for track engagement, based on all types of communication. Apart from real-time, it provides you with actionable data for making more informed sales decisions. In short, it is an excellent tool for team collaboration. Having several individuals working on sales and marketing, you will need a tool to efficiently keep everybody on the same page. ToutApp will simplify the process of sharing updates with others in real-time. 8. Sales PROPHET System The tool is offered by The Complex Sale (TCS) and functions as an analytics and forecasting software suite. It helps with producing accurate forecasts and pipelines which facilitate sales managers understand what salespeople precisely require for a closing number of deals. It comes equipped with amazing key solutions – R.A.D.A.R., Accounts Planner, Opportunity Manager and M.A.P. 9. Yesware A successful sales person will always look forward to selling smarter. This means you must save time and money while making efforts towards achieving daily marketing goals. Here, you must look for tools meant to save you time and money. The Yesware is one of them. It comes equipped with a special prescriptive analytics tool. The tool will help you move a step further after collecting data with respect to your prospects and sales cycle. It ensures easy access to high level, actionable insights which instructs you about what you need to do with the data collected. The best part is that you can share it with appropriate team members to make sure each of them makes the right moves. Yesware takes a three-point approach for describing prescriptive analytics, which is completely focused on action wherein actionable advice is offered based on the most important data. The second one is real time results via offering real-time data to help you take immediate action and boost the chances of success. Third is scale success. As soon as you know what you’re doing right, it is time to support other team members implement the strategy to scale your results. So the YouTube vlogging channel that you built may have started as a hobby or a personal space for you to share opinions and practice your expertise, post various interesting routines, or upload reviews of games. On the other hand, if you have continued with your vlogging regularly and even gained a small dedicated audience, you would want to take it a step further. A vlogging channel holds a natural tendency to emerge as a space for a community of like-minded people to congregate and discuss topics related to your YouTube Vlogs. Listed below are some easy yet very effective ways to build a community via using YouTube: Understanding the Significance of a YouTube Community So why do you think a YouTube community is important? Creating a community based around your vlogging channel will work towards bringing in the more number of viewers and grow the popularity of your YouTube channel’s popularity. Presently, most of the successful YouTube creators are individuals who make their supporters feel very special and work towards including them. There is absolutely no better way to build brand loyalty than focussing on building a community for those who regularly watch your videos and follow you on social media. Now the question is how you can actually boost the overall community aspect of your vlogging channel: Step 1 - Name Your Channel’s Community Have you named your channel's community? If not, then it is high time you do so! First and foremost, you should give your YouTube community an attractive and appealing name that will instantly resound with your audience. This is no rocket science. All you need to do is think about various topics you discuss. Now based on these, think of a cool name you can give to your channel. You should consider your target audience as well as any of the catchphrases you use on a regular basis. Also take a close look through your comments. Thereafter, you need to pick out things that your fans say and pop up a lot. Interestingly, any of these may prove to be your inspiration for a brilliant, catchy YouTube community name. Once it clicks, your fans will support and love it too! Step 2 - Acknowledge YouTube Community This is the next most important step. You must start calling your community by its name. Also mention your community in your Vlogs and all of your posts on social media. Do not forget to give them shout-outs. Make double sure they know precisely how important they are to you. For instance, let’s assume that you own a beauty vlog channel which focusses on various tips for makeup. You have named it Expert Makeup Tips. Here, you may name your community and engage with its members via including a shout-out right in the outro of each of your YouTube videos. Start by saying “Okay, Makeup Cues! That’s it for this one. I would like to thank you all again for watching the video. Don’t forget to subscribe and become a part of the Makeup Cue Nation!” Step 3 - Engage and Interact With Audience Regularly Apart from including target audience in your intros and/or outros, it is crucial to engage with your audience, especially if you wish to build an authentic community for vlogging channel. You may initiating via asking for their opinions, feedback, and/or ideas for any of your future vlog topics. This is best done at the end of your YouTube videos. Focus on asking your viewers to leave their responses in the comments. However, you should not stop there. The idea is to use these ideas as a good source of topics to come up with vlog topics and posts. This works in two ways. You get ideas, even if you already have loads of them and makes your audience members feel deeply involved and connected with you. For instance, at the end of a video, you can say something like, “Got questions about how to use this in a better way? Post them in the comments, and I’ll answer them in my next video!” Thereafter, once you receive questions from the audience, focus on answering them in your next vlog. Always give the viewers who asked them shout-outs. Mention the name of your viewer while answering queries. This will let your audience know you care. Also, thank them right after you answer their question. This is yet another strong and effective way to show that you care about your audience and appreciate their feedback. Step 4 - Give Response to Your YouTube Comments Most people ignore this. You must focus on giving fast and genuine response to all of your YouTube comments. This helps establish uninterrupted engagement with your audience. So don’t be afraid to get involved in the comments. Jump in and add your expert comments the moment you see queries, comments, and tips associated to your YouTube Vlogs. Make sure you add it to the conversation. You should always be polite and helpful. The idea is to respond to queries and criticisms as promptly and professionally as possible. Whenever you come across negative comments, dealing with them professionally and without getting agitated. Step 5 - Ask An Audience for Vlog Topics and Ideas It is easy for your audience to generate brilliant ideas for YouTube videos. This is an important step to follow even if you’re not running low on your own ideas for videos. The idea is to ask your audience what they actually want to see from you. Although you may have some wonderful tips and tutorials in mind, asking your audience will give them a feeling that you have a vested interest in them. They will be happier to know you are eager to upload videos precisely on the kinds of vlog topics they wish to see. Step 6 - Develop a Social Media Presence Around Vlogs Once you do this, strictly avoid restricting community of your vlogging to YouTube. Move one step forward and take it to other popular social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google+. These platforms are helpful for your viewers share more of your content and allow their friends know about you. In short, you will get more chances to interact with them. Developing community pages for the YouTube channel on other social media platforms is crucial. However, you need to be sure to include content exclusive to those specific networks. This will give a valid reason for people to to follow you on each social network. Make sure you share behind-the-scenes footage as well as stills from various upcoming episodes, news, updates, and other fun and informative content. These should be unique in a way that your audience won’t get anywhere else. This is important to encourage them to get deeply involved with your YouTube channel and your audience. The end result is consistent growth of your community. |