Has anyone ever told you the secret to increasing social media engagement? I bet you’ve gone through hundreds of articles about social media success but haven’t cracked the code yet. Hear me out as this article contains a secret sauce of dominating the social media space, and the good news is that anyone can do it.

Social media has significantly influenced the way we communicate, get inspiration, make buying decisions, and spend time.

One of the weird things about social media is that most of the starters want to rapidly grow on social media. When they hear the buzzword “social media,” they tend to think of the number of followers and overlook the engagement factor.

It’s a no brainer that celebs and influencers are warmly welcomed on a social media platform; all they need is to announce on a different social media platform or share it through a TV interview. Voila!

The number one reason why influencers and celebs rapidly grow on social media is the ample amount of engagement they get almost instantly.

When Jennifer Anniston joined Instagram, it took the internet by storm. Now the FRIENDS star has the world-record to her name for the fastest one million followers on Instagram.

Did Instagram know that this award-winning Hollywood actress is about to set up her Instagram account, and we need to bump it to the top? Of course, no.

It happened organically as Anniston is loved by millions of fans across the globe. The newspapers, magazines, blogs, and websites were publishing articles about her account, and it became a talk of the town.

When fans heard about her Instagram, they started searching for her official account and started following it. It didn’t end here; they also started liking and commenting on the very first picture she posted, and it went viral.

You might think it happened because she was already a celebrity, but I believe it was all the attention that led to high engagement to her account that took it off.

Since you and I aren’t famous Hollywood stars, so need to find ways to increase engagement on social media platforms and work our butt off to dominate social media.

Sit tight because I’m going to spill the beans here. I’ll share a handful of techniques that help you increase engagement on social media platforms without spending a whole lot of money.

You’ll notice that:

• I won’t be sharing any rocket science formulas to grow on social
• My tips would include practical and actionable tactics
• You won’t have to spend a ton of money on social media to get followers
• The strategies may look mundane, but they work if you stay persistent

So without any further ado, let’s take a look.

Increase Your Social Media Engagement: Here are 6 Ways to do so

Let’s dive deep into these social media engagement tactics:

Ask Questions

Social media engagement happens when followers get excited to respond to your post, and they’d only be excited about the stuff that’s relevant to them or they know about.

Have you ever noticed that we stop scrolling the social media platform’s feed when we see something relevant?

If you’re passionate about dogs, you might not care about bicycle tires. However, if you stumble upon a video about dog training, you’d immediately play and try to pick the brain of an expert.

If you pay close attention, then you’d understand that it’s the fundamental point of increasing social media engagement. Therefore, asking the right questions would unleash the social media attention that you’re hoping for on social media.

I once asked about the video editing software my Facebook friends are using and the post got a ton of replies:

This kind of attention and engagement doesn’t happen when I share a blog post link on Facebook. So it shows asking questions is an excellent strategy for starting a conversation on social media.

Am I only the one who thinks asking questions is good? To find the answer to that question, I went to Twitter and started scrolling through the timeline, and I found this tweet:

Rebekah Radice is a social media influencer, expert, and strategist. She also asked a question in her tweet. Look at the number of replies and likes on the tweet. It shows that asking questions is an ice breaker, especially if you’re trying to improve engagement on social media.

Create Polls

Social media engagement is a bit more subjective to each user. A piece of content might attract PERSON A, but it might be irrelevant to PERSON B. Therefore, surveying the audience from time to time can help us understand our audience better.

I learned that polls are a great social media tool available on all mainstream social media platforms. What they do is that they motivate people to click and get engaged without being pushy. You must have seen a poll on almost all of the major social media platforms.

One of the reasons why creating polls on social media could increase engagement is that polls standout pretty easily. We’re talking about an abundance of tweets or Facebook posts here, and when a poll shows up, it easily sifts through the noise and start attracting the audience.

I have multiple YouTube channels, and a lot of followers follow me across all channels. So I decided to survey one of my channels to help design my YouTube content strategy for 2021. Here’s the screenshot of the poll I created in the community tab of my YouTube channel:

You can notice that the majority of the responders were interested in YouTube content creation. It got me thinking to double-down my efforts on creating YouTube-related content.

Diego Oquendo is an entrepreneur; I found his poll on LinkedIn while scrolling through the timeline:

Here are three takeaways for creating polls on social media for increasing social media engagement:

1. Brainstorm a bit on the poll subject before moving forward with it so that you could come up with the most appropriate question to ask.
2. Provide the audience with multiple yet relevant options to choose from to get the best results. You should have at least three or more options in your poll.

III. Don’t judge the poll results too quickly; give it a good week or two before you conclude.

Creating polls would showcase results slowly but surely. Don’t chicken out if you don’t see loads of responses on the poll immediately. Learn a lesson and come up with a better poll next time.

I learned that sharing blog posts or YouTube videos on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn starts to look spammy at some point, and people are less likely to respond to the mundane content.

So creating a poll once in a while would be an excellent strategy to mix things up and increase the engagement on social media over time.

Repurpose Content

Content repurposing means taking a piece of content and transforming it into another type of content using the same information. It has become a popular content creation hack among digital marketers and bloggers as it’s hard to consistently put out fresh content.

Therefore, repurposing allows us to put out content in some shape and form as well as it also helps us build a following on different social media platforms.

When brands and entrepreneurs hear about repurposing content, some of them don’t follow it. Perhaps, it’s because it doesn’t get discussed as much as it should be.

Don’t be afraid of content repurposing. Most people find creating original content difficult, and there might be many reasons why they have not been able to create content such as:

• They don’t know their strengths
• They don’t come up with great ideas
• They don’t understand their target audience
• They are confused about the right niche
• They get stuck between the content types such as text, video, and audio

I have been an admirer of content repurposing for a long time. Back in 2018, I posted a book review on my YouTube channel. Later on, I used the review video to create a blog post on the blog. This way, I was able to put out two pieces of content.

Take a look at the screenshot below:

I took the embedded code of my YouTube video, wrote a brief blog post, put the embedded code into the blog post, and voila.

The story doesn’t end here; I have repurposed blog posts into infographics as well.

Check out this infographic, which was designed for my Facebook profile:

You can see the blog post URL on the footer of the image. Not only am I putting out a new infographic on Facebook, but I’m also directing the audience to the blog.

The point is that content repurposing could be very useful when you’re trying to increase social media engagement.

Mention an Influencer

Most of us follow influencers in our industry or niche, which is necessary to keep up with the latest trends and techniques. However, we don’t know how to leverage a connection with the influencer.

First things first, you should know you may have to invest your time, energy, and money into building a connection with the influencers.

It doesn’t mean you would have to spend thousands of dollars to invite an influencer for a personal one-on-one session or something. What I mean is that buying a couple of $15 books or attending a few seminars or else sharing their content continuously would do the job if you know how to do it. And, I’m going to teach you how to do it.

The easiest way to get noticed by an influencer is by understanding his/her core values and spreading the word about them. If you’re a blogger and you agree with an influencer on some common agendas, you can quote the influencer in your articles. If you’re a YouTuber, you can give a shoutout to an influencer’s channel or book.

However, there is a caveat, if you’re doing it just to get attention, you might not be able to pull this off. On the other hand, if you genuinely believe in what you’re saying, you won’t stop highlighting the influencer in your content, and eventually, you would get noticed.

There is no secret recipe to get the attention of the influencers, but if you keep the following key elements of influencer engagement in mind, you can win their attention:

• You must thoroughly study the influencer’s content before you speak about it
• You won’t get a response if you’re being negative about the influencer
• If you’re just doing it for the attention, it may seem fake and unauthentic and won’t work
• The persistence often pays off in winning the attention of the influencers

Here’s an example:

I was once reached out by the outreach team of Tony Robbins and they referred to the blog post in which I mentioned Tony Robbins’ book Unlimited Power. It was one of the best books I’ve ever read. So I went on to praise the book, but I didn’t pay attention to linking out to the Tony Robbins’ website.

Therefore, his team reached out and thanked me for talking about the book, and requested me to add a link to that blog post. And, I did it at their request.

The takeaway from the example is that I didn’t mention Tony’s book to get an email from the outreach team, but rather, I wanted to solidify my message by adding an authentic source.

Simply put, if you want to increase your social media engagement, then engaging the influencers is a great way to go about it. What you need to do is to take the following steps:

• Choose a handful of influencers that you agree with
• Follow them everywhere on social media and blogging platforms
• Show up in their comment sections on the blog, Facebook, YouTube, and pretty much everywhere
• Link out to them in your blog posts or talk about them in your YouTube videos
• Mention or tag them when you share your content in which they’re mentioned
• Share their content without any expectations whatsoever

What would happen eventually is that when you keep doing this for a while and don’t ask for a return favor, your name or face or brand would start to get familiar with them.

The next thing that might happen is that out of hundreds of comments, they might reply to your comment along with a couple more. At some point, they might share your content in which they’re mentioned. Once this starts to happen, you can expect a lot more attention and engagement as compared to the past.

Even if you don’t see a major change in the vanity metrics, you still got yourself a story to talk about and engage your existing audience.

Folks, mentioning an influencer you admire or follow could go a long way if you’re patient and authentic.

Try a URL Shortener Tool

Some of you may have used a URL shortener tool for trimming your long URLs for social media sharing. And here we are discussing this in a blog post about increasing social media engagement. You would think what good a URL shortener tool would do for social media engagement besides making the URLs look short and clean.

No wonder you’d be surprised, but hear me out first. In my defense, I’d say that it’s partly true that a URL shortener is mainly used for trimming down the URLs to look short and beautiful. However, I’m not going to discuss an ordinary URL shortener tool; you’d be baffled to hear what this tool can do for you.

Replug is my go-to URL shortening tool that doesn’t just shorten the URLs, but instead, it also brings the visitor back to your website or social media channel.

Therefore, when you use this tool for shortening a third-party article for sharing on social media, it creates a funnel to bring those visitors back to your site.

Here’s how it works: when you create a short URL of your friend’s article and share it on social media, it generates a tiny pop-up snippet of your site or social channel for the visitors to click-through and comes back to your platform.

So you aren’t just sharing others’ content, but you’re also infusing your website URL along with others’ content without being pushy.

Benefits of Replug

Custom Branded URL

Replug allows you to integrate a custom branded URL to your account, which enables you to use your short URLs for your social media campaign. For instance, youtu.be is a custom branded URL of YouTube.com.

Retargeting Clickers

This URL shortener doesn’t just trim your URLs for social media sharing, but it also helps in social media marketing. Retargeting the audience that clicked on the links is a huge plus of Replug. Capitalize on this opportunity to engage the audience and bring them to your platform through retargeting.

Call-to-Action Button

One of the best features of the Replug tool is that it provides users with an opportunity to add a CTA button on the pages that are being shared. What happens is that when a visitor clicks on the short URL you generated and shared, the visitor sees a clickable popup that displays the Replug user’s brief information, which could eventually drive visitors to the user’s website.

Performance Tracking

Measuring the performance of any marketing campaign is essential to moving forward in the right direction. Replug has a performance tracking feature that gives users insights into the links’ clickability to keep track of their social media engagement.

Chrome Extension

Replug has a Chrome extension that makes it easier for the users to add shareable links to the Replug account, and it makes social media management a lot faster.

All-in-One Bio Link

One of the coolest things about Replug is that it could replace your Instagram bio link with an all-in-one bio link. You can create a page that has all of your social media links and generate the short URL for the page to add to your Instagram bio. It could massively increase your social media engagement on all major platforms you use.

I once wanted to try a different URL shortener but didn’t subscribe to it for some reason. When I found out about Replug, I instantly signed up and started testing it.

I can say with confidence that the features Replug offers can increase social media engagement over time.

Use Video Content

I have said this a million times and I’m sure you have heard over and over again that video is vital to get attention on social media. Some of you might be paying attention to YouTube and Facebook videos. Let me burst the bubble; it’s not enough.

If you want to increase social media engagement through videos, you have to milk every social media platform that supports video content. Most users underestimate LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram for video content. What if I told you that must upload videos to these platforms to get more engagement?

The chances are, some of you haven’t thought about putting out videos on these platforms. Go to your LinkedIn timeline and start scrolling through; you’d notice that a video would show up after every 5 to 8 posts.

I have been noticing a video trend on Pinterest for quite some time. Now I’m planning on focusing on vertical videos for Pinterest too. The best part is that you don’t have to put a lot of effort into creating a Pinterest video; a lot of users use the same strategy of pin designing into creating video pins for Pinterest.

When it comes to videos, Instagram isn’t far behind. Go to your explore page, and I’m sure you’d find videos along with picture posts.

Most people are afraid of facing the camera and putting themselves out there. If you have been feeling stuck at this phase, then just go ahead and do it anyway. It may look scary, but that’s the only way to move forward. You should know that everyone makes a few bad videos before they start making better videos.

One of the perks of putting out video content is that it gets easier for some people to consume video as compared to articles. It won’t be easy, but the upside of putting out videos is so massive that you can’t imagine. Once you start to reap the benefits of video creation, it will easily overshadow the fear of putting yourself out there.

We want to increase social media engagement, and videos can be a very digestible form of content for the audience unless you don’t know much about the topic or put it out in front of the wrong audience.

How Would You Increase Social Media Engagement?

It’s easier said than done. Anyway, I tried my best to share strategies that have helped me increase social media engagement across multiple social media platforms.

Get to know your target audience and come up with compelling content to offer to the audience. Once you crack the code of creating enticing content and putting it in front of the right audience, you’ll be baffled to see the outcome.

The tactics I shared with you are tried-and-tested as I have been blogging since 2008 and learning something new ever since.

Had I known some of these secrets earlier, I would have made a fortune.

Anyway, Robins Sharma put it this way, “there are no mistakes in life, only lessons.”

It all comes down to this question:

How would you increase social media engagement?

Let’s talk in the comments section.

Author Bio:  Hassaan is a blogger and freelance writer. He has published articles on SEMrush, ThriveGlobal, BlogPress, FreelancerMap, and many other popular publications. He writes about freelancing techniques, tips, and career growth. Subscribe to his blog.

Garnering traffic to your website, regardless of the niche, is always an uphill battle. And whether social media has an impact on your SEO is up for debate, one thing’s for sure ― social media can be a major source of referral traffic to your website.

In fact, social media users have grown by over 10% in the past year, taking the global total to nearly 4 billion, or more than half the world’s population. Clearly, it doesn’t lack the potential to explosively boost your website traffic.

Now, whether you’re posting on social media to earn more readers for your business blog, to get your followers to check out a newly launched product, or win sign-ups for your newsletter, your goal is to get people to engage with your content and visit your website.

However, getting people off the social platform and on to your website can be a tall order, with your audience being constantly flooded with endless other engaging posts in their feed.

So, here are seven powerful ways to help you capture your audience’s attention and make them click through to your website.

1. Determine the Right Social Media Channels

Your very first step is to do your homework about your target audience ― on which platforms do they spend most of their time and what kind of content do they engage with the most.

There’s no need for you to be active on every channel. For example, if you wish to drive traffic to a food review blog, investing all your efforts in posting quality content on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter will likely fill the bill. Conversely, if you wish to drive traffic to your B2B SaaS blog, focusing on LinkedIn and Twitter makes more sense.

The last thing you want is to waste your efforts by focusing on the wrong channels where you’ll find little-to-no engagement and thus, a negligible bump in traffic at best.

So, if you have a customer base, ask them what social networks they prefer or use the most. Analyze your top competitors’ strategy. Which platforms are your competitors leveraging? Rather than guessing, use data to determine the right channels for successful social media marketing.

2. Craft Persuasive Titles for Your Social Posts

Headlines can make or break your click-through rate. Whether you’re posting an Instagram story or sharing a quick tweet, always keep in mind the three C’s of great social copy: creative, concise, and conversational.

The title of your post is your audience’s first taste of the actual content, so don’t shoo them away with an unexciting or “clickbaity” title.

While it’s a good idea to keep the headline as crisp as you can, crafting a narrative title typically boosts click-through rates. You can include a couple of benefits of clicking-through to your website, some surprising statistics, or an intriguing question the answer to which they’ll find by clicking on your link.

For instance, if you’re posting an article titled “How to Improve Your Customer Retention”, instead of copy-pasting the same title in your tweet, write something like “Want to build long-lasting relationships with your customers? Here are five battle-tested customer retention strategies!”. Clearly, the latter one invites more traffic as it’s conversational and leads with a gripping question.

3. Go All Out With Visual Content

Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, effective social media marketing is all about posting visually stunning content ― high-res photos, illustrations, infographics, GIFs, and videos ― consistently.

You may not think of Twitter as a visual-first platform, but Twitter’s internal data shows people are three times more likely to engage with tweets that include visual content.

Source: HubSpot

Modern social media users prefer and can’t get enough visual content. Even if you’re not redirecting followers to mouth-watering pizzas or ravishing undergarments on your website, uploading high-quality images with a caption is always better than plain text.

In short, if your content doesn’t catch your audience’s eye, they won’t bother to stop scrolling and click through to your website. So, strive to post striking visuals that people can’t help but pay attention to.

Also, don’t use images that are clearly free stock photos. Create original high-quality visuals or if you’ve transitioned to a remote working company (thanks to the pandemic), then hire a remote designer to help you create visually appealing social content ― don’t cut corners when it comes to quality and originality.

4. Use Custom Branded Links

Your website’s URL you link to can often be long and convoluted, making it visually uninviting for your followers. To make your links more inviting and clickable, customize them to make them shorter and also branded.

That is, use a custom URL shortener to create short links (an abbreviated version of the page domain) as it’s an excellent way to keep your branding consistent, boost link trust, and consequently, increase click-throughs and website traffic.

What’s more, a shorter link takes up fewer characters in tweets (where you’re limited to 280 characters), leaving you with more room to craft persuasive titles and exciting captions.

5. Have a Clear Call to Action

What do you want your followers to do when they stop scrolling to check out your post? Make it clear as to what action you want them to take.

If you want them to check out your latest product catalog, tell them that with a direct phrase like “check out our latest fall collection”, and include a link to your catalog page.

Likewise, if you want your audience’s opinion on something, just ask them to drop a quick comment. In essence, a clear call to action (CTA) is a tried-and-true way to boost content engagement and drive click-throughs to your website.

6. Post at the Right Times of the Day

Once you have great content to post, it makes sense to determine the ideal time to pull the trigger. After all, what’s the point of great content if your followers aren’t around to see it?

Sure, you’ll get some impressions and click-throughs if you post without thinking about the time, but that’s not how you’ll extract the most juice out of every post.

Timing your posts on social media does have an impact on the traffic you generate, and you must try to get your message across when the bulk of your audience is active.

Source: TrackMaven

To work out the best times to post on each channel, start by looking at what times and days you get the most engagement presently.

For Twitter, head over to ‘Twitter Analytics’ and sort by ‘Top Tweets’ to determine your best-performing tweets. Analyze the time and days when you get the most engagement. Use a free tool like Followerwonk to quickly figure out what time of day your audience is most active.

Likewise, for Facebook, head over to the ‘Insights’ tab to understand when you get the most reach and likes. It’s also a good idea to run some tests to see when your audience is most engaged and likely to click through to your website. Once you find a pattern, schedule your content accordingly on each channel.

Moreover, by sharing your content multiple times across each platform, you allow each post to get the maximum possible engagement from your audience. So feel free to post the same link twice or thrice, spacing the posts apart a week or two.

However, don’t risk annoying your audience by posting too frequently, or by posting the same piece of content more than thrice.

7. Deliver What You Promised

Finally, don’t let your audience down when they land on your website. Your post ― with its compelling title, stunning visuals, and inviting CTA ― should lead your followers to a landing page on your website that truly delivers on your post’s promise.

For example, if you share a link to your blog post on Facebook that’s captioned “How to bake an eggless dutch truffle in less than 60 minutes”, then your followers should be able to do that once they click-through to your website and read the post.

Because if you don’t deliver on your promise, you can’t expect people to trust your brand and click-through to your website again. So, make sure to meet your audience’s expectations with quality content that leaves them satisfied and helps you achieve your marketing goals.

To conclude, all the seven ways outlined above have the overarching theme of building trust and adding value to your followers’ social media experience. The more effectively you get it in front of your audience’s eyes (with stellar visuals, branded links, etc.), the more credible you’ll appear, which, in turn, will result in more click-throughs to your website.

About The Author –

Gaurav Belani is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Growfusely, a content marketing agency that specializes in content and data-driven SEO. With more than seven years of experience in digital marketing, his articles have been featured on popular online publications related to EdTech, Business, Startups, and many more. Connect with Twitter at @belanigaurav.

We’ve all done a google search on our names at some point. And for most of us, our Facebook profile or LinkedIn handle pops up first. Yet, for those who want to build a personal brand, this is not enough.

Bloggers, YouTubers, photographers, or budding businesses often turn to personal branding strategies. The more people recognize you, the stronger your brand value. If you are someone who wants to shine out from the crowd, then these tips and tricks might help. 

What is Personal Branding? 

Building a personal brand is as essential as your company’s reputation. Marketing is no longer a detached, depersonalized space. The modern-day customers prefer a one-on-one experience instead. 

The market is a social space where buyers and sellers interact. Business, in its very essence, depends on building human connections with people. And your customers are the best brand ambassadors you can get!

With personal brand building, you give your customers a glimpse of your personality. It is more than a mere extension of the business brand. With a personal brand, you try to change the public perception. It puts you in a position of authority. 

Personal brand building and profit

Most B-schools have a section on individual brand building. Here, the students learn all about personal branding and how to market themself. 

As a marketing student, you often get to dapple with research tools as well. The most popular of them being SWOT analysis or PESTLE to gain valuable insights. 

A SWOT analysis report gives you all the information on the internal and external micro factors that affect the brand. The acronym SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. You can apply this not only to products and services but also for people. 

For instance, the entrepreneur’s personal influence and expertise is a strength for the brand. Personal brand building allows the businessman to become an authority figure. And once they have the trust of the customer, they might even tweak the market trends to their benefit. 

Marketing students looking for some marketing assignment help are in luck. Here are some simple personal branding tricks that you explore.

Be more visible 

The first thing you need is a strong web presence. Your company might enjoy a good reputation online, but do the customers know you? Do the people recognize you outside your brand? 

Your brand value can add to your company’s reputation as well. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs are famous, even outside their companies. People recognize them beyond Tesla or Apple. 

Most businessmen enjoy celebrity status in the media. People want to know everything about their personal life, family, and experiences. With personal branding, you can put all that out there. 

Find your niche 

You cannot be an expert in everything sector or industry. Customers prefer brands that cater to their needs and preferences. You must find your niche and area of specialization.

If you are a content creator or blogger, deliver credible and well-cited articles. Here are some ways you can increase your online credibility.

• Collect relevant market information from analytical tools
• Look for updated content through content discovery
• Read up on the research that already exists in your industry
• Conduct a thorough SEO research
• Identify the key search words and terms that people use 
• Add high-quality links to research papers and journals 
• Cite all your sources 
• Add plain text descriptions to the images or graphics used 

Note that content creation is a mix of what you want to say and what people want to read/see. If you have an area of interest, pursue it.

Also, note that profit is not the sole motive here. Personal brand concerns more with sharing your life and experiences with people. You don’t have to stick to your industry or line of business. Viewers love personal anecdotes, fun stories from your life. You can even highlight social causes and talk about your political opinions. 

Be active on social media 

Social media networking is the easiest way to connect with an audience. We see many influencers, posting their opinion on a variety of topics. Social media influencers enjoy celebrity status. And if you have a good following online, you can get great brand deals and earn a fortune

Instagram and Twitter are the trending social media platforms that everyone’s at. For building professional connections, you can check out LinkedIn. You can even explore Pinterest if your content is more image-oriented.

So, instead of using social media for marketing your brand- have a little fun with it! Talk about your hobbies, interests, and opinions. Post pictures and Insta stories from your social media handle. Post regularly, see how often should you post on social media . Share a slice of your life, it makes you more human and approachable. 

Gain expertise in your industry 

You must know the ins and outs of the industry. As an entrepreneur, you need to be aware of the latest developments in the business. This also involves an in-depth competition analysis. A detailed PESTLE analysis allows you more profound insights into the business environment. 

Also, you need some level of expertise and credentials in your industry to make it big. Personal brand building is not about creating an artificial image. It focuses more on humanizing the entrepreneur to the audience base. 

Having an effective CTA strategy also impacts your personal brand. People can reach out to you with their queries, complaints, or positive feedback. CTA increases lead generations and divert more traffic to your business as well. 

Source: Freepik 

Practice 2-way networking 

Most people believe that networking is all about identifying your needs and fulfilling them. What networking lacks is a feeling of empathy. So, instead of focusing on your needs, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. 

2-way networking is a more holistic alternative. It ensures that everyone involved in the transaction benefits in some way. What are you offering to the other party? How is your brand adding to the customer’s value? These are a few questions you need to ask. 

This approach ensures a more secure connection with people. It also contributes to your personal brand. You should make a list of all your contacts and create custom-made messages to approach them. 

Conclusion 

Personal brand building is different from business marketing. I hope that these tips would help budding entrepreneurs, students, and freshers. You can use it to raise awareness, talk about important issues, or support a good cause. Good luck!

 

Author Bio: As an Assignment Expert, Bella delivers online sessions at Expert Assignment Help, helping students with writing essays and assignments. She is the co-founder and education consultant at Top My Grades. Beyond work, you can find her baking a fresh batch of cookies in her kitchen. 

The cart abandonment rate in the e-commerce industry, as you know, is high. As per 41 cart abandonment rate stats, the average shopping cart abandonment rate online is 69.57%. 

Even if you look at apps, the number of users uninstalling an app after only one use was 25% in 2019.

No wonder, many SaaS businesses are now recognizing the value of creating fantastic onboarding experiences to retain their customers. 

Now, what is user onboarding?

In simple terms, user onboarding is a process that introduces your product to new users, letting them understand how to implement it best. 

When you have a well-designed user onboarding strategy, users can easily understand your product and end up becoming loyal users.

An excellent user onboarding plan has a structured, step-by-step framework that guides new customers through the product. 

However, note that user onboarding is not a one-time process. Instead, it is an ongoing process since you need to keep revising, upgrading, and re-designing it. 

Here are the 12 best practices your business can implement today to create a successful SaaS user onboarding process:

• Align with sales

An incredible customer onboarding experience begins with sales. 

The goals set by your sales team about what will happen in the initial days or months after users have bought your product will significantly help your onboarding progress. That said, it might even deter the onboarding progress.

Create pre-sale content, speak to prospects, and train your sales teams regularly. 

• Create content

Users will feel good about your company when they can solve an issue on their own. In fact, a study reveals that 73% of users like to solve the problems on their own. 

To make your users feel good, create content that will assist your users in solving issues on their own. It will also make the onboarding journey faster.

Just ensure to make it available to your users at the right time. You can send the content via email or use in-app messaging. You can also add it to the onboarding UI too. But don’t force it upon your users.

Consider creating your content with ContentStudio’s intuitive editor and also leverage on its content planner and calendar feature that allows you to collaborate with your team.

• Do it like Slack! Use bots as customer service.

If you have used Slack, you definitely will be familiar with the Slackbot. 

Source

It simplifies the onboarding process when a customer first signs up to the platform, but it doesn’t stop there. After the initial onboarding process is over, the Slackbot serves as a customer service/tutorial as the onboarding process doesn’t end on the first day. 

It is evident that the company had planned past the first day when they planned their user onboarding. Rushing your users through a quick tutorial and then leaving them with no further help insight is never a good idea. 

Sure, you want to tell your new customers many things. But don’t overwhelm them with information. Keep it simple. Some things are better said when or can wait until they have spent some time in your product.

• Allow users to onboard before signing up.

Allowing users to onboard by giving them a free trial is a great process if you wish to create a habit-forming product that customers turn to regularly.

It is a practice common with educational apps. For instance, if you visit the Babbel website, you will be given the option to either sign up immediately or take a free trial mini-lesson.

Source

Before the platform asks the users to sign up and create an account, they already know which languages are being presented, have chosen their preferred language, finished their first lesson, and made some advancement. 

When the users have gained some value from the product, and they are most likely to commit, Babbel asks their users to sign up.

Source

Also, note how they offer positive reinforcement and encourage the user to continue. 

Offering free content to users before making a monetary commitment is an excellent tactic to convert users into paying customers. Once the users get used to the interface and like it, they are more likely to continue using it.

• Provide interactive walkthroughs

User onboarding, as you know, can be quite dull. Customers want fast and painless interactions. And one way to retain your customers is to engage them during the onboarding process.

Tools like Whatfix (that are top WalkMe competitors) can help you with:

• Keeping your users engaged throughout the onboarding process
• Helping you easily design interactive product tours
• Design & create onboarding task lists
• Provide appropriate guidance to your team & customer 

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It guides the users through an app, helping them to navigate through its various touchpoints and encourages them to take action. You can also personalize the onboarding experience, which is key to engagement.

Plus, it is easy to use. Simply install the Whatfix browser extension, and you are good to start. The browser extension is compatible with any web page. When you click the browser extension, the Whatfix Guide Editor will be launched. You can then start creating your interactive walkthroughs.

It is estimated that 91% of buyers prefer visual and interactive content. So, take advantage of it. 

• Use video content 

It is said that 64% percent of customers buy a product after watching branded social videos. And 51% of marketing experts worldwide say that video content brings the best ROI. So if you are not using video content, you are missing out on a lot.

Use videos to walk new customers through a product. 

For instance, if you sign up for Xero, the web-based accounting system, the first thing you will notice when you try to access your new account is a prompt to view the ‘Getting Started’ video. The new users are given an animated walkthrough, thus simplifying the onboarding process.

Source 

 

• Create value quickly

The “aha” moment should arrive for the users as quickly as possible. 

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Don’t let your users wait too long to get to know the value of your product.

If you are working with complex tools, it will be challenging to arrive at the full “aha” moment quickly but look for chances to show micro-value quickly when your users sign up.

The onboarding process should not be only about welcoming the users, discussing goals, and arranging subsequent steps without getting anything substantial done.

• Make onboarding skippable

If you don’t want to frustrate your current users, make the onboarding skippable. Some of your ‘new’ users may have already viewed a lot of your products.  

Chances are your users may merely be downloading your app onto a new device, sign up using a new email id, or they may have been made to sign up again due to other reasons.

Your users will not want to go through your onboarding process twice. To solve this issue, create a skip button just like Airbnb does.

Source

Your users will thank you for not having to do extra work.

• Add progress bars

To motivate your users to keep going, set expectations, and allow them to complete setup at their own pace, progress bars are crucial.

Consider adding relevant animation. It will beat the standard progress bars.

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Or set expectations by letting your users know where they are exactly and how much work they need to do before they complete the task.

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Progress bars can also be fun and colourful.

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To further engage your users and encourage them to complete the onboarding process, you can also use tools like Replug. It will allow you to create pop-ups to engage users when they are about to leave.

•  Offer excellent customer support

Don’t make onboarding all about the product. Customers want to feel special. Reach out to them with proactive customer service from the first day.

Let a customer support team member send a personal email letting your user know that you’re there to assist. You can even make a phone call. Or send a warm in-app welcome message. 

This action will let your users know that they are valued, and this will influence them to do business with you. 

In a survey, it was found that 42% of customers were willing to pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience.

•  Get early feedback

Don’t think it is too early to get feedback. Remember, not all unsatisfied users bother to complain. Be proactive in collecting feedback from the start.

You can ask relevant questions in case a user failed to complete the onboarding process.

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If they have completed the onboarding process, you can send them a quick survey asking them about their experience.

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But don’t stop there. Use analytics to analyze your customers’ behavior and find out about their experience with your product. 

 

•  Use A/B testing

Don’t forget to use A/B testing to comprehend what type of content would effectively onboard your users. A/B test will compare two different versions of content to let you know which one performs better.

If you implement the better version effectively, you will experience higher customer conversion.

The A/B testing process involves collecting data, deciding goals, creating a hypothesis, making variations, running experiments, and studying results. A/B testing will help you in creating brilliant customer onboarding strategies.

Wrapping-Up

Remember that your users are only humans with real problems. They are looking for a quick onboarding process and avail whatever value your product or service is offering. By making the onboarding process simple for them and giving the best customer experience, you will be able to convert them into paying customers and also retain them for the long haul. Follow the 12 best practices mentioned in this article to create a successful SaaS onboarding process.

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Author The Author:

Gaurav Belani is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Growfusely, a content marketing agency that specializes in content and data-driven SEO. With more than seven years of experience in digital marketing, his articles have been featured on popular online publications related to EdTech, Business, Startups, and many more. Connect with Twitter at @belanigaurav.

In these unprecedented times,  businesses are more than ever reliant on making a digital shift. Ultimately, this may even be the deciding factor in their sustainability. Being confined to your own home, marketers now have more time than ever to develop a perfect digital strategy. This means thorough research is required for the platforms where your clients exist and double efforts are needed to bring in more leads.

I have made a list of the most effective digital marketing strategies that will prove beneficial for your business in 2020!

So let’s dive in!

1. Webinar Marketing

Webinar marketing has the potential to generate hundreds of new leads in just a matter of hours. According to the survey conducted, 58% of the marketers use webinars for promotion and 32% of them think that webinar marketing will be imperative to their success. Hence, with the effective use of webinar marketing, you can effectively explain features and sell products and services!

So what exactly is webinar marketing? 

This term refers to an online (web) seminar that lets you connect to a wider audience. Most marketing webinars can be educational, informational, conversational and can be made to:

1. Explain their products and services in-depth. 
2. Illustrate their expertise in their domain. 
3. Answer the frequently asked questions with tips and suggestions. You can get help from your customer service team regarding this. 
4. Expand on a popular blog topic. 

Customers value this free, valuable information that they receive and may feel the need to upgrade their services, by purchasing additional items. Moreover, you can even sweeten the deal for the participants by providing them a free gift or a discount on the service you’re offering! By making use of “scarcity” you can tempt them to purchase the service in a week! This will bring in viable leads, higher engagement, and ultimately, a better brand image! If you need to create new landing pages for webinars that attract audiences, you might choose from among the most popular online website builders to help you to make a beautiful page quickly.

To make the most out of your social media contest, you can give away custom merchandise like t-shirts, mugs, or bags that align with your brand’s vision and your audience. Why? People love free stuff and they are more likely to take photos of themselves, wearing your perch. Sellfy claims that it’s one of the easiest (and most effective) ways to get your brand noticed.

2. Monitor Conversations about Your Brand

Keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand! When someone shares their experience by tagging your brand, you must view it and if necessary, immediately take action. If they are facing a problem, make sure to apologize and resolve their issue at the earliest. 

Nonetheless, not everyone who is posting about your brand is going to tag you! And that’s exactly what makes brand monitoring so crucial! 

In particular, you can use TweetDeck to organize, track and engage with your audience.

If you’re wondering… what exactly do I monitor? Branded keywords, slogans, campaign names, product features, competitor keywords, and lastly.. misspelled names! 

Similarly, maintaining competitive intelligence while brand monitoring is also the key! If a customer is unsatisfied with your competitor, feel free to let him know about your better and more satisfactory service! 😉 

3. Audience Targeting

Targeting the audience is using data to segment consumers by demographics, geographic, or behavioural or psychographic attributes to find the right content for the right person at the right place and at the right time! 

Analyze your marketing campaigns and ask questions like:

• Are we reaching our target audience properly?
• If not, then who are we reaching?
• Is our audience responding in a favourable manner?
• Will another audience be more beneficial?

It is also recommended to keep up with SEO analysis of website and SEO trends because  “there is nothing better than simply being in front of the customer when they search for exactly what you are able to offer.” 

Retargeting 

Most of all it is important that the leads that end up on your website eventually end up converting! That’s where retargeting comes in. The truth is that it’s a long journey from a visitor to an eventual customer. Social networking channels such as Google and Facebook ads help you gain traffic, leads, conversions; thereby, creating a win-win situation for your brand. 

However, be sure to manage retargeting properly by setting up a defined purpose, setting a frequency cap, breaking the audience into different segments, and conveying the right ads to each segment. 

4. Influencer Marketing 

Like many industries, influencer marketing has also taken a hit, due to the COVID-19. Campaigns are being put on hold and influencers have drastically reduced their rates.

However, all hope is not lost. At the same time, screen time for people has drastically gone up high. Research has shown that the average screen time of 5 hours and 40 minutes has got an 18% increase from previous weeks. As we social distance ourselves in this new norm, it is safe to assume that this figure will only increase.

As more people make their shift to e-commerce, there is a chance: with the right content, you can retain and nurture your existing customers by providing them value. Influencers have changed their standard of content. Now more than ever, it is important to carefully consider the caption and tone of your visuals. 

Essentially, it is important to note that you should consider social media as a time for community, rather than a competition. Try to keep your followers more engaged with your content. How? With live discussions, Q/As and webinars, you can keep Instagram followers hooked to their screens!

5. Encourage People to Post their Story

It should come as no surprise that reviews are a significant deciding factor in the user buying purchase cycle. Your success on social media is more contingent on what your clients are saying about you. This means you can convince consumers to share their journey with you: how did they find you, what do they like most about your product, and what has their experience been like?

According to a survey, almost 1 in 3 Facebook users make a purchase after “sharing, liking, or commenting” on the product themselves. So make sure that you get the user onboard for his journey: you can add his review on your website, or even make a video about him. Some companies even reward referral points to consumers for recommending their products to their friends! 

6. Post at the Best Time

Knowing the best times to post on every social media is essential to marketing campaigns. The first step is to create compelling content that is relevant to your audience. However, if you do not post your content at the right time, your efforts will never be fruitful!

You can find out your ideal posting time by testing the timing of your posts. By analyzing the geographic details of your audience, you can test which time zone would be most optimal and consequently, result in higher engagement. 

However, if you do not have the resources or the time to conduct this experiment, according to a study, the following are the best times for Facebook:

• Best times: Wednesday, 11 a.m. and 1–2 p.m.
• Best day: Wednesday
• Worst day: Sunday

Similarly, on Instagram, here’s the best time to post on Instagram within each timezone, as illustrated by Hubspot:

Sunday: 10 AM – 2 PM

Monday: 9 AM – 5 PM (Engagement peaks at 11 AM and 2 PM)

Tuesday: 8 AM – 6 PM, *7 PM

Wednesday: 5 AM, *11 AM – 3 PM

Thursday: 5 AM, *11 – 4 PM

Friday: *5 AM, 9 AM – 10 AM, *11 AM – 1 PM, 2 – 4 PM

Saturday: 9 – 11 AM

* = particularly high levels of engagement

I would also recommend using social media management tools like ContentStudio to plan and automate your social posts at a perfect time in advance! And that’s how you make use of social posting data to optimize your marketing campaigns! 

7. Stay updated with Social Changes

As more and more people turn to the brands they trust for updates in the current crisis, many industries have dramatically increased their volume of messages sent, hence using SMS marketing as a means to update their customers and growing their business. Especially the healthcare, and media industries, which provide continuous updates for the changes. Contrarily, travel and sports have been impacted the most. 

Depending on what your industry your brand belongs to, it needs to reevaluate its content and marketing strategy to best serve their clients as the situation changes.  

That’s all for today, folks!

Let me know in the comments if you learned anything significant and how you’re going to implement it in your digital marketing campaigns!

Everything you do while creating a novel perspective of your online brand marketing is for the sake of attracting customers towards you and eventually turn them into paying customers. Keep reading to know the Latest Digital Marketing trends in 2020.

Just assume, your brand has launched and is running flatly the way you want. You have won half of the game. But…

1.  What’s next though?
2. How are you going to convert leads into sales?
3. What about your click-through rates or pay click rate?

Here Conversion comes to play a role.

Conversion marketing is an approach that helps you to draw the customers’ attention and prompt them to reach in their pockets and pay you.

So keep an eye on the conversion because it makes you spend your hard-earned cash on online marketing, targeting audiences, and increasing ROI.

So, let’s cut to the chase, and let’s talk about boost conversion tips, tricks, and trends to get better web marketing outcomes, save money and time.

Top 8 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss in 2020

Automated Technology

What is Automated Technology?

Automated technology sounds like the software that assists you to do marketing activities and tasks automatically rather than manually.

Several digital marketing processes have been automated, for instance, email marketing, creating branded campaigns, sharing content on multiple social channels, and much more. Digital marketing has increased to a big ratio in 2020.

It is predicted that 80% of the advertising processes are likely to be automated and take a dramatic lead over ads. Hereby, it is vital that you are aware of the most Top Digital Marketing trends in 2020.

No doubt, automation tools enhance your workflow and create a more personal connection with cold audiences. In general, marketers do it just for the sake of efficiency and save time.

Automation Technology is one of the most trusted marketing techniques to improve user experience, streamline the workflow, earn more quality leads, and conversion to the website.

It creates ways to track the campaign’s performance, automate marketing activities, and tasks to bring the prospects towards your brand.

Admitting automation advantages and prospects of Digital marketing fields in 2020

• PPC advertising
• Programmatic advertising
• Social media Marketing
• Post-click experiences
• Native advertising

Influencers Marketing

This is something I would love to talk about.

If you’re a newbie, then I’m sure you can guess what I’m bringing next.

An influencer is someone who has the ability to affect the audience’s decision. They are leaders of sorts, that have a dominant public impact on the market, people admire them, give more priority to their ideas and decisions.

If you genuinely want to boost conversions, then connect with influencers who share the same passion for the industry as you do. This will help you sustain a steady place in the market, build brand awareness, and get new eyeballs for your content.

Influencers assist you in building the connection with the related niche audience, disrupt your content in the area that is affected by the people, and help you to increase the ROI.

They help you get more traffic to your website and generate intrigue so they are hooked for what’s coming next.

The guideline helps you identify the right influencers for your brand and get more ROI and increase sales for your product campaigns.

Call to Action

We all love our audience; don’t we?

We want to connect with them, listen to their problems/ stories, concerns, and trying to fill the gaps they are experiencing.

Am I right?

To enhance the conversion rate of the website, you must have to design a call to action (CTA) button. CTAs are the most compelling and expressive way to drive the audience towards you.

CTAs should be distinct from one another. It should manifest the instruction being performed at the back-end.

People commonly answer to those call to actions which have a powerful, accurate, and concise button. The CTA not only generates leads but also helps to improve the SEO and UX experience. This technique is also utilized by a leading SEO company.

Let’s take an example here.

We have two CTAs with different text in a button to lead the potential audience’s attention.

The first CTA button shows “Learn more or Click now”, and the second one “Apply for the life insurance”.

Which one is more relevant and understandable?

I would surely go with the second CTA because that is more appropriate, intuitive, and relevant.

Replug is a great application that encourages you to create catchy call to action ads to bring the audience to your landing page.

Link shortener

Have you ever felt disgusted while sharing ugly and unnecessarily long URLs on your social media channels?

Me too. Long URLs look untidy, complicated, and hard to share. Isn’t it? Plus there is the spam factor.

Link shorteners are the need of almost all businesses. A shortened link is more understandable, recognizable, seems pretty to look at, improves user experience, and makes super definite for the marketers to get.

If you desperately want to understand the success of links, determine what the audience is looking for, and find more relevant information, then Replug is one of the ideal tools.

It also aids you to create a custom URL that is more manageable to attract the audience to your landing page.

Let take an example here of Link shortener.

https://blog.contentstudio.io/how-to-use-influencer-marketing-to-promote-your-brand-using-contentstudio/

OR

https://cstu.io/influencer-marketing/

Now which one is more tidy and flexible? Second for sure.

Link shortener helps you to increase the click-through rate, make redundant URLs concise and memorable.

Here is a guideline that helps you to familiarise with the fundamental concept surrounding branded shortened links and create customized short links to enhance your business.

Compelling headline

Audiences are busy doing things on their own such as creating a list, strategies for online audience engagement, and much more. Until they find something valuable, informational, and useful from you, they don’t give you attention.

Visualize a blog post without any heading. There is no headline, not even an image or print.

Does it look complicated and tedious?

I guess, yes.

Ordinarily, the headline gives the sense of the subject to the audience, you are going to talk about.

People habitually try to avoid material that is not simple to read, or takes time to understand.

On average, 80% of people will read your headline while only 20% will read, watch, or listen to the rest.

So, here the marketer’s creativity acts as a dominant role, do you know how?

“If the headline is poor, the copy will not be read. And copy that is not read does not sell goods.” As John Caples said: *put a reference here*

We have learned from various writers that if you don’t begin your content with something intriguing or eye-catching, then you probably drop your audience.

If your blog post hasn’t adequate attraction, then your audiences keep on scrolling without wasting their precious time.

I have read an article earlier, and it was about social media engagement. It made me stop scrolling when I had read the headline that was” 15 Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement Quickly.”

Compelling headlines is part of creating exceptional content. It delivers a promise to prospects, that you have made in your post.

Compelling promise helps in building the relationship, band authority, and recognition. So you have to create an emotionally promise headline that draws people in.

This guideline explains Write Catchy Titles and Headlines with seven general principles.

Retargeting

Many of us sometimes got disquiet because for the first time users don’t convert into buyers. Right?

But you must bear in mind that, 99%, don’t buy from the first visit.

Although, the question arises why is it so?

Many audiences are unfamiliar with the brand, visit your website for the first attempt, and keep touring your website before making any decision.

At this phase, you need to create a trustworthy relationship with them.

The secret for doing this is called “Retargeting”.

It is one of the complimentary digital tactics to track your visitors and create possible ways to win them back.

Let me demonstrate to you more precisely.

Retargeting is a re-engage approach with the potential audience that came across your website but didn’t perform any particular action or respond to CTAs.

Before creating CTAs, you have to find your niche audience, then segment the audience and create CTAs regarding it.  It assists you to re-connect with the audience at the right time on the right channel with the right message.

Here is an article that briefly explains how Retargeting works and creates an engaging CTAs for the retarget the potential audience to boost the conversion to your landing page.

Another great way to market your product or service is through Exhibit trailers. Create a digital marketing campaign to showcase your product on an expandable event trailer.

Video Marketing

If we talk about our life, we love to adapt things that have a positive impact either on fashion or marketing.

No doubt, content marketing is a king, but video marketing is also a  key contender in the Digital world and that is why it is, however, the most appealing Digital Marketing trend of 2020. In order to promote your product on various social media platforms, video marketing becomes essential.

What is Video Marketing?

It is an approach to promote your product or service to the audience using different social channels to gain the social audience engagement to boost the conversion towards your landing page.

Video marketing is much cost-effective if you compare it with the other marketing technique.

“Your Content” is what matters in the market to attract the audience. The more your content is simple and clear, the more opportunity you have to give a sense of authenticity.

As the audience gives more priority to a video than a written post.  It has been envisioned that 78% of people watch online videos every week and will make 80% of customers by 2020.

This blog explains to you what video marketing is and how to effectively execute while marketing your product.

Analytics over data

If you have look at the time when the technology was not as improved as it is now, then you will realize how it is intricate to interpret your marketing activities and measure the campaign’s performance.

Frequently, marketers try to come up with new strategies, marketing tactics to improve their brand visibility in front of the audience, but they didn’t grasp how these strategies work for them.

For me, that could be tiresome. Right?

Analytics has an essential position in decision making because it gives you the direction of what strategy needs to evolve or stay the same. In short, it gives you the path that leads you to success with your brand.

Analytics indicates the user demographics, social engagements against blog or content post, and track the conversion.

Various tools are used to accumulate the hidden digital data and technique that creates the opportunity for you to gather actionable insight, focus on the audience’s demands, make better decisions,  run your business smoothly and effectively.

To collect fresh insight, analytics regarding your marketing activities and Digital marketing trends 2020 then you should go with ContentStudio.

It not only helps to measure, evaluate your marketing success but also helps you to discover the loopholes, try to fill it to compete for a competitive edge, and gain more customers’ trust.

Over to you

If you think that you are out of date with your marketing tricks, then you should implement these trends in your marketing effort from now onward.

Here, you have it – a comprehensive digital marketing roadmap that will lead you to stay ahead of the competition in 2020.

58% of marketers believe content marketing is the most appropriate strategy to expand the product in the market. 🤓

Why do marketers believe in it?  Is ContentMarketing so essential for real?

If you genuinely don’t know where content marketing headed to then probably you are one step away from quitting it.

Creating a content marketing strategy gives the direction to steer your customer’s attention and drive quality leads. It helps to develop a friendly relationship with the audience and stay on top of the audience’s mind through various means.

Content Marketing is much cost-effective than other traditional advertisement methods. In today’s time, it encourages you to enhance the conversion almost three times higher than traditional methods.  It gives the brand awareness of an existing brand to the AUDIENCE.

Crafting compelling content not only educates, inspires, entertains the demanding buyers but also gives the solutions to their pain points.  Apart from everything else, marketers do business to receive a vast amount of return. So for that purpose, you have to pull your audience towards your product by producing quality content which helps them in their buying decision.

All set? 🙌

What strategies do you need for Content Marketing?

60% of marketers tried their best to produce fresh content each day.  Content is King 👑 has been the phrase of the last decade and still holds true. Before start marketing your product or brand in front of the immense ocean of customers, you must know the answers to these questions:

1. Why Is Content King?
2. How does it matter?
3. Why content is the heart of marketing?

Content is king because it keeps the ATTENTION of the audience and gives the ANSWER to the problems.

Take it this way. If you don’t know about any terminology or you want to cook something new. Do you Google for it?

I am presuming there were more YESes than NOs. So, you see, whatever your writing, your audience will read it. You just have to figure out what to write and where to publish it so as to get the maximum return off of it.

The focal point here is to craft compelling content, share an experience, address the idea that makes the pulses of the audience beat. In easier words, your content should have a solution to their query and some valuable information that earns your respect. It gives a strong brand impact and attracts the target audience towards their shop or website.

Content is the heart of your marketing, and it matters a lot to your business. It has a magical power that takes your brand where you want to. You can build brand awareness, the authority to attract the prospects towards your website, and prompt them into sales customers. ✌

And once they start trusting you, they’d literally do this.👇

Do you know Content Marketing is the most vital aspect of the company’s reputation? 😕

Absolutely yes, content marketing certainly proves that it has an integral part and also a backbone of promoting the product and building a brand’s reputation.

Don’t you get the feeling of how important it is? 🤔

Marketers crafting content, that’s somehow altered to one another in the market. Although how they relate and deliver the content to the audience that matters. Because when prospects read your content, they will create an opinion or a picture in their mind about your brand.

Having expert-written content helps educate the audience, make them aware of the surroundings, provide a slew of benefits that create a warm and trustworthy relationship with them. Once you give a sense of curiosity related to your brand, there will be more people taking an interest in your product, and you will receive a quality lead or conversion to your landing page.

Challenges of Content Curation?

While content marketing, you might face some challenges like content curation. If I talk about myself, then I would love to stay observant or up to date, and I’m sure you would too. So, targeting the audience and your potential customers with the updated facts, figures, and highlighting their issue is kind of a complex task.

At this point, you need a fantastic social media management tool for curating content and sharing daily updates to the audience through social media channels.  So, what do you say? 🙂

Well, cut the crap and get into it. 👇

We all know, 2019 holds a lot of stuff for you in the store. Now, it’s all up to you how you make the right choices for your brand.

Yes, it is an imperative struggle to move your business out there and strive to make sure it works for you.

Quite hard? Right? 😫

So, here I will definitely recommend you a tool which is more or less the most appropriate choice for you ever (totally unbiased, promise 😉)

And, the tool is. 🥁

ContentStudio, you probably have heard about this tool before too. If no, then no worries. I’m here to give you a detailed insight into it.👍

ContentStudio helps you curate the most trending content, compose the content, and schedule the content all across your social channels merely to catch the prospect’s attention. This is what each marketer looking for.

It also allows you to write a blog, fetch the content from different other web modules, refine the content for the desired audience, and present the content in a way that is easy to digest. ✌

How influencers could help the business expose their product to the novel audience.

Apart from all, some times it gets tricky to find the Influencers who have more social audience engagement, more followers, etc. If you genuinely want to keep the online brand presence across various social channels, then you have to build a trustworthy relationship with the buyers through influencers.

Influencers have an essential part in today’s online business. It helps to promote your product in front of the audience and increase revenue. They have a warm connection with a different niche and a massive reach in the market.

Generally, influencers have a piece of profound knowledge about the appropriate subject, which prompted the niche audience to accept them and give more priority to their recommendations.

So, without moving from a couch or leaving a cup of coffee, you can find the leading influencers in the market by using ContentStudio. Fascinating? 😍☕

Okay, let me clarify to you. ContentStudio always tried hard to stay on the top of the audience’s mind and help their business to grow organically.

ContentStudio introduced another engaging feature name is Influencers to the audience, so stay tuned. I’m going to demonstrate to you a little bit more. 😳

ContentStudio empowers you to hunt the most famous author or leader in the market. It enables you to find the most relevant influencer, blogger, or writer to present your product to the new audiences who might be not familiarized with your band before.

You can filter your search by influencers type, region, and language. After finding the influencers in your niche, you can follow them, add to your favorite list, view their social engagement, and build the outreach strategies surrounding them. 🙌

Does a Call-To-Action improve the website?

CTAs are extremely important in PPC for content marketing. It helps you to deliver each value content to the audiences by adding a clear and engaging CTA.

In simple words, both your Content and CTA have some comparable relation with each other: Content provides entertainment, information, motivation, and CTA creates excitement to dig deeper.🤔

The most satisfying thing about CTAs is: you can produce a tailored message for the segmented audience, which assists you to educate the right audience at the right time through the right CTAs.

Interesting, right? 🤓

If you want to influence the potential buyers at the pivotal moments, then you should go with Replug which helps you to create customized CTAs for each piece of content to attract more people towards your website.

Well, this article guides you about how different companies improved their conversion statistics by simply improving their  Call To Action.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that enables you to create and distribute estimable, relevant, and consistent content to the audience that educates them, helps you build brand awareness, and grows an online presence.

Many content marketing challenges may occur during your journey. You just have to be clever when choosing the platform that provides you the answers to your questions and helps you to lead your strategy with your product.

CTAs assist you to convey your message and inspire the audience to perform a certain action against CTAs and convert them into your clients or loyal customers.

 

It has been estimated there are over 3 billion active users spend at least two hours on different social media channels every day. Social media marketing strategies make it easier for businesses to stand in the market and get quality traffic and profit through social media by adding another revenue stream.

‘People don’t buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.’ by Seth Godin. To effectively run a social campaign, marketers need to establish a relationship with the people and find ways to earn their trust.

Let’s take a look at the factors to maximize influence on social networks.

Identify the Actual and Potential Reach

Reach means how many people visit your website, see the targeted ad, and convert it into customers. In the marketing world, customers are a significant part to boost your marketing efforts, sales, and receive high ROI in return.

To reach the audience, you need to identify the group and target your product. There are two ways you can measure reach.

• Actual Reach
• Potential Reach

Potential Reach

It is based on the total number of followers you have on your social account. Let’s take an example of the ContentStudio.io Twitter account for your sounder understanding. ContentStudio has 8,602 followers, who can view tweets and retweets. That 8,602 is the potential reach of the ContentStudio on the Twitter account.

Actual Reach

It means how much your potential customers are reaching the post on social media channels. The customers who surely viewed your shared post in their timeline. ContentStudio’s actual reach to the post is 7,184 as shown in the below image.

To identify the potential reach, you need to view the variable while classifying the customer’s group.

• Geography
• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Benefits

After that, you need to define the target audiences and create a profile for them and compare the rival profitability holding a similar product in the marketplace.

Columnist Steve Olenski provides you with guidelines that help you to connect with potential clients and generate more leads. These guidelines are based on ten steps.

• Survey Customers
• Research Your Competitors And Find Out Who Their Customers Are
• Target Ads
• Smart Social Media
• Respond To Every Email, Tweet, Facebook Comment, And Phone Calls
• Affiliate Marketing
• Establish Trust In Your Community: Publish User Reviews, Get Likes, Syndicate Articles
• Connect With The Right Influencers
• Post Relevant Content On Blogs
• Craft An Engaging Newsletter To Foster Leads

Address your customer’s need and preferences

People who are new to the marketing game need to identify the customer’s needs and wants. Marketers should deploy strategies after addressing customer’s behavior. Customers are the most valuable resource for every business person to attain a share and get maximum profit in the market for a long time.

A need is “something that solves an actual or imaginary problem.” says Jorge Baba from Game-Changer.  Needs are the basic necessities of the customer which should be fulfilled at any cost.

Wants:   It’s a desire of the customers to buy some products to satisfy the need. That’s why the small segments need to be a target with a unique product in the market.

Demands: The customer who is willing and able to buy a particular product at a given price.

To meet demand, your product should be a pain killer, not a vitamin. So, the market needs to research the customer’s preference through different social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many more before designing a product.

With the technology transformation, the customer’s behavior also evolves with time. Nowadays customers give more priority to online shopping and payment rather than doing it manually.

They expect the manufacturer to be able to do so with the product to satisfy their needs. There are a few tips that illustrate how you can find the customer’s preference while serving the product or service in the marketplace.

• Identify who your customers are
• Find out their shopping methods
• Invest in customer research
• Conduct a customer satisfaction survey
• Develop a good customer contact strategy
• Assist in developing relevant marketing strategies

Explain your goals and objectives

The goal is measuring the end result which consists of one or more objectives or chunk. The objective should achieve within the time frame to accomplish the goal.

Every entrepreneur needs to identify the goal and objective of the business and describe it to the audience. It gives the marketers direction to the destination they are looking for.

There is a certain criterion that helps you while creating a smart goal and objective.

• Specific – Your goal should be specific that which audience you’re going to target.
• Measurable – Your goal should be a measure that means where exactly you want to stand.
• Achievable – The goal must be attainable and not hard to achieve.
• Relevant – The goal should be relevant to the objective that what you are trying to achieve or why do you want to reach this goal.
• Timely – Your goal must be achieved at its given time frame.

There are plenty of social networking sites that help marketers to set their goals after engaged with the customers.

Using different platforms not only help in generating more leads and traffic but also assist while setting smart goals and objective. Marketers can easily accumulate the pool of information where they need to invest and utilize the resources, time, and energy.

Organization goals explain to the audience what product’s value they have, services, solutions to their problems, and organization goal-related activities.  It motivates the consumers to acquire the product for their personal benefit.

If the entrepreneur’s goal is to hold a 40% market share with the product, then he/she need to design unique strategies that contain a set of actions to actualize the goal.

Create quality content

Creating content is all about how you attract or persuade the attention of the audience. Writing great content is the best approach to advertise your content all over the world through smart social media channels.  A marketer should come up with an exceptional content idea that inspires, educate, and inform the audience to modify their lives and business.

Facebook is the most successful platform for marketers to market the product or brand. It has been estimated that Facebook has around 2.2 billion active users.  Another social networking website is Instagram, most marketers earn huge revenue using these social channels. Instagram has around 1 billion active users.

These social media channels make it easier for marketers to attain a market share and develop a reputation for your product or brand. Utilizing these platform markets can engage with the audience, identify the competitor’s activities, and also find out the customer’s behavior.

This is very important to know which market you are going to target with the content. There are the best three ways to give value to the target audience.

• Create unique and original content
• Make content actionable
• Be a resource

The information marketers provide in the content must be accurate, based on facts and figures, short in size, easy to understand. The customers find the solution in your quality content and also enhance their knowledge experience, monitor leads, and traffic to your content.

Marketers produce content for the customers looking desperately for. You need to consider the loopholes of the competitor strategies and how you fill it with unique marketing tactics.

As an example, the content produced by the Backlinko or Sumo is a pure gem. If you look at their case studies, you will find most of the things are based on pure facts. Here is one of their article How Intercom Generates $50 Million Annual Recurring Revenue.

You can write visual content and spread all over the different social channels, Visual content consists of:

• Images.
• Screenshots.
• Memes.
• Infographics.
• Video

By creating quality content, companies like DollarShaveClub reached a $1 billion acquisition by making only one video viral on social media channels.

A similar story is of Font Awesome which raised over $1,076,960 on Kickstarter with only a single video. Though Font Awesome has been used by many companies, to reach a milestone over $1 million is through by putting high-quality video content.

Convey a message: Put it in an infographic

Infographics bet on two words ‘Information’ and ‘Graphics.’ It means providing information with the graphic images to easily recognizable the product or brand at once.

Infographics are a very reliable way to share a piece of complex information in a simple and clear image. Marketers utilize this valid method to spread their content on multiple social networking channels. People remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they perceive and perform.

There is a case study that gives you the idea of how you can share your content on multiple social platforms and the value of the infographics.

Infographics is a kind of storytelling which capture the attention and enhance the social engagement of the audience to your brand and established a genuine connection with them

It’s is a broad type of visual communication that includes data and images. Marketers try to present extensive information in a graphic format to the audience to convey a message related to the product. 

Customers more preferred to visual content text rather than textual. Infographics have the ability to raise your sales and business reputation in an eye-catching manner.  People engage more with social media channels to know or learn about something and share the information with others.

We have an example that illustrates to you how infographics affect the content positively. Here is a travel agency infographic which demonstrates their customer from top to like a story. It tells from the destination to baggage in useful content the customer can easily classify while planning a trip.

There are seven tips to create infographics for your business.

• Make one big point
• Use simple combinations of primary colors
• Space it out
• Choose three quality fonts
• Come up with a solid, eye-catching design
• Decide on what’s important and what’s not
• Make it addictive

Boost your reach – Using Hashtags

Hashtags is a word or expression that interprets the message related to a specific topic by using the ( # ) hash sign on different social channels. Nowadays hashtags are a vital element to boost the reach or target the audience all around the world utilizing multiple social channels. It helps people to find informative data and enhance their experience.

Marketers use hashtags to represent their brand reputation, convey a message related to the product, and established a warm connection with the clients.

“Hashtags are supposed to be short and concise. Every time you’re writing to them, pay attention to this rule. If they’re too general, you’re likely to be using the wrong words. Effective marketing is always targeted for marketing.” – J.D., Digital Marketing Specialist at Rush My Essay.’

The one thing which is notable for every businessperson that hashtags should be relevant to the product which shows the attribution of the products, simple and easy to interpret by the audience. 

Here are some suggestions which help you while adding Hashtags on pretty popular social networking sites.

Instagram: To increase social engagement towards your content or post marketers require to adhering less than 11 hashtags.

Facebook:  One of the best sites to boost your marketing reach there you need to add 2 hashtags. One should be a branded hashtag, relevant to your product or brand and another must be worth pursuing.

Twitter: If marketers crave to get 2* social engagement towards their product then they need to hold minimum hashtag on Twitter. Twitter has a set of rules and regulations. They restricted the entrepreneur to use minimum hashtags like one or two for each post.

According to Brandon Stanley ‘Hashtag Marketing can boost Social Media Effectiveness Up to 40% ‘

There are plenty of tools that help marketers hashtags on different social channels. I’d suggest you Hashtagify to use the right tool for monitoring the hashtags and engage with the customers.

It gives you the ability to search any hashtag, explore famous trends, and choose the best hashtag for the brand campaign. You can monitor the performance of the hashtags on different social channels and track influencers to produce new ideas.

You can also automate your report to view the market results and share with the people to prove yourself how well you are performing than rivals.

Use marketing tools

These social online marketing tools make it convenient for the merchant to run the campaigns on various social channels and track the valuable insight and the performance of the campaign.

In the digital world, marketers can easily examine the target customer’s taste and preference through the social network. In 2019, social media users are expected to reach about 2.5 billion people all around the world every day.

Marketers should stay active on social channels because people retain more with these channels to keep in touch with others and want to know what’s going on around the world. The user follows or interacts with their favorite brand on any social channel because they perceive the content and information campaigns more valuable.

Let me explain to you some fantastic social marketing tools to improve your marketing campaigns.

ContentStudio – Social media marketing tool

I hope you have heard about it. ContentStudio is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools for social media marketers, individuals, businesses, and digital agencies. It helps them boost their marketing activities by curating content, automating their social campaigns, and managing their brands.

It comes up with tremendous features that help marketers in various ways. Using AI technology, ContentStudio brings the most popular content from all over the world and facilitates you to use its smart features and gain more social engagement towards your marketing campaigns on a complete auto-pilot.

Replug

Replug is a URL shortener and link tracking platform that also allows you to add eye-catching and branded call-to-actions or retargeting pixels to any page on the web which you can later share on your social network channels to increase your brand awareness and traffic. 

With Replug, you can create branded shortened links with your custom domains. You can add a call to action to every link which you shared on various domains and identify the traffic which is generated from domains where you share that link.

Through CTA’s, you can engage your audience towards your site when they are about to leave or capture leads by showing an optimized opt-in form. Now it is effortless for you to create brands and campaigns in a more optimized way.

KEYHOLE

KEYHOLE gives the ability to understand how your audience feels about your brand or product and rivals product. It helps you to understand the conversation and the sentiment around it. It gives you the chance to don’t miss significant conversion rates.

You can easily understand themes, trends, and audiences to better cater to your target market’s requirements. Capture every significant moment of your event and access real-time engagement data to amplify your event reach as it runs.

Save your team hours every week by using Keyhole to aggregate metrics, monitor and analyze your campaigns, and build reports. Find and connect with the most relevant and engaging influencers in your industry.

Portray your appearance as a brand

Brand image is the general impression of the product or service.  You have listened more often ‘The first impression is the last impression’. The way you portray your product will create an impression of your business in the sights of the target audience.

According to Jerry McLaughlin, “brand is the perception someone holds in their head about you, a product, a service, an organization, a cause, or an idea.  Brand building is the deliberate and skillful application of effort to create the desired perception in someone else’s mind.”

Brand images are one of the prominent elements which differentiate your brand identification to others brand.

The brand image represents the mission, vision, unique attribution of the product, and brand voice to the target audience.

In the digital marketing world, multiple brand designs help marketers while building a strong brand foundation.

• Typography
• Color Palette
• Form/Shape
• Logo

If the audience feels estimable after inspecting the brand image, then they will automatically turn into your loyal customers and spread the reputation of the brand with others on several social network channels.

The important thing which marketers always keep in mind that the character they used to explain the brand personality in the brand image has a positive perception in front of the audience or people inspired with the entity then there are the chances that the customers can easily interpret the brand message in the right way.

Let’s take an example of Coca-cola who has a massive margin all around the world with a revenue of over $44.29 billion. It is not just a firm but an economy.

Coca Cola is a brand known for happiness, pleasure, and a great experience. It is the ‘original cola’ and has a ‘unique taste’.

Coca-Cola Company has registered as one of the largest marketable brands with 94% of the state acquiring the red and white Coca-Cola brand Logo.

Coca cola’s presence in more than 200 countries and serves 1.9 billion people regularly. In fact, out of the 55 billion servings of all kinds of beverages drunk each day.

You can survey the marketing history of Coca-cola, the strategies they were used at an early age, and how they got the idea of the bottle, and much more.

Stay Proactive

Proactive is action-oriented behavior, being proactive the marketers instead of waiting for the problem, change, need or things happen in the future they try to seek alternatives solutions or opportunities and give their best to handle it effectively.

The marketers should continually look forward to marketing tactics and actively engaged with the audience using numerous social media channels to make things proceed.

For attaining a market share, the marketer needs to study the trends. It’s is the best way to running in a marketplace instantly. So marketers must spend quality time on different social sources to understand technology advancement.

Spending time on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and etc also gives you the strength to understand the audience so you can develop a persona according to the identified target audience.

A proactive enterprise sets the budget first because all digital tactics need an investment consist of the team, executing, implementing, advertising and etc.

Marketers just need to focus on qualitative and quantity distribution. Both are a major aspect of marketing products or services. You can find the analytics against the campaign which you spread on multiple social media channels.

It’s difficult to find the social marketing tool where you can curate niche relevant content, tracking the performance of the campaign, and find the analytical of social sites under a single station.

Tackle customers complaints

Every business deal with the complaints of the customer. It is a challenge for the entrepreneur to handle it with patience and professional manner. By ignoring complaints, they quietly leave and get the product from the competitors.

To maximize the ROI, you have to listen to your customers carefully and assure them that you will work on it. Markets need to ask the question to the customers that what they expected about the solution to their problem.

As a successful organizer, you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and view the obstacles of the customer from their perspective rather than your own.

Salesperson seeks to employ ‘You statement’, whenever you’re talking to the client it feels them valuable and respectable. If the issues arise then apologize to the customer rather than blaming other staff or departments. Try to avoid giving excuses to the audience in advance.

There are five strategies to handle customers’ complaints constructively.

• Stay calm
• Listen well
• Acknowledge the problem
• Get the facts
• Offer a solution

Analytics tools for measuring performances

Analytics is a more refined way to accumulate data related to different marketing trends. It also gives you the direction where marketers need to make improvements to achieve their goals more effectively and grow share in the business.

With the extensive use of social media channels, marketing strategies dramatically evolved to satisfy their customers. Businessmen need a tool to enhance campaign performances and marketing efforts all around the world on multiple social networking channels.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a platform that helps the entrepreneur to get a profound understanding of your customers. It gives them the ability to understand site and app users to entirely evaluate the performance of your marketing, products, and more.

Marketers can operate with Google’s advertising and locate valuable insight to reach the target audience. Process and share your data instantly with an easy-to-use interface and shareable reports

According to Mariam Naficy, Founder & CEO, Minted

‘Google Analytics helped us optimize our art marketplace, resulting in 400% year-over-year revenue growth for our art business’.

 

Conclusion

The factors mentioned above are simple and obvious to understand the impact of the social networking channel to advertise your product or band all over the world.

We have discussed briefly how you address your customers and provide them with a quality product and content to give the idea of your business.

With ContentStudio, Replug, and other marketing platforms to track the performance of the campaign and brands in your marketing strategy.

 

 

The Importance of video content marketing

As reported by CISCO, videos amount for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. Youtube, the Mecca for online videos report that an astounding 5 billion videos are watched every day. Within the digital marketing community, videos content persistently aids in lead generation. A video allows you to see the face behind the case and gives a sense of confidence while online purchasing.

With such humungous daily traffic, it was only imperative that digital marketers joined the party. With so many eyes, it is an ideal opportunity to present your case. The only thing that needs to be perfect is your ad copy. In this article, we will discuss how you can share links on YouTube to keep your viewers engaged.

Links on Youtube

Many businesses are of the impression that only having a presence on Youtube is enough. This is not true.

There are quite a few ways you can share links on Youtube for advertisement. This includes sharing links in the description box, the comment section and linking within the videos. Sharing a link on the video itself can be done by two methods, one from either ‘cards‘ that pop up in the frame of the video, or clickable ‘end screen‘ elements that are overlaid on the video itself.

Let us explore these methods one by one.

Channel page and banner

This is the default channel of any brand on Youtube. It contains all basic information regarding the creator, type of content, a small video showing the nature of the content and a banner image.

 

 

The first place you will see the links on a Youtube channel is the bottom right-hand side of the banner image. The link you should be posting here should be to your main/ money website or to your landing page. Placing it here will invite people to click on it and draw traffic leading to conversion.

Right beside the link to your main website is a space to link your social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Linkedin pages. This can be done by clicking on the “about” section, click on the “links” icon and filling in the necessary URLs.

You can add multiple links here which will then appear on your banner.  The first link you put here should be your main website or landing page. One important thing to remember is that the first link will be a “Do Follow” links which means that it will contribute to your SERP. The remaining links you can use for your social channels or other URLs.

Your banner link in also associated with the analytics feature. This means that you will get statistics about how many clicks your primary banner got.

Links in the Video Description

Many YouTubers who want to give shoutouts to other pages and references to songs in their video use the phrase “Links are in the description”.  It is an easy way to promote your secondary channel or for affiliate marketing.

There are however a few challenges to sharing links in the description. The first one is that people usually use the link without copying the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Not using “https” with the link you use in the description will make the link you share seem as normal text.

Strict rules by Youtube ensure that you always use “https” so that the links stand out from the text and looks like a clickable item.

The other thing that people forget while sharing links in the description box is using “Branded links”. If you have a healthy number of views on your videos, using branded links is an opportunity for advertising and conversion.

Let’s take an example.

This video has been viewed 35 million times. This means using branded links, there are 35 million possible conversion opportunities from just one video. Let’s see another one

PewDiePie is a very famous video game player and commentator who has a huge following. Look how in the image above he has used branded links effectively to promote a brand to 83 million people just from a single video.

The other great thing about branded shortened links is that they increase brand recognition. Sharing engaging and relevant content with your branded domain associated with it will increase visibility and improve recognition.

A branded link instills trust which in turn increases your CTR. By being willing to share your brand name with your link it offers a guarantee that you are leading them to the destination suggested in your link.

Link on YouTube Videos

In the early days, annotations were the only way to add links directly in the video. However, people did not like this method because of its intrusive nature. They popped up unwanted and disrupted viewing of the video.

To improve the user experience, Youtube introduced Cards and end screens.

Youtube Cards

Cards are used in Youtube videos to incite actionable results from the content. They let you add more visual components with underlying objectives to your YouTube videos instead of just annotations, making your videos more interactive.

There is no specific point in the video where the card should appear. The card may include images, outside links, and even content that’s downloaded when viewers click.

Youtube cards can be categorized into 5 categories.

• Video or playlist: Promote your video content.
• Channel: Promote another channel.
• Donation: Feature a nonprofit or cause of your choice and encourage donations.
• Poll: Encourage viewers to engage in a multiple-choice poll.
• Link: Link to an approved website off of YouTube.

Adding Cards to your Youtube Videos

Let us explore the steps required to add cards to a Youtube video. Navigate to Youtube video manager in your profile and select the video you want to add the card to. Click on edit, right below the video title.

In the top navigation bar click on the Cards tab.

Here you can create new YouTube cards to add to your video. Click “Add Card” and then click Create to the right of the card you want to create.

Fill in the necessary information for the particular type of card you have selected to create. Let’s assume you selected channel.

Once you’ve added the card to your video, you can adjust when the card will show up in the video. Just drag the card on the time marker below the video to the spot when you want it to appear.

You can set up multiple cards once you have verified that the first one looks fine.

End Screens on Youtube Videos

The purpose of an end screen is similar to that of a card. The difference is that whereas cards can appear anywhere on the video, end screens appear in the last 20 seconds. They provide the user with the option to view similar videos or be redirected to a website of their choice.

Optimizing end screens for better results

End screens drive the most traffic out of all link sharing methods on Youtube. Your CTA should be clear and persuasive, and it should flow naturally from the content in your video.

Here are some tricks and tips to optimize end screens to drive more traffic.

Start With a Call-to-Action in Mind

Creating a video for your viewers, it is important to keep the end game in mind. Having the end screen and call to action into consideration, your video’s will be better poised to deliver the message. Before making the video, ask yourself the following questions.  Do you want your viewers to

• Subscribe to your channel
• Opt-in to your email list
• Visit your website and make a purchase

If you know the answer to these questions, your end screen will appear as a natural step towards the end.

Keep Device Type in Mind

If you know the preferred device type of your viewers, you can better design their journey. If most of your viewers are desktop users you can guide them through the opt-in, sales and upsell page.

In contrast to that mobile users do not tend to follow the same number of steps. For them, you can create a CTA to sign up for your mailing list so you can follow up with them later.

Enough time to click

The end screen is shown for a maximum of 20 seconds, which means that you have to make each second count.  Use all of the 20 seconds to display your links and if you want to give instructions, do them in the video.

For example, let’s pretend the end of your video has a voiceover that says:

For more digital marketing tips and strategies straight from the pros, including Facebook ad tutorials and copywriting tricks, click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

In this case, show your end screen at the end of this sentence. Because people aren’t going to click on the subscribe button until after you finish explaining it.

Use UTM Parameters

In order to analyze and optimize the performance of your end screens, you’ll want to keep track of all website visitors who come to your site through an End Screen.

To do that, just add a UTM parameter like this to the end of your website link:

?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=endscreen

This way when you log into your analytics, you can segment your visitors by source or medium and see exactly what they did on your site.

Conclusion

Both the cards and end screens are a great way to keep viewers hooked onto your content.  Linking videos together and linking to preferred landing pages creates a seamless user experience for the viewer.

An important point to keep in mind is that linking to external website option is only available to those channels which have signed up for a partner program with Youtube. It is not allowed to link any type of website to your videos.

Youtube is a great platform to showcase and advertise your brand by sharing links. The thing you need to be careful about is to adhere to the rules and regulations laid down by Youtube.

While sharing links on Youtube videos, why not use Replug to share branded shortened links. While commenting on related videos, using the description box, use branded links to better convey your message to the targeted audience. One word of advice is to NOT use branded links in the end screens and cards as they have to be Youtube links or websites.

Interactive video content is becoming more and more influential each day. It allows you to keep visitors engaged in your content by suggesting them relevant content. Use the cards and branded links to enhance your brand’s image.