Improved Scalability for a URL Shortener

With the recent influx of new users, we saw a huge increase in traffic on the URL shortener which led to downtimes during the peak traffic.

To tackle this problem, we have scaled our infrastructure, which is now auto-scalable, capable of serving up to 50,000 requests per minute.

Alongside, we added an uptime monitoring so that you can monitor the system status: https://rplg.co/05ebdd30

Custom Domain Registration and Encrypt SSL

We have updated the infrastructure of our system. This helps you to avoid any kind of custom domain registration errors.

Once you have added your domain to the platform, the next step is to point CNAME in your domain registrar’s DNS. If you would like to redirect your root domain, please try adding @ or www. Some of the registrars do not allow the @ option, for that you will have to add www as a HOST value.

CNAME – Canonical Name: rplg.co
HOST: @ or www

However, if there is a working website on your root domain, we recommend using a subdomain such as links.yourdomain.com or track.yourdomain.com. Then follow the convention below.

CNAME – Canonical Name: rplg.co
HOST:  links or track or (whatever subdomain name you)

If you don’t want to use a subdomain, you should use a different domain that doesn’t have any website working on its root URL.

IMPORTANT: You need to point through CNAME to our URL shortener to avoid SSL error or update the IP Address / A address (35.238.70.19) to avoid connection errors the future.  For more details on how to add a custom domain, please read the following article.

https://docs.replug.io/article/150-how-to-add-custom-domains

We sincerely hope that the above-mentioned improvements will elevate your Replug experience, enabling you to achieve better ROI from the branded shortened links you share.

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.



 

 

Do you know that Amazon arises to the global list of research and development spenders by the multiple billion dollar margins?

As reported by Bloomberg, the R&D obtain the level of success in 2017, it’s estimated that $22.6 billion is spent on R&D by Amazon.

In the beginning stage, they sold books to customers, from there they expanded their business and become one of the largest public company in the world.

Now, Amazon is a titan of e-commerce, logistics, data storage, and media. It splashes in excess more businesses.

In this blog, I’ll explain to you in detail how you can develop a connection with the shoppers, generate more leads and increase sales on Amazon.

Get Review and Feedback from the Target Audience

Reviews and Feedback have a dramatic impact on the sale on Amazon and can add value to the business.

Feedback is like a “Progress card” which shows the performance, quality, and service of the product. Customers give suggestions to the seller related to the product where they need improvement to satisfy their customers all over the wide area. It is entirely related to the customer’s product experience.

On the other side, a review is an opinion of the customers, which tells the detail and attribution of the product such as product life, guarantee, and their experience with a product.

Marketers can clearly recognize the customer’s expectation, concern, and preferences by reviews on the Amazon.

Feedback and reviews play a critical role for them in selling their product. The customers are the vital resource which emphasis the sellers with the key information about the product they have. Feedbacks supports marketers in their business success.

The sellers can examine the performance of their product by getting feedback from the customers and also identify how much the customers pleased with their product. It also helps the sellers to address the pain point of the community.

The review is an essential part of e-commerce business. 90% of customers say buying decision is influenced by online Reviews.

Ryan Fish demonstrates in detail that how online reviews will impact on various practices.

Buyers do a lot of research on Amazon before buying a product or service. Reviews help them while making an informed product decision, give the ability to compare similar products and analyzed the efficiency of the product.

There are two types of review.

Positive reviews:  Explain the performance and effectiveness of the product. It also persuades the audience to pay more money for quality product and services.

Negative Reviews:  It negatively influences your customers buying decision and product sale of approximately 22%.

There are some essential findings of the customer who used the internet to read reviews for the local business in 2017 and 2018.

• In 2018, 27% of consumers survey online daily for the local business as a comparison with 2017.
• 69% of customers monthly survey the reviews.
• 56% look online business weekly.

Sell a Unique Product

“If you use your money to create exceptional products you don’t need to spend it on ads,” says Seth Gadin.

Unique product means the product which you’re going to distribute with the key attributes to retain your customers towards your brand, and nobody else in the market will have the same product as you have.

Before designing a product or item for your target audience, you need to accumulate information about the market trends, competitors, customers behavior towards the instant product.

After that, you can easily classify which product the shopper immensely need or demand in the market. It’s estimated that in Amazon the seller generates a profit of over $12,000,000 on sales every hour on average.

Amazon makes it convenient for the seller who is new in the market to come up with the brand new product that has unique features to get more positive reviews and feedback from the shoppers.

According to Omnichannel Buying Report, 78% of universal respondents to survey made a purchase on Amazon.

To maximize the revenue, the sellers must codify the small segment they want to target. They should identify the hurdles their customers are facing and turn up with a unique product having a solution to the problem.

Along with the evolution of marketing strategies, customer behavior also changed. Sale conversion helps the seller to gather worthwhile information about the customer what they like or looking in the product to satisfied their requirements.

Improve Ad copy

Ad copy plays an essential part in the market while describing your product to the audience. It looks like a sales letter or a specific content which is written to address the customer’s problem and get a response of your reader towards your brand or product.

Ad copy impels a massive impact on the conversion rate, sales, and profit. Selling your product online on Amazon is not easy, at that time Ad copy takes place.

 You can underline the key benefits which customer could receive after acquiring the item. It also raises more traffic to sales and adds more value to the product.

There is one of the best tool named Sellerapp which helps you to find the best product to sell on Amazon. Using this tool, you can increase sales on Amazon and hunt for business activities daily.

There are two mains types of Ad copy.

Ad Image:

Great Images gives the perfect impression of any product or brand. Selling your product on Amazon, you must have high-quality images, features and benefits to attract your audience and turn them into your customers.

Jungle Scout App & Jungle Scout Pro Extension is the solution for Amazon product. It helps you to extract all the data of the product on Amazon. It also facilities you by providing photography for your product to attract your public audience.

There are other magnificent tools named as Splitly which helps you to track the Amazon best product images. Using this, you can improve your listing content, rank on search engine and test prices. titles, images and much more.

You are also able to add video, which shows how your product works and how customers take advantage of it. Powerful video copy emphasizes the individual verbalizing everything that would be included in the pattern of written copy.

Ad text:

When you’re striving to explain the audience regarding your product, then you need to take care of words which you need to use.

The text should be concise, simple and easy to understand. Every word should demonstrate the worth of the product to the audiences. The text drives the Amazon searcher directly towards your brand or product than rivals.

The text which you add in ad copy should match with the keywords that are crucial for the product, conversion rate, relevance, and clicks.

That’s why it’s important to have relevant keywords that closely relate to what the person is searching for,” says Macfarlane.

“Amazon wants your title to be short, descriptive and to the point, they do allow for between 150-250 characters”.

Examine the Competitor:

Each business faces competitors, which hold the same product by sharing the market pie with you. The customers might be spending more money on your competitor’s product.

So, if you crave to sell your product online using Amazon, then it’s imperative to analyze your competitors. There are a few questions you should know the answers to them.

• Who’s your competitor?
• What they are selling?
• Is your product different from rivals?
• Have you obtained information about their competitors?
• What strategies they’re using or working on?

Before offering a product or service to the target market, you need to find that if your product is similar to competitors then how you could attract the customers toward you than your rivals. So, you can urgency find the gaps in the competitors marketing strategies and try to fill up.

Competitive analysis or competitive research is a field of strategic research that specializes in the collection and review of information about rival firms. It’’s an essential tactic for finding out what your competitors are doing and what kind of threat they present to your financial well-being.

Through competitor analysis, you can assemble valuable information about the competitor’s activities they are performing to get more prioritization and hold a stand in the market with a similar or unique product. 

There are 5 incredible steps for competitive analysis by Dan Tighe,  which helps you in while developing the marketing strategies to convince the audience towards your product.

• Identify Your Top Ten Competitors
• Analyze and Compare Competitor Content
• Analyze Their SEO Structure
• Look at their Social Media Integration
• Identify Areas for Improvement

Competitive pricing:

Have you heard that the price of the commodity is raise because of the quality of the product is high?

Yes, the customers buy something expensive because it assures them that the quality of the product is superb than a cheap product.

Competitive pricing means setting the price of a related product, based on your competitor pricing in the market.

After entering the Market, the seller always must have a glance at competitor pricing. If the product features are comparable to a rival, then the seller may set the price of the product relative to competitor pricing.

This is human nature when they look at the two same product in the market with the same attributes then they are more looking towards to that seller who’s pricing is less than others.

There are three things which the seller keeps in mind while setting a price of the product.

• If your product has unique features than competitors, then you can set the price above the commodity.
• Sometimes the seller has enough resources and doesn’t affect the cost of production after setting a low price, then it reveals that how seller constructively develop their marketing strategies.
• When the product is relatable to a competitor, then the seller needs to focus on the product itself by advertising their product on Amazon and other social media channels.

Amazon pricing strategy is different from their competitors such as Walmart, Alibaba, eBay and many more.  Amazon usually doesn’t focus on its competitor because they viewed as creative in the market. 

Currently, it has become easy for the seller to oversee the competitive prices using fancy tools. There is one of the most appealing tools named as Pricefy.io, where you can monitor your competitor’s products price all over the world, currency or marketplace, (Amazon, and eBay) on regular basis.

You can also monitor an e-commerce competitor directly, just using their store website URL.

Follow Rules and Regulations of Amazon

There are certain policies and agreements for the seller on Amazon which should b followed or otherwise you may lose the chance to sell the product on Amazon marketplace.

Let’s talk about some essential policies on which Amazon holds dear.

Product and Listing Restrictions

Sellers need approval from the Amazon to get listed or sell your product to the target audience all across the world. You can’t list the product which is assisting the violation of legal rules and regulations like drugs or contraband.

You can overview the  product restriction before selling your product on Amazon which includes:

• Listing restrictions
• Trade control laws
• Prohibited product claims

Product details

The other policy is about product detail information which explains in detail that which writing style you need to use to portray your product to the audience and influence the customers buying decision.

Amazon also mentions the rules which seller should apply in all products in the Amazon service.

There are some other policies for the seller if they want to obtain more ROI utilizing Amazon service to sell their product to the public.

• Prohibited Content
• Condition guidelines
• Drop Shipping Policy
• ASIN creation policy
• Supply Chain Standards
• Standards for Brands Selling in the Amazon Store
• Imaging and Video Services Terms and Conditions
• Japanese Consumption Tax

SEO optimization:

SEO is the process which gives you the ability to optimize or rank your website or web pages in order to appear at Google search engine.

The search engine helps you to get massive traffic and leads to your content, website or pages. It also encourages more people to find the highest ranking content by adding specific keywords. 

If you want a product optimized for a specific keyword on Amazon then you need to ensure the following.

• A catchy title including your main keyword in a title.
• Product information and keywords which also greatly impact on the positive and negative reviews about the product
• Add relevant multiple images for your product

Paul Skarie provides you with a proper guideline which helps you that how you can optimize listing on Amazon.

Let’s take an example for a better understanding of the science behind the ranking.

Keywords

• If you search for the keyword “DJ Headphones” into the Amazon search bar, it will show you the following results.

• You will see that most of the product have the main keyword “DJ Headphones” in their title.
• We have selected the Greatest Stereo Headphones DJ Style Dynamic Sound. In the product description, headphone keyword added multiple time which increases its ranking on the search engine.

• Relevant Images: For the above product, all of the images are related to Headphones. Amazon uses machine learning to detect the nature of the product.

Product Promotion

Product promotion is a set of marketing activities intended to boost up the sales of product and services. It also informs the customers about the product quality aspects and influences the customer’s purchasing power.

There are several ways to promote your product to the target audiences.

Here are the best Five Ways to promote your Amazon listing introduced by Adam Zlotnik in a more comprehensive way.

• Sponsored Ads &  Promotions
• Social Media
• Blogging
• Build an Email List
• Deal Websites

Facebook Retargeting for Amazon Products

With the advancement of technology in the digital era, marketing tactics also grew which helps the marketers in numerous way to target the audience on social media platforms.

Now it becomes more favorable for the Marketers to retarget the customers who have just visited your website but haven’t bought your product.

Retargeting is a significant move for the retailers to bring the customers towards your website repeatedly. There are multiple tools which help you to retarget the public by creating the campaigns or brand for selling the product or services.

Retargeting operates by appending a piece of code (usually called a pixel, such as the Facebook Pixel) to your website. When a visitor comes for the first time to your website, the pixel drop an unnamed browser cookie. It won’t affect the performance of the site.

The cookie helps you to find out that when serves ads to the customers as a retargeting provider, and your ad should serve to those who visit your website once.

There are two approaches that you can apply to plan Facebook retargeting for your Amazon business.

• Retarget your existing customers: You can retarget your audiences with the campaigns, ads of your product, who visit your website previously but haven’t performed any action.
• Retarget landing page visitors:  If you want to attain traffic towards your brand from the outside of the Amazon to a landing page, then you need to place the retargeting code or pixel on your landing page. That will gives you the ability to retarget your visitors.

Replug is one of the best tools which constructs Retargeting pixels of social media platforms for your businesses in a simplistic way. You can also create a custom campaign and find insight to track the performance of the campaigns.

Attain the Buy box

Buy Box means having a product detail information on Amazon where the customer can add the favorite items or product into the cart for purchasing the product.

After selecting a product, you can view the product detail page and buy box on the right side of Amazon as shown in the image.

Not all sellers are eligible to win the buy box, its all depends on the seller, selling product history, quality, performance, and the benefits that customer receives after acquiring the product.

Lots of newbie seller comes with the unique product possessing better quality than rivals on Amazon market then they have a chance to get the buy box by adheres the Amazon certain standards. There are some factors which included to attain the buy box.

• Order Defect Rate
• Performance metrics
• Customer service quality
• Length of time on Amazon

It would difficult for the seller to win the buy box for every product which they listed on Amazon. On the other end, it’s necessary to win the eligibility of buy box to endure hard against the competitors carrying a similar product and get more ROI.

Offer Discounts

Offer a discount is a very effective strategy to draw customers into your stores. Customers are continuously looking for ways to get discounts on different products and services. You can easily attract your customers to your brand by telling them how you can save your money.

So, if you want to increase in sales, then you have a better option to offer a discount on Amazon to get informed your customer and build a strong relationship with the shoppers.

There are many blogs which explain you different strategies of offering a discount on the product and services to persuade the audience’s buying power.

One of the best blogs which I’ve not studied before is How to Use Discount Pricing Strategies to Make More Sales by Celine Roque. She describes the pros, cons, and types of Discount Strategies in an elegant manner.

For instance, there is a seller who entered the Amazon marketplace. The seller represents their product and its essential detail to the target audience. They develop strategies to reach a pool of customers and establish the reputation of the brand. The strategies are:

• Initially, the seller offers a 50% discount on all items.
• After actively bringing customers towards their storehouse, they offer a 10% discount on 100 items and a 5% discount on 500 items.
  

Through these strategies, the seller would receive more profit, gain a market share and receive feedback and review related to the product.

Conclusion

When selling products on Amazon, you should be focusing on providing better customer service to delight users. This can increase the positive reviews and feedback for your product.

Also, it is quite noticeable that running marketing campaigns on Facebook and other social media channels along with retargeting campaigns can dramatically increase your sales.

And while running campaigns, you can use Replug to retarget visitors whenever they click on your ad. If you have other advice from your personal experience, please do share.

 

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the changes that will occur in the next ten.” — Bill Gates

These words are taken from Microsoft founder’s book “The Road Ahead,” published in 1996. In his book, he talks about the prevalence of the internet and its impact on the world of computing. We can see the immediate change in the world, such as the popularity of TV, radio, smartphones among the public.

A traditional way of advertisement through which you can grasp the attention of the limited audience is by doing cold calls and investing a large amount of money on them.

With the advancement of technology, the way we communicate with the audience, consume a piece of relevant information, and our marketing tactics; have also evolved. Now, people are more inclined towards the internet of things. They find more ways of utilizing the internet to smartly automate their tasks.

In the Digital Marketing world, the marketers are well-prepared to persuade the audience towards their product or brand and create an inclination that automatically attracts their target audience.

Social media is the most powerful way of acquiring customers and building a firm strategy to hold a concrete position for your product in the market.

Through the Internet, you can easily target a wider audience and address them without leaving your seat.

Here, we have some guidelines which could help you evolve your marketing strategy with the passage of time.

Educate your Audience

Billions of people engage with several social media channels to get aware of the latest fashions, find the trending content on different websites and share it on their social media channels.

They acknowledge the content that has factual grounds which also holds value for them. In order to produce content that is actually useful for your audience, observe the level of information they require.

You can share the product related information to give a direction to your audience to choose the right product for themselves. To attract the audience towards your product you need to build up a sense of urgency among your audience. Align your company’s goal with your audience’s needs and make them focus on how to best utilize your product.

Visual marketing has a vibrant impression in the market. Statistics tell us that the human brain forms the first impression in under 50 milliseconds. Visual images are naturally self-explanatory and hold the capability to make a constructive first impression.

Use different images, infographics, and graphical tutorials through which you can educate your audience in an effective way. This will help your audience absorb your special features and establish a better understanding of your product.

Message Promotion

As we all have an idea about cold and warm audiences. The most essential thing to consider when taking a pace into the market is to strategically target the right kind of audience.

Your content doesn’t matter to the cold audience; but on the other hand, the warm audience takes interest in what you’re providing them. So, in simple words, you have to find the audience and try hard to promote your message among them.

Before writing a message, think about the fundamental element that could sell your product. To attract your target audience towards your idea, you need to convey a message that addresses their pain-points. Your message should be simple, concise and laser-focused. If your message fails to hit the right strings, people will avoid the messages which are sent to them; until they receive an immediate value.

Social Media advertisement is the best way to enhance your customer engagement, generate more leads and traffic which resultantly would raise your the conversion rate.

Ruairi Galavan, a Product Education Manager at Intercom, discloses the most effective messaging strategies to build up the customer engagement.

Market Research

Market Research gives a wholesome picture of the market which is very helpful for marketers to identify all the prospects of the marketplace. It could be about the obstacles the customers face, your rival’s product position, or the paths you have to choose to introduce your product to the market.

You can also analyze the audience’s behavior towards your competitor’s product which gives you the idea about the necessary things you have to take care of while entering the market.

After Market research, marketers can interpret their product’s position. They are able to narrow down the target audience.

To put it briefly, there are two main ways to research the market.

Primary Research: The data is collected firsthand through conducting interviews, questionnaires, phone calls, online surveys.

Secondary Research: You can gather data which is already published on websites by someone. It includes market statistics and reports.

There is a 5 step guide to help you do market research and accomplish an in-depth place for your product. Let me summarize these points for you.

1. Define Your Buyer Persona
2. Engage Your Target Audience
3. Prepare Your Research Questions
4. List Your Primary Competitors
5. Summarize Your Findings

Practice Empathy

Empathy is the ability to “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”. It’s a characteristic which should be practiced by businesses to retain their loyal customers.

For a better relationship with your customers, you should take care of your customer’s emotions, preferences, and values. You must be concerned with the customer’s priorities and try to create customer-friendly content.

If the customers feel valuable then they will automatically be attracted towards your product and become your advocates. It helps you to promote your product through the word of mouth.

The customer taste, preferences change over time. If your product is not demanded by the audience then the purpose of your existence fails.

Brand Voice

An important for marketers to remember while writing content is that they should be able to define their purpose of existence.

Give your brand a unique voice by assigning an identity.

The Logo is an element which is essential and gives an idea related to the product to the customers. If you have not added the logo in content then it is hard for the viewer to relate your content with your brand.

Brand voice enables the companies to keep clarity between the product and the customers whom they are targeting. It also helps customers while interacting and purchasing the product.

So, while writing content, it is mandatory to explain the personality of your brand, the purpose of your existence and illustrate the specification and features of your product.

Nevertheless, you must not exaggerate or overdraw the picture for your audience. That will merely raise up their expectations from your product and deceive them.

“Trying to fake your voice is like putting lipstick on a pig.”

Your brand should provide value in real terms rather than fake-furnishing the product to the target audience. That’s an unhealthy practice which results in a bad imprint on your credibility.

Loyalty

The customer’s loyalty depends on the customer’s satisfaction which the marketers fulfill by providing the product.

When companies bring innovative products in the market over time and engage with customers with new concepts. Then the customers feel valued and more inclined towards the services you provide them.

Once your actual customers become your promoters then they will be able to help you gain loyal customers.

 

Content marketing is one of a crucial aspect of digital marketing. It is all about how you communicate with your audience and presenting a fancy content to build up the brand’s reputation. It’s a way to establish an affectionate connection with the audience, retain them in such a manner that they eventually turn into your actual customers.

If the audience finds your content most trending, informative and valuable then they will surely share your content with other fellows using social channels and word of mouth as well.

Content marketing does not only help in improving the brand’s reputation, in fact, it also helps you to improve SEO and influence the conversion rate. With the advancement of technology, you can attract your customer with visual content and generate more leads and traffic.

For maximizing the ROI, you have to create more appealing marketing strategies for the target audience. It’s is more convenient and cost-effective than the traditional methods. So here are various ways to get your content shared more often.

Find Target Audience

Before advertising the product digitally, you have to find a small segment which you are going to target. You have to survey a market or accumulate the data from the secondary source such as multiple social channels which helps to find out the customers wants and needs.

If you’re quite aware of the target audience then it’s easy to understand from where you have to begin and make the different marketing strategies to fulfill their customer’s requirements. It gives you an idea about the product positioning in the market.

You cannot please every individual in the market. So it’s better to invest energy, money and time in a targeted audience.

There are two types of entities that you could target. First one is target market in which the company introduces their products to a group where the user is more likely to purchase the product and service by age, gender, personality and many more. The other is little bit complex they are more likely to give a positive response to your product, services, and promotions because they are satisfied with your product.

We have a fine example of Netflix.

In Early stages, the DVD discs were sent to customers via mail and the customers frequently received the DVD critiques as damaged and unable to fully play. Then Netflix starts finding gaps in the competitor’s strategies and decided to fill it in a unique way to hold a strong stand in the market and get more profitable.

After that, they came up with compression technology that offers a service for streaming movies and TV series over the internet, instead of sending it in the mail. The Netflix absolutely increased with the enlargement of streaming through an online queue. They target the audience who want exclusive experiences and convenience.

Pick up the Channels

In the Digital era, we have plenty of tools through which you can target your audience and share the content on social media channels. It allows you to promote your product through various online mediums.

You can collect a pool of knowledge about the customers which helps your product to survive in the market. With the passage of time, these social channels play a significant role in the marketer’s business through which they can recognize the social engagement of the audience towards your product or content, the traffic, and leads which are generated.

Before the technology transformation, the markets did advertising in a traditional way like television, radio, and print. It is grueling to reach out to the potential audience and find out the problems they are facing.

So Social media is a place where people come up for entertainment, fun and find it easy to network with others.  As reported by MarketingSherpa, 95% of online adults ages 18 to 34 are more looking towards a brand on social media.

Marketers can flourish market strategies by using multiple social channels to build up the awareness of the product and the reputation of the business as well.

Write Great Content

“Content is King,” written by Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1996. Content has the ability to persuade the audience to purchase or buy the product. Now it’s up to you to portray your product and company in front of an audience through your content.

You should write content as a story that gives the idea about the product and the value which you have for your customers. Your content should provide the solution to the audience’s problem which other business don’t.

If customers find your content more valuable then they’ll begin trusting you, would want to interact with you, and share the content with others and turn into your loyal customers.

Your website visitors behave like wild animals (source: Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) customers are hungry for the trending information and desperately share the content with others.  Content is the perfect technique to engage the audience towards you and easily communicate with them and their problems.

While creating content you have to take care that your content should target the right audience at the right time with the right social channel. There are some guidelines which help you develop the right Marketing strategies step by step.

Add Unique perspective

Content marketing doesn’t mean that how you create content, in fact, it means how you deliver relevant content to the target audience consistently. It should be informative for the customers to understand the broad view of the company and product.

So always keep in mind that your purpose of writing content should be different from others. You have to facilitate your audience in a novel way. You need to select the audience for targeting with a certain piece of information which creates ease while purchasing the product and service in the market.

If you want to establish an emotional connection with the audience by presenting content, then you have to take care of their needs. If they feel empathy then they are more likely to share your content on multiple social channels and with their fellows which helps you in reaching more social engagement from different web domains.

Content is one of the three pillars of SEO. This means the search engine gives more value to the contents which is offering more quality to the audience.

Share Valuable Information

In online marketing, content is a crucial part for advertising the product and highlighting the unique selling point.

Your audience must be hungry for information. Present it in such a way that they keep longing for more. Each piece should hold it own unique print in the minds of the reader.  

Create Appealing Headings

The headline should be simple and easy to understand which can grasp the attention of your customers. We have seen often if the people find catchy headline then they are more likely to read the content. If it doesn’t then they may scroll down or switch to some other landing page. 

It must be concise and to the point, which helps the audience to quickly understand why they need to spend their time on that content.

Headlines explain marketer’s opinion about the product and the benefits you provide to the customers. If you ask questions in the heading then there are more chances that the audience feels your content interesting and in return gives you the positive response.

Write a catchy headline and get more people on the social media channels and receive more engagement towards your content.

Persuasive Visual Content

The power of visual marketing comes through when you pair it with the short story. Your message can be that much powerful says, Ann Handley.

We all know the impact of visual content, it is much more than anything in the digital world.

Visual content has the ability to give a fresh look to the content. Through which the customers get encouraged by the significant content and feel curious to know more about the product or brand. It also leaves a long-lasting effect on the customers.

Did you know that human beings can process the visual content 60,000 times faster than the text?

Yes, the visual content gives you the ability to interpret the image faster than text. It influences individual behavior to understand and increase the possibility that the learner will remember the visual content for the long term.

Visual content is a technique which you can use to make your audience aware about product and reputation of the brand in no time. Now, it’s effortless for the marketers to advertise their product vision and convey the message to the audience using different social media channels within a few minutes.

It is more cost effective for the marketers to receive more social engagement, traffic, and leads generated towards your visual content, product or campaign by using visual infographics. Visual content makes your content more readable and shareable on multiple sources. It includes:

• Comics
• Images
• Videos
• quotes
• Infographics

Give Solution to the Problems

This is the most fundamental element for the marketers. In the content, you must try to resolve customer’s problem, communicate with them and address the pain point.

After classifying all that, you have to introduce the solution. You have to empathize with them and be their pain killer.

While writing you need to have a substantial look at your competitors as well. Find the gaps and discuss it in your content and also inform about how you cover the gaps left by your rivals.

It might be difficult to fill these gaps and come up with a creative solution. But if you are able to do so, you will get more appreciation and social engagement of the audiences.

Use Vibrant Colors

Color plays an essential role not only in human life in fact in the Marketing world as well. It has the ability to communicate with people and their emotions.

Using vibrant colors in the content gives a festive look to the content and audience feels excited while reading it. If the customers feel good then they are more likely to share the content with others and on the social accounts.

In some cases, if you want to influence the customer then there is nothing more appropriate to understand the knowledge of color wheel because colors affect the human choice, emotions, and behavior.

The marketers have the opportunity to use visual content with the vibrant colors that is one of the best sources to attract the audience towards you and receive more leads and traffic.

Every color has varied meaning so the marketers have to keep an eye on which colors they need to use while rendering the product, values, and company on different web sources.

Create Data-driven Content

You could collect data from multiple web sources which helps you to understand the customer’s preferences. After identifying the audience, you may develop the content marketing strategies. In every stage of development strategies, you need useful data insights where you can find out the performance of your campaign, content, blogs and the behavior of the audience towards it.

We have multiple online platforms as Replug through which you can overview all statistics of your brand, campaign, and links.  When you are familiar with social engagement metrics then it will be easy for you to prioritize things and track the success of your content.

You can identify the customer’s interest and the participation on multiple social channels. You always take care that your content should be relevant and more accessible by the target audience.

It must be specific and add some ingredient for the potential customer so they convert into your actual customers.

Recycle Content

Recycle content means to re-post the same content which you had posted on a different social media channels with some addition. For instance, you can add infographics, videos, quotes or any other related content to make it more tempting.

One powerful social media marketing tool for marketers, business entities, and Bloggers is ContentStudio; it gives you the ability to recycle evergreen content in which your content will be re-shared on social media channels.

You can modernize your previous content, keep it visible and make it more useful to the audience who are new to your content. So Evergreen is the best technique used to give a fresh look to your content and unique to many people.

Content Planning/ Scheduling

If you want to get your content shared more often than you have to work on the content planning or scheduling like how you can compose your content on multiple social channels to receive more traffic and leads towards your content.

As we talked earlier, there are multiple platforms which facilitate in more or fewer ways. ContentStudio creates ease for the end users by providing them a composer where you can compose your content wherever you think is the best place to get a large pool of knowledge and more popular in the digital world.

Using the tool to collaborate with the team members

In a productive team, team members are like clock work. They team members have a significant impact on the product. They help while creating, managing the relevant content and also support to shaping the organization’s goals as planned.

If team members work together with passion and contribute their best skill and knowledge in the social media marketing then it increases the productivity and effectiveness of marketing strategies.

Focus on Quality and Distribution

Quality content and distribution helps on how to nurture customer’s engagement and the reputation of your product or brand in the technological world. While creating content you must have focused on the quality and distribution.

Quality means the content should contain the necessary point which persuades the audience to buy or purchase your product and distribution determines how you promote the content on different social media channels.

Your mission should inspire your customer with qualitative and quantitative information. Markets need to define different strategies in the content which grants the benefit to an audience.

If the customers perceive more preference than others, they are more likely to share on their social accounts.

When it comes to distribution then you have to scan which channels are more reliable to distribute your content, where you can obtain more engagement from the customers towards your content.

“Reaching the inbox is not your goal___ engaging people is.”
For the Marketers, Email is an influential part of their business success. With the Advancement in Technology, Email Marketing has become essential for the business and its growth. It’s the most cost-effective and convenient way to convey the message to the audience and keep them updated. 

Matt Blumberg, the CEO and Chairman of Return Path says that we need to be laser-focused while creating content. Try to find ways to keep the audience engaged with your product or brand by targeting the right audience.

Replug has introduced third-party integrations with some of the finest Email Service Providers to help you procure the leads/subscribers for your business.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at our newest integrations.

FreshMail:

FreshMail comes with a profound design where you can create appealing Newsletters without having a technical background. You can design brochures that give an image of the product or brand to the audience’s mind. It creates ease for the people to create a design for their product using Freshmail template. It facilities you to gather more leads by using glorifying programs and e-commerce courses.

Connect Replug and FreshMail:

Now, you are able to proficiently handle the FreshMail account using Replug, under a minute.

Once you are successfully logged into Replug then go to Settings and Click on Integrations from the drop-down menu. You will see a list of integrations. Find Freshmail and click on Connect to integrate with it.

Pop up follow:

To get into FreshMail account. You need to follow a pop-up which requires the Name, API key, and API Secret key. In order to access the API key. Login to FreshMail account.

Hover over to  User icon > Settings > Plugins and API on the left side of the dashboard. Click on the Integration located under the Plugins and API.

Moving forward, input API key and API Secret into the field of the pop-up and Connect your FreshMail account with the Replug.

MailChimp:

MailChimp is an online email marketing platform where you can create a unique campaign for representing your brand in the market and automate your work. It gives you the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message at the right time. You can email your client, customers and codify the activities, time and staff with Replug.

Before starting the process of connecting your Replug account to Mailchimp. You must log in into your Replug account.

Integrate your Replug account to MailChimp.

Going ahead, Go to the Setting on the top right side of the corner. Click into Integration and the following list of integration will appear on your screen. Click on Connect button in front of Mailchimp.

Input Credentials:

In the next step, you need to input credentials which contain Username and Password for future processing. If you don’t have an account of Mailerlite then you can Sign up and add your credentials into the field.

 

After adding, you’ll be asked to select the list which you need to connect with Replug.

 

MailerLite:

MailerLite is another superb social marketing platform for small businesses, where you can not only build up the content using images and videos but also add a countdown timer that dynamically shows the time remaining until you launch a product. It’s more user-friendly, you can edit your content, manager subscribers and monitor the campaign reports with statistics.

In order to access the Connection with the MailerLite, you must need an API key. For this purpose.

Connect to MailerLite:

Go to Settings, Hover over to Integration from the pull-down menu. You can see the API key in front of your screen, now you can copy it.

After getting this, You need to connect with the Replug account. Go to Settings just like we did in above integrations.

Locate Replug:

Settings > Integration > MailLite > Connect

Then, you’ll be asked to put your MailerLite Account Name and API Key. Paste API key here which you had copied.

Add API Key:

 

 

Remarketing your brand

The need to share engaging and viral content is irresistible and instantaneous. Each time you share content on social channels, it’s an opportunity to advertise your business. Replug does just that by allowing you to create branded short links, which you can share with your audience.

The upside to this type of marketing is that you can establish brand awareness and instill trust with your readers. The easiest and quickest way to create and share a branded link is to have the tool at hand. To empower our customers with swift remarketing, we have developed the Replug extension for Google Chrome browser.

Replug Chrome extension helps to create a shortened link quickly just by selecting your brand and campaign. It must be noted here that the brand, as well as the campaign, have to be pre-created in the Replug web application in order for it to be visible in the extension.

Creating branded short links

Creating branded links with Replug is convenient than ever before. Simply navigate to the web page, article or blog you wish to share and click on the Replug extension.

Select your brand which you want to promote and the campaign. Campaigns are really important as they define what kind of widget you want to show your visitors. In addition to that, you have the option to set tags e.g. if the blog is related to e-commerce or marketing, assign it the appropriate tag. This helps you to categorize the links.

Click on the create button to generate your branded link. The story does not end there. If you look at your link there will be some random digits/ alphabet at the end of it. Clicking on the edit button you can actually insert a phrase or keyword, replacing the random digits/ alphabets.

This helps you to better relay your message and connect with the readers. Not only they will recognize your brand but also get the context of the content at hand, Two birds with one stone.

Replug extension also has an autofill URL field with the active tab that saves precious time for the user.

Content Intelligence with Powerful Analytics

After sharing your link on social channels you can see how well it is performing using the “Analytics” module in your Replug account. This helps you to determine the type of content your readers are interested in.

Let take a use case where you share 2 articles on your social channels. One related to finance (we will call it A) and the other related to fashion (we will call it B). Using analytics you can determine if your readers like A or B. You can then alter your content strategy to better connect with your audience.

Parameters such as clicks, links, and conversion rate permit you to make necessary tweaks to your content strategy and improve engagement.

Download and Sign in

The Replug extension is available on the Google Chrome web store.

Download the Extension here

After downloading you will see the replug icon on the top right corner of your screen. You can easily sign in by social platforms and by email password as well.

So add the chrome extension now and start promoting your business by sharing trending content.

Digitization has made Brand Marketing a challenging task. There are numerous tools now which can disseminate and automate your work. But, to settle down on one tool that is qualified to accomplish your tasks, is another enigma.

Brand Marketing is like a big oak tree with many branches denoting the marketing subsidiaries. You need a tool that can address all aspects of your brand’s marketing campaigns.

In this blog, I’ll be talking about the atomic necessities of your brand’s marketing paradigms. I’d like to throw some light on Replug and how you can use it to get the most return from your efforts.

Branded Links

Branded links can increase the average CTR (Click-Through Rate) up to 39% as compared to unbranded links.

Every brand loves to create their unique identity to stand out from the rest. Having your own branded link can help you win an exclusive place in the market.

Replug remarkably creates shortened branded links to solidify your branding and mount your credibility. Branded links give an aesthetic aura to your brand which is more likely to spellbound the customers.

It’s easier to win the viewer’s trust by your authentic branded link.

Branded links are also browser and search engine friendly. A neat branded link is most likely to get ranked by the search engine as opposed to a meaningless URL.

All the popular brands have their own branded links that look very elegant. Have a look at them yourself.

1. Red Bull uses its slogan “Red Bull gives you wings” in their branded URL. ‘win.gs’ keeps their marketing campaign consistent across all the channels.
2. Pepsi incorporates its brand name in their branded URL link. This link affirms the identity of Pepsi’s original website.
   

With Replug, you can easily create your own branded link by adding your brand’s custom domain.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the easiest and cheapest channel to reach out to your potential customers, subscribers, and your loyal customers. No matter how many communication channels have evolved, none beats the email. 

Up until today, almost 48% of the world’s population already has an email account. Imagine the growth of your brand if you effectively exploit the email users around the world.

Replug can strengthen your email marketing campaigns and widen your email outreach. Brands can customize their call-to-actions to target a specific group of people and get them to sign up.

Replug has recently announced its Integration with third-party Email Service Providers.

You can now integrate your Replug account with your favorite ESPs. Check out Replug’s Latest Integrations to help grow your email list: Episode#1, 2, and 3.

Replug tracks the best leads for you and strengthen your third-party email lists.

Call-To-Actions Ads

Replug has the capability to attract domain-focused people by striking them with the relevant call to action ads. These call to action ads can take the best leads and escalate the consumer outreach.

Nathan Gotch of The Gotch SEO company narrates that his company’s revenue propelled from a goose egg to 161% in 6 months. One of the key strategies that won him such an exceptional upshot was using call-to-actions; making the customer experience more fluid and seamless.

Use Replug to create call-to-action ads for attracting the audience for your websites, tracking email leads and whatnot.

Replug lets you concretize your creativity and gives you a variety of options to create the best call to actions. You can choose the theme of your call to action from the options enabled at the time of creation.

For example, you can create a CTA ad to show up right when the visitor intends to leave, or create a pop-up, a banner, or more.

Create extremely captivating CTA ads using Replug and expand the realm of your brand.

Manage Multiple Brands

No matter if you are a small company with a developing business or a giant company maintaining numerous brands, you can trust Replug with every marketing requirement for each of your brands.

Replug provides you with the basic, pro, and agency plans where you can organize 1, 5, and 10 brands; respectively.

Depending on the plan you choose, the least amount of campaigns you can handle is 5.

Replug also incorporates team management by allowing the team members to define their roles and accomplish their tasks.

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads are the most powerful tool for businesses to acquire a targeted custom audience. The goal for marketers today is not to bring the audience to the top of the sales funnel but to take them down towards the end.

Watchfinder, an industry that specializes in luxury watches, noticed a 1300% increase in ROI on their ad spend. They did it by retargeting 20 groups of people who showed their intent of purchase.

Many platforms have enabled a retargeting pixel to accelerate focused-driven traffic towards your website. All you have to do is embed the retargeting pixel in your website’s code and the pixel will hunt down your potential audience for you. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow marketers to retarget their platform-users.

Replug assists your campaigns by allowing you to add the retargeting pixels from different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Quora; and build up your CTA ads to turn the window shoppers into actual buyers. Read more about utilizing retargeting pixels in Replug.

Link Shortening

Replug’s link shortener is a great tool to optimize the links you share in your social media posts. Shortened links are easier to remember and have an incredibly higher click-through rate. Links that are concise and resonate with your brand’s consistency are considered to be elegant and artful.

Often times the pages we try to access have gibberish text in the URLs. That gibberish is understood and remembered only by the browsers, not by the humans.

Imagine how cumbersome it would be if you had to share such URLs in your posts to redirect your audience. For instance, Twitter only allows 140 characters in a single post. Shortened links come in handy when you wish to share your opinion along with the source link.

Hence the declaration states that short links promote social media sharing.

The importance of shortened links doesn’t end here. Short Links are also vital for tracking the activities of the end-users.

Replug’s shortened links come with a facility of tracking those links and analyzing the viewers’ perception towards it. Businesses scout the usefulness of their links and sculpt their strategies accordingly.

Custom Widgets

A widget is a piece of code that defines a protocol of conduct. You add a custom widget on your website when you wish to integrate a functionality of a plugin or any third party to your product.

For example, if you own a website, you may wish to integrate a chatbot. It’s not a wise choice to build a chatbot of your own from scratch when you can avail third-party plugins.

So work smart, and collaborate with the third parties that provide fully functional features.

Leverage your Replug campaigns by plugging in the custom widgets you desire; to enrich your production.

Replug provides you tremendous opportunities to dignify your campaigns. You could use opt-in forms by teaming up with tools like Optinmonster, Sumo, Poptin, Convertful, or your own custom lead forms.

It doesn’t restrict you just to the opt-ins, there are numerous other options like chat widgets (Intercom, Drift etc.), video embeds (YouTube, Vimeo, Vooplayer, Wistia etc.), Quizzes (BrandQuiz, SurveyMonkey, Outgrow etc.) or any other possible widget you can use for a website.

Detailed Analytics

Feedback and recognition are of paramount importance for us all. I am sure you agree with this statement.

Likewise, Replug provides an evaluation for the efforts you put in for your branding campaigns. Examine the factual outcome from your campaigns and measure the return on your investment.

Replug creates an Analytics inventory for you to monitor and control everything about your campaigns.

Gather an accurate analytical display of your brand’s current situation in the Analytics section of your account.

You can view the number of clicks you received for a particular link, view the conversion rate statistics and graphical demonstration of your individual brand, campaign, or links’ performance.

Replug Analytics will give you a better sense of interpreting the strategies you create. Everything will fall in a perfect circle if you are able to polish your strengths and diagnose your weak links. Replug intuitively makes you optimize your links and enhance user engagement by identifying the forthright statistics.

This will help you a lot with re-prioritizing your time, money, and other resources; and channelize your investments.

Chrome Extension

Replug’s Google Chrome extension is a real timesaver for your brand management. Instead of taking a long route, you can take a shorter detour and create a branded shortened link by adding the chrome extension.

Simply visit the URL which you wish to optimize, and click on the extension. Replug will automatically read the URL of the website and grate out the optimized link. Read more about Replug’s Chrome Extension and how to use it here.

Conclusion

Replug is built on a foundation to facilitate brand marketers to get the most return from their efforts. To earn a respectable status in the saturated industry, it is fundamental for a brand to have their own unique voice. Replug gives you that voice by making your campaigns flawless and fully effective.

Create branded shortened links for your brands to maintain consistency throughout your social crusade. Branded links add to the credibility of a brand and are more elegant to look at.

Replug lets you retarget your customers with or without your branded call to action ads. Call-to-action ads are very important to broadcast your offers to the public and gather an audience instantly.

Knowing the importance of email marketing, Replug has recently announced a collaboration with many third-party Email Service Providers. You can integrate these third-party ESPs with your Replug account and populate your lists with subscribers that are interested in your products.

Accessorize your websites with features that add to your customer experience. Replug provides you with an option to add custom widgets to your websites.

All your efforts could go in vain if you can’t monitor the results of your efforts. In Replug, you can analyze all your campaigns and prioritize your tasks accordingly.

 

Every link you share on social media is an opportunity to advertise your business. How? Customized short links are a great way to promote your business.

Before we dig deep into how you can effectively use this marketing tactic, first we must get familiarised with some basic concept surrounding branded shortened links

What is URL shortening

URL shortening is a technique in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is made substantially shortened but still directs to the same page. This is accomplished using a redirect which links to the webpage that has a long URL.

Let’s start by looking at some examples, the URL

“http://example.com/assets/category_B/subcategory_C/Foo/”

can be shortened to

“https://example.com/Foo”

Similarly

“https://www.blog.google/products/maps/wheres-waldo-find-him-google-maps/”

can be shortened to

“https://goo.gl/rVBBtP”

Why we need URL shorteners

As the number of domains on the world wide web grew leaps and bounds, URLs became more and more complex. The problem reached a point where it was impossible to remember, type and share URLs due to their complexity.

This is where URL shorteners come in handy. They shrink the number of characters in the URL to make it easier to share the link online, whether it’s via email, social media, or downloadable PDF.

Difference between simple and branded link shortening

Branded links are URLs which after being shortened bear the name of a person, company or brand. As the name suggests, they are built to induce branding in the shortened link. As a result, these links boost awareness and recognition.

Each day we share posts, recommend videos to our peers and comment on blogs. Each time we do this, unless we use a branded domain to tell others about this content, we miss out on a massive marketing and branding opportunity?

You share posts you’ve found helpful. Recommend videos that made you laugh. Comment on presentations and other content too and occasionally even slag some authors (only if they deserved it, of course).

But did you know that unless you use a branded domain to tell others about this content, you’re missing out on a massive marketing and branding opportunity?

Why branded links are better than generic short links?

Branded links took the internet by storm and companies got a great marketing hack to exploit. There are a number of factors why branded links are very popular amongst digital marketers.

For starters branded links are very easy memorable and even more so pronounceable. The fact that it utilizes your brand name and can be easily read and remembered by others has a great impact while making a mark on the internet.   

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.

Last but not the least branded links have an inherent reporting mechanism. You can track which piece of content is performing well and gain more insight as to which type of content you need to produce. Along with that, you can evaluate ideal publishing times and performance benchmarks of real estate industry peers.

Protection against Spammers

Generic shortened URLs are susceptible to cyber attacks. They do not provide the same level of security against hackers as their branded counterparts. Hackers can scam shortened link same way they break short passwords, through brute force.

This means that web pages could become accessible by people you didn’t intend to view them. One line of defense against these attacks is having a custom domain name for your URL. This makes the URL trustworthy and on the plus side most social scheduling tools e.g. ContentStudio, allows you to use your own branded URL by connecting it to one of the custom URL shorteners that support them.

Effect of Link shorteners on SEO

A shortcoming of these type of links is that the destination link is hidden. This gives spammers an opportunity to insert harmful links. As a result, visitors end up on undesired websites.

This causes a lot of problems and relays a  bad name for link shorteners. Also, If you are setting up a chain of 301 redirects, which can happen for very reasonable reasons, you might face a few issues in terms of indexing

This practice causes a problem because it gives a bad reputation to shortened links as people who have already experienced spamming will never trust one again. Social networking websites usually put a ‘NoFollow’ tag in the links. This is done as a safety precaution.

This does not apply to link shorteners as they short-circuit the whole process. Indeed, these type of links will be then followed back by search engines which entails that some value will eventually pass through them. This proves to be a huge bonus for people who use social media as part of their marketing campaigns or who just use them to share content.

According to several ranking specialists, it seems that using URL shorteners doesn’t lead to any negative impact on your SEO. As a matter of fact, shortened URLs are considered by search engines as any regular 301 redirects and they will thus act upon it.

Top link shortening tools available

There are a lot of link shortening tools available in the market today. We have shortlisted 10 which present the best value for money.

Bitly

With Bitly you can create a short domain name for custom link shortening and forward on Twitter or Facebook.

Clikim

Clikin allows you to use your branded domain, retarget on click, monetize with custom, responsive, full-page interstitial ads.

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. With Replug you can shorten links, track and optimize them with catchy call-to-actions.

It also provides the ability to add retargeting pixels paired with branded links and powerful analytics.

Rebrandly

Use your own domain name to create branded, memorable, and pronounceable custom short links.

Droplr

It is used to share ads and market them on a custom domain name directly from your Mac storage.No need to write long emails anymore. With Dropler you can show complicated, processes using screencasts and transfer files with a customized short link

Tinycc

Plug-in your own short domain then manage your whole brand from social media to product packaging.

Geniuslink

Genius Link makes localizing, tracking, and managing smart links dead simple so you can earn more without added work.

CloudApp

Share links, images, files and more with this powerful menubar app for your Mac. It is an easy-to-use screen recorder that brings video, webcam, screenshot annotation, and GIF creation securely to the cloud.

Short.cm

Ity allows you to create your own branded short links on your domain. You can easily manage links and view click statistics. If you need short links for different websites, you can manage many domains in your account. It provides an API for developers and Google Chrome extension for a better experience.

T2M

T2M can be used as a URL shortener with  Twitter, Facebook URL Shortener, YouTube URL Shortener. You will get a powerful dashboard which will make your work easier.

How to create branded shorten links with Replug

Using replug is as simple as branded URL shorteners can be. Login to your Replug account or sign up if you do not already have one. 

The first thing you need to do is to create a brand. What is a brand you may ask? A brand is a unique identity for your call-to-actions widget. To put it in more simple words, let’s say you have 5 websites, they are 5 unique identities for you, and these 5 unique identities are considered to be brand in Replug.

You can put in your website logo or your profile picture as a brand to convey your message

Follow the below steps to create a branded URL.

Step 1

Navigate to Brands page

Step 2

Click on create a new brand and fill in the necessary information e.g. company product name and upload image.

Save your information and navigate to “New Link” on the homepage

Step 3

Select your campaign and enter the link to an article where you want to add CTA.

You also have the option to add the tags which can be used for reporting later on. Click on save link

Step 4

Now go ahead and share this optimized Replug link with your audience on social, email, web or any other channel you want.

Notice that besides the shortened link generated is an edit button. You can use this option to change the ending part of your URL. This allows you to further customize your URL, and add meaningful phrases to conjoin brand with a message.

One suggestion is to choose these words/ phrases very carefully to be in sync with the message being replayed in the content. This helps users to better relate to both your brand and the content in question.

Conclusion

Branded shortened links are a great way to promote your brand. They can also be converted to eye-catching CTA’s to help improve conversion rates. Similarly, they can be tracked to evaluate the performance of your ads as well as the content you share.

By using branded links in the content we share you can effectively imply remarketing in your content marketing strategy. If you know other health benefits of using branded leaves, please leave a comment.

Email Marketing can kick your brand up a notch.

In my previous blog, I mentioned The Top Email Marketing Influencers to follow in 2019. You can learn from these email professionals to make your email marketing campaigns more effective and more fruitful.

Be among the wise, and start using the cheapest yet the fastest way to grow your network and your customer base.

Replug offers to collect leads for you. So, if you are looking forward to getting a rush of subscribers toward your Email Campaigns, wait no more.

Integrate your Replug account with your favorite Email Service Providers and structure your brand’s growth.

CampaignMonitor

Campaign Monitor provides an easy-to-use platform for its users to design and automate emails that command viewers’ attention. Moreover, they have an award-winning customer service and provide email marketing experts’ opinion to reform your strategies.

Integrate CampaignMonitor with Replug

Connect your accounts to get the best ROI for your businesses.

And, it’s as simple as it gets. Let me walk you through the whole process.

Step#1: Locate Campaign Monitor

Go to your Replug account and go to Integrations in your Account Settings. Find Campaign Monitor in the list and connect with it.

Step#2: Allow Access for Connection

Replug will ask you to input your credentials for CampaignMonitor. Enter your Email/Username and Password and then press Continue.

Afterward, Replug will ask for your permission to access a list of things from your CampaignMonitor Account. If you agree with this, Allow Access and proceed.

Step# 3: Connect your CampaignMonitor List

Once you have connected your accounts, the next step is to choose the list for which you want to collect the subscriber traffic.

Connect your list(s) and you’re good to go.

Mautic

Mautic is an extraordinary platform that helps your relationship to blossom with your contacts. It lets you design your messages by providing a seamless and intuitive interface.

From a simple follow-up email to a complex multi-channel interactive campaign; Mautic covers it all.

Integrate Mautic with Replug

Grow your Mautic list by linking it with your replug account and collect the data of a highly relevant audience.

The connection could be done in a few easy steps.

Let’s begin!

Step#1: Locate Mautic

The first step is to find Mautic among the other third-party connections available. For that, go to your Account Settings and click on Integrations. Once you’ve spotted Mautic, click on Connect.

Step#2: Connect Mautic to your Account

In this step, Replug will ask you for your Mautic’s credentials to begin the connection. Enter your Mautic Username, Password, and your Mautic Site URL. Once you’re done, click on Connect.

And both of your accounts are connected. Now, connect your list(s).
It’s as simple as that.

BenchMark

Benchmark Marketing Services provide the Digital Marketers an opportunity to nurture customer relationships that lead to business growth. Using this platform, you can design customizable emails for your audience and drive revenue.

Integrate BenchMark with Replug

Connect these two platforms to get more signups and expand your outreach. The integration is simple and it won’t take much of your time.

Let’s see how it’s done.

Step#1: Access your BenchMark API Key

To initiate the connection process, you’d need an API key from your Benchmark Account.

To find that, go to User Icons> Integrations> API Key. There, you’ll find your key. You’re going to use this key while connecting your Replug account with your BenchMark account.

Step#2: Locate BenchMark

Go to your Account Settings in Replug, and click on Integrations. A whole list of third-party integrations will be shown to you from which you have to locate BenchMark and click on Connect.

Step#3: Enter your API Key and BenchMark Lists

Enter your secret API Key and click on Connect.

After this, It will ask you for the email list where you want to send your lead/subscriber information. Choose your lists and click on the Save button to connect your Benchmark Email account successfully with your Replug account.

And, the two of your accounts are connected.

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Let’s grow together!