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If your business is not using the Instagram Stories feature, you are missing out on a key new tool that can help you reach potential customers. Using Instagram stories helps support business growth. By 2018, the number of Instagram users had reached one billion. This means that if you do your social media marketing strategy right, you get to connect with your ideal customer audience on Instagram.

The Instagram Stories feature has made Instagram one of the most popular social media platforms for users and therefore among businesses marketers.  Time spent watching Stories by users has grown incredibly in the past year and is now the location of the most engagement by users on Instagram.  In simple terms, this means users watch Stories and interact with them and you can support business growth by using Stories!

 Why Instagram Stories?

One in every five Instagram Stories gets a reaction from the viewers, allowing businesses to interact directly with their followers. Here is how Instagram Stories facilitate growth.

Stories Enable Real-Time Marketing

To get the most out of a marketing campaign, businesses need to provide customers with current and relevant content. Real-time marketing encourages more people to join your campaign, allowing immediate connection and feedback from customers.

Instagram Stories Maintain the Visibility of Your Brand

Unlike regular posts which are likely to be outrun by content from other accounts, Stories stay at the top of your followers account on the Instagram App. The visibility brought about by Instagram Stories keeps your brand relevant and in the minds of your customers, giving you an advantage and a way to be “sticky.”

Increased Engagement

Storytelling is key to customer engagement. User participation is higher when you are using Instagram Stories. Engagement is social proof of your business, which also endorses you. Customers are more likely to purchase your products if other customers are happy about it. Short video clips in Stories can help. Videos generate 12 times more engagement than text posts and images, which also leads to greater brand exposure and awareness.

Instagram Stories improve engagement by allowing you to share events, give consumers behind the scenes content, and also the ability to host Q&A sessions to help your customers know your company and products better.

How to Use Instagram Stories to Support Business Growth

Here are some of the ways you can use Instagram Stories to grow your business.

Collaborations

By teaming up with influencers or your followers with a big following, you can help your brand get more customers and sales. Influencers have a high engagement rate as people view them as a trusted source for recommendations. Hosting interviews or Q&A sessions with influencers can have a significant impact on your sales.

Polls

Simple photos with no context are no longer popular with users. Instagram Stories has a poll option, allowing you to interact with your customers and at the same time conduct market research. Get feedback from customers on the performance of your products and how they prefer to engage.  Therefore enabling you to create highly relevant and effective campaigns. More so, you can make the necessary improvements to your products and services, leading to customer satisfaction.

Countdown

The countdown feature is a useful tool to create call-to-action, make announcements, and promote contests. Consumers love to participate in competitions and get prizes for it. Promoting contests can be a good way of getting more customers, creating brand awareness, and getting more traffic. Even though many of the contestants will not win, you will still manage to create an emotional connection. Hence brand loyalty.

Countdown on offers can encourage your audience to make a purchase. Countdowns of offers such as free shipping and discounts will also encourage your followers to share your link. This helps to increase your visibility and traffic. The followers become your customers and will continue to buy even when there are no offers available.

Using Instagram Stories helps support business growth by increasing engagement, brand awareness, and making your customers your brand ambassadors. Instagram Stories can offer a cost-effective way to create an emotional connection with your customers. Consistency is key, so be sure to incorporate Instagram Stories into your daily routine.


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How-to-Integrate-Email-Marketing-with-SEO-1

In the context of search engines and social media, email seems like ancient tech, having arisen as early as the 1970s. But email is still very relevant to businesses for communication. Confirmation messages, newsletters, and deals are all still disseminated via email to current customers. The distinct nature of every message extricates it from the noise in social media. Thus long and well-designed emails can engage your customers more than social media posts.

However, email is not the public platform that social media is, and, for that reason, email has less impact on SEO. When a search engine ranks pages, it does not use email as a factor because email is a process outside the public-facing web.  Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all have public-facing, searchable content, but email does not. So how can email help your SEO?

Engage the Customers

Email is an excellent way to engage your customers off social media platforms. Social media platforms offer a way to standardize your message to all of your customers. Email offers a way to customize your message to your customers, ideally in different groups. For example, age groups or geographic region can be easily separated in an email, while national or any aged customers can be serviced through a broad social media appeal.

Having links to the customized material will bring more visitors to your page. It is easier to navigate directly to something needed than to navigate to a base page and then find what is needed. Customers will be happier (and more likely to visit) if the topic they’re interested in is easily accessible rather than buried somewhere on a large website. Use email to bring those customers directly to the content they want.

If your business closely tracks customer behavior, personalized email is also a great way to engage the customer and increase click through. An email requesting a customer’s opinion or help is more likely to capture attention than an email simply promoting a product or website.

The whole point of increasing customer visits is to increase traffic, thereby eventually increasing visibility and search result rankings.

Encourage Consistent Visits

Sending periodic emails on website updates will encourage more users. If customers can expect an email with all the latest posts, especially an email that concisely summarizes those posts and draws them to the page, they will be more likely to regularly visit your website. Encourage that regularity, because it will cement patterns of behavior and reduce customer retention efforts.

Remind them of Social Media Presence

This can be as simple as a few tags at the end of the email. It is a subtle reminder to current and new customers to become followers or members of your social media circle. Thereby increasing the number of customers engaged on social media. It can also be implemented for specific email sections. For example, during a new product launch, an email should discuss the product and link to a demonstration video on YouTube. Once the customer engages the YouTube content, you can encourage them to subscribe there.

On the other hand, use social media to promote your email newsletters or offers. If a customer is already a follower on social media, s/he can still become an email recipient. Then customized deals or information can more easily be shared with that particular customer.

Ensure emails are mobile friendly

There is a lot of conversation around mobile-first indexing, and companies need to ensure they have mobile-friendly versions of websites. But that is not the only concern. Americans are embracing mobile telecommunications wholeheartedly, and even the workplace is seeing more mobile-friendly practices. By neglecting to create mobile-friendly emails, you are ignoring a potentially large set of customers. Some people don’t even read email on a desktop/laptop screen anymore.  Email seamlessly integrates with mobile devices.

Make sure emails link to mobile websites, or that your website can detect a mobile versus desktop visitor. Ensure the layout is friendly for those with small screens. As well assure your layout is comfortable when viewing on larger screens, too.

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The Keys to Engagement-315Mastering the ropes of “Attraction” content and engaging your leads is not only a priority but also critical. Unlike attracting audiences, engagement with audiences takes less time and but is quite sensitive. You'll need to follow up on your brand’s reviews and questions and suggestions on social media to help you narrow in on your specific audience.

Don't worry if you have no idea how to engage your leads ... yet. I outline everything you need to know about engagement in this article. Continue reading!

What is Engagement?

How you respond and react with your community is defined as Engagement. It's an art that happens on your website and social media platforms. It involves:

I acknowledge the following 3 key traits a brand must have to be “Engaging”:

An engaging brand is human. It's only possible if you:

Why Is Engagement Important?

With the arrival of technology, engaging your leads is a game changer for your business. Not every lead is ready to purchase immediately but engaging with them can lure them into buying earlier than intended or making a decision to buy when they had no intention.

Supply them with a variety of points of contact to help them know you better and increase trust and like you and your brand. Despite the 7 points of contact, we can't rule out engagement. It falls within positions 2-6 of the “connection” process and contributes a lot to making a sale.

Disregarding Engagement Opportunity

Overlooking and ignoring engagement is a disaster in the making. Ignoring this blessing in disguise and embracing old-school marketing methods as billboards and magazines lead to frustration and low sales. Today, social media ranks on top in marketing. For people to do business with you or purchase your products, they have to like you. The “like” mentality gets built through interaction. To be a successful marketer, get committed on social media and respond to all mentions and comments.

Tips for More Engagement

  1. Download at least two social media apps to your mobile device to notify you when your brand receives comments and reviews.
  2. Post at least 50% of your content on social platforms as a campaign to Attract and Engage your audience. Initiate interaction by inviting feedback.
  3. Always respond on time. If you're not available, make it known to your audience you will get back as soon as possible.
  4. Reply to all your comments on Facebook. Include @mention of the sender while replying on Twitter.
  5. “Follow” a commenter on Twitter and Instagram. With the notification sent to them on their smartphones, it is a no-brainer. It’s a fantastic form of engagement. Your business gets to build a top of mind connection.
  6. Use Videos to engage. As they say, pictures speak louder than words! The power of videos as a tool for engaging on social media is stunning. Create a short video that invites a response as you ask questions. It’s easy. By use of a mobile phone, log into your social media account like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and post the video.

It’s incredible how live videos in Periscope and Facebook have become a magnet for many audiences. Live videos take you to where your clients are, and you get to engage them directly. Isn’t it incredible? Here's a list of some topics when live on video:

Videos reach the audience 3 times faster than posts on Facebook. Here is an engagement post example that starts with a simple question:

“We love beer brand from San Diego craft. Do You?” The question begs for engagement and as expected the fans response was overwhelming. The example got sourced from Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina’s Facebook page. The fact that the Facebook page got flooded with so many comments emphasizes that “Engagement” is the KEY to lead capture techniques.

Conclusion

Social media success has no shortcut. You have to be ready and very committed. It might appear to be an uphill task, but the results are rewarding and send you straight to the bank smiling. Just like a two-way street, both you and your audience have to engage for mutual benefit. You have to create an impressive rapport. Then connect to help your leads to know you better and build trust in you.

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Improve Your Social Media Engagement with Quizzes and 1 Click Quiz Maker-315While the word "quiz" may take you back to your school days, quizzes are actually very useful in the world of marketing. Why? Quizzes are an effective and convenient tool for engaging with your audience.

On social media a whopping 82% of users complete quizzes. From Facebook to Buzzfeed, quizzes are used to gather relevant information from site users quickly. Brands have recognized and embraced the power of quizzes.

Creative Ways to Engage Your Audience

Quizzes allow you to create branded content that's fun and accessible. A fast quiz on a new product or service can make learning about a brand's offerings much more entertaining than a standard info dump.

For users, quizzes provide a reward for the users who complete them. Quizzes empower the user to voice their opinion and test themselves on their knowledge. Instead of a one-way exchange, users and brands are interacting at a more personal level.

A well-designed quiz is image heavy, interesting, concise and has snappy copy (no long paragraphs). This is the perfect format for social media marketing, and it encourages users to share.

A great example of a brand's use of a quiz to engage their target audience comes from the online business program, The Foundation. The quiz, which was paired with Facebook ads, questioned users on what kind of entrepreneur they felt they were (and ultimately, if The Foundation was right for the user). Therefore, the quiz leads to the brand garnering thousands of leads and millions in revenue.

Improve Your Social Media Engagement with Quizzes and 1 Click Quiz Maker-1Insurance review site, Obrella, also created an engaging quiz for their audience. Quiz takers know upfront that the quiz is short, the questions are relevant, and they get to see how their scores compare to other test takers (adding the element of competitiveness). The quiz also urges the audience to share their results.

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Ready to use quizzes as a tool to reach your right audience?

There's an excellent tool to get you started with just 1 click. You can build simple, attractive, interactive, and quick quizzes with 1 Click Quiz Maker.

Improve Your Social Media Engagement with Quizzes and 1 Click Quiz Maker-315One-click Quiz Maker works by drawing data from the web (like social media accounts and Wikipedia) about a subject of your choosing. When you hit "Create Quiz" the data that's being gathered will be used to generate witty facts and questions about the subject automatically. You're able to edit or add to the questions and share the quiz on social media. For quiz takers, the quizzes are fun, interactive, and serve as a quick and easy introduction to your brand. For you, it is fast, a time-saver, and free.

You're able to edit or add to the questions and share the quiz on social media. For quiz takers, the quizzes are fun, interactive, and serve as a quick and easy introduction to your brand. As a result, for you, it is fast, a time-saver, and free.

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Check out a sample quiz.

Ready to get started. Create a quiz with 1 Click Quiz Maker.

 

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What is it exactly that drives the popularity of cats and bacon in social media?

Cat memes and bacon pics rule and have massive engagement and share rates for some reason that escapes me!

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I have to admit, I don't get it.  Why do cats have over 30 million monthly Google searches?  How is it that bacon is searched for nearly 6x more than Kevin Bacon?

This is a fun and mysterious side of social media, trying to figure out why somethings go viral and gain traction.

As Marketo notes, "The infographic is a fun visual representation of the insane popularity around cuteness and deliciousness. See how these stats below can be leveraged as a sort of “catnip” for your own marketing campaigns, giving them a savory shot of personality for extra social media lift and virality."

Below is the full infographic from Marketo (all images credit: Marketo).  Whether you start adding more cats and bacon in your social media posts will be up to you.  I'll paraphrase Fox News, "I'll report, you decide."

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Your Turn:

Any thoughts?  will you add bacon or cats more to your marketing mix because of their engagement and interest levels?

 

 

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