techguydigital23-blog

[techguydigital23-blog]

Social Media Strategies for Startups

In essence, the fundamental aspects of marketing remain valid even during overwhelming presence of digital marketing. To have a success in field of digital marketing, it is pertinent to know fundamentals of marketing.

As is the case for start-ups, an entrepreneur finds himself building strategy and tactics for every domain and ends up being a jack of all trades. Here is a chance for you to be king of digital marketing strategy for social media. Digital marketing certificates can also help leverage your knowledge and skills. But this article will provide you insights and different strategies for Social Media.

Taking about strategy, a manager generally expects superior profitability and superior profit growth from its competitors when developing a long-term strategy for its organisation.

Thus, even for social media strategy, we would first look at the resources and capabilities, to arrive at distinctive competencies of the organisation. These distinctive competencies will help you arrive at Functional strategies. The functional strategies are defined in terms of superior:

·       Efficiency

·       Quality

·       Innovation

·       Customer Responsiveness

So, to achieve the goal of functional strategy, we place our marketing objective based on Porter’s Generic Strategies –

·       Differentiation

·       Focus

·       Cost Leadership

Thus, organisation building on the above steps leads to value creation of its enterprise and ultimately achieves superior profitability, which is the core aim of business strategy.

Hence, the job of social media managers is to leverage the use of platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter to implement the marketing strategy. Digital marketing certificates will provide you with rich experience of social media marketing.

So, over and above we can define social media strategy as means of communication used to achieve interaction and better relationship with social network users to meet the business goals of organisation.

The social media strategy can be developed by introspecting following aspects–

·       Target Segment

For the same organisation, the target audience of each social network differs in terms of demographics  

 ·       Content preference

Emulate the type of content your audience prefers to watch by analysing the consumer behaviour. Also, listing out all the different types of content available to the consumers.

·       Priority of the type of content to be published

There are different types of content that can be posted and the audience can be engaged with.

·       Point of Differentiation

For each network, the manager has to define points of parity and points of differentiation.

·       Tracking the Social Activity

There are ample number of tools to track the activity of the audience. Also, necessary is to track the business activity and key metrics of performance.

·       Optimising the Social Presence

Tracking is worthless unless it is reviewed and acted upon. From the insights available, we can test, learn and refine the organisation’s marketing activities.

Social media has ample amount of applications throughout the customer lifecycle, but it is most effective when it is used to develop existing relationships and encourage advocacy to create brand awareness and favourability.

Most of the companies are becoming customer centric and trying to establish an effective relationship with the audience. Thus, social media provides a good platform to engage the audience in a way that is profitable to customers.

The following are types of social media platforms to engage the customer with –

Social Networks

The core social networking platforms are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat to engage with the customers.

 Social Publishing

Nearly all newspapers and magazines have an online presence with the option to participate through comments on articles, blogs or communities.

 Social Commenting in Blogs

Getting to engage customer and making a good conversation out of it always works for the organisation as it helps to put a better relation of the customer with the company.

  Social Search

When google+ was launched, search engines incorporated more social features such as voting for sites via google+.

 Other Social Media Strategies

Listen and manage reputation

Transformation of brand through social media

Increase sales

Deliver customer experience

[techguydigital23-blog]

What is Brand Awareness?

What is Brand Awareness?

 In general, a Brand, what it does at best is occupy a specific position in the minds of the customer, in order to generate value for the firm or to the firm, many a times, both of them.

Brand Awareness, is generally measured by how well your customers are able to recognize your brand as compared to other brands. It can also be described as, “degree of consumer recognition of a product by its name.” (1)

For What Use?

So, brand awareness pertains to differentiating your brand from your competitors in order to make a specific position, with respect to how much easily the consumers are able to recognize your brand. The higher brand awareness of your firm, the higher you are putting, the barriers of entry for your competitors. Thus, a highly recognizable brand can add to profitability and profit growth of the company, giving them a position to occupy relatively higher share in the market.

How beneficial is it?

There are umpteen number of methods, tactics and strategies available at marketer’s disposal to increase brand awareness.

86% of B2B marketers have used content marketing in the year to raise brand awareness. (2)

Increasing brand awareness and engagement are the biggest objectives for mobile advertising. (3)

According to Talkwalker, The Global State of Influencer Marketing, 2019, “The main objective of influencer marketing for marketers is increasing brand visibility, with 65.8% responders agreeing on this.”

The firm may resort to any number of practices, but unless it has created a long-term sustainable strategy to generate value for its firm, from which the consumers can benefit, the campaign for brand awareness can never gain the amount of success it is supposed to.

  Why Brand Awareness?

In Marketing Management, we read it as, “the science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping and growing customers through creating, delivering and communicating superior customer value.” (4)

As a manager with growth mindset, you want your company to grow, progress and expand. Thus, for growth, expanding customer base is important. First reason for brand awareness is thus to reach a greater number of people and subsequently convert them into consumers of your brand. Today’s time, more important aspect is to make the brand more and more visible to the public.

Well, more important aspect is to build brand equity. Brand awareness is a vital factor in building brand equity for the company. Brand equity is, “the added value endowed to products and services with customers.” (4)

Having a strong brand itself has many advantages –

·        Higher financial market returns

·        Increase in customer loyalty

·        Increase in effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns

·        Brand extension opportunities

For a successful brand awareness campaign multiple and simultaneous efforts are required in promotion of the differentiation factors and value generating factors of the company. Your brand awareness can be measured in both qualitative and quantitate metrics.

Earned Media

Direct Website Traffic

External Links

Blog Shares

Search Volume

Brand Mentions

Thus, above metrics can help you keep track of brand awareness. These metrics can have a benchmark, with which we can compare the future results.

Brand Awareness creates a recognition for your brand in the market. Recognition of brand means that your customer can differentiate between your brand and other similar brands in the market.

It does not merely to know the name or having recalled seen it before, Brand Awareness implies customer can associate the name, logo and other brand symbols in his mind.

One of the interesting theories presented by Philip Kotler is, ‘CCDVTP.’ It stands for Create, Communicate and Deliver Value to a Target market as a Profit.

Creating value means product management which can include tangible and intangible products. By communicating value, we arrive at brand management. To deliver value is called customer management which involves reaching the customers via different means.

Use of Social Media for brand Awareness

Social Media provides a good platform to promote your brand. If you are looking for opportunities in India, then it won’t be surprising to know that there are over 700 million internet users in India and on top of that, there are over 370 million people using social media, out of which 250 million are active users of social media. Now, to reach that kind of mass, you need a new marketing approach, to pursue it on the digital platform.

No only that, social media now provides an excellent platform to interact with the customers and respond to their needs. We have observed examples from past where distressed customers have been taken care of by the brands.

There are number of Digital Marketing Courses you can take to upgrade your knowledge on Brand Awareness

KPIs you can use to measure Brand Awareness

Impressions - An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or other site on the Google Network.

Click Through rate (CTR) – CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown.

Avg. Cost Per Click (Avg. CPC) - The average amount that you've been charged for a click on your ad. Average cost-per-click is calculated by dividing the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) - A way to bid where you pay per one thousand views (impressions) on the Google Display Network.

Brand Awareness forms essential part of any Digital Marketing campaign and overall success of the Marketing strategy of a company. As long as people remember your brand and has positive associations with it, your company will be a success.

  References  

1. KOPP, CAROL M. Brand Awareness. Investopedia.  [Online] 21 April 2019.  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brandawareness.asp.

2. Stahl,  Stapehanie. success-differentiators-b2b-research. www.cnotentmarketinfinstitute.com.  [Online] Content Marketing institute, 22 october 2019.  https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/10/success-differentiators-b2b-research/.

3. Summit, Open  Mobile. Open Mobile Summit 2017. www.brandquaterly.com. [Online]  30 November 2017.  http://www.brandquarterly.com/event/open-mobile-summit-2017.

4. Kotler, Philip.  Marketing Managemnt. s.l. : Pearson, 2018. 978-93-325-5718-5.

[techguydigital23-blog]

10 Things You Should Know About Google Analytics

There are various steps in the customer journey, where the customer makes decision about engaging, dis-engage or take further step to interact with the processes designed for the customer to arrive at a decision.

That decision most of the times pertains to buying/purchase of product/service to the customer. Depending upon the effectiveness of the process, the customer chooses to buy the offering or reject the offering provided by the company.

Marketers very well know the importance of customer journey and the necessity to track the decision-making process. Here comes the role of ‘Analytics for digital marketing.’ The company’s digital marketer will be concerned about the customer’s online journey and decision-making process.

So, digging further ahead, here are 10 things you should know about google analytics –

  #10 Maximize relevance of your data

The data you want from Google Analytics will be provided as you want and Google will provide you sufficient amount of data to play with. It is your job as an analyst to make the relevant meaning out of that data.

The best marketer will go all out to put the best metrics which are actually required by the company to measure the progress of the company. Any other amount will only lead more to collection of garbage.  

  #9 Keep in Mind the Overall Picture of Analytics

Advance Segments is the place for you. Google Analytics provides extensive details on the customer segments and it segments your customers based on their characteristics. The Advance Segments is on the top left of the screen with a selection box. There are lots of characteristics of visitors that are collected by default by Google Analytics, from details about their browsers and screen sizes to the sites that they come from and the types of pages they view.

  #8 Set Up Your Account Properly

Google Analytics allows you to have up to 100 Google Analytics accounts under one Google account. You can have up to 50 website properties under one Google Analytics account. You can have up to 25 views under one website property.

  #7 Tracking Code is Important

In the Google Analytics account, you will have to navigate to click to the Get Tracking ID button. This way you will get your Google Tracking ID. The tracking ID code you get, you would have to paste it to every page you want to track.

#6 Set up Goals

There are multiple types of goals which are very essential for the success of your business. You can setup the benchmark as you wish. Every interaction you track on your website can be broken down into one of 4 Google Analytics goal types:

Destination

Duration

Pages/Visit

Events

 #5 Setting up of Site Search

Site search will allow you to track down any site search made on your website therefore, giving your more insights about what the customers are looking for on your website. Site search will provide you valuable data from your customers.

  #4 View Google Analytics Data

The google analytics data has been provided to you very meticulously. Every time you log in into google analytics account, you will be provided with the audience view report, through which you can know more about the consumer behaviour and their characteristics.

  #3 Various Types of the Reports

In Google Analytics, you have different report sections. Under Audience reports you have Active Users, Cohort Analysis, Demographics, Interests etc. Under acquisition, you have All Traffic, AdWords, Search Engine Optimisation, Social, Campaigns. Under Behaviour section, you have Site Content, Site Speed, Site Search, Events, AdSense.

  #2 Conversions Are Important

If you setup Goals in your account, you will be able to see how many conversions your website has received. (Goals > Overview) and what URLs they happened upon (Goals > Goal URLs). You can also see the path that visitors took to complete the conversion (Goals > Reverse Goal Path).

Speaking of goals and conversions, most of the tables within Google Analytics standard reports will tie specific data to your conversions. For example, you can see the number of conversions made by visitors from California in the Audience > Geo > Location report.

  #1 You Can Share Your Google Analytics Data

You don't have to give your Google account information over to someone who needs access to your Google Analytics data. You just need to go to your Admin menu and under the Account, Property (website) or View you want someone to see, click the User Management menu.

From there, you can add the email address of anyone you would like to view your Google Analytics data and choose the permissions you would like them to have.

[techguydigital23-blog]

What Is ORM? Why Do We Even Need It?

The overall objective ORM (Online Reputation Management) is monitoring, addressing, mitigating SERPs (search engine result pages) or mentions in the online media and of the web content. It revolves around, how your brand is being perceived by the customers. In rather simple words, has your brand’s online presence been working with or against you?

Services Marketing pertains to a concept called ‘Moment of Truth’, which is the exact time when the customer forms an opinion about the product or the services offered by the company.  This is an important aspect for pursuing Digital Marketing at large.

As a manager, it is pertinent for you to understand how the customer forms an opinion about your organisation, whether it is in a positive or negative light.

In 2011, Google came up with the term, ‘Zero Moment of Truth’, meaning, ‘the moment in the buying process when the consumer researches a product prior to purchase.’ We know for a fact how much we read reviews and try to gather a perception of the brand before making a purchase. Reviews and the online image are as important for the company as it is for the customer to make a purchase decision.

It is true that the company by itself cannot control all the online reviews, but can certainly influence the way reviews are put out in public and the interaction with the audience. Every aspiring marketer wants to deliver wow factor to his customers and surely, he wouldn’t want to miss out on this aspect of marketing.

That’s why you need Online Reputation Management process for your organisation, to improve the customer journey and to reflect the right brand image in the minds of the customers.

  Creating Good Online Presence, but How?

 Respond to the reviews – Put your google alerts on and respond to your customers reviews positively. Even if they had a bad experience, try to make it positive experience for them. A quick and effective response can help increase customer delight and thus also helps increase customer loyalty.

Develop good content strategy – Developing quality content will work for a long time for you. Yes, the amount of content you put doesn’t matter if it is not of value to your customers. It may give your page higher ranking for short duration, but quality content goes long way.

Strengthen brand presence – Be proactive in responding to your customers by being available on all the social media platforms.

Customer Centricity – Be obsessed with customer delight and customer satisfaction. Retaining your customers is more profitable than expanding and getting new customers.

That’s all about ORM in brief.