Social media marketing: 5 reasons it’s good for business

Welcome to the 21^st century, where your entire customer base can be found online. Now this is a great thing to hear if you are a business owner. Gone are the days that you have to telemarket or sell your product door-to-door to your potential customers. Now, it can all be done with a click of a button. Okay, maybe two or three.

This is where the benefits of social media marketing come into play. For those of you who don’t know, social media marketing is the technique that targets social networks and applications to spread brand awareness or promote particular products.

So, why is social media good for business?

1. Brand Awareness

As mentioned above, brand awareness is one of many benefits of social media for business. A good brand on social media will help to build a better reputation, which in turn will help make people trust you. These networks will expose your company to new eyes that you wouldn’t have even thought of targeting with a traditional marketing strategy. Social media can help you find the people who are already talking about your business and with that information you can use it to reach even more people.

By simply having a social media page, your brand will benefit and if your business uses it frequent often it can help produce a wide audience.

2. Customer Satisfaction

Benefits of social media for business can come in a number of ways. The tactic called social listening can help you understand what people think about your brand. Not only that, you also have the power to monitor mentions of your company. In order to be effective in social listening, you have to be open-minded, observant and can’t expect that all the comments will be positive. Negative comments can also help your company because if enough people are saying the same thing, it would be in your company’s best to rethink that particular product and/or service.  A brand that is devoted to customer satisfaction will be viewed in a positive light, regardless of if you are responding to a positive or negative comment.

3. Relevancy

Staying relevant is a significant reason why social media is important for business. We don’t think there is a better way of staying relevant than directly addressing the customers’ wants and needs. Social media gives your company that insight to be able to help you evolve and deliver high-quality results for your business and your customers.

4. Lead Generation

Over 75% of B2C companies generate leads through Facebook. Is yours one of them? Social media sites can help you target leads for your business that will turn into sales down the line. This process is done after you have completed social listening as mentioned above.

If you put your brand into an atmosphere where the conversations are already happening, chances are someone online will mention your brand to a family member or friend. This is where the cycle begins and it provides you an opportunity to close them.

5. Search Engine Rankings

This is where the big benefits of social media for business come are introduced — the rankings. Although search engine rankings won’t be directly correlated with social media presence, it is the high-quality content that is integrated with keywords that does. Once your company’s social media profiles start to deliver quality content, you will start to create a community where your followers will start to like and share your content. This gives your company the opportunity to get in front of industry influencers who will then write about your company and provide back links — which will directly increase your search engine rankings.

The longer you wait to put your company on any social media platform, the longer you are hindering your success. When social media marketing is done right, you have the potential create brand awareness, respond and respect customers’ comments, stay relevant with your target audience, gain leads and have the potential to appear higher in search engine rankings.

If this is the direction that you want to take your company, contact Edkent Media so we can start growing your business today.

 

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Social media marketing: 5 reasons it’s good for business

Welcome to the 21^st century, where your entire customer base can be found online. Now this is a great thing to hear if you are a business owner. Gone are the days that you have to telemarket or sell your product door-to-door to your potential customers. Now, it can all be done with a click of a button. Okay, maybe two or three.

This is where the benefits of social media marketing come into play. For those of you who don’t know, social media marketing is the technique that targets social networks and applications to spread brand awareness or promote particular products.

So, why is social media good for business?

1. Brand Awareness

As mentioned above, brand awareness is one of many benefits of social media for business. A good brand on social media will help to build a better reputation, which in turn will help make people trust you. These networks will expose your company to new eyes that you wouldn’t have even thought of targeting with a traditional marketing strategy. Social media can help you find the people who are already talking about your business and with that information you can use it to reach even more people.

By simply having a social media page, your brand will benefit and if your business uses it frequent often it can help produce a wide audience.

2. Customer Satisfaction

Benefits of social media for business can come in a number of ways. The tactic called social listening can help you understand what people think about your brand. Not only that, you also have the power to monitor mentions of your company. In order to be effective in social listening, you have to be open-minded, observant and can’t expect that all the comments will be positive. Negative comments can also help your company because if enough people are saying the same thing, it would be in your company’s best to rethink that particular product and/or service.  A brand that is devoted to customer satisfaction will be viewed in a positive light, regardless of if you are responding to a positive or negative comment.

3. Relevancy

Staying relevant is a significant reason why social media is important for business. We don’t think there is a better way of staying relevant than directly addressing the customers’ wants and needs. Social media gives your company that insight to be able to help you evolve and deliver high-quality results for your business and your customers.

4. Lead Generation

Over 75% of B2C companies generate leads through Facebook. Is yours one of them? Social media sites can help you target leads for your business that will turn into sales down the line. This process is done after you have completed social listening as mentioned above.

If you put your brand into an atmosphere where the conversations are already happening, chances are someone online will mention your brand to a family member or friend. This is where the cycle begins and it provides you an opportunity to close them.

5. Search Engine Rankings

This is where the big benefits of social media for business come are introduced — the rankings. Although search engine rankings won’t be directly correlated with social media presence, it is the high-quality content that is integrated with keywords that does. Once your company’s social media profiles start to deliver quality content, you will start to create a community where your followers will start to like and share your content. This gives your company the opportunity to get in front of industry influencers who will then write about your company and provide back links — which will directly increase your search engine rankings.

The longer you wait to put your company on any social media platform, the longer you are hindering your success. When social media marketing is done right, you have the potential create brand awareness, respond and respect customers’ comments, stay relevant with your target audience, gain leads and have the potential to appear higher in search engine rankings.

If this is the direction that you want to take your company, contact Edkent Media so we can start growing your business today.

 

The post Social media marketing: 5 reasons it’s good for business appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

Edmonton SEO

SEO Edmonton |#1 Edmonton SEO Company | Edkent Media

SEO Edmonton – Are you looking for a reliable Edmonton SEO Company that produces results? Edkent Media is a Canadian-based internet marketing company with a global reputation when it comes to producing real results with your return on investment (ROI) top of mind. Not only do we excel in the area of search engine optimization (SEO), but we also create innovative website designs that are made with the intention of receiving high conversion rates — the higher these rates, the higher the possibility for leads.

Edmonton SEO Impacts on the Buying Cycle

The key aspect that SEO provides is that it will increase your company’s sales without respectively increasing your marketing costs. This alone will help grow your profits rapidly and over time. SEO can further your overall business goals at a better ROI than most, if not all, other comparable forms of digital marketing. This is because of its fundamental effect on better conversions and mores sales at little additional cost.

At Edkent Media, we understand the important role that SEO plays in the research and buying cycle. By attracting potential customers to your website through the analysis of targeted and relevant keywords, SEO functions as a prospect magnet. These keywords and phrases are ranked high in search engines where your target audience is looking for their information about them. An effective SEO strategy finds where your customers are and directing them to your website to provide them a solution.

Our three key factors for a successful Edmonton SEO strategy are:

Content

• Keywords
• Domain Name
• Original Images
• Site Structure
• Site Speed
• Originality and length of site content

Activity

• Traffic
• Bounce Rate
• Engagement of visitors
• Updates

Linking

• Inbound (other websites linking to yours)
• Outbound (links to related websites from yours)
• Links from social media (including likes and shares)
• Links from authority sites

SEO Edmonton and Brand Building

Branding can often be costly, complex, and chaotic. The strategy of throwing things at your customers (figuratively, of course) in hopes that something will stick in their mind isn’t the most productive way to build your brand. With the help from your Edmonton SEO company, the use of SEO can help advance your branding campaign and make your company more memorable to your target audience.

By implementing an efficient SEO strategy, you can help get the ball rolling, by ranking your website on page 1 of Google, which will attract more traffic to your website. As more people start to visit your website, get familiar with your business and what you offer, and even order from you, the chances that they will return or tell a family member or friend about your company increase tremendously.

If your company is ready to take the next step into brand development or just increasing overall online sales, get in touch with SEO Edmonton Company Edkent Media for a free consolation today!

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15 Questions to Help You Define Your Target Audience

Before you can be successful with any business endeavour, you need to do a complete target market analysis to determine your ideal customer.

Creating a target market profile is often the most overlooked and difficult aspect of online marketing. But if you don’t take this step then your response rates will be low and you will likely waste a significant amount of money.

To help you determine your target market profile, we have compiled a list of 15 key questions to ask yourself to help with the process.

1. What is your target demographic?

These are characteristics of your target market profile that consider areas such as age group, gender and marital status.

2. Where do they live?

Determining where your target audience lives will help you with location-based marketing campaigns as well as where to target traditional marketing methods.

3. What industry do they work in?

The industry your target market works in may be more relevant to some business models than others. A simple example of target market industry would be targeting human resources if your company is selling an employee evaluation tool.

4. How much do they earn?

This question will help you determine the price range of your product down the line. If your target market analysis shows that your ideal customer is on the low- to mid-range salary, you need to ensure that your prices reflect that and not that of a high-range salary.

5. What are their hobbies?

Your answers should include both their hobbies and how they spend their free time such as playing baseball, running marathons or spending time at home with their families.

6. How do they get their information?

This used to be an easier target market question to answer, but with the introduction of the internet, it has made it more difficult. A target market example for this would be online (social media, online articles, Google etc.), traditional (newspapers, magazines, word of mouth) and advertising methods (billboards, transit advertising, and media advertising).

7. How do they communicate?

Again with the introduction to technology, these methods have changed. It can vary from face-to-face conversations and email to telephone calls. Determining this factor can help with your customer service department in knowing what the appropriate method to contact the customer would be and how quickly they are likely to respond.

8. How do they think?

This is a target market question that isn’t always evaluated as much as it should be. When answering this question consider personality type, attitude, values, lifestyle and behaviour.

9. Who is important to them?

Since referrals and peer support are crucial factors in business growth, it’s important to know who your target market is close to. From learning that information, you are now able to strategize ways to reach them as well.

10. How can you best reach your target market?

This factors into how your target market profile likes to communicate. Once you determine that, you can take those findings and tailor them to your proposed marketing strategy.

11. What challenges do they face?

By understanding the challenges and frustrations that your target market has, it will help shift the conversation from how they can help you to how your business can help them.

12. Can your service or product help them with these challenges?

First off, the answer should be yes or you need to reconsider your target audience. If you take the time to answer this question effectively, it can help shape upcoming marketing strategies.

13. What pushes them to make purchasing decisions?

To better answer this question, you may also need to consider what influences them to make the final step, and what obstacles might be in their way.

14. Who had these customers before you?

By determining who had these customers before you, your company can learn from their mistakes in order to retain these customers for the long run.

15. What are their biggest objections to using your service or product?

This may be the most crucial question you need to answer. Without answering this question, you will never get the conversions for your business that you want and expect.

Once you have defined your target audience, your company will be able to create highly-marketed marketing campaigns that can help increase brand awareness and encourage brand loyalty.

If you need assistance defining your target audience or creating effective PPC and social media marketing campaigns, contact Edkent Media today!

The post 15 Questions to Help You Define Your Target Audience appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

15 Questions to Help You Define Your Target Audience

Before you can be successful with any business endeavour, you need to do a complete target market analysis to determine your ideal customer.

Creating a target market profile is often the most overlooked and difficult aspect of online marketing. But if you don’t take this step then your response rates will be low and you will likely waste a significant amount of money.

To help you determine your target market profile, we have compiled a list of 15 key questions to ask yourself to help with the process.

1. What is your target demographic?

These are characteristics of your target market profile that consider areas such as age group, gender and marital status.

2. Where do they live?

Determining where your target audience lives will help you with location-based marketing campaigns as well as where to target traditional marketing methods.

3. What industry do they work in?

The industry your target market works in may be more relevant to some business models than others. A simple example of target market industry would be targeting human resources if your company is selling an employee evaluation tool.

4. How much do they earn?

This question will help you determine the price range of your product down the line. If your target market analysis shows that your ideal customer is on the low- to mid-range salary, you need to ensure that your prices reflect that and not that of a high-range salary.

5. What are their hobbies?

Your answers should include both their hobbies and how they spend their free time such as playing baseball, running marathons or spending time at home with their families.

6. How do they get their information?

This used to be an easier target market question to answer, but with the introduction of the internet, it has made it more difficult. A target market example for this would be online (social media, online articles, Google etc.), traditional (newspapers, magazines, word of mouth) and advertising methods (billboards, transit advertising, and media advertising).

7. How do they communicate?

Again with the introduction to technology, these methods have changed. It can vary from face-to-face conversations and email to telephone calls. Determining this factor can help with your customer service department in knowing what the appropriate method to contact the customer would be and how quickly they are likely to respond.

8. How do they think?

This is a target market question that isn’t always evaluated as much as it should be. When answering this question consider personality type, attitude, values, lifestyle and behaviour.

9. Who is important to them?

Since referrals and peer support are crucial factors in business growth, it’s important to know who your target market is close to. From learning that information, you are now able to strategize ways to reach them as well.

10. How can you best reach your target market?

This factors into how your target market profile likes to communicate. Once you determine that, you can take those findings and tailor them to your proposed marketing strategy.

11. What challenges do they face?

By understanding the challenges and frustrations that your target market has, it will help shift the conversation from how they can help you to how your business can help them.

12. Can your service or product help them with these challenges?

First off, the answer should be yes or you need to reconsider your target audience. If you take the time to answer this question effectively, it can help shape upcoming marketing strategies.

13. What pushes them to make purchasing decisions?

To better answer this question, you may also need to consider what influences them to make the final step, and what obstacles might be in their way.

14. Who had these customers before you?

By determining who had these customers before you, your company can learn from their mistakes in order to retain these customers for the long run.

15. What are their biggest objections to using your service or product?

This may be the most crucial question you need to answer. Without answering this question, you will never get the conversions for your business that you want and expect.

Once you have defined your target audience, your company will be able to create highly-marketed marketing campaigns that can help increase brand awareness and encourage brand loyalty.

If you need assistance defining your target audience or creating effective PPC and social media marketing campaigns, contact Edkent Media today!

The post 15 Questions to Help You Define Your Target Audience appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

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How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Your content marketing plan needs to be better than ever for 2017. Nearly one third of B2B marketers are spending 25% or more of their budgets on content marketing. You need to take the time to either create or revamp your content marketing strategy to make your company stand out in a crowded marketplace.

The best content marketing strategies all start with a brainstorming session about the purpose and response that best reflects your business goals.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is often confused with the general term of content strategy. The content marketing strategy analyzes alternate ways in which content marketing can be utilized across the customer cycle. Simply put, creating a content marketing strategy looks at how content marketing can be used in a strategic way with and for other marketing strategies that the company has in place.

Determine the Company’s Objectives for Content Marketing

This is crucial with any marketing strategy and this doesn’t change with content marketing. What is the purpose of doing this? Are you trying to create brand awareness, improve customer retention or generate leads?

If you don’t know why, then you shouldn’t move any further until you do, unless you want to throw your money away.

Create What Will Make Your Company Stand Out

The best content marketing strategies have one thing in common. And that is, that they are not common to one another. Your content marketing distribution needs to be unique. The content itself needs to be unique to your company, even if you are just revamping it.

You have to give your customers a reason to switch to your business. If you simply copy the competition, then the customers will just stay with the company that they are more familiar with.

Collect Data on Your Content Marketing

The objectives that were determined above will ultimately dictate your metrics. These metrics can range from consumption, sharing and lead generation, to sales and return on investment.  If you don’t put these metrics in place, there is no way of knowing if your contents of your marketing plan are actually working, and whether or not they need to be revamped.

Chances are you won’t get it right the first time, but there is no need to feel discouraged. The real success story is that you are actually taking the time for your business to amplify its achievements —no matter how they are measured.

Define your Audience

Your audience is also dictated by your core objectives, which is why we mentioned that you can’t successfully move any further without figuring them out. Once you determine your target audience, create personas and research to determine optimal content types and ways they consume it. Get to know your personas as well as you know your closest friends and family.

Determine What Audience Needs Are

Now that you know who your audience is and everything else about them, you need to determine what you can do for them. The best content marketing strategies are based on customers’ needs and wants. If your company doesn’t provide either, then why would the customer bother giving your company a chance?

This determination needs to go beyond the numbers. Your marketing team needs to have these conversations and start to understand the needs, so your company can then create persuasive methods to turn the needs into dollars.

Create Content Execution Plan

The goal here is to determine where and how your audience consumes information. To say that your audience is on social media is not enough because it is not a generic platform. You need to determine if that means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat… do you see what we mean?

Not only do you need to find out where your audience is but also what type of content needs to be developed during the different stages of the marketing funnel.

Your content planning should be extensive. Each time your post you should know its publishing date, format, author, description, audience needs, targeted persona, funnel stage, call-to-action and measurement (or metric). Consider a well-detailed calendar for your content marketing strategy with views every weeks, month, quarter and year. If you know when content is supposed to be done, there is less of a chance of falling behind or missing your targeted purpose.

Content Amplification Planning

The execution plan, while thorough, is not enough. That’s why content amplification always appears in the best content marketing strategies.

Amplification can be done by adapting your content to the different platforms in which you share your content to personalizing the experience for the customer whenever possible.  A great way to amplify content is by creating the solid customer base who appreciates the content your company creates. From there, these customers take some of the workload off because they start to share the content for you. This is why the introduction of social media has been huge in the area of content amplification.

Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all template for a content marketing strategy. Your company needs to differentiate itself and make sure that content marketing strategy is documented for your entire staff to see. It’s crucial that your goals and mission are known by all your employees, so they can contribute to it on a timely basis.

If you feel that creating a content marketing strategy is too much for your company to handle, contact Edkent Media for the best results based on your objectives!

The post How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Your content marketing plan needs to be better than ever for 2017. Nearly one third of B2B marketers are spending 25% or more of their budgets on content marketing. You need to take the time to either create or revamp your content marketing strategy to make your company stand out in a crowded marketplace.

The best content marketing strategies all start with a brainstorming session about the purpose and response that best reflects your business goals.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is often confused with the general term of content strategy. The content marketing strategy analyzes alternate ways in which content marketing can be utilized across the customer cycle. Simply put, creating a content marketing strategy looks at how content marketing can be used in a strategic way with and for other marketing strategies that the company has in place.

Determine the Company’s Objectives for Content Marketing

This is crucial with any marketing strategy and this doesn’t change with content marketing. What is the purpose of doing this? Are you trying to create brand awareness, improve customer retention or generate leads?

If you don’t know why, then you shouldn’t move any further until you do, unless you want to throw your money away.

Create What Will Make Your Company Stand Out

The best content marketing strategies have one thing in common. And that is, that they are not common to one another. Your content marketing distribution needs to be unique. The content itself needs to be unique to your company, even if you are just revamping it.

You have to give your customers a reason to switch to your business. If you simply copy the competition, then the customers will just stay with the company that they are more familiar with.

Collect Data on Your Content Marketing

The objectives that were determined above will ultimately dictate your metrics. These metrics can range from consumption, sharing and lead generation, to sales and return on investment.  If you don’t put these metrics in place, there is no way of knowing if your contents of your marketing plan are actually working, and whether or not they need to be revamped.

Chances are you won’t get it right the first time, but there is no need to feel discouraged. The real success story is that you are actually taking the time for your business to amplify its achievements —no matter how they are measured.

Define your Audience

Your audience is also dictated by your core objectives, which is why we mentioned that you can’t successfully move any further without figuring them out. Once you determine your target audience, create personas and research to determine optimal content types and ways they consume it. Get to know your personas as well as you know your closest friends and family.

Determine What Audience Needs Are

Now that you know who your audience is and everything else about them, you need to determine what you can do for them. The best content marketing strategies are based on customers’ needs and wants. If your company doesn’t provide either, then why would the customer bother giving your company a chance?

This determination needs to go beyond the numbers. Your marketing team needs to have these conversations and start to understand the needs, so your company can then create persuasive methods to turn the needs into dollars.

Create Content Execution Plan

The goal here is to determine where and how your audience consumes information. To say that your audience is on social media is not enough because it is not a generic platform. You need to determine if that means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat… do you see what we mean?

Not only do you need to find out where your audience is but also what type of content needs to be developed during the different stages of the marketing funnel.

Your content planning should be extensive. Each time your post you should know its publishing date, format, author, description, audience needs, targeted persona, funnel stage, call-to-action and measurement (or metric). Consider a well-detailed calendar for your content marketing strategy with views every weeks, month, quarter and year. If you know when content is supposed to be done, there is less of a chance of falling behind or missing your targeted purpose.

Content Amplification Planning

The execution plan, while thorough, is not enough. That’s why content amplification always appears in the best content marketing strategies.

Amplification can be done by adapting your content to the different platforms in which you share your content to personalizing the experience for the customer whenever possible.  A great way to amplify content is by creating the solid customer base who appreciates the content your company creates. From there, these customers take some of the workload off because they start to share the content for you. This is why the introduction of social media has been huge in the area of content amplification.

Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all template for a content marketing strategy. Your company needs to differentiate itself and make sure that content marketing strategy is documented for your entire staff to see. It’s crucial that your goals and mission are known by all your employees, so they can contribute to it on a timely basis.

If you feel that creating a content marketing strategy is too much for your company to handle, contact Edkent Media for the best results based on your objectives!

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