Start Planning Your Summer Promotion Now (it’s not too early)!

While it might seem like Spring just got here, Summertime is right around the corner – and so is your chance to run a fun and engaging summer contest or sweepstakes!

Het goede nieuws is, Heyo has everything you need to plan, produce and manage your campaign so you can be live in no time! And if you’re struggling to think of an idea for your promotion, check out some of these examples for inspiration!

Father’s Day Giveaway

Father’s Day is a great opportunity to run a UGC Contest or Sweepstakes. En, a brand doesn’t have to be directly associated with fatherhood or parenting in general in order to be able to capitalize on the buzz surrounding the holiday. Chances are your audience already participates in Father’s Day anyway, so why not engage them by tapping into behavior they’re already doing, for a chance to win something that IS relevant to your brand? Consider inviting people to submit photos of how your brand or product is helping them celebrate their fathers. Of, run a simple Enter-to-Win Sweepstakes for a chance to win a prize bundle to help them throw a festive Father’s Day celebration!

The same rules can apply if you want to run a Fourth of July Promotion!

There is so much buzz and activity surrounding the 4th of July holiday that you can easily run a contest or sweepstakes that allows your customers to share what the holiday means to them for a chance to win a brand-relevant prize.

En tenslotte, there’s always a great opportunity to invite your audience to celebrate SUMMER in general! Have people share photos or videos of how they are enjoying their summers in the context of a UGC Contest or Sweepstakes! And then have people vote on their favorites in order to drive engagement and awareness of the promotion!

Ready to start planning your summertime promotion? Klik hier to schedule a live demo with a Heyo Account Representative.

3 Major SEO Opportunities in 2017

Every year, DEZE (zoekmachine optimalisatie) presents different and better opportunities for businesses compared to the previous one. There are almost always algorithm changes being implemented for better results. Evenzo, the strategies for better ranking are ever dynamic. If you are not privy to the latest SEO trends and therefore fail to take advantage of the existing opportunities, your website could be rendered useless within a short time.

Many small business owners are investing less in SEO, according to a survey by Manta Wellness Index. This is interesting because the SEO arena has several opportunities that businesses could utilize in order to have a competitive advantage. Onder, we will highlight 3 Major SEO Opportunities in 2017 that we believe could have the biggest influence on business success.

First Opportunity: Organic Traffic

The survey mentioned above revealed that few business owners are planning to use SEO, content marketing, and pay-per-click advertising this year. What they do not know is that they are losing an excellent opportunity to beat out the competition. It seems a majority of businesses are planning to rely on ads. The benefit of organic search is that it is long-term and it draws visitors from natural searches on search engines. The question that arises then is this: How does a website win this organic traffic?

The secret lies in the kind of content posted on their website and blog. Even if building this kind of traffic requires time input, the returns are worth the wait. SEO Chicago experts advise business owners to give SEO and organic traffic at least six months before making their analyses.

Second Opportunity: Other Search Engines

Many people assume that Google is the Alpha and Omega of online search. But did you know that Bing controls about 30% of total search engine traffic? If you ask me, this is an audience to be taken seriously. It becomes even more exciting when you consider that a bulk of Bing’s traffic is voice-centered (voice is covered in my next point).

In 2017, you want to optimize for other search engines. Optimizing for Google and Bing could vary here and there but for the most part, they are similar. You will reap bigger rewards if you find a way of optimizing for the two sites concurrently. Bijvoorbeeld, consider publishing content and follow up with a powerful social media promotion.

Third Opportunity: Voice Search

Data shows that voice search is increasing in 2017. This has been the trend since 2010, so chances are that this will continue for several years. There are two reasons why every business needs to take this opportunity seriously.

Eerste, technology is improving, hence making voice recognition seamless. Tweede, more adults and teenagers are joining the voice community. Onlangs, Google representatives revealed that voice now accounts for around 20% of mobile queries. This data suggests that voice search optimization is critical because it guarantees a competitive advantage in 2017 en verder.

Conclusie

Has your SEO strategy been effective so far in 2017? History shows that SEO rules are always changing and on the move. Whatever worked in 2016 may not necessarily have the same impact this year.

Organic search and voice search are already on top and those in the know have devised strategies to address these trends. Google is still the mother of all search engines, but it does not hurt to optimize for other ones as well. If you want to win the SEO game, then you need to use these three opportunities and others available hier before it is too late.

This piece was originally written by Keith Randolph for the Votigo blog.

Top 7 Productivity Tools for Social Media Marketers

Any good marketer knows that in order to stay ahead of the game these days, you have to take advantage of everything that social media has to offer. This isn’t just a place where people go to chat and play games. Social media is one of the best marketing tools to come along in decades. Maar, you need to know how to be productive and not just waste your time fooling around on social media websites. There are tools you can use to be more productive with your social media marketing. Here are seven of our favorites.

• Crystal Knows – Get real time coaching for all social media conversations. Import contacts from social media and Google to get personality reports. Use this information, get coaching, and access personality data from millions of profiles to learn about others before you get into discussions with them. Hoe meer je weet over hen, the better your discussions are going to be in the long run.
• Time Doctor – Do you know how you spend your time? You might think you do, but if you really break it down and look at it, you might just find that you waste a lot of time in the run of a day. Time Doctor can help you figure out where you are spending your time, and how get your life back on the right track. This is the ultimate time management tool, and one that all social media marketers need to take advantage of in order to get the most out of their marketing efforts.
• WriteRack – If you really want to start a Tweetstorm, but you don’t want to spend hours creating Tweets, here is a tool that you need to start using now. WriteRack will create Tweets for you. All you have to do is type or copy and paste the information you want to send out. WriteRack will format the information into a series of Tweets. It will also post them for you, one after the other, in the correct order. This is free to use, so there is no reason not to check it out now.
• Polish My Writing – Check out “After the Deadline” at the Polish My Writing website. Here you can enter anything that you have written, and you will get a critique of everything from spelling and grammar to style suggestions and more. It is free to use this tool, and it can really do a lot to help improve your writing skills. If you are relying on social media for marketing, you need to be able to write well, and this tool will give you the edge you need.
• Hey Focus – Even though social media is your focus, it can also be pretty distracting. You get on a site to make a post, and you end up checking out other posts, chatting playing games, etc. All of the sudden, you have completely lost focus of what you were doing. It happens to the best of us. Maar, you can take steps to change that. This Mac app lets you block the websites that are distracting you from getting things done.
• Reedsy – Maybe you want to take the next step and actually write a book, and you want to use social media to promote it. Reedsy is a great tool for this. You can use it to find just the right team for your book (editors, graphic designers, etc.) to collaborate on projects. Their team will help you find the right people, and provide you with the tools you need to work together for awesome project results.
• FoxType – This is another tool that will help you to become a better writer, even if you are only writing short paragraphs and Tweets. Simply copy and paste your document into FoxType, and it will tell you all kinds of interesting things. Anything highlighted in red is bad, such as jargon words, poor sentence structure, etc. You can also use this tool to check for things like formality, politeness, get alternative words, en nog veel meer.

Bonus

In addition to the above tools, we thought we would give you a bonus, and talk about some cool tricks for social media marketers.

• Use an Editorial Calendar – You can save yourself a lot of time if you use an editorial calendar. It will help you plan out all of your content, so you know exactly what you need to post, waar, en wanneer. Things you will find in your calendar include pitched posts (ideas for new posts), assigned posts (taken from pitched and assigned to team members), in progress posts, drafts without images, and final reviews. This is going to keep your blogging and writing a lot more organized.
• Be Choosy about Social Networks – Not all social networks work for marketing all types of businesses. You need to narrow in on the ones that work for you, and concentrate your efforts there. Don’t waste a lot of time on the social networks that aren’t working for your business. To know which ones are best, you will need to take advantage of analytics tools to get all of the metrics.
• Be Picky about Content – You need to publish the right content for your audience. This means that you need to learn as much about your audience as possible, and then write in a way that markets directly to them. Content that gets the best results includes content that is optimized for search engine results, content that competitors see traffic with, and content that gets shared a lot.
• Rehash Old Content – Just because you have already published something, it doesn’t mean that you should never publish it again. In feite, it is just the opposite in many cases. If the content is really great, it deserves another go around. Of, it may be that some of your audience missed it the first time it was published. You can continue to get value from older posts if you keep sharing them every so often.

5 Ways to Build Customer Trust & Reputation with Social Media

In the world of digital marketing, social media is considered to be one of the most powerful channels you can use to promote your business and build a sound relationship with your customers. Because it can either make or break your relationship with them, it becomes critical to take special care while planning a social media marketing strategy.

Creating a powerful social media marketing strategy with an aim to build a robust relationship with customers and maintain a good brand reputation is an important task. Right away, you need to determine which platforms will be targeted.

While determining the platforms, it is essential to know the current business trends and the outcomes you are looking to achieve. Daarnaast, selection of the social media platforms should be determined by considering your target audience. Als resultaat, you can reach a potential audience and attract loyal customers to your business.

Hier zijn 6 strategies that can be helpful in knowing how to engage a large number of customers and retain a strong relationship with them.

#1 – ALWAYS KEEP WHAT THE CUSTOMER NEEDS IN MIND

One of the most basic principles of social media marketing is to identify your customers’ needs. Maar, the issue is that entrepreneurs run after revenue and commit the mistake of only focusing on a sales proposition. If you do the same, now is the time to make a change.

People make use of social media for their entertainment or to grasp some useful information. Nu, when you’re continuously shooting posts with selling purpose on social media, then there are high chances to miss your potential customers.

It would be better to focus on the needs of the customers and offer them accordingly. Adopting this method would not only help you in attracting an audience at large but also it would build trust with the customers that your company offers something of their interest.

#2 – VALUE (AND RESPECT) THEIR TIME BY RESPONDING

Just as important as your posted content itself is the need to respond to your customers and make them feel heard. This will result in customer satisfaction and eventually it can help in building a strong relationship with them.

#3 – ALWAYS TRY TO EXCEED YOUR CUSTOMERS’ EXPECTATIONS

One of the most efficient techniques that social media marketers need to concentrate on is to offer more than what your customers typically expect.

When a customer feels that they are served with something that is more worthy than what they were expecting, there are high chances that they will trust you as a brand more readily.

By exceeding expectations, you portray how important your customer is to you and this will lead to a positive brand experience for them. Ook, this gesture would encourage them to visit you again and again.

#4 – INTRODUCE CREATIVE WAYS TO ENGAGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS

None of us like to go through long and boring texts, so how can we expect users to engage with lengthy, texted content? Consider using creative images, puzzles or quizzes to engage them instead. This tactic also encourages people to come back to your page if they grow to expect that you consistently provide interesting and engaging content.

Make an attempt to publish creative and interactive posts on your social media accounts. When customers engage with the posts, showing gratitude towards them would be the smartest way to build a trustworthy relationship with them. You can either respond to them with a ‘Thank You’ note or reward them for participating. This way users will become more inclined to engage with your brand and also be more likely to talk about you with their own network of contacts.

#5 – MAINTAIN CONSISTENCY

Maintaining consistency means literally maintaining all the traits of your brand across all the different ways that you communicate. This can refer to the tone you use in your content, the logo of your brand, the layout and style of materials on your company’s website and of course your social media accounts. Everything should be consistent so that your customers get a reliable brand experience.

A FINAL WORD

While the world of social media marketing is certainly complex, it can also mean wonderful things for your brand if you use it the right way. I hope that these strategies help you as you work to define your own approach!

Over de auteur: Maulik Patel is the managing director at Blurbpoint Media. His passion for helping people in all aspects of online marketing flows through in the expert industry coverage he provides. Bovendien, Maulik also runs the best SEO companies of India, ClickMatix en HireSEOAgency, to help businesses with local SEO, link-building, content marketing and paid advertising.

Why Your Small-Business Social Media Strategy Could Be Inadequate

Social media is an excellent way to boost organic traffic for your small business. With the right social media marketing strategy, you can see a drastic increase in viewer numbers and sales. The problem is that many small businesses don’t have the right social media marketing strategy. This means that at best, the business is wasting its time on a strategy that isn’t working. At worst, it could be harming its own brand. Here are some of the most glaring social media mistakes made by small businesses, and how you can avoid them:

1. Not Having Social Media Accounts for Your Business

If you’re not currently using social media at all for your small business, then you’re missing out on the opportunity to reach a large number of potential customers. You wouldn’t be alone either, as only 53 percent of small businesses were active on social media as of 2015.

It’s understandable that you may not want to commit more of your business’s limited time and resources towards social media, but it’s becoming more and more of a necessity. Think about how necessary it is to have a website for your business in the modern era. It’s becoming the same with social media. To make sure that no one else snatches up your business’s name, you should register it with all the major social media networks, including Facebook, Tjilpen, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.

2. Trying to Do Too Much Too Soon

Many businesses jump headfirst into social media and immediately try to build their brands on every platform. The problem with this is that you can quickly spread yourself too thin. It’s not easy to interact with people and post consistently when you’re doing it across four or five different networks. Avoid this by building your brand on one or two networks at a time, achieving measurable results on each platform before deciding to expand out to another.

3. Not Using All Available Tools

A successful social media presence requires more than just one person sitting on their computer, thinking of interesting things to post. Constructing meaningful social media campaigns is hard and involves a lot of moving parts. Rather than trying to create and manage everything yourself, consider paying a nominal fee to use a social media-campagne management service that will allow you to easily create and automate campaigns.

Creating the campaign is only half the battle; You must also be able to track the campaign’s impact on your bottom-line in order to justify allocating resources to social media. Een business intelligence dashboard can give you a clear view of how much you’re spending and earning from each social media campaign, as well as from your other marketing channels. Armed with this data, you’ll be able to understand which marketing channels are right for you, and what level of social media presence is the most profitable.

4. Lack of Interaction

Remember that it’s called social media for a reason. You can’t just hop on, make the occasional post to promote your products, and call it a day. Your small business’s social media account and posts won’t get many viewers that way, and the viewers it doet get aren’t going to come back.

Your business needs to interact with people. You should be starting conversations, handling any customer issues that are brought up on your page, and making sure to respond to all your comments. One of the biggest pet peeves customers have is when a business doesn’t respond to them on social media or fails to respond in a timely manner. Show your customers that you care by responding promptly to them.

5. Not Being True to Your Brand

Businesses of all sizes have made the mistake of trying to pander to specific demographics on social media. One of the most common ways businesses do this is by inserting slang into their social media posts. It’s transparent and doesn’t leave a good impression in the target audience. Maintain a consistent brand voice. Slang is fine, as long as it fits your brand’s image. A skateboard shop can get away with using slang in its social media posts. An accounting firm will look ridiculous doing that. Different brands need to communicate in different ways.

Effective social media marketing isn’t easy, considering the large number of businesses that now use social media for that very purpose. But if you avoid these common mistakes and stay active, you’ll stay a step ahead of your competition.

6 Ways To Acquire More Clients For Your Startup Social Media Agency

Zo, you’ve decided to quit your day job to get your very own social media agency off the ground. Congratulations! The road ahead is going to be a challenging one, but at the same time extremely rewarding. With so many powerful social media management tools available to help you make a success of it, there has actually never been a better time to launch a social media marketing agency.

The biggest obstacle you’ll face is coming up with strategies to grow your agency while at the same time, providing a consistent level of service to your existing clients.

If your startup has been going for a while, I’m assuming that you’ve already answered the following questions (als niet, stop reading this right now, grab a notepad, and jot down the answers before reading on):

• Why did I start a social media business?
• Who is my ideal client?
• What services do I provide?
• What makes my agency different?
• How do my prices and service compare to my competition?

At Sendible, we have helped thousands of agencies worldwide implement winning social media strategies for their clients and in turn, expand their agency businesses using our software. In feite, 43% of them started out just like you, with the simple idea of offering affordable social media marketing services within a specific vertical. I’ve personally had the pleasure of seeing some of these agencies grow from literally having just one client to supporting hundreds!

Having had the pleasure of speaking with so many agencies over the years and having launched a successful startup myself, Hier zijn de 6 most effective tactics I’ve personally adopted at Sendible to gain clients early on.

1. Talk to friends and family – Tell your story

In the early days, it’s critical that you spread the word within your personal network. Let everyone know that you’ve taken the leap and have decided to start your social media agency. You’ll be surprised by how much support you’ll receive and how many introductions your immediate network will be able to make for you!

In order to gain buy-in, it’s essential that you have a credible story. Your future clients need to trust that you will deliver an incredible service for them. They need to know why you are better than the thousands of other agencies out there. Think about what you can offer that’s different. What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? What experience do you have that can showcase your past successes? What can you offer them that other agencies can’t? Onthouden, the best referrals come from people who know and trust you. Declan Dunn from The Growth Generator, has the following suggestion, “Start an agency with a few free clients, and learn what you’re worth, then charge for it. The experience will teach you so much, if you’re willing to learn.”

Once you have a few clients, even the free ones, you’ll be able to use case studies and testimonials to attract even more clients.

Here is how I recommend launching your agency to friends and family:

• Create a basic landing page on your website. If you don’t yet have a website, you can use a service like Unbounce to validate your startup idea. The landing page should list 1 challenge your prospective clients are facing and how you can solve it for them. There should be a simple form that captures their email address and phone number.
• Open Excel and add the names of your 20 closest friends and family members along with their email address, where they work, job title, phone number and links to their social media accounts. Later, you’ll extend this to include prospects from LinkedIn and other sources.
• Draft an email that looks something like this:

Er [friend’s name],

I hope you’re well. I’m going to be launching a new social media management service for [insert niche/vertical here]. De #1 challenge they face is [insert challenge here] and I want to provide a new type of service that [insert your solution here].

Do you know of anyone in this vertical that I could speak to?

Best,

[Jouw Naam]

P.S. I’ve created a landing page that explains what I’ll be offering. If you can share this link with your friends on Facebook, I’d really appreciate it: [insert link to landing page]

Voorbeeld:

Hi Bob,

I hope you’re well. I’m going to be launching a new social media management service for small independent coffee shops. De #1 challenge they face is competing with the large coffee chains like Starbucks and I want to provide a specialist service that helps them drive more business by spreading the word on social media and attracting more coffee lovers to their establishments.

Do you know of any coffee shop owners that may be interested in this?

Best,

Jane

P.S. I’ve created a landing page that explains what I’ll be offering. If you can share this link with your friends on Facebook and LinkedIn, I’d really appreciate it: [insert link to landing page]

2. Partner with a non-competing service provider in your niche

Other agencies and service providers who work with similarly sized clients but offer non-competing services can be a great source of new-business referrals. Bijvoorbeeld, if you offer social media management solutions for coffee shops, you could find a partner that offers SEO services and loyalty programs for small, independent restaurants.

Reach out to these service providers by explaining what you offer. Opnieuw, always start with a challenge they may be facing and how you could help them. It’s also worth adding that as you grow, it becomes essential to bring on a partner that can provide the content piece and deliver bespoke blog content for your clients.

Here is an example of an outreach email you may wish to send to a potential partner:

Hi Bob,

I’ve heard about the great work you’re doing in SEO for small restaurants. I was wondering if you have ever had any requests to provide social media management as well.

I would love to see if we can partner up to offer a package that includes both of our services.

Are you free to speak for 15 minutes on Tuesday?

Jane

Once you’ve developed a relationship with a partner, you may want to host a meetup or webinar to help spread the word about your offering. Cross promotion is a great way to attract new clients and showcase your expertise in the space.

3. Use LinkedIn to carve out your ideal prospects

Hunter Wills from Wovv.com, compares online relationships to dating. “Did your mom or dad ever tell you the dating rule, ‘Don’t kiss on the first date’? I think that applies to online relationships”, hij zegt.

Here are his LinkedIn tactics for building a list of your ideal prospects:

1. Using the advanced search features on LinkedIn, locate your ideal clients.
2. Add their details to the spreadsheet you created earlier, along with their Twitter and Instagram handles.
3. Every couple of weeks, make some sort of contact with each person in the spreadsheet. Start with a soft touch such as a like or comment on their updates.
4. After a few subtle interactions, look for an article they may enjoy based on their interests and share with them directly. You may also decide to tag them in an interesting photo you find using a hashtag search on Instagram by mentioning them in the comments.
5. Repeat this for 2-3 months and then send an email asking for a quick call. You can gently nudge towards this by mentioning that you’ve been connected for a while and that you’ve enjoyed their content and wanted to get to know their business a bit better.

Will explains, “A person’s favorite subject to talk about is themselves! Nadien, 90%+ of the people will then ask about you and your business. Talk about the parts of your business that answer the pain points they brought up. See if you can (gently) advance them down the sales funnel.”

4. Invite prospects to a free training session on social media

Everyone needs help doing a better job with their social media marketing. As a startup agency, your challenge is to be seen as an expert in your field.

Come up with a series of talks that you can present to your ideal prospects online. The idea here is that the first talk will be a free taster session. Gebruik een dienst als GoToWebinar of Google Hangouts to host your first session. The key is to make it simple for people to register.

‘How do I find attendees?', je vraagt. Goed, you can easily find new prospects by conducting a search on Quora or Twitter with the question “Where can I learn social media marketing?", "Is social media training really necessary for a business?"Of"What are the best resources for online social media training for small bedrijf?” Leave a response with details of a free online training course that you’ll be providing which will answer this question. Explain that the first session is free so there is no up-front commitment. Each registrant then becomes a potential client for your business.

Make sure you record your webinars and upload them to Youtube so that you can repurpose them on your blog, social media and direct people to them on Quora.

5. Let your clients build the business for you

Do remarkable work for your clients and let them build the business for you. By doing great work for your early clients, you can feel confident that they will inevitably bring more business to you through referrals.

To avoid disappointment and unhappy clients, start by setting realistic expectations from the get-go. A lot of clients, especially those who are new to social media marketing, will expect to see ROI fairly quickly. You need to make it clear that if they are looking for immediate ROI, there are other, more effective ways to do this and social isn’t always the best channel. Echter, by agreeing on common goals with your clients and defining steps that move you towards achieving them, your clients will have full transparency on where you are focusing your efforts.

Once you’ve signed your first client, start by defining the outcomes. What are they hoping to achieve? Once you know your client’s goals, you can then work backwards and define exactly how you will achieve those objectives. Each step needs to be measurable, time-bound and specific.

Bijvoorbeeld, let’s assume you and your client agree on the following goal:

“Increase visits to my coffee shop”

You would then define the measurable steps and strategies needed to get your client closer to reaching their desired outcome. These are SMART goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely.

Bijvoorbeeld:

1. Publiceren 1 blog post per week educating readers on the source of the coffee shop’s beans and flavors with each blog post achieving at least 20 shares on social media.
2. Post 2 photos of food and coffee from the coffee shop to Instagram every day with at least 20 likes per photo.
3. Increase Instagram followers door 100% by the end of the first month.
4. Drive at least 10 conversations on Twitter each week that show a positive intent from someone new to visit the coffee shop.
5. Add 5 more positive reviews on Yelp by the end of February.

By agreeing the objectives and key results needed to help your client be successful over a given period, you can prevent having to patch up relationships with disappointed clients later on. Since everything is agreed and signed off on up-front, as long as you can deliver progress towards the agreed-upon goals, you can be almost certain that you will have happy clients who are willing to recommend your service to others. You can also use this as a tactic later on to show your clients what you could potentially achieve with increased budgets.

6. Don’t let quality slip as you grow. Plan for scale early.

It’s important that you maintain a consistently high quality of work as you bring on more clients. The worst thing that can happen is that you start to grow and your first few clients who benefitted from most of your attention early on suddenly start to notice your level of service slipping and decide to leave you. Don’t be greedy. If taking on a new business means that the quality drops for your existing clients, say no for the moment and work on scaling up your operations to support your new demands.

Ideaal, you should plan for scale as soon as you’ve brought on your first client. The way you should think about scale is “how can I provide the exact same level of service to each of my clients, whether I have 1 of 100?"

You need to have an advanced social media management tool in place to ensure you can offer the same high level of service your clients have come to expect from you as you grow.

You may want to select a lesser-known tool to give your agency the edge over competitors. Offer them something they can’t find elsewhere. The tool you select should be designed specifically with startup agencies in mind, as you need a solution that gives you the productivity benefits to be able to go out and pitch to new prospects whilst at the same time, delighting your existing clients with excellent work.

As a minimum, the tool you select needs to have the following:

1. A unified social inbox. The biggest mistake that startup agencies make is using a tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to manage each of their clients’ streams individually. You don’t want to be jumping between your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and Instagram streams for each of your clients. You need a single-view, priority inbox for each client that allows you to respond to conversations from anywhere, no matter the source.
2. A focus on social media productivity naar help startup agencies service multiple clients easily and efficiently. You have limited resources, so the tool needs to act as an extra pair of hands! You should be using the additional time it gives you to pitch to new clients and grow your agency.
3. Content approval workflows that allow your clients to approve content before it goes out. This is also critical as you start to grow your team so that you can maintain the quality by double-checking content before it’s published. The worst that can happen is that you are responsible for ruining the reputation of one of the brands you’re managing!
4. The ability to bulk import content from a CSV file for each of your clients. The last thing you want to be doing is manually scheduling content for clients individually. Make sure the tool you select allows you to import your client’s campaigns with one click.
5. Easily source engaging content on specific topics for your clients that is more likely to drive positive interactions with the brand. Finding content can be extremely time consuming. The tool you select should recommend high quality content that will resonate with your client’s audience.
6. Automation of time-consuming lead generation activities such as social listening, conversation starters and growth hacks. We all know that one of the strategies employed by experts to grow a following rapidly is to engage with influencers by listening and adding value to conversations. Make sure the tool you choose allows you to automate some of these activities.
7. The option to create logins for your clients so that they can collaborate with you more easily on social media. The more transparent you can be with clients, the more trust you can build. By providing a login to your social media management software for clients, you can assign them conversations, share your progress and they can easily see where your efforts are going. This will come in handy when their contracts are up for renewal!
8. Produce great-looking reports for clients to showcase your progress. It’s essential that the social media solution you choose makes it simple to automate the delivery via email of insightful PDF reports for your clients. You need to show progress against the client’s goals, so a social media management tool that offers advanced reporting capabilities is essential.

Partner with a trusted platform that not only helps you deliver a superior social media management service to your clients but also enhances your productivity. Onthouden, to grow, you need to be able to provide the same high level of service to clients at scale.

3 Ways to Enhance Engagement With Your Brand

Building up your brand awareness online requires you to have a presence on your blog, your social media channels, and anywhere else your customers can be found. Once you’ve put your brand out there, the next step is to create engagement opportunities with your customers.

This is far easier said than done, but with the right strategies in place, you can give people great reasons to engage with your content, wherever it may be.

3 Ways To Increase Engagement With Your Brand

Standard practices for engagement usually include asking for comments, giving your audience something to talk about, enzovoort. We’re going to discuss a few strategies that go beyond the basics and really position your brand as one to watch and engage with.

1. Tell Great Stories

Stories are an incredible part of our society, and they’re also a powerful way to get someone’s attention. In a time where our attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s, you need a good hook to grab people and keep them with engaged with your content.

The answer lies in stories. The kind of stories that show (and tell) your audience what your brand can mean to them. I’m talking about great tales with a main character that customers can root for and understand. These stories should have a clear beginning, midden, en eindigen. More than that, they should have a great hook that makes a customer stop on your site, or on social, and engage with your content.

Focus on the human side of things. Say, bijvoorbeeld, you’re telling a story about james from top10-websitehosting. You can talk about how he started working for the company, what unique things he brings to the company, and what he does for the customers.

2. Run a Sweepstakes or Contest

Our second strategy is one that involves getting people excited about your brand through things like sweepstakes, prijsvragen, or marketing campaigns. Uitchecken user-friendly tools like Heyo that help you create a variety of different promotions without the need for complex coding.

A great example is running contests on Facebook. You can create all kinds of different campaigns and offer prizes for the winner/winners in order to incentivize customer participation.

Let’s say you’re a t-shirt company and you want more engagement in the form of likes. You can hold a sweepstakes where you send out t-shirts to lucky winners who entered to win and also ask that people like your page in order to access the promotion. Another option would be to hold a contest where people can submit their designs. The person who wins will get a cash prize and a free t-shirt with their design on it. Just like that, you also have a new design to sell!

3. Host a Live Stream or Webinar

Live streaming has become huge in today’s online world. With giant brands like Facebook introducing live services, brands can more easily access the tools they need to host live events or even webinars. For B2B companies, webinars can be great for engagement as they promise valuable information that other businesses will want to obtain.

For B2C companies, a live stream can offer incredible amounts of engagement. Other brands have already found the success they wanted from live streaming. BuzzFeed, bijvoorbeeld, streamed themselves putting rubber bands on a watermelon until it exploded. Silly, ja, but it earned them 807,000 views during its peak, en 315,000 opmerkingen!

Live streams are popular and exciting, so look for a way to create live event that your customers would enjoy. Even something as simple as a behind-the-scenes look at your business could work.

Final Thoughts

Brand engagement is the goal of all online businesses. These strategies will help you better understand how you can pique the interest of your customers and convince them to join up with your brand and your content. How do you increase brand engagement? Let us know in the comments!