by Dotun Olagbadebo | Jan 16, 2018 | Social Media Tools
Use YouTube to Drive your Website Traffic
YouTube, the second largest and popular search engine with over one billion visitors monthly, offers huge potential marketing rewards. As a business owner or online marketer, how can you tap into this rich goldmine? How can your business upload content that viewers will want to watch, and more importantly, how can you transform those viewers into customers? Easy! Your YouTube marketing goal is simple: To drive customers to your website. You have to build a community of potential leads. Your target is to reach those genuinely interested in what your business has to offer. With these steps, you can use YouTube to drive your website traffic through the roof.
- Upload content often
Be sure to upload content regularly. One-off viewers are less likely to become customers than people drawn back time and time again to view new videos. And don’t forget to use the comment section to engage potential customers in conversation (always pointing them to your website!). It may take a few videos to convince a user to jump from YouTube to your site. By frequently uploading quality content, you increase the odds of converting leads to customers.
- Always include a Call to Action
An effective call-to-action drives web traffic and boosts sales. Calls to action are not always about having the viewer buy your products. You may choose to focus on encouraging viewers to visit your website. A call to action could even invite viewers to watch another video.
- Use the video Description Box
Whenever you upload new content to YouTube, you are given the opportunity to describe the content using the Video Description Box. You can use this feature to drive traffic to your website by adding your site’s url alongside a short (6-7 words) call to action. This URL will work as a clickable link displayed permanently under your video.
- Use Call to Action Overlays
The Call to Action Overlay is a banner ad that appears in the lower third of the video screen. The Overlay is an effective way of encouraging viewers to visit your site. The Overlay takes only a few minutes to set up, and can feature copy, a thumbnail image and a url.
- Watch the Analytics
Analytics offer you an insight into the effectiveness of your campaigns, telling you whether your YouTube campaigns are driving traffic to your site and allowing you to tweak your marketing strategies. YouTube offers a variety of metrics, enabling you to determine who your viewers are and which content most interests them. YouTube also provides analytics on adverts, giving you another insight into your audience’s likes and dislikes.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Dec 21, 2017 | Social Media Tools
Top 10 Twitter Tools of 2017
As every digital marketer and social media user knows; new, useful tools pop up all the time and those still around, evolve while some lose their popularity. In 2017, we had a lot of social media tools – new, old and revamped. This article features our top Twitter tools of 2017:
1. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management tool for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and LinkedIn. You can use Agorapulse to monitor your mentions in the Social Inbox, to publish and schedule updates and there are also monitoring features with multiple keywords, keywords to avoid and location/language settings, Twitter reports and a very handy CRM tool which tells you whether you have any influencers or brand ambassadors following you. Hot, right?
2. Hootsuite
Another all-in-one social media management dashboard that works with over 35 different social networks. You can use it to manage multiple social accounts from one place, publish and schedule content, set up monitoring searches, create lists and create analytics reports.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social works with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. Similar to Agorapulse, it has an inbox where you get all of your social media mentions, a content calendar for publishing and scheduling updates, analytics features and a CRM tool for help managing your followers.
4. TweetDeck
TweetDeck by Twitter is a Twitter tool to help you manage your account. There are multiple streams on your dashboard (such as home tweets, notifications, Twitter lists and DMs, just to mention a few). Apart from monitoring your Twitter account, you can also publish and schedule tweets and add images to them.
5. Oktopost
A B2B social media management dashboard that provides all the tools you need to keep on track of your social media marketing. Publish and schedule updates, check your social analytics, find great curated content to share with your audience, monitor and listen to your audience, engage with your followers, all in one place.
6. MavSocial
This is a social media management dashboard whose biggest focus is visual content. Publish and schedule content with the editorial calendar, create media galleries, monitor campaigns and find great new images to share with your social media audience.
7. Buffer
Buffer, my personal favourite, works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest and you can easily share great content, including images and videos and add content to your queue as you browse the web, with their browser extensions.
8. Twitter Audit
Having problems with ghost followers? With Twitter Audit, you check to see exactly how many of your followers are real – you’ve got one free check, but then you can get the Pro version to continue auditing your followers, to block your fake followers and get a monthly audit report.
9. Followerwonk
Moz’s Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tool that helps you take a deeper look at your followers: their locations, their tweets and so on. Plus, you can also use it to find and connect with social influencers.
10. Klout
Klout used to be a tool for scoring yourself on social media – basically, the bigger your Klout score, the bigger your influence online. Now, not only does it tell you how influential you are, but it also aims to help you become more successful on social by suggesting great content to share and more.
There you have it. Our top 10 twitter tools of 2017. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Dec 20, 2017 | Design
Graphic Design Trends to Look Out for in 2018
As the year comes to an end, 2017 ushers out the old, and heralds the new graphic design trends that designers should keep abreast of in 2018. Alongside creative and bold typography come double exposure duo tone visuals, augmented and virtual reality, vivid colours plus gradients, and bespoke illustrations. In no particular order, these trends are listed below.
- Creative typography
Instead of the standard and commonplace type, unique hand drawn designs are standing out from the crowd. These include creative and bold typography, cropped typography, and typography that interacts with real life elements. - Double exposure duo tone and double light visuals
Unlike conventional double exposure photos, this style fuses duo tones to create one visual made of two overlapping images in monochrome colours. Double colour light or colour channel splits, which comprise two actual light sources to develop a more modern look, are also on the rise. - Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality
Google, Apple and IKEA have already begun incorporating augmented reality into their products plus services. As AR and VR gain traction, it’s anticipated that more brands and designers will incorporate these technologies and 3D shapes into their portfolios. The applications extend beyond just advertising and marketing, but also lifestyle, education, architecture, interior design, retail, and travel. - Vivid colours and gradients
Instagram redesigned its logo to a simpler and more colourful gradient design and now, other brands have taken a ‘vivid colours and gradients’ page from the company. This style also ties in closely with colourful 3D graphics and colour fonts to make the colours pop. - Hand drawn, customised illustrations
This year saw the likes of Google, Airbnb and McDonald’s opting for bespoke illustrations in their campaigns, and it likely won’t stop here. Get ready for more hand drawn, personalised graphics that fuse with 3D, bold colours, double exposure, and paper cutouts.
This article first appeared in TAXI
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Dec 20, 2017 | SEO
Dos and Don’ts of Researching Keywords to Improve SEO
SEO keywords not only help sites when it comes to search engine indexing, they also help see to it that people find your website when they search for something that you might be offering. It’s extremely important for businesses to know how their consumers refer to their products or services. Having the right keywords in the right amounts will help boost your site’s ranking on search engines like Google. You should not craft content for your website without first thoroughly researching keywords. Below are seven dos and don’ts to researching keywords.
- To find the best keywords and phrases to use, it would be best if you do not just run one search. Do multiple initial searches then go through the process again month on month. In doing so, you will see patterns forming and general trend insights that will do your business a lot of good.
- Also, do keep in mind that if you plan on using search ads for your website, targeting the most common keywords can be a tad expensive. This is because you’ll surely be competing with your industry rivals for the same words and phrases. But if you have an expanded list, you have plenty of viable terms to play with. You can gain traction for your site without much of an expense compared to if you vie for easy, common, or popular search terms.
- Now that you have keywords, do make them work for you by incorporating them into your site content. Focus on areas of your site that carry a high-appeal index. This means that you should use keywords in places that the visitors will first notice them like in titles, categories, and even on URLs. Also use them on Meta tags, anchor text, and path files.
- Don’t attempt to create something per keyword, as this will be an impossible feat.
- Don’t stuff content pieces with too many of them as well.
- Do group these words and phrases. Create easily scaleable and manageable groups of terms and create content to carry these groups.
- Do create your own variations of these words and phrases apart from the general keywords that you find through your research. Put yourself in the shoes of your consumer and this will help ease this process out.
by Dotun Olagbadebo | Dec 20, 2017 | Business
Create a Great Marketing plan with The Power of 6
As a small business owner, having a marketing plan, which outlines your company’s course for success is important. A marketing plan describes who your customers are, where they get information and how you expect to reach them. Having an in-depth layout of your marketing strategy can reveal opportunities from a new audience or potential product line, pitfalls in pricing, competition reaction, and potential reach. Here are 5 tips to creating a great marketing plan.
Know your target market.
Before you can write a marketing plan, you need to find and understand the specific demographic you’re targeting. Research your target market by asking those within it.
Why should a customer use your business?
Figure out the core need that your product or service will meet; is it to help your customers do their job more efficiently? Be respected and admired by friends? Your product/service should be designed to solve client problems or meet customer needs better than the competition can.
Identify your competitors
Small businesses seldom take the time to study their competitors in depth, or determine competition that may be outside their industry but just as capable of luring the customer away. Knowing who they are, what their core competitive advantages are and how they will respond to your offering will help you figure out strategies to combat such losses.
Let your customers know what your brand symbolises.
You should be able to write down a simple declarative sentence of how you will meet customer needs and beat the competition. The best positioning statements are those that are single-minded and focus on solving a problem for the customer in a way that promotes the best value.
Do an audit
Auditing your business, which you can do with the help of a third-party contractor, can help you recover if your initial marketing strategy doesn’t give you the results you wanted. Understand what products or services you are offering, then identify who you help and how you help them. Next, check all your marketing platforms to ensure they reflect that message. This will help you avoid a disconnect with the audience.
Marketing Approach
How do you plan to reach that target customer? Here are two marketing channels to use asides broadcast and print media:
- Social media. Every type of customer is on some type of social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. Focus on the ones that can benefit your business the most. Figure out where your customers are spending their time, and set up shop on those platforms. Develop a content strategy that can be executed internally, and then execute your strategy by posting branded content on your selected platforms.
- Email marketing may not be as new a concept as social media marketing but it is an effective and popular choice for small business owners. Companies can implement email marketing techniques in a number of ways, including newsletters, promotional campaigns and transactional emails.
In conclusion, creating a well-defined list of budgets, goals and action items, with appropriate personnel assigned to each, can help make your marketing plan a reality.
This article was adapted from Business News Daily
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