Networking is important for entrepreneurs and small business owners. One place you can do that is at networking events. Don’t underestimate the power of networking events if you are a soft skills trainer looking to build your company. A strong professional network will help you achieve more than what you can accomplish on your own.
6 Must-Know Tips for Effective Networking
Don’t be Just a ‘Business Owner’
Yes, you are at a networking event to interact with others and talk about your business. But, don’t make it your only agenda.
People will lose interest if you just keep talking about business instead of showing them who you are. Focus on building new relationships with others. Good relationships and contacts will eventually help you get new business.
Be Authentic
Don’t put a mask and present yourself at the networking events. Be authentic and honest about yourself. You need to be confident and appear as a leader. Authenticity reflects these traits and will cement your reputation as a soft skills trainer.
It also shows that you are comfortable in social situations, which is important for a soft skills trainer.
Maintain Positive Body Language
One effective networking tip is to watch your body language. Even if you speak pleasantly, poor body language may indicate that you are unapproachable. That will work against you and defeat the purpose of a networking event.
Be approachable and show a genuine interest in others. Your body language must exude confidence and warmth. When it shows that you are welcoming, it will help others open up to you. This way, you will make several contacts and share healthy relationships with them.
Offer Help
It is normal to want to approach people at a networking event with a problem you are facing. There is nothing wrong with it, but change your approach a bit.
When you meet someone, ask questions, and understand how you can provide value to them. When you offer help, people will remember you and this will help you in the long run.
Stay in Touch with Former Connections
Networking events help in making new connections but don’t make the mistake of forgetting old connections. Your former connections can give you new leads and connect you with influential people. However, this won’t happen unless you share a strong relationship with them.
Keep in touch with your old connections, and you may be surprised by what they can bring to the table.
Use Social Media
Be active on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Engage with your followers and share content relevant to the industry. This will build your credibility as a soft skills trainer and generate inbound networking.
People may reach out to you on social media to seek help. This will help you build your network without relying on just networking events.
Final Words
Keep these networking techniques in mind the next time you go for a networking event. You can meet people who can help you and whom you can help. Either way, it’s a win-win situation.
About the Author
An award-winning Image Management Professional, Suman Agarwal has helped students, home-makers, women on sabbatical as well as people seeking second career alternatives to explore Image Management and Soft Skill Training as a vibrant professional choice. She is also the co-founder of Image Consulting Institute.
She frequently writes blog posts about the urgent need of image consulting professionals and soft skill trainers in the 21st century and loves guiding people in exploring lucrative career. You can find more about Suman Agarwal from here.
A considerate portion of marketers in Asia Pacific [29%] don’t have the right balance and synergies between digital and offline media, while the majority [84%] still struggle with cross-channel measurement. That’s according to the latest annual state of marketing study, Getting Media Right: Marketing in Motion, released today by Kantar.
2020 is set to see a significant rise in digital ad spend, as marketers in the region look to optimise their media mix. 80% of marketers plan to increase their investment in online video advertising over the next 12 months, while 68% plan to increase spend on social media networks and 57% plan to increase spend on podcasts. This is in sharp contrast to print media, where 72% of marketers say they will decrease spend in magazines, while 60% will reduce their investment in newspaper advertising.
Despite the projected growth in online advertising, digital measurement remains a challenge for marketers, with blind spots such as ‘walled gardens’ impacting the ability to understand cross-channel performance. This leaves many advertisers in the dark about the performance of their brand across channels.
Now in its sixth year, Getting Media Right examines the current state of marketing in a fast-moving connected world, and is based on in-depth survey feedback from nearly 500 senior marketers globally spanning advertiser brands, media publishers and agencies globally. It reveals an industry that continues to diversify its usage of different media contexts, yet requires better understanding of how ideas, content and media channels work together to achieve their goals of driving short-term sales and long-term brand growth.
Key findings from the study
The short-term vs. long-term dilemma comes to a head. Almost all marketers in the region [89%] now recognise the importance of balancing short-term sales with long-term brand building. However, still only 61% of marketers are using both short and long-term measurement; 32% still rely solely on short-term sales results.
Marketers globally still struggle with integrated campaigns, but APAC marketers are having more success. 88% of marketers say they have integrated their marketing organisations, compared to 75% of global marketers.
Programmatic targeting continues to grow. Four in five marketers in APAC [78%] currently use programmatic targeting for their campaigns – and that is expected to reach 87% in 2020. But still one in five marketers [21%] aren’t confident they’re successfully targeting the right audiences.
Cookieless advertising could leave marketers in the dark. More than a third of marketers [36%] haven’t begun preparations for a cookieless world, leaving many concerned about how such change will impact the industry.
Nearly two thirds of marketers [61%] agree that developing custom content is an imperative, but when it comes to understanding how context impacts creative executions, there’s still a gap. More insight is required into how specific content needs to be tailored to specific contexts to improve message receptivity.
Jane Ostler, Global Head of Media Effectiveness, Kantar, said
While the rapid growth in digital ad spend comes as no surprise, this new research indicates that marketers still have a long way to go to when it comes to cross-channel measurement and proving ROI.
The next 12 months will see huge changes for the industry, with the rise of newer channels, such as podcasts and advanced TV, and the move away from cookies set to transform the way advertisers target and measure campaigns. Marketers should aim for the best of both worlds -they need to create a framework to monitor impact on business and brand metrics. That means harmonising measurement tools, building an infrastructure that enables measurement across the diverse marketing mix, and creating meaningful insights to improve performance across all channels.
Pablo Gomez, Chief Digital Officer for the region, said
The results go to show just how dynamic and complex APAC is as a region. Marketers here are faced with the challenge of rapidly increasing their digital investment, whilst at the same time, ensuring there is integration with offline media.
Measurement also remains one of the biggest issues for the region, especially online-offline cross measurement which is critical in a region dominated by TV and mobile. It’s clear that marketers need more focused data, with insights that give them the direction they need to better integrate and optimize their campaigns. This will also allow them to customize content better and improve the entire experience for their audiences.
Sandeep Ranade, Executive Director, South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar said
This research indicates that many marketers today focus on short-term measurement though they recognise the importance of balancing short-term sales vs long-term brand building. Integrated campaigns are the way forward, however there still a lot that needs to be done here. Marketers need to be more cognizant of the specific contexts while developing content.
This will help them future proof their digital measurement approaches in the rapidly growing and changing digital scenario.
How many times have you opened and read an email from a company because the subject line was interesting and content in the email was personalized? That company could either be an e-commerce firm promoting discounts on products or company cross-selling products as per your purchase history or sending a reminder about the price increase in items left in the shopping cart. Such companies create effective & customized email drip campaigns with tools like Snov.io. Drip emails are extremely useful and bring a lot of profit to their users.
It is the era of hyper-personalization and the intent of making an important decision [buying, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.] is key when the email is personalized. As per a report, 86% of consumers who responded to the survey feel that personalization plays a major role in making purchase decisions.
Though social media marketing is an integral part of online marketing strategy, email marketing is still a vital piece as far as online marketing is concerned. It is also referred to as Drip Email Marketing which is a direct marketing strategy where promotional pieces are sent across to existing and prospective customers, details of which are captured in a lead nurturing campaign. The name is derived from drip irrigation where plants & crops are watered in small amounts over a long period of time to achieve the necessary results. Just the same is with drip emails: one by one, emails are sent to people with some pauses.
Why use Snov.io?
Snov.io is a leading platform using which customers can create effective email drip campaigns that can be sent at different phases of the sales funnel or campaign’s life-cycle. It follows a freemium model hence you can use the majority of the features before you plan to use the premium version. The primary benefit of drip campaigns is that it keeps the existing customers updated about the progress as far as the product is concerned and generates better opportunities to cross-sell products. Using drip emails from Snov.io, you can schedule, design, and send drip campaigns based on specific actions, triggers, or customer history. It is a great way to keep the customers and users engaged through the life-cycle that comprises stages – Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Purchase [pre & post].
Manual sending emails is a challenging task and it will not yield the same results like email drip campaigns built with the help of Snov.io. Using Snov.io, you can set multiple-step hyper-personalized email campaigns with minimal effort and track results to measure effectiveness and perform necessary actions. To get started with the creation of drip campaigns on Snov.io, you need to create an account on the platform.
A step-by-step guide to creating an email drip campaign
Now that you are logged in, you are all set to create an email drip campaign on Snov.io. Below, there are some of the major steps you need to take.
1. You need to visit the Email Drip Campaigns section on the web application. In this section, you can see a list of all the email drip campaigns that you have created so far. Click the New drip campaign button and give an appropriate name to the campaign. The name should be in-line with the purpose of the campaign; names like Campaign-1, Campaign-2, etc. should be avoided.
2. You can choose one of the active accounts or set up a new one for sending emails. Once you have the list of contacts to which you plan to send an email drip campaign, you need to decide whether you want to send emails to only verified email addresses or to all. If a recipient has multiple email addresses, you have the option to choose whether the campaign should be sent to all of them or only to the first one.
3. Once you select the sender’s email account the users will reply to or feedback will be sent, you need to select the recipients of the drip campaign. It is better to create a list of recipients since it eases the task of managing the list. There are four types of elements to create an email drip campaign – Email, Trigger, Delay, and Goal. In the campaign created by us, we seek feedback about the blog from our subscribers.
4. It is recommended to add the elements of personalization in a drip campaign since they make the campaign more effective. By default, there are 11 system variables, though if you need more, you can manually add the ones you need.
5. You can set a Trigger condition [Contact opened email or Contact clicked on the link from email] after which the drip campaign will stop for certain time duration and the next email will be sent later.
6. You can add the Delay element that will pause the campaign for the specified time after the reply is received.
7. Your drip emails may have a certain goal or goals associated with it e.g. in our case, no further emails should be sent to the subscribers after the feedback is received. After the set Goal is achieved, no further emails are sent in the automation flow. This gives flexibility to the campaign creator since they need not monitor the goals all the time. Shown below is the final drip campaign that we’ve created for seeking feedback about the blog from our subscribers.
The effectiveness of any type of email campaign also depends on the time when the campaign is sent to the recipient. For example, if your users are predominantly from India, it makes sense that the campaign is scheduled according to Indian Standard Time [IST]. Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns tool also lets you schedule campaigns as per different zones that you can achieve the best Click Through Rate [CTR] or Click To Open Rate [CTOR].
Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns benefits
To persuade you, we’ve collected some benefits of using the Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns tool.
Drip email in minutes: You can create a highly-customized email drip campaign within minutes since the tool is easy-to-use and does not require any technical know-how.
Track campaign performance: You can send emails to your users and customers in one go and keep a track of the campaign performance. You also have the flexibility to fine-tune the campaign in case it does not show relevant results.
Schedule campaigns for better results: You can schedule campaigns based on your customer’s time zone so that the campaign reaches the intended recipients when it matters the most!
If you are an email marketer looking to improve the performance of the sales funnel, you should definitely give Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns a try.
These days, the moment ‘digital marketing’ or ‘social media marketing’ gets uttered, we can’t help but include influencer marketing. Many marketers swear by influencer marketing because it’s effective on younger audiences who don’t believe in advertising.
However, marketers agree that it gives them a hard time to calculate the ROI of their influencer marketing campaigns. Let’s see what we can gain from influencer marketing campaigns.
It Increases Sales
Did you know that 53% of companies use influencer marketing strategies to increase their sales? The feedback and reviews from influencers are completely genuine. Such authenticity helps brands win the trust of their customers and encourages them to make more purchases.
70% of millennials are influenced by social recommendations while making a purchase decision. Therefore, recommendations by influencers can definitely increase your sales.
Generates Great Content
Influencers know their audience and therefore create the right kind of content that works for them. The added benefit is you can always re-purpose the content for other marketing communications.
Establishes Your Thought Leadership
Consumers can associate an influencer’s thought leadership with your brand. Therefore, if your influencer is an expert in a particular field, it adds value to your brand by strengthening your authority in the field.
Gets You More Engagement
Authentic and engaging content from influencers is what attracts their audiences towards them. It encourages their followers to engage with such content too. Many influencers believe that their sense of humor and honesty are the reasons for their high engagement rates.
According to Linqia, 89% of companies use influencer marketing to share authentic stories about their brand. Due to such authenticity, followers continue to engage with an influencer’s branded content. And in this way, audiences are effortlessly transformed into becoming paying customers for brands.
Multiplies Your Reach and Access to New Markets
Influencers can help brands tap into and explore new markets and expand their reach. Many people largely depend on the recommendations of influencers. So, this helps brands access new potential customers and win their trust.
Improves Search Engine Ranking
Did you know that 47% of marketers use influencer marketing to boost traffic to their websites? Using influencer marketing, you can also improve your search engine rankings.
You need to ask influencers to write and share their honest reviews about your products or services on their blogs. This can help you get the attention of your prospects and gain valuable back-links that can help to improve your rankings on search engines.
The ROI of Influencer Marketing
A study by RhythmOne found that you can generate massive ROI in earned media value using influencer marketing. Influencer marketing has helped companies generate $11.69 for every $1 they’ve invested.
In addition, 76% of marketers agree that influencer marketing has helped them build brand awareness on social media. Almost 71% of companies have agreed that it helps them reach more targeted audiences. When calculating the ROI of your influencer marketing, you should also keep the following points in mind-
1. Influencers’ Cost
No matter how you are paying your influencers – cash, kind, event tickets or any free service – it would incur you some cost. Obviously, the bigger the project, the higher the cost would be. You can also opt for an affiliate model where you give a percentage of sales to the influencer
2. Time Invested
A lot of your time will be invested in planning and executing your influencer marketing campaign. You’ll have to especially invest your time into communicating with influencers and helping them understand your goal and the brand personality.
3. Cost of Hiring an Agency or Buying a Software
For bigger projects, marketers might need to hire agencies to kickstart their influencer marketing program. You might need to too. If you’re among the businesses that require the help of an agency, make sure you consider the agency cost. And if you’re investing in an influencer marketing platform, consider the cost of that.
Check out the infographic below to further discover more factors to consider when calculating influencer marketing ROI.
Almost everyone checks out reviews on social media before buying anything today. Brand messages combined with those from influencers can do wonders for businesses. They have been known to increase purchase intent 5.2X. No wonder why influencer marketing is said to be one of the most effective methods of customer acquisition.
However, you need thorough planning to get outstanding results from your influencer marketing campaigns. Here are a few strategies to help you get phenomenal results
Discount Codes
Discounts have always been effective in boosting sales and conversions. If you combine this strategy with influencer marketing, it can be even more effective. All you need to do is share a unique discount code with each of your influencers and ask them to share it with their followers.
This can drive more conversions and also help influencers woo their audiences more easily. For example, watchmaker Daniel Wellington provides unique discount codes to their influencers and asks them to share them in their sponsored posts. This strategy helps them get greater brand awareness and also increase their revenue.
Brand Mentions
When an influencer mentions your brand in their content, you get to grab more eyeballs and be seen by a relevant audience. This can help you build trust, generate greater brand awareness, and can make their followers buy from you as well.
Giveaways
Giveaways can help to increase your engagement drastically. After all, who doesn’t like free goodies? You can partner with influencers to host giveaways in which you give away some of your products as a reward. This can help you build brand awareness and encourage people to buy.
Takeovers
57% of marketers believe that influencer-generated content is more effective for marketing than the content they create. So, seasoned marketers often allow influencers to take over the brand’s social media accounts and post content on their behalf for a limited period of time.
Influencers promote such takeovers on their own accounts which can help brands gain more followers and engagement.
Long-Term Collaborations
In a long-term collaboration, an influencer becomes the face of a brand. They both have a vested interest in the partnership and work together for the growth of the company. This way, the brand as well as the influencers can gain more followers and get more visibility.
An influencer can help you enhance your brand’s personality and get you quality traffic. Long-term partnerships with influencers can help to enhance brand advocacy and awareness too.
Freebies
An influencer creates quality content and spends their valuable time engaging with their followers to drive traffic to your website. One way of collaborating with them is to offer free products or services in exchange for their hard work.
You can also offer such freebies in addition to their monetary compensation to thank them for their efforts. Such gestures go a long way to improve your relationships with influencers.
Influencer Challenges
When you challenge your influencers, they get motivated to put in their best work. You can arrange a little contest during which the influencer who can get you the maximum number of likes, comments, or shares, wins a prize.
Challenging influencers is a great strategy when you want to launch a new product. It can also help to boost brand awareness and drive more traffic.
These are just a few strategies that can help you run profitable influencer marketing campaigns. For some more ideas, check out the following gifographic
The ROI of Influencer Marketing Infographic
About the Author
Brandon Brown is the CEO of Grin, an influencer marketing software solution for brands. Grin’s software helps customers identify, recruit & activate the world’s most engaging influencers. Prior to Grin, he led marketing for the #1 energy drink market in the world, Los Angeles & Orange County, at Red Bull North America. You can know more about Brandon Brown here.
Take the case of the following scenario – You are not a married person and obviously, you do not have any kids [Hopefully!]. But for some reason, you receive promotional emails from a vertical e-commerce website during their online shopping festival and guess what; the promotional email contains offers highlighting Baby Products. And to make things worse, the email campaign has zero-personalization and it is quite likely that the same email was sent to all their customers [without taking any personal traits of the customer into consideration]. As per a report, 86% of customers feel that personalization played a major role in their purchase decisions. This is the era of hyper-personalization and marketers have a plethora of information about customers – Age, Sex, Browsing History, Social Media information, Purchasing History, etc. which can be extremely helpful in charting their ‘hyper-personalization marketing’ strategy.
It is of prime importance that when an email campaign is sent to the customer; it is designed well, conveys the relevant information, is personalized, clearly has the ‘Call to Action’ and has a ‘well-designed subject line’ so that the recipient opens the email. To summarize, a sub-standard subject of an email campaign results in low ‘open rate’ and average email content & design results in low ‘Click-Through Rate’. Email marketing companies are also leveraging the power of Machine Learning [ML] & Artificial Intelligence [AI] in order to cater to the hyper-personalization requirement of email marketers. Entrepreneurs Ben Richardson and David Greiner faced a similar problem where they could not find email marketing a tool that could suffice their requirements and that is what made them co-found ‘Campaign Monitor’. ‘Campaign Monitor’ is a global email-marketing company that offers a full range of email solutions to help marketers create meaningful, lasting connections with their audience. ‘Campaign Monitor’ streamlines every part of the email marketing process and the beauty of the product lies in its elegant design & scalability across different verticals.
Campaign Monitor – Overview
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing platform that companies can use to design personalized messages to its customers. Once a campaign is created using ‘Campaign Monitor’, tracking & analytics that is integrated with the dashboard can be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. The platform also provides list-management tools in the ‘List & subscribers’ tab where a brand can create segmented lists in order to send ‘personalized email campaigns’ based on the customer’s profile & other important data points about the customers in the list.
Along with personalized email campaigns, Campaign Monitor can also be used to create personalized customer journeys. Campaign Monitor can be integrated with close to 250+ platforms; some of them being Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, SalesForce, etc.
Campaign Monitor – Features
Design customer-centric emails – Once the marketer logs into the Campaign Monitor dashboard, he can use the drag & drop mechanism to create simple, yet beautifully designed emails. Due to the simplicity of the interface, designing email campaigns is a very simple task.
Insights & Analytics – Similar to Google Analytics, ‘Insights’ feature of Campaign Monitor helps in tracking the CTR, open rate, engagement, and geographical coverage of the audience. It also provides analytics through which marketers can improve the performance of a campaign.
Automation Emails – Through the ‘Journey’ feature, a marketer can set up customer journeys as well as RSS campaign to send automated updates from the customer’s website. You can choose the appropriate ‘Industry Vertical’ [Media & Entertainment, Publishing & Digital Media, Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Travel, Hospitality, etc.] and your intent of sending the email campaign. You could send a personalized welcome-email on signup or send an email in order to keep a customer engaged on the platform.
While creating the ‘customer journey’, you should choose the end-goal of the campaign. You could choose from the following options
Drive a series of actions
Drive conversions
Increase email engagement
Smarter Transactional Emails – Transactional emails are triggered by your own site or app, typically in response to a user’s action, such as an order confirmation or a plan renewal. They are some of the most valuable emails a company send but usually, aren’t measured or optimized. ‘New sign-up email’ is an ideal example of a transactional email and is used to welcome a new user. Transactional Email can be created using the Email builder feature and there is also an option to import your own design. This category of email is triggered on demand and you can choose from a portfolio of ‘wide range of designs’. API or SMTP can also be used to send email directly from your site or app.
Campaign Monitor – Email Campaign Creation
Campaign Monitor has a number of templates that can be used for creating an effective email campaign. It has a WYSIWYG editor through which you can design campaigns by using the ‘drag & drop’ facility. The design of the campaigns can be optimized for different mediums namely, desktop, mobile, tablet, etc. There is also an option to import HTML template or HTML design, but you might need certain coding knowledge to use the HTML feature.
A/B Testing or Split Testing is used widely by designers & developers to compare two versions of a web-page and measure the overall performance of the test. Campaign Monitor provides a facility of A/B Testing where a user can create two versions of the same campaign. This also helps in figuring out which design works well and designing a long-term marketing strategy. In a nutshell, Campaign Monitor can be used to send personalized email campaigns and trigger automated workflows based on customer behavior.
Campaign Monitor – Pricing and Third Party API integration
There are three plans of Campaign Monitor – Basic, Unlimited, and Premier. The Basic Plan costs $9/month, Unlimited Plan costs $29/month, and Premier Plan costs $149/month. Below are more details about each plan
Basic Plan [$9/month]
2,500 emails across campaigns and automated emails
Customer support via email
All core email marketing features Use our drag-and-drop email builder and professionally-designed templates to launch completely branded email campaigns.
Insights analytics suite
Basic marketing automation
Unlimited Plan [$29/month]
Unlimited emails across campaigns and automated emails
Priority customer support via email
All core email marketing features
Insights analytics suite
Basic marketing automation
Advanced marketing automation
Unlimited inbox previews
Time zone sending
Unlimited spam testing
Premier Plan [$149/month]
Unlimited emails across campaigns and automated emails
Premier phone and email support
All core email marketing features
Insights analytics suite
Basic marketing automation
Advanced marketing automation
Unlimited inbox previews
Time zone sending
Unlimited spam testing
Send-time optimization
Advanced link tracking
Template management for teams
In case you are using emails occasionally, you can use the ‘Pay per Campaign’ feature of Campaign Monitor. Further details about pricing can be found here.
Campaign Monitor – API Integration
Campaign Monitor has a robust third-party API support and using those APIs, you can connect all your core business apps to meet your unique email marketing and automation needs. You can also integrate the platform with popular Content Management System [CMS], Blog, and other third-party software. Based on the ‘core requirement’ of the email campaign, you can use the third-party APIs from the host of services mentioned below
Account
Campaigns
Lists
Clients
Segments
Subscribers
Templates
Transactional
Webhooks
More details about API integration can be found here.
Campaign Monitor – Conclusion
There are number of companies that provide ’email marketing’, some of them being SendPulse, Moz, LeadsRx, SocialPilot, etc. and each of them have flexible pricing structure & variety of features. Campaign Monitor’s extensive feature-list, attractive pricing strategy, excellent customer-support makes it an ideal choice for companies that plan to use email-marketing to welcome new customers and retain existing customers. You can also create simple, yet effective surveys using Campaign Monitor.
In case you are Campaign Monitor use, do leave your feedback in the comments section.. You can log on to Campaign Monitor in case you want to give Campaign Monitor a spin!
Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room – Jeff Bezos
Completely agreed! I know several startups who have created an attractive website, their business is located at prime location, they spent a good amount of money on digital marketing, they are owning a team of skilled staff but still waiting for calls from customers. Is it happening to you too ?
If your answer is a big yes, don’t worry! You are at the right place. But before diving into the article, remember what Jeff Bezos has said. According to him, it’s all about your brand. Your brand represents your business and reputation. So, be sure to have a good one.
Many people argue that they already have a good and attractive logo, what else is needed in branding? Do you really think having a good brand logo is enough for the branding? No, definitely not.
Here I am going to mention some common startup blunders that businesses are making and how one can fix it.
Blunder #1 – Inconsistency
What is the color of the logo of social media giant Facebook? Blue, right? Did you ever see Facebook using its logo color as red in any of its marketing campaigns? No, I am sure. Consistency is very important in building a brand. If you are using yellow as your logo color on the website, keep it yellow everywhere. Otherwise, it confuses users and perhaps they won’t be able to recognize your brand at a glance. Inconsistent branding can lead to customer confusion and a high bounce rate.
Solution – Be consistent. Be consistent with your designs and brand color. It will not only help you in building brand image but also provides recognition.
Blunder #2 – Replicating competitors
This is another blunder that most of the startups make. It is good to know and research what your competitors are doing but copying exactly their marketing strategies lead you to a pitfall. Understand first, you are in the starting stages of your business. You don’t have enough capital like your already established competitors to spend a lot on everything. It is also possible that their marketing styles and trends will not work for your business.
Solution – Do a good competitor research, try to understand what they are doing in promoting their business. But don’t copy everything from them. Don’t try to replicate their marketing styles in hope of getting better results. You can also try some DIY. Tools like Canva help you create your own visual identity.
Blunder #3 – Marketing it everywhere
Do you join every function you are invited to? Certainly not. Likewise, every marketing platform is not a perfect place for showcasing your products. Just because, your company’s name can be somewhere, you started posting everywhere. Representing your brand at wrong places can directly affect your branding campaign.
Solution – Research and figure out what are the best-suited places for running your marketing campaign. Don’t try to be present everywhere.
Blunder #4 – Ignoring social media
Today, everybody has gone online. Even a 10 years old kid is hanging out with friends on several social media platforms. Social media has enormous power. Businesses, politicians, and everybody is seeking the help of social media in promoting their brand name. One can’t ignore the power of it especially startups should be more active on such social media platforms to reach out to the targeted audience. They are the best platforms to build your brand value.
Solution – Be active on social media platforms. Figure out which one works best for you out of a lot. Not every platform is of use to you. Post offers, spread awareness and post attractive contents regularly.
Blunder #5 – Neglecting the power of analytics
Do you really think posting and commenting on social media platforms is enough in branding? It is not. If you ask any digital marketing expert, he will explain to you the importance of analytics. The analytics will help you in knowing which type of content is driving more traffic than other.
Solution: Always have an eye on analytics. With the help of analytic tools, you should know what type of content you need to post and who is your targeted audience.
These are some blunders that most of the startups are making while building their brand. Try to avoid such mistakes and show your customers your real value. Build a brand in a right way. Don’t forget Jeff Bezos.
Don’t make these mistakes and before doing anything, do analyze your business well.
About the Author
Kavita Paliwal is Independent Marketing Analyst and Blogger. When not glued to her laptop, she can be found making travel plans that rarely happen. Connect with Kavita on Twitter & Linkedin
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to acquire new customers quickly. It is especially beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses that have small marketing budgets. Social media influencers are people who are immensely popular on social media primarily due to their content. Their followers love their content and follow them for their ideas, opinions, and expertise in their niche. In fact, their followers are likely to act upon their recommendations and purchase products they endorse too.
According to a Twitter study, 40% of people have purchased products based on an influencer’s recommendation. This suggests that influencer marketing can help brands build credibility and grow pretty quickly.
Here are some of the best influencer marketing strategies to acquire customers
Branded Blog Posts
Branded blog posts from influencers can be very useful for brands. If you work with bloggers who have a high Domain Authority and who get a high amount of traffic to their sites, your brand will gain greater visibility.
This will also help you build greater brand awareness. Ask your influencers to review some of your products or services and share their honest opinions on their blogs. Such authentic reviews can help you win the trust of their audiences [who are essentially your target audience].
However, for this, you need to make sure that you collaborate only with relevant influencers in your niche. You can also give their followers a little nudge towards a purchase by sharing affiliate links or discount codes with your influencers. When someone makes a purchase using them, you might need to pay a certain percentage as commission to the influencer.
Brand Mentions
Mentions of your brand by influencers on social media can help to attract more eyeballs. This can increase your visibility, brand awareness, and boost credibility too. When popular influencers mention your brand in a positive light, it can help to increase your conversions too.
Electronic Arts collaborated with popular Instagram influencers like David Lopez and Koya Webb to promote their gaming app, Bejeweled. As a result of the campaign, the app rose 520 places, from #702 to #182, among the top grossing apps in the Apple App Store.
Guest Posts
Guest posting on an influencer’s blog or website is a great way to attract more traffic to your site. If their website or blog gets a large amount of traffic and is a high-authority site, it can help with SEO too. Any backlinks from their site to yours will be of high-quality which can help to boost your rankings as well as traffic.
In addition, you’ll also benefit from greater visibility and brand awareness.
Takeovers
A takeover is a very interesting influencer marketing strategy that’s used by many brands to generate content and gain more followers. It involves an influencer taking over your social media account for a certain amount of time.
During this time, they will be posting content on your account. When they cross-promote such takeovers on their own accounts, their followers are likely to check out your account. Not only does this give you a chance to woo your audience with some amazing content, but also grow your following.
To learn about some more influencer marketing strategies, check out the following gifographic
