Category: Social media

Browse blogs on social media strategies, content, and trends. Stay ahead with tips to grow engagement and reach.

  • TikTok For Business: Strategies to Promote Small Businesses

    TikTok For Business: Strategies to Promote Small Businesses

    Are you a small business looking to grow?

    Do you know which is the most popular platform globally to promote your small business?

    You might think of Google or Facebook. It was true till 2025!

    Google had been the most popular online platform for more than 11 years. However, in July 2010, Google Pulled ahead of Yahoo. Till then it reigned in the top spot for more than 11 years. Moreover, even Facebook couldn’t get ahead of Google. Microsoft came up with its default search engine, Bing, but still couldn’t get ahead of Google.

    But things have started to shuffle. And COVID played a huge role in digital disruption.

    TikTok is the new reigning champion of the internet.

    Yes, you read it right.

    Till 2020 TikTok was the 7th most popular internet platform. Google was on the top, followed by Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix & Amazon.

    popular domains

    Source: Cloud Flare

    But, in 2021, TikTok jumped to the top. 

    Now TikTok is available in more than 150 markets in more than 75 languages. The platform has surpassed 2 billion monthly active users. In addition to that, according to a report, 1 in 4 TikTok users can’t be found on any other platform.

    This highlights the radical shift for your digital consumer to ‘watching’ instead of ‘reading’.

    TikTok is continuously getting more popular with its trends, memes, music, and endless cultural fascination. Cloudflare’s data suggest that TikTok has become a ubiquitous part of digital consumer’s daily life.

    Source: Cloud Flare

    Why does your business need to be on TikTok for 2026?

    TikTok is the most visited online platform with more than 1 billion monthly active users. Therefore, the platform is worth considering to include in your strategy for 2026 for growing your small business. 

    Its popularity is not going away anytime soon. Due to TikTok’s rising popularity among its users and small businesses, other social media platforms are upgrading their strategies to compete for consumers’ preferences. That is to say, Instagram has officially announced that it will focus more on the video content approach.

    TikTok’s competitor Instagram announced the reels featured in 2020. Subsequently, Instagram’s head Mosseri admitted that their biggest competition is TikTok. He said in his video, “There’s some serious competition now – TikTok is huge”. The fact that the world’s popular social media platforms are admitting the popularity of TikTok certainly tells you the worth of the platform.

    Therefore, many business owners have now started to realize the major TikTok marketing opportunities they had been missing.

    Understanding TikTok Platform for Small Businesses

    TikTok focuses on the user experiences through a personalised feed. Therefore, the unique user experience of the platform makes it to outstand from its competitors.

    Further, the features to shoot, create, edit, customise videos with effects, sounds, and filters within the app; give users a complete experience from creating videos to publishing those. The whole journey takes place within the same app.

    Moreover, the app listens closely to the feedback they get from its users. For example, if certain trends and features are popular among its users, TikTok creates the editing features accordingly to create more content. Thus, users spend more time on the platform.

    Similarly, if there is negative feedback on the content or any feature, the platform quickly adjusts it to users’ likings and preferences.

    tiktok algorithm 2022

    Source: Quora 

    TikTok’s Algorithm

    In a press release by TikTok, they explained how their algorithm works. They also explained what increases the performance of your content for better organic reach. According to them, different factors contribute to the video’s performance, which includes the interests the users have selected.

    The factors which contribute to the performance of your content are as follows:

    1. User Interactions: How many people have viewed, liked, commented, shared, and followed your content? If a viewer has watched the complete video, the algorithm will consider it good content and push it for greater reach. On the contrary, if viewers are skipping your video, it will limit its reach.
      Pro Tip: Make valuable, trending, and entertaining content for your viewers
    2. Video Information: The captions, hashtags, and sounds play a significant role in reaching the relevant audience.
      Pro Tip: Include relevant hashtags, engaging captions, and popular sounds from the TikTok library.
    3. Device & Account Settings: This includes your language preference, location, and device settings according to your audience.
      Pro Tip: Add overlay text on videos, set language preferences, use integrations to drive sales.
    4. Location of Video Viewer & Video Creator: Where is your viewer located? What are the location settings of your business account?
      TikTok for marketing your small business will accelerate your digital marketing efforts for your business.

    Understanding TikTok Audience for Small Businesses

    “Does TikTok has my target audience? Isn’t TikTok just for Gen-Z?”

    These were convenient thoughts to skip TikTok from your marketing strategy. However, when Facebook and Instagram started, those were also considered platforms for ‘young’ people. Businesses didn’t see any value in promoting their businesses on these platforms. Fast forward to the tail-end of 2025, now these platforms serve as marketing tools for millions of businesses.

    Certainly, TikTok is moving in the same direction. The platform started with Gen-Z but is now growing with every second. It is more popular than Google. Therefore, it is safe to assume, everyone is on the platform, including your target audience and potential customers for your small business.

    With Facebook, Instagram and YouTube’s examples, we have seen that small businesses and personal profiles that get in early are rewarded from brand awareness to brand recognition. This also helps to establish brand credibility in the short-term and long term.

    Demographics: TikTok Users By Age

    tiktok users by age

    Source: Statista

    Is TikTok Marketing Right for Your Small Business?

    TikTok offers you to play around with creativity and authenticity. TikTok’s algorithm offers exposure for your small business to a huge audience. This audience determines the success of small businesses it can attract.

    Many small businesses gained success and grew into popular brands through TikTok. Creativity and authenticity helped them win the algorithm. TikTok has a huge audience, and the exposure it can give to your small business is not possible on any other platform.

    If you want to engage the TikTok community, invest time to create valuable and entertaining content. Finding the best time to post on TikTok for your business will help you get the most engagement to the content you produce. This will help you build brand awareness and help you get new customers while retaining the older ones.


    Source:  Marketing Science

    TikTok’s video-focused approach will help you tell your brand story in a creative, authentic and budget-friendly manner. For all your link management needs, from branded bio-links to analytics and traffic routing, check out Replug.io, a full-fledged link management platform built for marketers and small businesses.

    The content produced and published on TikTok can be shared on different social media platforms while driving traffic for the sales at the same time.

    Note: If you need clean, share-ready URLs for your TikTok campaigns or bio, you can simply shorten link using this link-shortener tool to make them concise and professional in no time at all!

    How Did TikTok help Businesses Grow?
    [Case Studies]

    TikTok is changing the marketing landscape for small businesses to grow and drive sales. Even its tagline “Don’t make Ads, Make TikToks” offers a unique strategy for small businesses to grow. Small businesses have always been looking for ways to grow. The fact is consumers are smart in detecting ads, and that’s where TikTok comes in. Every business needs a customised TikTok marketing strategy according to the goals they want to achieve and their target audience.

    TikTok is always working on initiatives for small businesses to grow. Their ongoing efforts small businesses convert their traffic into sales. They even released a series titled “Small Wins” to help small businesses use TikTok strategies for their digital marketing. The series featured various small businesses from across the globe. These success stories and strategies used by small businesses are great examples for all the other business owners who want to grow their small business using TikTok.

    We are sharing 4 case studies of small businesses from the tech, beauty, interior design and training industries who promoted their small business through TikTok

    Acome (Tech-Retail):

    Acome is an Indonesian tech retailer. They provide high-tech products for electric, smart, autonomous and hybrid vehicles. For their TikTok strategy, they created content to showcase their products in a fun but relatable way. The marketing team of Acome, tapped into a wide range of formats for their video content, such as unboxing, hacks, announcements and hilarious skits. However, creativity, authenticity, and recognizable brand identity stayed consistent.

    They also collaborated with TikTok creators for promoting their business while also giving creators creative liberty with the few guidelines. Their collaboration with creators, from telling a story to doing a prank just to promote their products in a subtle manner.

    acome


    Source: TikTok (@Acome)

    Digital marketing supervisor of Acome, Anas Prambudi, stated that they combined their brand’s selling points with user’s daily life. They used the content to add value to their customer’s life while pitching their product.

    Acome has now more than 290K followers and has seen a boost in their business since they included TikTok in their digital marketing strategy to grow their business.

     Josh & Matt Designs (Interior Decor)

    Josh & Matt Designs is a home décor small business run by Melbourne-based duo Josh & Matt. This hobby-turned-venture started during pandemic lockdown when they were living inside a simple home with no décor. They started creating videos about the fun projects they were designing and creating for their home. What started as a simple project was discovered by the TikTok community and gained them more than 260,000 followers. Josh & Designs is now a small business that converts its traffic into buyers on its online store. It all started with TikTok.

    In an interview with TikTok, they said that they started the account only to share the décor they were creating their small home during the lockdown. “During lockdown in Sydney, our home was nothing but a tiny white box. We were like; we need some art that could match our style. So, we started experimenting and creating DIYs with different types of material and showed it to TikTok, and people loved it”.

    josh and matt design case study


    Source: TikTok (@joshandmattdesigns)

    Josh & Matt were a bit apprehensive and unsure at first, but then, after a few weeks, they started seeing traction from people who were interested in their content that it turned into a small business eventually. You can apply their strategy for your small business as well to build brand recognition and sales. 

     Yakitori Don (Restaurant)

    Yakitori Don is a Tokyo-based chicken joint that gained its popularity through TikTok. The restaurant’s owner Hiroaki Higaki used to make videos with funny skits about the restaurant industry and life at a restaurant.

    A lot of people appreciated his videos because of his relatability with people who have worked at a restaurant. Relatability and humor were the secret success formula for Yakitori restaurant. He was discovered by the TikTok community, and people started visiting his restaurant more because of his popularity. 

    tiktok case study

    Source: TikTok (@Higakiyakitori)

    His strategy worked for him in driving more customers to their restaurant and thus increasing sales. They now have more than 184,000 followers and are now accelerating their organic success through paid media ads.

    Girls That Invest (Digital Products)

    Girls That Invest is a community for women who want to learn about investing. Their TikTok strategy comprises of sharing tips, aspirational and informational content related to investments. This content helps them drive traffic to their Masterclass, online courses and podcast about investments.

    girlsthatinvest tiktok strategy
    Source: TikTok (@GirlsthatInvest)

    Girls That Invests used BioLinks to redirect their TikTok traffic for digital products and podcasts which helped them to get to the #1 Podcast in the world in the business category.

    tiktok bio link example

    Source: BioLink Landing Page of GirlsThatInvest

    They started their TikTok journey in September 2021, and within four months, they gained 25,000 followers. Thus, driving more traffic to their website through adding relevant services in their bio link.

    How to Promote Your Business on TikTok?

    Develop a Brand Story

    Sales and creativity are co-related.

    Seth Godin once said, “People don’t buy products. They buy stories”. Your audience connects well with your brand through a story.

    Have you crafted your brand story? 

    Your brand story can be derived from your mission and vision statements. You can strategize the content formats in which you can tell that story, such as hacks, tips, humorous content or engaging TikTok creators and community through a challenge.

    TikTok community thrives on authenticity, creativity and joy. The lesser flashy ads, the more authentic and relatable feel it will give out to its users. Your brand story will be the best way to connect with your audience and can share your mission with them.

    Connect with TikTok Community at all Stages of Your Sales Funnel

    According to a report, 75% of US consumers want to support small businesses by promoting and buying from them. This is the best time for small businesses and brands with consumers on a human level, outside the advertising models. TikTok is the perfect place to connect with your consumers through relatable and non-flashy, budget-friendly content.

    The community on TikTok is always looking for inspiration and discovering new things such as your brand, small business product and services. According to the data from TikTok, some statistics show why it is important to connect with the community.

    • 67% of TikTok users agree that TikTok content inspired them to shop from a small business even they weren’t looking to shop
    • 74% of TikTok users say that TikTok has helped them with brand awareness
    • 66% of TikTok users agreed that TikTok helped them to make a decision to buy something
    tiktok small business statistics

    Source: TikTok Marketing Science

    Optimize Your TikTok Profile

    Your target audience will discover your account based on their interest preferences. Therefore, it is important to optimize the profile with a location setting, using keywords in the info section and using the relevant link in the bio.

    TikTok only allows you to add one link in the bio, but you can use Replug’s bio-link feature to link to multiple platforms and websites using a single link.

    Use Hashtags

    There are a lot of small business conversations already happening on TikTok. From social media tips and strategies to branding small businesses, hashtags cover an ocean of conversations. Do hashtag research for your niche and your small business. These hashtags will help you from reaching new customers to driving sales on the platform.

    tiktok makeup video

    Source: TikTok (_tattilashes)

    The view counts of each hashtag show how small business conversations are popular on the platform.

    For example, #smallbusiness has 33.8 billion views on TikTok, #Entreprenuer has 12.8 billion views, #smallbusinesscheck has 10.2 billion views, #supportsmallbusiness has 3.1 billion views. The popularity of these hashtags shows that small businesses are growing on TikTok as they are already getting a lot of attention from the TikTok community.

    Use TikTok Business Account

    TikTok Business account is designed for commercial purposes. It is a great tool for small businesses to see how their content is performing, the demographics of their audience and analytics. The business account also offers a variety of features and tools such in-built content management platform and music library. The data and analytics feature will help you see how your audience is interacting with your content and how you can optimize for the best results.

    Tiktok business account

    Source: Medium (The Startup) 

    Increase Your Sales Through TikTok with Shopify Integration

    If you are a business owner, we know your primary goal is to increase sales of small businesses. The primary goal of any small business is to increase sales. TikTok’s partnership with Spotify enables small businesses to create shoppable ads. Shopify’s integration will allow the worldwide community to buy products from small businesses.

    More than 1 million users of Shopify can now promote their small business and e-commerce stores on TikTok and sell their products.

    tiktok and shopify

    Source: Shopify

    Shopify integration with TikTok will allow small businesses to set up the TikTok Ads Manager, identify their customers from the TikTok audience and drive more sales.

    The process to synchronize merchandise inventories and payments for your small business with TikTok is very user-friendly. You’ll be able to create videos, ads and optimize your content for the marketing campaigns through TikTok and won’t need to be overwhelmed by video editing tools.

    In addition to all these benefits, you can track the performance of your campaign through pixel setup — this will help you allocate marketing budgets accordingly while increasing your returns on investment.

    Use Bio links to Drive Traffic to Other Platforms

    TikTok is a great tool to drive your traffic to your website, YouTube channel, or other channels. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use bio-link to your advantage. Although TikTok only allows you to add one link in the bio, you can use Replug bio link feature to your benefit.

    With this feature, you can house all the important links within one link. The bio-link will divert your TikTok traffic to other platforms. This is one of the best hacks for small businesses to grow on TikTok.

    Example 1:

    For example, Dwayne Johnson has a bio-link on his TikTok profile which directs his audience to a home page where they can find links to all his social profiles, online shop, affiliate links to his products, and recent news and interviews.

    the rock tiktok

    therock

    Source: TikTok (@TheRock) 

    Example 2:

    Similarly, Ed Sheeran uses bio-links in his profile to promote his recent song releases across different platforms and his concerts. The separate page for all his links helps his audience to listen to his latest hits on different music platforms like SoundCloud, Apple Music, Youtube etc. 

    edsheeran tiktok profile

    edsheeran tiktok

    Source: TikTok (@EdSheeran)

    If Ed-Sheeran and Dwayen Johnson are using the power of bio-links, what’s stopping you from promoting your small business and brand with bio-links? 

    Bio-links is one of the most effective and essential tools to use for your sales funnel. According to a study by Parse.ly:

    Strategic bio-linking can increase traffic by 10%-15%

    This can increase many folds if you are using the TikTok marketing strategy and re-direct the traffic to other platforms as well. 

    Use TikTok Ads Manager

    What is the quickest way to market on TikTok? – TikTok Ads! 

    TikTok’s advertising platforms offer you the complete journey of creating an effective marketing campaign – from creating video ads in seconds to launching them. In addition to that, small businesses are always looking for affordable marketing tools and strategies. Irrespective of the size of your business, TikTok ads manager is simple to use and do all the heavy lifting for you, from creating video ads to adding soundtracks in TikTok Ad studio.

    tiktok ads manager

    Source: TikTok  (@Mercedesbenz)

    Mercedes Benz is a luxury brand but it has been using TikTok advertising to target the viewers through challenges and TikTok Ads.

    TikTok ads appear on the “For You” page. It is curated according to the interests of each user. The ads appear for almost 9 seconds. After 9 seconds the video freezes to the last frame with a clickable Call to Action

    If you include paid advertising in your digital marketing plan for 2026, then TikTok ads are one of the best platforms to invest in. You can also try Facebook ads and Quora ads as your paid marketing strategy.

    Collaborate with TikTok Creators to Communicate Your Small Business

    You can rev up the results of your marketing campaigns by collaborating with TikTok creators. Therefore, TikTok has a creator marketplace that gives you access and information about a diverse pool of influencers, content creators and storytellers. The marketplace will help you understand the right fit for your products and niche.

    The huge following of these content creators and influencers will help you accelerate the growth of your small business. Thus, bringing you buyers for your small business. With TikTok marketplace, you can choose which content creators would go best with your brand’s voice. 

    tiktok collaboration

    Photomyne Creator Collaboration Case Study

    TikTok Opportunities in 2026

    Delivery Only Restaurants for Viral Recipes

    TikTok is partnering with Virtual dining and GrubHub to turn viral videos into meals. Thus, the platform’s community will be able to order through the platform. This is a great opportunity for small businesses in the food and beverages industry. 

    tiktok kitchen

    Source: TechCrunch+

    Longer Videos on TikTok

    TikTok videos get viral because they are quick and snappy. Last year TikTok introduced the feature of longer videos for the creators.  The longer videos received over 5 billion views globally. Hence, the creators and small businesses used the feature to share long-form content such as podcasts, vlogs, and tutorials. Small businesses can leverage this feature to their benefit to increase brand awareness and customer retention. 

    Wrap Up:

    I hope this helps you create a great Tiktok marketing strategy for your business.
    Follow for more strategies and updates on Tiktok Business.

  • What is the Best Time to Post on TikTok

    What is the Best Time to Post on TikTok

    TikTok is breaking the internet with its trends and videos. If you are trying to grow on TikTok, you might be wondering what is the Best Time to Post on TikTok in 2026.

    How the TikTok algorithm works? What are the best hours to post on TikTok for maximum reach and engagement? Or you might be thinking if there is a right time to post given the content on TikTok is so fast and spontaneous?

    TikTok has 1 billion active users globally – and the platform is still growing.

    So why not invest in TikTok Business?

    TikTok trends move at the speed of light, and people have become stars overnight through this platform. TikTok growth tactics are continually evolving. Therefore, it is essential to have a TikTok strategy in place.

    In this article, we’ll cover what the best times to post on TikTok are? When most of your audience is online, and how you should prioritize your content and use TikTok analytics for better growth and engagement.

    So, let’s dive in! 

    Why is it Important to Know the Best Time to Post on TikTok?

    People love TikTok for the personalized mix of content that it has to offer for its users. The “For You” page shows the content from both big and small accounts.

    However, all the personalized content on the main interface of all users is not older than a couple of days. 

    This tells us two things about TikTok content: 

    1. Publishing needs to be consistent and timely 
    2. TikTok trends go viral because it promotes the content timely 

    Therefore, for best results and better reach, you should find out the best time to post on TikTok – and it is when your audience is online. 

    Two things are important to understand to find the best time to post on TikTok: 

    • Where your audience is located? (TimeZones) 
    • When are they online? 

    How to Tell the Best Time to Post on TikTok? 

    The best time to post on TikTok is favoured by both the algorithm and your audience’s online presence. 

    But how can you find out? – By combining tested timings and keeping a close eye on the performance of your content to find the frequency and timings that work best for you.  

    What is the Overall Best Time to Post on TikTok? 

    Based on the frequency of your content, you can select the best time to post on any given day from this list. 

    • Best time to post on TikTok on Monday: 6 AM, 10AM, 10 PM (EDT)  
    • Best time to post on TikTok on Tuesday: 2 AM, 4AM, 9 AM (EDT)
    • Best time to post on TikTok on Wednesday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM (EDT) 
    • Best time to post on TikTok on Thursday: 9 AM, 12 PM, 7 PM (EDT)
    • Best time to post on TikTok on Friday: 5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM (EDT)
    • Best time to post on TikTok on Saturday: 11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM (EDT) 
    • Best time to post on TikTok on Sunday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM (EDT)
    best time to post on tiktok

    That said, some hours and days seem to work better across the board. Based on research and experiments by HootSuite, some days and hours bring the maximum engagement on TikTok:

    • Tuesday: 10 AM (EDT) | 7 AM (PST) 
    • Thursday: 1 PM (EDT) | 10 AM (PST)
    • Friday: 8 AM (EDT) | 5 AM (PST) 

    You can use a time converter like SavvyTime to see the hours in your time zone. 

    best time to post on tiktok EDT

    How to Figure Out Your Own Best Time to Post on TikTok? 

    Your TikTok audience is unique to you, and your content is unique to them. Therefore, it’ll be good practice to couple your posting with tested time with ways to figure out the best times for your fans. 

    We will discuss how you can also figure out your own best time for posting on TikTok?

    Use TikTok Analytics 

    TikTok analytics will provide you with tons of information about your content and followers – from where are they located to when are they most active. You can use this information also to choose your own best time for publishing. 

    But, how to access TikTok analytics?

    Don’t worry; we’ll take you step-by-step on how to get access to analytics.

    Step 1: Switch to Pro-Account of TikTok

    • Tap the first three dots on the top-right of the profile. This is the menu. 
    tiktok profile

    • Tap on “Manage My Account”
    maanage tiktok account

    • Tap on “Switch to Pro-Account” 
    tiktok pro account

    • Select the type of your account. Follow the steps to complete the process.
    • Now you’ll be reverted to the account menu. You’ll receive an email of account up-gradation. 
    • Now, you can see “Analytics” in your menu
    tiktok analytics

    Step 2: Understand TikTok Analytics

    TikTok analytics will show you three tabs:

    1. Overview: This will give you the bird-eye-view of video views, profile views and followers.
    2. Content: This tab will show you the video metrics like views, likes, comments, average watch time etc. 
    3. Followers: This is the most helpful tab for you to determine the best time. It will show you about the follower growth, demographics, location and time when they are active.
    tiktok analytics

    source

    You Are Ready to Find Your Own Best Time to Post on TikTok 

    Know Your Audiences’ Location 

    You can identify the best time to post by knowing where your audience is located and when are they most active. 

    Tap on the “Followers” tab and scroll down to see the territories. The tab will show the name of the country where your audience is located. 

    But the problem is even in the same country. Let’s say the United States have different times in different states. For example, if you are based in New York, you might be assuming your audience is on the East coast of America but people in California might be preparing for the day.

    If your audience is US based, there are few things you can consider to identify your own best time to post on TikTok.  

    • Know when is the engagement rate is higher
    • Take insights from your high performing content.
    • Check insights from other platforms to predict audience availability. 

    In the analytics image below, you can see the audience distribution of a TikTok account. 

    tiktok analytics distribution

    Know When Your Followers are Most Engaged

    Identify when is your audience is most engaged. Click on the “Followers” tab. Scroll down to see the followers activity. 

    In this image, you can see the follower’s activity is almost the same throughout the week. 

    tiktok engagement

    From this, you can tell when the follower activity is highest and from which hour it starts spiking. Choose to publish between those hours. 

    The information from analytics will help you find the best time to post TikTok for maximum engagement.  

    Know Your Time Zone

    The time mentioned on TikTok is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Therefore, you’ll have to convert the hours according to the time zones of your audience. 

    You can use different time converting tools. 

    TikTok has global users. Therefore, you must see the time according to your audience’s time zone. 

    For example, 7 AM in New York is 4 AM in Los Angeles

    Generally, early morning posts seem to perform better early in the week (Monday till Wednesday), while on weekends (Thursday till Sunday), the afternoon and evening posting will get better traction.   

    Identify Your High-Performing Content

    TikTok analytics will show you your content performance. 

    1. Click on “Content” at the top of the analytics page (Image) to see it. Now you can see the last week’s content performance.
    2. Scroll down to see your trending videos. Each post will show more details about it. 
    3. Each post will show views, likes, comments and the total number of shares. It’ll also reveal the average watch time and where the most ideas came from.
    best time to post on tiktok


    Source

    Your key takeaways from your best performing content should e following: 

    • What was the date and time you shared that post? You’ll find it on the top of the page under the video thumbnail. 
    •  Where did the audience come from? What is their time zone? Convert Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) into your followers’ time zone.  

    Once you have these points, now make a pattern. 

    Let’s say one of your videos performed well on Friday evening; then, it is the best time for you to post on TikTok. 

    Track Your Content Performance Over Time 

    TikTok analytics only show the data of the last seven days, and it deletes it after 28 days. Therefore, it might be a bit challenging to find accurate time since it also involves guesswork.

    You can track your content’s weekly performance in Microsoft Excel or Google sheet. 

    Over time, you’ll have the information and see the patterns emerging between the type of content and the best hours and days to post on TikTok. 

    For example, your data might show you your comedy videos perform better than dance videos. Then you can focus more on the content types along with the best time to post. 

    Cross Check Your Audience with Other Platforms 

    Do you produce similar content for other platforms as well? If you have an active audience on Youtube or Instagram, these platforms can also help you identify the best times to post on TikTok.

    See Instagram, Facebook and YouTube analytics for similar content and see when is your audience live, what has been the best performing content when it was published.

    The chances are they’ll discover your TikTok videos on other platforms and then hop on TikTok to follow you. That’s why it is important to hook your audience and check their online behaviour across the board.

    You can share your social media profiles in bio links. One way to navigate traffic from Facebook and Instagram is to use Tiktok links as Instagram bio links.  

    All these tips will help you understand what your audience is loving and appreciating? When are they online? When are they most engaged? 

    Now, once you have found out about the kind of content your audience likes and when are they most engaged, the next step is how you can use the TikTok algorithm in your favour for the identified hours and content types. 

    How to Use TikTok Algorithm for Your Favour? 

    The success of content is to get it on as many “For You” pages as possible. 

    It is important to know how TikTok controls what appears on the ” For You Page”? 

    To get better social media engagement, here are some factors discussed which make the algorithm favour your content. 

    1. Hashtags
    2. Captions 
    3. Trending Sounds and Songs 
    4. When your audience is most active 
    5. Video Content & Editing 
    6. Location 

    Hashtags

    The “For You” page is personalized for every user for the type of content they mostly engage with. Landing on the “For You” page is like hitting the TikTok lottery. 

    According to a statement issued by TikTok, using hashtags like #ForYouPage #FYP etc. does not guarantee a spot on For You Page.  

     Rather than using generic hashtags, the best way to optimize your content for “For You Page” is to approach things scientifically. 

    Tips: 

    Some tips to optimize your content with the right hashtags are as following:

    1. Go to “Discover Tab”. Find trending hashtags. You can also see the performance of the hashtags you want to use. 
    2. Use the hashtags which have a fire icon next to them. Use these hashtags in your captions if they align. 
    3. Check the views of hashtags you want to use. The numbers will show which content is favoured.
    4. Research what hashtags are trending and see if your brand fits can create content around it to be part of the trend. 
    5. Be cautious of the content practices you are being part of. You have to evaluate and see if it is the right fit for your brand else; it can backfire. 
    hashtags tiktok

    Captions

    The next TikTok algorithm factor is Captions! 

    Unlike Instagram and Facebook, TikTok is a platform with short captions, timely hashtags and quickly digestible content.    

    Tips:

    1. To get better results, keep the copy short and snappy
    2. Include questions in your captions to lead conversations in your comments 
    3. Include jokes in your captions or add a touch of mystery to the copy
    4. Top comments have the prime spot on the comments list. You can lead conversations as people will notice comments on your video.

    Just like Cori Spruiell does:

    top comments tiktok

    Trending Sounds & Songs 

    TikTok’s trending sounds and music have played a significant role in the music industry. The trending sounds play a major role in content discoverability. Using trending sounds at the right time can help you boost the views. 

    Tips

    Here is how you can find the trending music for TikTok: 

    • Sounds on video editor: Go to TikTok video editor. Press the plus icon at the bottom of the screen. Tap “Sounds”. Scroll through what’s trending. 
    • Favourites: Similar to “Saves” on Instagram, favouriting a sound collects it for you in one handy spot. If you like a sound and want to use it in the future, tap on the sound under the username and tap “Add to Favorites” — it’ll come in clutch when you need it most.
    • Sounds your followers are listening: To find the top sounds your audience has listened to in the last seven days go to your Analytics tab (only accessible for TikTok Pro accounts) and under the Followers tab, scroll down to see the music your audience is vibing to!
    add sound tiktok

    When Your Audience Is Most Active

    Posting content when your audience is live will help you save your content from getting lost in the ocean of content. We have already discussed TikTok analytics with the TikTok Pro Account above to see when your followers are most active.

    Tips: 

    • Go with the best time to post on TikTok slots which we have shared above  
    • Use TikTok analytics to find where your audience is located and when are they active 

    Video Content & Editing

    TikTok is the hub of creativity. With millions of unique video styles, TikTok allows you to represent your brand as you like. 

    With a strong video strategy, you can hook viewers to re-watch and share your video. The re-watches and the videos users keep coming back to tells the algorithm that your content is being appreciated and thus it rewards your content by showing it to more people.

    This type of content is something TikTok is very likely monitoring, serving more of the content users are gravitating towards. It could be machine learning over personal preference that determines whether a video goes viral or not.

    Tips: 

    • Once you have the idea for a video, spend some time editing to make the format engaging for viewers. There are many MP4 editors that could help you with it
    • See the best performing video formats and the trends people are following

    Location 

    Tiktok serves hyper-local content to its viewers to make a more community-oriented feed. 

    “Location is definitely a key factor in what videos get recommended to users on their For You pages. Having a global team has really allowed us to explore and confirm patterns in how we’re served location-based content. Because of this, there’s a lot of potentials for smaller businesses to benefit from being on TikTok to really increase brand awareness – especially if they’re trying to reach Gen Z and Millennials. ” – Lindsay Ashcraft, Social Media Coordinator. 

    Although location is a small variable for the TikTok algorithm, there’s no denying that users have started to see (and engage!) with content that was posted closest to them.

    Tips: 

    • Use TikTok analytics to understand where your audience is located 
    • Convert the time zones according to their location 
    • Use hyper-local trends to make your content more engaging 
    tiktok analytics

    Why do Some Videos on TikTok go Viral and Others Not?  

    Many people have seen or heard of the “slow burn” phenomenon on TikTok — when something is posted, barely gets any engagement or reach, and then suddenly pops off on TikTok.

    This timing could be 48-hours after posting or weeks later, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

    For now, we can assume that while videos slowly gain likes, comments, and views, the TikTok algorithm may push your video onto the For You page, even if it’s not a brand new video.

    Or, a sound could suddenly get a lot of exposure, based on someone else’s video going viral, and your video that features the same sounds could get a little bump.

    So even though you might not get an initial huge reaction, it’s worth waiting and keeping an eye on your video for weeks, and even months after you’ve posted.

    Read also: How to post TikTok on Instagram: Step-by-step Guide

    Conclusion

    The combination of what is favoured by users as well as the TikTok algorithm define the best hours to post on tiktok.

    However, with series of experimenting and testing different times of publishing by industry experts and TikTok influencers, there are some days in the week and some hours which perform better across the board.

    The best time to post on TikTok is Tuesday, Thursday & Friday. Convert the slots according to your time zone and when your audience is most active. Combine the best hours to post along with the tips and tricks to hack the TikTok algorithm for the best engagement.

    What is the current brand you are handling? What are your objectives? Or if there is anything you have tested for your TikTok strategy, do share. 

    If you want to know about more tried and tested tips on content strategy for TikTok, let us know in the comments and we would love to help! 

    Steps you can take to discover the best time to post a TikTok

    Here’s a quick summary of the steps you can take to discover the best time to post a TikTok video to maximize audience engagement:

    1. Get a TikTok Pro account to gain access to analytics about your content and followers.
    2. Find out where your audience is based in the Followers tab.
    3. Convert the global best times to post on TikTok (mentioned above in EST) to your audience’s timezone.
    4. Discover when your followers are most engaged under the Followers tab. Then convert the time’s listed in TikTok (which are in UTC) to your audience’s time zone.
    5. Look at post analytics under the Content tab – is there a pattern of videos performing well when they’re posted at certain times?
    6. Track your video’s performance over time to identify trends that tell you the best time to post on TikTok.
    7. If you have an engaged audience on Youtube or another platform like Instagram, check out the analytics to see if they can inform when your target audience is the most engaged on social media.

    Note: If you’re juggling posting schedules, multiple content links, and tracking across platforms, a pledged link management platform can help you stay organized, so you don’t lose track of when or what you post. Also remember, when sharing your TikTok videos across other social channels or bios, you may want to use a URL shortener so links stay clean and more clickable, which can help improve reach and tracking across platforms.

  • How to build your brand on YouTube – branding on YouTube the right way!

    How to build your brand on YouTube – branding on YouTube the right way!

    [toc]

    Trying to expand your business? Looking for branding on Youtube? 

    Most companies make the mistake of treating Youtube as a platform for self-expression and company updates…

    But the truth of the matter is that Youtube is a search engine and a marketing platform — just like Google.

    So most (if not all) strategies that apply to your blog also apply to Youtube.

    In this article, we’ll explore the strategies listed below for branding on YouTube and show you how to adapt them to the video format.

    1. Pick Your Niche Carefully
    2. Do Keyword Research for YouTube Videos
    3. Consistency is a GameChanger
    4. Bring Out the USP of Your Product in Your Videos
    5. Humanize Your Videos
    6. Have Great Production Quality
    7. Widen Your Audience Base With Collaborations
    8. YouTube Channel Promotion

    Once you expand your business across multiple channels, managing links becomes a pain. And that’s why pro Youtubers use Replug — an all-in-one link management tool. Click this link to register for free!

    1. Pick Your Niche Carefully to Build A Brand on YouTube

    Suppose you’re creating content in a niche you’re not familiar with.

    You’ve just done some research and got a feeling that this niche might be profitable…

    Well, if you’re not an expert on the topic your viewers will sense that you’re not giving real advice…

    And that’ll be a big turn-off.

    So before you pick a niche, make sure that:

    • You’re passionate about. 
    • You can quickly gain expertise in it
    • You have ideas on how to create unique content in this niche
    • Other people interested in the niche are willing to spend money on it

    2. Do Keyword Research for YouTube Videos

    Once you pick a niche, find what your audience is interested in. And guess what? The best way to know about their interest is through keyword research. 

    Just look at the image below, Best smartphones 2021 keyword can drive up to 880 visitors per month. 

    grow youtube keywrods

    Over time, all these keywords can bring immense traffic. 

    But remember, keyword research is just the basics. To get the most out of it, you’ve to do proper YouTube SEO optimization. 

    3. Consistency is the Real Game Changer for Your Brand

    To start with branding on YouTube, Just pick any successful YouTube channel you like and see how consistent it has been. Embedding your YouTube channel on your website can also help you gain more visibility and direct traffic to your content.

    Yes, YouTube’s algorithms help those who publish consistently. 

    When you upload regularly, it constantly reminds viewers about your channel and eventually gives them more recommendations

    And as you know, the more practice we do, the better we become. So with every video that you make, the quality gets better

    Everyone knows about the YouTube sensation, PewDiePie. 

    Most people that have ever looked him up or know a bit about him will tell you that he became viral overnight after his Amnesia gameplay videos. 

    But the truth is, he consistently uploaded a video every day for 3 years before getting the numbers he deserved.

    youtube growth case study

    #1 Strategy to Stay Consistent on YouTube

    To have a turtle-like consistency, follow these tips: 

    1. Schedule videos in advance with a content calendar
    2. Produce content in batches and beforehand
    3. Keep things simple and easy to follow
    4. Keep the publishing rate depending upon your free time and schedule

    As far as we know, there’s no ideal upload frequency since YouTube didn’t make any statements about it.

    If YouTube discloses this information, everyone will start making content with no value.  

    Nonetheless, try uploading a video anywhere between once a day or once a month depending on your niche

    The reason for such a wide range is because different niches require different engagement rates with your audience.

    For example, an educational channel doesn’t need to upload daily because their videos are evergreen and don’t go out of fashion after a few days…

    On the other hand, gamers and entertainers need to upload every day to keep their audience interested and happy. And that’s because a huge part of entertainment is linked to what’s currently going on in the world. 

    Another consistency element is your logo. It needs to be well-designed so it can look as good in a video as it does on your shop window or your merchandise. Using a youtube logo maker, you can create a logo that looks as good in a video as it does on your shop window or your merchandise. It may not seem relevant at first, but your logo is how people recognize you, it must be consistently present in your videos and look the same wherever people spot it. Take Nike for instance – no matter where you see their content, their logo is instantly recognizable.

    So consistency with both your image and how often you post are some of the most important factors, especially when building a brand from scratch.

    4. Bring Out the USP of Your Product in Your Videos

    YouTube has over 500 hours worth of videos uploaded every minute. 

    It means no matter what niche you’re in, you still have stiff competition for these precious views. 

    To experience success on YouTube Branding, there’s an enormous need to stand out

    In fact, this is where your USP (unique selling proposition) comes in. 

    It’s a unique aspect or trait about your videos that no other channel can bring. 

    If there is nothing different about your videos, the viewers won’t find you interesting. 

    Here are a few things to create and refine a solid USP for your YouTube presence and branding:

    • Understand the target audience, niche, and competitors to spot missing opportunities in the industry
    • Look at the trends and act on those that seem to be successful 
    • Find a way to communicate your USP in subtle yet effective ways
    • Look at surveys and stats in the target niche to stay updated about it

    If you can establish a good USP, use it to define your channel theme, style of videos, and content. 

    5. Humanize Your Videos and Keep Them Friendly

    Unlike written content, Youtube gives you the chance to leverage the power of facial expressions and various tonalities to create highly engaging content.

    But before you jump into that, keep a check on 2 things

    A. Don’t be a Professional Nerd – Speak Casually & Freely

    Although some niches demand seriousness, there are many that don’t. 

    But no matter how formal your niche is, always add a touch of fun to sound human. Learn to speak conversational English.

    After all, people hate getting advice from a robot. 

    B. Tell Stories To Sell Your Product 

    Whenever it comes to video marketing, the term storytelling often comes up.

    That’s because storytelling is a powerful way to grab someone’s attention and get them to adopt your reasoning, logic, and mental frame to increase video conversions.

    (And once that happens, your product pitches will be very well accepted within your brand community.)

    To understand how brands sell their products with stories, take a look at the 5 stages of storytelling: 

    • Exposition: Your intro video is the deciding factor whether the audience will stay or skip your video. You can use a YouTube intro maker tool to make your intro video creative and engaging.
    • Rising Action: Creating anticipation about your video and some kind of problem that requires a video-defining action or solution
    • Climax: Main point of the video that can give an actual answer to the problem
    • Falling Action: Performing the action with your product 
    • Resolution: The conclusion of your video with a proper ending
    youtube video

    When you take viewers through these stages, they fully immerse in it. And as a result, you gain their trust through online branding.

    Related: Video Marketing Fundamentals to Increase Conversion Rates

    6. Have Great Production Quality

    Back then before 2012, video quality wasn’t a problem. But now, there are a lot of people who are trying to do the same thing as you. 

    In today’s era, having better production quality will definitely give you an edge. 

    HD videos and good audio make it easier for the viewer to focus on the main topic. 

    They also make your videos more attractive and aesthetically pleasing. 

    So you should try your best to have a proper set-up with a decent background, good lighting, and looking presentable in your videos to get the most video conversion rate. 

    Lastly, create attractive thumbnails and have well-edited videos to make everything stand out. 

    Always remember, quality over quantity always gives the best results especially for branding on YouTube. 

    7. Collaborate with Fellow YouTubers to Widen Your Audience Base

    Being a small YouTuber, gaining exposure can be life-changing. 

    You can find YouTubers like you who want to grow their channel and collaborate on a project.

    This way you can introduce your channel to their followers and vice versa. 

    If these followers see some value in your videos, they’ll surely check out your channel. 

    You can also learn something new along the way and push yourself to be more creative and diverse. 

    Even big channels love to collaborate. 

    Back in November 2020, Thomas from Yes Theory went on a crazy adventure to Afghanistan with a fellow YouTuber Drew Binsky.

    Both went on a 96-hour journey to see Afghanistan.

    Although the channels featured weren’t exactly similar, they still gained each other’s exposure through experience.

    To secure such relationships, all you gotta do is reach out to the influencer through social media or email.

    5 Key Steps to Successfully Collaborate with Other YouTubers 

    1. Find some people in the same niche or something closely related to it
    2. Create a plan or a rough sketch of what could be done with the collaboration
    3. Approach the YouTuber, propose the idea, and get their thoughts on it
    4. Try to fully utilize the creativity from both ends and make a video
    5. Promote your video across all social media channels 

    Two brains are better than one. Therefore, go out into your community and find someone like-minded to make a video with. 

    8. YouTube Channel Promotion – A Must-do For Branding on Youtube

    Consistent uploads and great content are not enough. To get recognition, put efforts into marketing and promotions. 

    Right now, there are 4 popular methods that can help for promotion: 

    A. Paid Advertisements – Fastest Exposure on YouTube

    Paid YouTube Ads are great for maximum visibility

    Google claims that viewers who watch your YouTube Ad entirely are 23 times more likely to visit your channel and check out other videos.

    So, it’s definitely worth a shot!

    You can advertise your videos directly on the same platform, leaving an option for viewers to check your channel. 

    For ads, you can either choose an existing video or create a special ad campaign. 

    You can also choose from the following formats:

    • Display Ads
    • Skippable & Non-Skippable Video Ads
    • Bumper Ads
    • Overlay Ads
    • Sponsored Cards

    Another similar thing to YouTube Ads is a sponsored video on another channel. 

    You can hire another YouTuber to make a completely sponsored video or a sponsored segment in one of their videos. 

    Regardless of what type of ad you go with, keep a checklist of the following things:

    • Have a strong Call-To-Action in the ads
    • Create a highly targeted ad with YouTube targeting features 
    • Put your channel info or links with the ad
    • Choose the format based on your needs
    • Set up a remarketing plan if the ad is successful

    B. Giveaways and Contests

    Giveaways and contests can be extremely exciting for your audience. But yes, most YouTubers do this to gain new followers.

    Whenever you run a giveaway, the prospective follower has a chance to win something. 

    In return, they have to subscribe to your channel or follow your socials. This creates a win-win situation for you as well as your audience.

    Also, Contest CTA’s have a 3.73% higher conversion rate when compared to other CTA’s. So, there’s an increased chance of attracting new audiences.

    C. Seek Help from Other Social Media Channels

    YouTube being the only channel is a bad idea.

    Along with your YouTube channel, take your online presence to a whole new level with a website and social media. 

    All you need to do is maintain these channels and create content for them that is in conjunction with your YouTube channel. 

    If this is too much for you, simply post video updates and some personal status to increase social media engagement

    You can also use paid ads on social media like Facebook ads to promote your YouTube channel. 

    D. YouTube SEO and Video Optimization

    It’s true that good content is a must for your viewers. But to make these viewers see your good content, YouTube SEO is a must. 

    Focusing on optimization will increase your views substantially and boost your channel’s views and recommendations.

    And a fun fact about recommendations: Over 70% of videos watched on YouTube are determined by the recommendation algorithm!

    Here are a few ways you can perform YouTube SEO the right way: 

    • Do proper YouTube Keyword research and look for ideas with the most searches
    • Keep your videos engaging throughout the duration to keep the audience retention high
    • Focus on increasing metrics like video comments, likes, CTR, etc 
    • Add attractive and informative thumbnails
    • Write clear and concise titles without clickbait
    • Add Youtube links
    • Proper descriptions with a healthy amount of keywords in it
    • Add topic-related tags

    The practice doesn’t end here, there are plenty of crazy things you can do to boost your YouTube SEO. 

    Managing these promotional activities effortlessly

    YouTube is already a hectic occupation. Marketing on the other hand could get a lot more time-consuming as well. 

    With Paid Ads on YouTube or other platforms, giveaways, and social media marketing, you’ll be dealing with a ton of links. 

    Cross-linking means you will have several different links that could get tough to manage. This is where Replug.io comes to the rescue!

    Replug – all-in-one link management tool

    Replug is a top-notch link shortener that can generate short branded URLs, track links, and do much more.

    Replug

    With Replug, you can easily have all of your links in one place where you can:

    • Create branded shortened URLs for your website, social media, and links through our Youtube link shortener.
    • Tracking URL and monitoring the clicks and visits on the links with detailed analysis
    • Retarget every visitor who clicks the link
    • Create social media bio links like Instagram bio links
    • Embed a call-to-action to every link you share
    • Create custom bio link landing pages

    To get started, all you need is a link to share your YouTube channel or a video. 

    With replug, you can create a branded link that is optimized with customizable options for messages and appearance. 

    As soon as your link gets clicks, you can measure the stats and analyze your progress by link tracking clicks and visitors. 

    Visit Replug to know more about this URL shortener tool.

  • How to create the perfect LinkedIn content strategy in 10 easy steps [advanced tactics included]

    How to create the perfect LinkedIn content strategy in 10 easy steps [advanced tactics included]

    With over 1.2 billion members in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is the place to be. Whether you’re looking for side hustle opportunities, a new job, or simply want to grow as a thought leader, LinkedIn can help.

    If you’re sharing content, resources, or links regularly on LinkedIn and want an easy way to manage and track them all, Replug.io
    offers a robust link-management dashboard that keeps everything organized and streamlined.

    Whatever your goal is, you’ll need to create high-quality content to stand out in the crowd. So, let’s help you create the perfect LinkedIn content strategy plan for growing your personal brand and attracting the right people to your network.

    We’ll start with looking at the benefits of posting more content on LinkedIn. Then, we’ll dip into the algorithm’s working so you can create a strategy that’ll get you high reach and engagement. Finally, we’ll give you the ten steps to create your strategy along with three advanced tips to grow on the platform.

    Let’s get on with it.

    Benefits of having a well-defined LinkedIn content strategy

    A thought-out LinkedIn strategy gives you direction. It sets objectives related to what you’ll post, how frequently you’ll post, and how you’ll grow on the network. Having such a strategy in place also means you’re carefully positioning yourself in front of your audience.

    Here’s a brief walkthrough of the upsides of having a defined LinkedIn content marketing  strategy.

    • It helps you define your personal brand

    A LinkedIn content strategy help you position your personal brand in a manner that you become recognized for it. With the content you post, you show your values and what you stand for. It also positions you as a subject matter expert – the ultimate goal of LinkedIn users.

    • It works as a content testing channel

    While you can always listen to your audience on LinkedIn by reading and jumping into comments, you can also ask for their opinion yourself.

    For example, you can post on a topic and test how well it’s received by your audience. If it gets a positive reaction and stirs conversation, you can tell it’s a topic worth talking about more. For those of you running personal or company blogs and newsletter, this is a good way to identify engaging topics to cover.

    • It serves as a content distribution channel

    On the flip side, LinkedIn is an excellent channel to share the content you publish with your audience. Instead of sharing links on top of links in post after posts though, consider taking a community-building approach that’s based on value.

    Note: Before posting, you can create short link versions of your articles or resources. This not only makes URLs cleaner and more user-friendly but also helps track clicks and engagement more accurately. You can also create a LinkedIn QR code to bridge your offline and online presence, especially useful for printed content, event booths, or presentations where a scannable code drives instant profile visits.

    Tip: Don’t share any links in your post as it’ll impact your reach. LinkedIn’s goal is to keep users on their platform and a link-bearing post indicates that you’re driving people away from the network, which reduces your reach. A popular alternate to this is adding the link in your first comment. Don’t forget to write, ‘link in comments’ to alert readers.

    • It opens doors for opportunities

    Lastly, LinkedIn is the hub of opportunities since it’s where professionals and decision makers hang out. As a freelance writer, I’ve got a ton of clients come through the network. Others have found their dream jobs, and still others have connect to collaborate on podcasts, co-marketing opportunities, and much more.

    Understanding the LinkedIn algorithm

    Before you go on to create your LinkedIn content marketing strategy, here’s the quick look at how LinkedIn algorithm works. Knowing this is essential so you can create content that works with it, rather than against it.

    Here goes:

    • The LinkedIn algorithm favors relevancy over recency/freshness. This means the more audience-relevant content you create, the better. It’s why we’ll start working on your strategy with a target audience survey.
    • The algorithm loves community and relationship building. It’s why it shows you content from people you know, share interests with, and engage with. Translation: be sure to engage with people in your target audience.
    • The algorithm also favors hashtags and going niche. Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s Senior Director of Product Management explains that going deep into topics stirs conversations, which the algorithm prioritizes. Hence, an important step in strategizing your content for the platform involves niching down.

    There’s more on the algorithm too. But, instead of bundling it here, I’ve added the details in relevant sections below so you can better understand its application.

    How to create the perfect LinkedIn content strategy in 10 simple steps

    Ready to learn? Let’s take things step by step.

    1. Start with learning about your audience

    As discussed, LinkedIn prioritizes content from the people you interact with. To put it another way, your target audience will only see your content if they interact with it regularly.

    One way for that to happen involves you engaging with them. This way, they’ll want to return the comments you make – thanks to the law of reciprocity (a person is likely to return something you do for them).

    Another way to get their attention is by posting content that’s valuable for them. This brings us to researching your target audience. If you’re new to LinkedIn, you won’t have much data to pull from your analytics to learn about your intended audience.

    So what now? Think of who your ideal audience is and survey your competitors’ audience to create your audience profile. As you spend time on LinkedIn, take insights from your analytics to refine this profile and create increasingly relevant content to attract the right people to your profile.

    2. Define your brand

    Your goal here is to answer the following: how do you want to position yourself on LinkedIn? Students, for example, can position themselves as learners, sharing what they’ve learned or read. Content managers, on the other hand, can show themselves as experts, sharing their experiences and tips on content creation, distribution, and more.

    Now, to get you to work: an easy way to go about creating a personal brand is to ask your colleagues and friends to define you in a few words. Traits that most of these people use to define you can help you define your brand. This way, you can be true to yourself and create an authentic brand as well.

    Plan to dive deep in personal branding by creating a logo and brand fonts and colors? Excellent. You can get a professional logo made or use a logo maker.

    For the fonts you choose, make sure they’re easy to read. As for the colors, pick ones that define you while also going into color psychology to understand the kind of impact your preferred colors have on your audience.

    3. Set a goal for yourself

    With your personal brand ready, let’s get into goal setting mode.

    Start by asking yourself: what do you want to achieve from LinkedIn? Typically, the answer to this lies somewhere among these pointers:

    • Grow your network and with it your opportunities
    • Distribute content to get in front of the right people
    • Position yourself as a go-to person of authority on a niche topic

    Either way, relationship building is the approach to take. Why? Because all opportunities, and networking, even thought leadership are based on strong relationships. On top of that, the LinkedIn algorithm also favors relationships.

    To this end, set a goal to offer value. The more value you offer, the better your audience will respond to the content you share until they start seeing you as an expert.

    With this out of the way, set yourself some numbers-based SMART goals too. Case in point: I want to grow my LinkedIn followers to X by posting Y times in [specified time].

    4. Niche down to a few topics you want to talk about

    To position yourself as an authority, you need to niche down to a few topics that you’ll talk about on LinkedIn. If your content’s subject is all over the place, people won’t instantly recall you as an authority on something. We’ve also seen how the algorithm favors niche content. So there’s that too.

    For example, Bryan Kelly talks about the art of reading with his network:

    Similarly, Camille Trent talks about all things content:

    Hence, an action step for you here is to take a piece of paper and brainstorm on topics you can talk about. Don’t filter just yet. Create a list, then tally the topics with how likely your audience is going to like them. Once you do that, your list of topics will automatically chop. From there, narrow down to a topic that you’ll create content on for LinkedIn.

    Remember to go deep into the topic. That’s how you’ll use your hashtags too (#projectmanagement instead of #management). Speaking of which, LinkedIn recommends you use no more than three hashtags.

    5. Outline a writing style

    Identify your content style including tone and voice. Do you want to sound helpful or smart? Or, do you want to keep things light-hearted and humorous in your LinkedIn Posts? Whatever you settle on, don’t deviate far from your original self since it’ll be tough to keep up with a fabricated voice.

    Keep in mind: A strong brand has a strong voice. For example, my brand is against swear words. So there are none in my content. If someone from LinkedIn hops on a call with me, they won’t hear me swearing there too.

    6. Determine the angle your LinkedIn content will take?

    A solid angle helps you set apart from the noise on the platform. So ask yourself: will you tell stories? Do you plan to cover case studies or trending news? Or, do you want to explain your point with examples?

    Case in point: Here’s Eddie Shleyner with his storytelling chops on LinkedIn:

    Whatever you finalize, keep things human and actionable.

    Tip: I don’t recommend creating a year’s worth of LinkedIn content in one sitting. Create a week or month’s content. See how your audience reacts to it. Determine what gets the most attention and what doesn’t attract engagement. Create the next batch of content based on these takeaways.

    7. Decide on the visual aspect of your LinkedIn brand

    You can always stick with text-based LinkedIn posts. However, it helps to keep in mind that posts with images get 2x the comments that text posts get.

    Videos, on the other hand are five times more likely to get comments than text posts. So, in this step, determine what content format you’d like to create for LinkedIn.

    You can always start off with text posts, then diversify your content formats. Or, you can start strong by creating a video marketing strategy for the platform. This could be as simple as using GIFs to stand out in a busy LinkedIn feed as James Laurain does.

    Or, you can create branded LinkedIn carousels or videos. Here, you’ll find the brand colors you’ve worked on useful as it’s best to create all your visual content using your brand colors and fonts to create a recognizable, signature style.

    That said, another LinkedIn content format you can tap into are LinkedIn Stories. For this ephemeral content, brainstorm ideas for sharing behind the scenes content.

    Perhaps you’re shooting a new video and you can share a picture of it. Or, you can record yourself with a quick tip/food for thought for the day. Sharing snaps of your lunch or midday snack are also good ideas to engage your audience via Stories. Whatever your approach is, just make sure you’re using a high-quality online video editor to have superb video content.

    a 9 y-o surprising his doctor mummy with a plate of nicely chopped melons

    8. Create an engagement plan

    Next up, work on your engagement plan. Since the algorithm favors engagement, you can’t ignore this step or put on the backburner.

    Your plan here is going to be two-fold:

    Firstly, figure out how you’d engage with others

    Begin with setting up a goal of leaving X comments daily. Aim to drive conversations by sharing your experiences or asking questions in the comments.

    At the time of writing this, the LinkedIn community is speculating that the algorithm loves comments that get others to engage. For example, a comment is long enough (but not fluff-ridden) to trigger the ‘see more’ option and others click it to read it – signifying engagement. Comments that get likes also tell LinkedIn that you’re offering value to your readers, hence, boosting your content’s reach.

    Arwind Budhauliya abd other famous marketing specialists commenting on LinkedIn posts

    Source

    • Secondly, plan how you’ll drive engagement to your content

    Of course, commenting on other’s content does part of the job. For the remaining of it, the following tips will help: tag relevant people or brands to get them to engage with you (less is more when it comes to tagging), post on times when your audience is active, and ask questions as Mo Hassan does at the end of this post.

    Mo Hassan's sample LinkedIn post as a Growth Marketer

    Source

    If you’ve done your homework on understanding your audience well, you’ll be in a better position to create content that’s relevant to your audience, therefore, growing your engagement.

    With that out of the way, aim to rake engagement within the first 60 minutes of posting. The quicker people engage with your content, the faster the algorithm picks up their interest in your content and increases your post’s reach.

    9. Know how to format your content on LinkedIn

    This is critical. Content that looks easy to read is content that gets read. Formatting your LinkedIn content right makes it visually appealing to read and engage with.

    The following tips will help you format your content right:

    • Break text domination by adding color with relevant emojis. And, before you say emojis aren’t professional, know that they make your writing human. And, whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter, you’ve got to show your human side.

    Tip: Use a brand emoji like Morning Brew has come to be known as coffee cup emoji. ☕

    • Make friends with whitespace. To this end, add spaces between your lines.
    • Each paragraph in your 1300-character long post should be no longer than two sentences. Three at most.
    • Use bullet points to change sentence-based text format. But, remember to keep them short to make them easy to read.
    • Mix sentence length. Long sentences are boring to read. Short sentences are digestible. Since you can’t do away with long sentences all together, consider mixing short, mid-length, and long sentences.

    Here’s a well-formatted LI post for reference:

    well formatted linkedin post by an experience saas marketer

    Source

    10. Settle on a publishing frequency and stick to it

    You can learn what suits your audience best by checking your analytics. For starters, however, Tuesdays and Thursdays between 8 am and 2 pm are good posting times for LinkedIn. This varies by industry though. So, again, testing your posting times helps.

    What’s more, plan to be regular so your audience sees you regularly on the network. For the posting frequency, show up at least weekly. Four times a week is a good starting goal. This consistency in showing up, posting content, and engaging on LinkedIn regularly is key to success on the network.

    Keep in mind: it’s okay if you miss a post or two. Continue engaging with your audience’s content if you can. In this way, you’ll still be showing up and adding value.

    Also, remember that it’s easy to get carried away and end up scrolling for hours through LinkedIn. When you’re posting stick to the important actions that add value and avoid wasting time. You can use an hours tracker online app to make sure you stay on track.

    Advanced LinkedIn content strategy moves

    Once you’ve grown your followers and have a solid grip on your audience and what engages them, you can try these three advanced LinkedIn engagement tactics:

       1- Create a branded hashtag

    A custom or branded hashtag is one that you create and grow as your own hashtag on the platform. Erin Balsa, for example, posts content under #erin100. Balsa’s agenda is to post hundred content marketing tips using this hashtag.

    The predictive Index Marketing Director posting a content Marketing Tip

    Source

    Similarly, John Espirian runs a #LinkedInLearnerLounge where he shares LinkedIn tips.

       2.  Write LinkedIn articles

    The plus side to this is that LinkedIn articles get ranked in search, earning you eyeballs outside of the platform. And, if the content is absolute goodness, you can grow your followers further.

    Google search results for a query

    Question now is: what should you write about? You can always tweak content that you’ve already published and share it as LinkedIn articles. Or, you can work from scratch. Test the topic you want to cover by writing it out as a post. If it gets good response, go ahead and add details to it, turning it into an article that your audience will be interested in reading.

    3.   Go live

    Live video on the platform gets 7 times the reaction and 24 times more comments than posting native video according to the horse’s mouth. This makes LinkedIn Live gold. Is there a post that’s gotten excellent engagement? Take that topic and discuss it live. Or, ask your audience what they’d want to learn from you and do a live video on it.

    Looking for inspiration? Sarah Noel Block is great at hosting guests on LinkedIn Live.

    Wrapping up

    Tapping into LinkedIn can feel overwhelming in the start. But, that’s true for any social network you want to grow your personal brand on. So I’d say you put that overwhelm aside, create your content strategy and start using the platform. You don’t have to aim for perfection. Aim to get started, be consistent, and learn. Things will take off from there.

    So what are you waiting for? Grab a sheet of paper and get to work.

  • 7 Ways to Boost Your Website Traffic Through Social Media

    7 Ways to Boost Your Website Traffic Through Social Media

    Garnering traffic to your website, regardless of the niche, is always an uphill battle. And whether social media has an impact on your SEO is up for debate, one thing’s for sure ― social media can be a major source of referral traffic to your website.

    In fact, social media users have grown by over 10% in the past year, taking the global total to nearly 4 billion, or more than half the world’s population. Clearly, it doesn’t lack the potential to explosively boost your website traffic. 8.79% of the global social media segment is controlled by Twitter, compared to Facebook’s 72.04% or Instagram’s 2.92%

    Now, whether you’re posting on social media to earn more readers for your business blog, to get your followers to check out a newly launched product, or win sign-ups for your newsletter, your goal is to get people to engage with your content and visit your website.

    However, getting people off the social platform and on to your website can be a tall order, with your audience being constantly flooded with endless other engaging posts in their feed.

    So, here are seven powerful ways to help you capture your audience’s attention and make them click through to your website.

    1. Determine the Right Social Media Channels

    Your very first step is to do your homework about your target audience ― on which platforms do they spend most of their time and what kind of content do they engage with the most.

    There’s no need for you to be active on every channel. For example, if you wish to drive traffic to a food review blog, investing all your efforts in posting quality content on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter will likely fill the bill. Conversely, if you wish to drive traffic to your B2B SaaS blog, focusing on LinkedIn and Twitter makes more sense.

    The last thing you want is to waste your efforts by focusing on the wrong channels where you’ll find little-to-no engagement and thus, a negligible bump in traffic at best.

    So, if you have a customer base, ask them what social networks they prefer or use the most. Analyze your top competitors’ strategy. Which platforms are your competitors leveraging? Rather than guessing, use data to determine the right channels for successful social media marketing.

    2. Craft Persuasive Titles for Your Social Posts

    Headlines can make or break your click-through rate. Whether you’re posting an Instagram story or sharing a quick tweet, always keep in mind the three C’s of great social copy: creative, concise, and conversational.

    The title of your post is your audience’s first taste of the actual content, so don’t shoo them away with an unexciting or “clickbaity” title.

    While it’s a good idea to keep the headline as crisp as you can, crafting a narrative title typically boosts click-through rates. You can include a couple of benefits of clicking-through to your website, some surprising statistics, or an intriguing question the answer to which they’ll find by clicking on your link.

    For instance, if you’re posting an article titled “How to Improve Your Customer Retention”, instead of copy-pasting the same title in your tweet, write something like “Want to build long-lasting relationships with your customers? Here are five battle-tested customer retention strategies!”. Clearly, the latter one invites more traffic as it’s conversational and leads with a gripping question.

    Pro tip: If you’re using a tool like Missinglettr, which can write social posts for you, it’s worth it to go in and change the post’s titles to make them more human-friendly and appealing compared to what an AI tool can do.

    3. Go All Out With Visual Content

    Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, effective social media marketing is all about posting visually stunning content ― high-res photos, illustrations, infographics, GIFs, and videos ― consistently.

    You may not think of Twitter as a visual-first platform, but Twitter’s internal data shows people are three times more likely to engage with tweets that include visual content.

     Go All Out With Visual Content

    Source: HubSpot

    Modern social media users prefer and can’t get enough visual content. Even if you’re not redirecting followers to mouth-watering pizzas or ravishing undergarments on your website, uploading high-quality images with a caption is always better than plain text.

    In short, if your content doesn’t catch your audience’s eye, they won’t bother to stop scrolling and click through to your website. So, strive to post striking visuals that people can’t help but pay attention to.

    Also, don’t use images that are clearly free stock photos. Create original high-quality visuals or if you’ve transitioned to a remote working company (thanks to the pandemic), then hire a remote designer to help you create visually appealing social content ― don’t cut corners when it comes to quality and originality.

    4. Use Custom Branded Links

    Your website’s URL you link to can often be long and convoluted, making it visually uninviting for your followers. To simplify and optimize all your shared links from one place, especially when you’re managing multiple social campaigns, you can use a link management platform that centralizes link creation, tracking, and analysis.

    You can also use a powerful URL shortener, which not only shortens URLs but also adds your custom brand, tracks clicks, and helps boost click-through rates.

    What’s more, a shorter link takes up fewer characters in tweets (where you’re limited to 280 characters), leaving you with more room to craft persuasive titles and exciting captions.

    5. Have a Clear Call to Action

    What do you want your followers to do when they stop scrolling to check out your post? Make it clear as to what action you want them to take.

    If you want them to check out your latest product catalog, tell them that with a direct phrase like “check out our latest fall collection”, and include a link to your catalog page.

    Likewise, if you want your audience’s opinion on something, just ask them to drop a quick comment. In essence, a clear call to action (CTA) is a tried-and-true way to boost content engagement and drive click-throughs to your website.

    6. Post at the Right Times of the Day

    Once you have great content to post, it makes sense to determine the ideal time to pull the trigger. After all, what’s the point of great content if your followers aren’t around to see it?

    Sure, you’ll get some impressions and click-through if you post without thinking about the time, but that’s not how you’ll extract the most juice out of every post.

    Timing your posts on social media does have an impact on the traffic you generate, and you must try to get your message across when the bulk of your audience is active.

    TrackMaven_Overall-Best-Times-to-Post-on-Social-Media_graphic

    Source: TrackMaven

    To work out the best times to post on each channel, start by looking at what times and days you get the most engagement presently.

    For Twitter, head over to ‘Twitter Analytics’ and sort by ‘Top Tweets’ to determine your best-performing tweets. Analyze the time and days when you get the most engagement. Use a free tool like Followerwonk to quickly figure out what time of day your audience is most active.

    Likewise, for Facebook, head over to the ‘Insights’ tab to understand when you get the most reach and likes. It’s also a good idea to run some tests to see when your audience is most engaged and likely to click through to your website. Once you find a pattern, schedule your content accordingly on each channel.

    Moreover, by sharing your content multiple times across each platform, you allow each post to get the maximum possible engagement from your audience. So feel free to post the same link twice or thrice, spacing the posts apart a week or two.

    However, don’t risk annoying your audience by posting too frequently, or by posting the same piece of content more than thrice.

    7. Deliver What You Promised

    Finally, don’t let your audience down when they land on your website. Your post ― with its compelling title, stunning visuals, and inviting CTA ― should lead your followers to a landing page on your website that truly delivers on your post’s promise.

    For example, if you share a link to your blog post on Facebook that’s captioned “How to bake an eggless dutch truffle in less than 60 minutes”, then your followers should be able to do that once they click-through to your website and read the post.

    Because if you don’t deliver on your promise, you can’t expect people to trust your brand and click-through to your website again. So, make sure to meet your audience’s expectations with quality content that leaves them satisfied and helps you achieve your marketing goals.

    To conclude, all the seven ways outlined above have the overarching theme of building trust and adding value to your followers’ social media experience. The more effectively you get it in front of your audience’s eyes (with stellar visuals, branded links, etc.), the more credible you’ll appear, which, in turn, will result in more click-throughs to your website.

  • Top 10 Ecommerce Influencers You Should Follow in 2026

    Top 10 Ecommerce Influencers You Should Follow in 2026

    With the advancement of information technology, things are heating up. Now, marketers can reach their target audience effortlessly and encourage them to make their purchasing decision.

    Marketers seeking hard to creating viral and high-performing content that create fascinations for their readers, which can’t be irresistible for sure.

    No doubt, social media turns things a way we can’t even imagine. It becomes an active approach to nurture new marketing leads.  On the other hand, Influence marketing also has a significant role in today’s world.

    It makes a track for the business to engage with the audience and catch the attention of your product over social media channels.

    So, you can’t negate the power of the e-commerce influencers that helps you to grow your business and build brand appearance in front of a huge ocean of the audience.

    Influencers are resources, from where people come to you, acquire the product because they trust you adequately to give their money.

    To receive more ROI and improve the sales funnel, this guideline demonstrates some basic steps to identify the right influencers and creates campaigns for your brand.

    When you’re working with multiple influencers and tracking various affiliate or promo links, using a centralized link management platform helps you keep everything organized, branded, and performance-ready.

    Here, we’ve created an extensive checklist of e-commerce influencers that you need to follow all around the world to make things work for you.

    Tobi Lütke (@tobi) 

    tobi lutke

    Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify.

    Shopify is a complete cloud-based and Canadian e-commerce firm that helps businesses to set up and run online businesses all across the world.

    Approximately, more than 500,000 active stores are running on Shopify, and collectively driving sales of over 40 billion.

    He learned to code at an early stage and enter a computer programming apprenticeship at 16 years.

    In 2019, Lütke rapport for StarCraft grasped online attention all over the internet because he offered “Starcraft 2” player Ryoo “SeleCT” Kyung Hyun an internship in his company based on his past achievements.


    Lütke is active on Twitter, engage with the audience, talk about games, and associating with employees. He also occasionally promoting his 57,000 followers with Shopify-related products and business plans.

    In the COVID-19 situation, Lütke and his wife established the ‘Thistledown Foundation’ and have sowed with an initial $150 million endowment. Their core mission is to enhance technological solutions for decolonization.

    Linda Bustos (@lindabustos, @ecomillustrated, @edgacentlinda)

    Linda Bustos

    Linda Busatom is an e-commerce consultant, media analyst, and chief blogger at Elastic Path Software.

    She is so passionate about public speaking that led her to present at various events including the Vancouver Social Media Bar Panel and the Banff Blog Promo for Broadcasting.

    Bustos also an author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog which considering as one of the best places for eCommerce blogs and the co-founder of Edgacent.

    Elastic PathSoftware provides a flexible eCommerce platform that gives enterprises the capabilities and control to deliver innovation in a complex environment.

    The thing that impresses me about her that she has three Twitter accounts and all of them give us e-commerce estimable insights and news updates.

    Andrew Youderian (@youderian)

    Andrew Youderian

    Anne Frank said: “No one has ever become poor by giving.”

    Her quotes are absolutely a perfect fit for Andrew Youderian. He is the one who shares his personal business experiences with other entrepreneurs to assist them to grow dramatically in the market.

    Andrew Youderian is the founder of eCommerceFuel and co-author of  The Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping together with Marke Hayes.

    eCommerceFuel is a private community for high six and seven-figure eCommerce merchants where they discuss the common barrier they face regarding their business.

    His voice on business is natural, people believe him and consider his ideas as an appropriate approach to move smartly in the e-commerce world.

    He is an active influencer on Twitter, doing podcasts, talk about numerous topics, shares valuable insights to the audience, and encourage them to add value to your business.

    Tracey Wallace (@TraceWall)

    Tracey Wallace

    So, here we have another top resource of eCommerce. A big round of applause for Tracy Wallace.

    Tracey Wallace is the Founder of Doris Sleep ( lavish bed pillow brand), the Editor-in-Chief at BigCommerce, and Head of Marketing Eterneva.

    I’m sure you have heard before: Content is a KING and Tracy creates content the way it acts like a king.

    She is the most well-known lady in the world for her work with the Bigcommwerce. Wallace knows how to create compelling content to drag the audience and the way captivated the internet.

    She covered all hidden audience needs, fear, and understands how e-commerce really works for the business.

    She works with numerous experts, influencers, marketers to educate all aspects of e-commerce to assists them to drive more conversion, increase sales pipeline, quality traffic, and make their brand better inform of the audience.

    Connor Gillivan (@ConnorGillivan)

    Connor Gillivan

    Connor is an all-around eCommerce. He is the Co-founder and CMO of FreeUp.

    FreeUp is the most active solution that assists you to find & hire pre-vetted freelancers online.

    He is the owner of ConnorGillivan.com, where he writes about entrepreneurship and eCommerce.

    Gillivan started his first business in e-commerce since he was 16 and expanded to over $10 million per year from two firms within the eCommerce industry.

    He also advises other entrepreneurs based on his personal experience to level up their business, lead a voice for digital marketing, and share significant insights through podcasts.

    Connor’s writing is frequently featured in publications such as Business2Community.

    Richard Lazazzera (@RichardABLS)

    Richard Lazazzera

    Richard Lazazzera is the founder of A Better Lemonade Stand.

    A Better Lemonade Stand is an online e-commerce incubator to encourage, educate, and aid entrepreneurs in the initial stages of an entrepreneurial journey.

    He began his career in marketing and later ventured into the eCommerce business.

    He is so enthusiastic to share information, best practices, tricks, and tips he learned while building his own business.

    After building his business, he co-operated a helped with Shopify to achieve over 200,000 merchants from a 60,000 benchmark.  In early 2015, Richard decided to left Shopify and focus on A Better Lemonade Stand full time.

    Austin Brawner (@a_brawn)

    Austin Brawner

    Austin Brawner is the CEO of Brand Growth Expert and hosting the most popular eCommerce Influencer podcast.

    He helped over 267 established eCommerce entrepreneurs, marketers, and freelancers unlock massive growth in their businesses.

    Through the podcast, Brawner interviews several successful entrepreneurs and discussed their struggles, hurdles they faced, and successful story.

    He also published numerous articles on topics including search engine optimization, email marketing, and productivity for e-commerce business owners to drive more conversion and lead on the right track.

    He helps coach private clients to create a clear plan to grow the company in less than 48 hours at a unique profit summit workshop.

    Austin’s podcast is a one-stop-shop for the crucial information you need towards building a profitable eCommerce business.

    He has worked with several brands like Kettle and Fire, MVMT, etc, and also operates Brand Growth Experts.

    Ezra Firestone (@ezrafirestone)

    Ezra Firestone

    Who doesn’t want to maintain a work-life balance?

    I’m sure, we all love to do it. So, here we should follow the most energetic marketer Ezra Firestone.

    Ezra Firestone is the CEO of  Smart Marketer.

    Smart Marketer is an online platform that concentrates on core strengths in e-commerce, conversion optimization, you need to build a successful eCommerce business and assist to sustain a balanced lifestyle as an entrepreneur.

    Ezra is a man of inspiration and full of passion. He has created a ton of quality videos that demonstrate each and everything about the eCommerce market to help entrepreneurs to run their online business dramatically.

    He started his first online store, My Costume Wings, and created his second-most flourishing eCommerce brand BOOM with some experience.

    After some time, in 2012 he sold My Costume Wings to fully concentrate on BOOM. He also started to connect with the eCommerce and marketing community as Ezra continued growing his business.

    Brett Curry (@BrettCurry)

    Brett Curry

    BrettCurry is the CEO of OMG Commerce.

    OMG Commerce is the agency that helps companies with PPC advertising and accelerates their growth through world-class digital marketing that drives measurable results.

    Brett founded his first marketing agency in 2003 and launched his first marketing campaign for search engines in 2004.

    He is the author of the ultimate guide to Google Shopping published by Shopify.

    With significant publications worldwide, he talks and reads. He is an expert in e-commerce search marketing, particularly an evangelist for Google Shopping, and hosts eCommerce Evolution – a podcast focused on accelerated understanding and growth of eCommerce fanatics.

    Brett works really hard with experts to continually strengthen and evolve the key tactics and methodologies in OMG accounts.

    Drew Sanocki (@drewsanocki)

    Drew Sanocki

    Have you wondered about applicative e-commerce strategies?

    If yes, then meet Drew Sanocki.

    Drew Sanocki is the founder of Nerd Marketing.

    Nerd Marketing is a marketing company, that offers the audience to build effective digital marketing strategies and assist them to promote their brand visibility on the Internet.

    He built his first business, Design Public, and became one of the leading retailers in premier online design. After eight profitable years, he sold it to private investors in 2011.

    Drew has gained experience in developing his own eCommerce business, He is an expert in growth hacks for eCommerce executives and more than 30 retail experts were consulted to learn about the biggest eCommerce opportunities.

    He is also sharing established strategies to help marketers monetize and improve their eCommerce businesses. He writes on his website NerdMarketing about digital marketing based on data for e-commerce retailers.

    Drew’s humor can knock you down and his expertise gives him a crystal clear insight into his writing, which is challenging to find elsewhere.

    He also did marketing for multiple businesses, including eCommerce brand Karmaloop.com and SaaS company Teamwork.com.

    Final thought

    No doubt, there are plenty more e-commerce influencers to learn from. But we have mentioned the top 10 e-commerce influencers in this article that certainly helps you to grow your online business dramatically and build brand appearance all over the internet.

    Now, you are in a perfect place to get started. This article assists you to know where you need to invest your energy, money, and resources. Don’t forget to follow them on Twitter or Linkedin. Try to engage with them and ask questions regarding your business to stay on the right track.

    Also, must keep one thing in mind, that before sharing affiliate or promo links from these influencers, you can use a simple free short link generator to make URLs clean, branded, and more trustworthy, which improves click-through and overall campaign appearance.

  • How to Understand and Maximize Your Reach on Any Social Network

    How to Understand and Maximize Your Reach on Any Social Network

    It has been estimated there are over 3 billion active users spend at least two hours on different social media channels every day. Social media marketing strategies make it easier for businesses to stand in the market and get quality traffic and profit through social media by adding another revenue stream.

    ‘People don’t buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.’ by Seth Godin. To effectively run a social campaign, marketers need to establish a relationship with the people and find ways to earn their trust.

    Let’s take a look at the factors to maximize influence on social networks.

    Identify the actual & potential reach

    Reach means how many people visit your website, see the targeted ad, and convert it into customers. In the marketing world, customers are a significant part to boost your marketing efforts, sales, and receive high ROI in return.

    To reach the audience, you need to identify the group and target your product. There are two ways you can measure reach.

    • Actual Reach
    • Potential Reach

    Potential reach

    It is based on the total number of followers you have on your social account. Let’s take an example of the ContentStudio.io Twitter account for your sounder understanding. ContentStudio has 8,602 followers, who can view tweets and retweets. That 8,602 is the potential reach of the ContentStudio on the Twitter account.

    Actual reach

    It means how much your potential customers are reaching the post on social media channels. The customers who surely viewed your shared post in their timeline. ContentStudio’s actual reach to the post is 7,184 as shown in the below image.

    To identify the potential reach, you need to view the variable while classifying the customer’s group.

    • Geography
    • Demographics
    • Psychographics
    • Benefits

    After that, you need to define the target audiences and create a profile for them and compare the rival profitability holding a similar product in the marketplace.

    Columnist Steve Olenski provides you with guidelines that help you to connect with potential clients and generate more leads. These guidelines are based on ten steps.

    • Survey Customers
    • Research Your Competitors And Find Out Who Their Customers Are
    • Target Ads
    • Smart Social Media
    • Respond To Every Email, Tweet, Facebook Comment, And Phone Calls
    • Affiliate Marketing
    • Establish Trust In Your Community: Publish User Reviews, Get Likes, Syndicate Articles
    • Connect With The Right Influencers
    • Post Relevant Content On Blogs
    • Craft An Engaging Newsletter To Foster Leads

    Address your customer’s needs & preferences

    People who are new to the marketing game need to identify the customer’s needs and wants. Marketers should deploy strategies after addressing customer’s behavior. Customers are the most valuable resource for every business person to attain a share and get maximum profit in the market for a long time.

    A need is “something that solves an actual or imaginary problem.” says Jorge Baba from Game-Changer.  Needs are the basic necessities of the customer which should be fulfilled at any cost.

    Wants:   It’s a desire of the customers to buy some products to satisfy the need. That’s why the small segments need to be a target with a unique product in the market.

    Demands: The customer who is willing and able to buy a particular product at a given price.

    To meet demand, your product should be a pain killer, not a vitamin. So, the market needs to research the customer’s preference through different social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many more before designing a product.

    With the technology transformation, the customer’s behavior also evolves with time. Nowadays customers give more priority to online shopping and payment rather than doing it manually.

    They expect the manufacturer to be able to do so with the product to satisfy their needs. There are a few tips that illustrate how you can find the customer’s preference while serving the product or service in the marketplace.

    • Identify who your customers are
    • Find out their shopping methods
    • Invest in customer research
    • Conduct a customer satisfaction survey
    • Develop a good customer contact strategy
    • Assist in developing relevant marketing strategies

    Explain your goals & objectives

    The goal is measuring the end result which consists of one or more objectives or chunk. The objective should achieve within the time frame to accomplish the goal.

    Every entrepreneur needs to identify the goal and objective of the business and describe it to the audience. It gives the marketers direction to the destination they are looking for.

    There is a certain criterion that helps you while creating a smart goal and objective.

    • Specific – Your goal should be specific that which audience you’re going to target.
    • Measurable – Your goal should be a measure that means where exactly you want to stand.
    • Achievable – The goal must be attainable and not hard to achieve.
    • Relevant – The goal should be relevant to the objective that what you are trying to achieve or why do you want to reach this goal.
    • Timely – Your goal must be achieved at its given time frame.

    There are plenty of social networking sites that help marketers to set their goals after engaged with the customers.

    Using different platforms not only help in generating more leads and traffic but also assist while setting smart goals and objective. Marketers can easily accumulate the pool of information where they need to invest and utilize the resources, time, and energy.

    Organization goals explain to the audience what product’s value they have, services, solutions to their problems, and organization goal-related activities.  It motivates the consumers to acquire the product for their personal benefit.

    If the entrepreneur’s goal is to hold a 40% market share with the product, then he/she need to design unique strategies that contain a set of actions to actualize the goal.

    Create quality content

    Creating content is all about how you attract or persuade the attention of the audience. Writing great content is the best approach to advertise your content all over the world through smart social media channels.  A marketer should come up with an exceptional content idea that inspires, educate, and inform the audience to modify their lives and business.

    Facebook is the most successful platform for marketers to market the product or brand. It has been estimated that Facebook has around 2.2 billion active users Another social networking website is Instagram, most marketers earn huge revenue using these social channels. Instagram has around 1 billion active users.

    These social media channels make it easier for marketers to attain a market share and develop a reputation for your product or brand. Utilizing these platform markets can engage with the audience, identify the competitor’s activities, and also find out the customer’s behavior.

    This is very important to know which market you are going to target with the content. There are the best three ways to give value to the target audience.

    • Create unique and original content
    • Make content actionable
    • Be a resource

    The information marketers provide in the content must be accurate, based on facts and figures, short in size, easy to understand. The customers find the solution in your quality content and also enhance their knowledge experience, monitor leads, and traffic to your content.

    Marketers produce content for the customers looking desperately for. You need to consider the loopholes of the competitor strategies and how you fill it with unique marketing tactics.

    As an example, the content produced by the Backlinko or Sumo is a pure gem. If you look at their case studies, you will find most of the things are based on pure facts. Here is one of their article How Intercom Generates $50 Million Annual Recurring Revenue.

    You can write visual content and spread all over the different social channels, Visual content consists of:

    • Images.
    • Screenshots.
    • Memes.
    • Infographics.
    • Video

    By creating quality content, companies like DollarShaveClub reached a $1 billion acquisition by making only one video viral on social media channels.

    A similar story is of Font Awesome which raised over $1,076,960 on Kickstarter with only a single video. Though Font Awesome has been used by many companies, to reach a milestone over $1 million is through by putting high-quality video content.

    Convey a message: Put it in an infographic

    Infographics bet on two words ‘Information’ and ‘Graphics.’ It means providing information with the graphic images to easily recognizable the product or brand at once.

    Infographics are a very reliable way to share a piece of complex information in a simple and clear image. Marketers utilize this valid method to spread their content on multiple social networking channels. People remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they perceive and perform.

    There is a case study that gives you the idea of how you can share your content on multiple social platforms and the value of the infographics.

    Infographics is a kind of storytelling which capture the attention and enhance the social engagement of the audience to your brand and established a genuine connection with them

    It’s is a broad type of visual communication that includes data and images. Marketers try to present extensive information in a graphic format to the audience to convey a message related to the product. 

    Customers more preferred to visual content text rather than textual. Infographics have the ability to raise your sales and business reputation in an eye-catching manner.  People engage more with social media channels to know or learn about something and share the information with others

    We have an example that illustrates to you how infographics affect the content positively. Here is a travel agency infographic which demonstrates their customer from top to like a story. It tells from the destination to baggage in useful content the customer can easily classify while planning a trip.

    There are seven tips to create infographics for your business.

    • Make one big point
    • Use simple combinations of primary colors
    • Space it out
    • Choose three quality fonts
    • Come up with a solid, eye-catching design
    • Decide on what’s important and what’s not
    • Make it addictive

    Boost your reach – Using Hashtags

    Hashtags is a word or expression that interprets the message related to a specific topic by using the ( # ) hash sign on different social channels. Nowadays hashtags are a vital element to boost the reach or target the audience all around the world utilizing multiple social channels. It helps people to find informative data and enhance their experience.

    Marketers use hashtags to represent their brand reputation, convey a message related to the product, and established a warm connection with the clients.

    “Hashtags are supposed to be short and concise. Every time you’re writing to them, pay attention to this rule. If they’re too general, you’re likely to be using the wrong words. Effective marketing is always targeted for marketing.” – J.D., Digital Marketing Specialist at Rush My Essay.’

    The one thing which is notable for every businessperson that hashtags should be relevant to the product which shows the attribution of the products, simple and easy to interpret by the audience. 

    Here are some suggestions which help you while adding Hashtags on pretty popular social networking sites.

    Instagram: To increase social engagement towards your content or post marketers require to adhering less than 11 hashtags.

    Facebook:  One of the best sites to boost your marketing reach there you need to add 2 hashtags. One should be a branded hashtag, relevant to your product or brand and another must be worth pursuing.

    Twitter: If marketers crave to get 2* social engagement towards their product then they need to hold minimum hashtag on Twitter. Twitter has a set of rules and regulations. They restricted the entrepreneur to use minimum hashtags like one or two for each post.

    According to Brandon Stanley Hashtag Marketing can boost Social Media Effectiveness Up to 40% ‘

    There are plenty of tools that help marketers hashtags on different social channels. I’d suggest you Hashtagify to use the right tool for monitoring the hashtags and engage with the customers.

    It gives you the ability to search any hashtag, explore famous trends, and choose the best hashtag for the brand campaign. You can monitor the performance of the hashtags on different social channels and track influencers to produce new ideas.

    You can also automate your report to view the market results and share with the people to prove yourself how well you are performing than rivals.

    Use marketing tools

    These social online marketing tools make it convenient for the merchant to run the campaigns on various social channels and track the valuable insight and the performance of the campaign.

    In the digital world, marketers can easily examine the target customer’s taste and preference through the social network. Social media users are expected to reach about 2.5 billion people worldwide.

    Marketers should stay active on social channels because people retain more with these channels to keep in touch with others and want to know what’s going on around the world. The user follows or interacts with their favorite brand on any social channel because they perceive the content and information campaigns more valuable.

    Let me explain to you some fantastic social marketing tools to improve your marketing campaigns.

    ContentStudio – Social media marketing tool

    I hope you have heard about it. ContentStudio is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools for social media marketers, individuals, businesses, and digital agencies. It helps them boost their marketing activities by curating content, automating their social campaigns, and managing their brands.

    It comes up with tremendous features that help marketers in various ways. Using AI technology, ContentStudio brings the most popular content from all over the world and facilitates you to use its smart features and gain more social engagement towards your marketing campaigns on a complete auto-pilot.

    Replug

    Replug.io is a URL shortener and link tracking platform that also allows you to add eye-catching and branded call-to-actions or retargeting pixels to any page on the web which you can later share on your social network channels to increase your brand awareness and traffic. 

    With Replug, you can shorten URL for free with your custom domains. You can add a call to action to every link which you shared on various domains and identify the traffic which is generated from domains where you share that link.

    Through CTA’s, you can engage your audience towards your site when they are about to leave or capture leads by showing an optimized opt-in form. Now it is effortless for you to create brands and campaigns in a more optimized way.

    Replug

    KEYHOLE

    KEYHOLE gives the ability to understand how your audience feels about your brand or product and rivals product. It helps you to understand the conversation and the sentiment around it. It gives you the chance to don’t miss significant conversion rates.

    You can easily understand themes, trends, and audiences to better cater to your target market’s requirements. Capture every significant moment of your event and access real-time engagement data to amplify your event reach as it runs.

    Save your team hours every week by using Keyhole to aggregate metrics, monitor and analyze your campaigns, and build reports. Find and connect with the most relevant and engaging influencers in your industry.

    Portray your appearance as a brand

    Brand image is the general impression of the product or service.  You have listened more often ‘The first impression is the last impression’. The way you portray your product will create an impression of your business in the sights of the target audience.

    According to Jerry McLaughlin, “brand is the perception someone holds in their head about you, a product, a service, an organization, a cause, or an idea.  Brand building is the deliberate and skillful application of effort to create the desired perception in someone else’s mind.”

    Brand images are one of the prominent elements which differentiate your brand identification to others brand.

    The brand image represents the mission, vision, unique attribution of the product, and brand voice to the target audience.

    In the digital marketing world, multiple brand designs help marketers while building a strong brand foundation.

    • Typography
    • Color Palette
    • Form/Shape
    • Logo

    If the audience feels estimable after inspecting the brand image, then they will automatically turn into your loyal customers and spread the reputation of the brand with others on several social network channels.

    The important thing which marketers always keep in mind that the character they used to explain the brand personality in the brand image has a positive perception in front of the audience or people inspired with the entity then there are the chances that the customers can easily interpret the brand message in the right way.

    Let’s take an example of Coca-cola who has a massive margin all around the world with a revenue of over $44.29 billion. It is not just a firm but an economy.

    Coca Cola is a brand known for happiness, pleasure, and a great experience. It is the ‘original cola’ and has a ‘unique taste’.

    Coca-Cola Company has registered as one of the largest marketable brands with 94% of the state acquiring the red and white Coca-Cola brand Logo.

    Coca cola’s presence in more than 200 countries and serves 1.9 billion people regularly. In fact, out of the 55 billion servings of all kinds of beverages drunk each day.

    You can survey the marketing history of Coca-cola, the strategies they were used at an early age, and how they got the idea of the bottle, and much more.

    Stay Proactive

    Proactive is action-oriented behavior, being proactive the marketers instead of waiting for the problem, change, need or things happen in the future they try to seek alternatives solutions or opportunities and give their best to handle it effectively.

    The marketers should continually look forward to marketing tactics and actively engaged with the audience using numerous social media channels to make things proceed.

    For attaining a market share, the marketer needs to study the trends. It’s is the best way to running in a marketplace instantly. So marketers must spend quality time on different social sources to understand technology advancement.

    Spending time on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and etc also gives you the strength to understand the audience so you can develop a persona according to the identified target audience.

    A proactive enterprise sets the budget first because all digital tactics need an investment consist of the team, executing, implementing, advertising and etc.

    Marketers just need to focus on qualitative and quantity distribution. Both are a major aspect of marketing products or services. You can find the analytics against the campaign which you spread on multiple social media channels.

    It’s difficult to find the social marketing tool where you can curate niche relevant content, tracking the performance of the campaign, and find the analytical of social sites under a single station.

    Tackle customers complaints

    Every business deal with the complaints of the customer. It is a challenge for the entrepreneur to handle it with patience and professional manner. By ignoring complaints, they quietly leave and get the product from the competitors.

    To maximize the ROI, you have to listen to your customers carefully and assure them that you will work on it. Markets need to ask the question to the customers that what they expected about the solution to their problem.

    As a successful organizer, you need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and view the obstacles of the customer from their perspective rather than your own.

    Salesperson seeks to employ ‘You statement’, whenever you’re talking to the client it feels them valuable and respectable. If the issues arise then apologize to the customer rather than blaming other staff or departments. Try to avoid giving excuses to the audience in advance.

    There are five strategies to handle customers’ complaints constructively.

    • Stay calm
    • Listen well
    • Acknowledge the problem
    • Get the facts
    • Offer a solution

    Analytics tools for measuring performances

    Analytics is a more refined way to scrape data related to different marketing trends. It also gives you the direction where marketers need to make improvements to achieve their goals more effectively and grow share in the business.

    With the extensive use of social media channels, marketing strategies dramatically evolved to satisfy their customers. Businessmen need a tool to enhance campaign performances and marketing efforts all around the world on multiple social networking channels.

    Google Analytics

    Google Analytics is a platform that helps the entrepreneur to get a profound understanding of your customers. It gives them the ability to understand site and app users to entirely evaluate the performance of your marketing, products, and more.

    Marketers can operate with Google’s advertising and locate valuable insight to reach the target audience. Process and share your data instantly with an easy-to-use interface and shareable reports

    According to Mariam Naficy, Founder & CEO, Minted

    ‘Google Analytics helped us optimize our art marketplace, resulting in 400% year-over-year revenue growth for our art business

    Conclusion

    The factors mentioned above are simple and obvious to understand the impact of the social networking channel to advertise your product or band all over the world.

    We have discussed briefly how you address your customers and provide them with a quality product and content to give the idea of your business.

    With ContentStudio, Replug, and other marketing platforms to track the performance of the campaign and brands in your marketing strategy.

  • What is brand awareness? 9 trending techniques to expand your businesses via social media

    What is brand awareness? 9 trending techniques to expand your businesses via social media

    Whenever you get flaky lips, you go to the market to buy a chapstick. Have you noticed that chapstick is a brand name for a lip balm product made by Pfizer? How did people start using the word ‘Chapstick’ instead of ‘lip balm’ then? That is called brand awareness.

    Brand Awareness is the familiarity of the consumers with a brand to such an extent that the brand name becomes the Household name. Every brand owner dreams of their brand name becoming a real word; this concept is called proprietary eponym.

    Brand awareness cannot be achieved merely by creating a brand and with conventional marketing techniques; one has to keep on growing higher and building deeper roots with their followers.

    Brand Awareness - Replug

    It is quite a challenge to gain a never-ending attention to a brand from its audience. A brand created on the foundation of a well-thought-out vision can easily expedite a sentimental value among the public.

    We have gathered some of the best practices for you to expand your brand.

    Related: Online Branding: The Roadmap to Stand Out and Succeed Online

    Pick Your Platform

    The monumental growth of social web is the result of increasing social networks every day.  The basic intent of each platform is to tear down the geographical distances between people and to maximize communication between them. People use social media for multiple purposes like sharing their opinions, brand monitoring, entertainment, media sharing, political activity, news reporting, education, collaboration and spreading information etc. Nevertheless; each social platform provides a unique service.

    For example; Instagram is for sharing photos telling your everyday activity, Twitter is to connect people with similar interests who can share in-the-moment updates; Pinterest is to allow users to visually share and discover new interests by creating new Boards and sharing ideas among the followers.

    Social Media Platforms - RePlug

    With that being said; it is very necessary for you to pick a platform to run your campaign.

    The backbone of marketing is to target the right audience. So, it is necessary to pick the right platform to advertise your business. By doing so, you will be able to drive back the maximum traffic of those users who are actually interested in your offer and are most likely to buy your products/ services.  

    For instance; if you have a clothing business, you might need to focus on your Facebook, Instagram and YouTube campaigns. Know where your audiences reside and save your energies to target them as your potential customers. If you don’t know the suitable networks for your business, the best way is to start analyzing your incoming referral traffic.

    Market Your Uniqueness

    The community of social web comprises of humans interacting with each other; selling or acquiring services from others. It is an inbuilt necessity for humans to find an emotional value in the things they use or the people they talk to. We are attracted to charismatic personalities, kindness, authenticity, and most importantly uniqueness. A unique trait of a thing or a person makes them stand out from the rest of the crowd.

    Uniqueness - Replug

    This trait can easily be exploited for marketing your businesses. Uniqueness could be attained in the form of an eye-catching tagline, highlighting a key feature of your product that no one else provides or giving your brand a fun identity.

    So, create your brand voice by applying this strategy and again find the target audience which could easily get influenced by the flavor you have added to your marketing strategy.

    Remarketing or Retargeting

    You must have experienced visiting a website and later on getting similar ads throughout your social media browsing. Some may call it magic but we call it remarketing.

    Remarketing also goes by the name of Retargeting, is capturing the attention of those users who came to your website and left. This strategy is applied by placing a cookie in the viewer’s web browser when they visit your website for the first time. So, while they are browsing you can track their browsing activity and which social platforms they use the most. That way, you can serve them with your ads on the platforms they use and drive back the lost traffic.

    Retargeting - Replug

    Remarketing saves a lot of time and energy as it only targets those people who have already shown interest in your product. If done smartly, remarketing can turn window-shoppers into actual buyers.

    Social platforms like Google display Network, popular blogging websites, Quora, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more; allow you to run ads. You have to come up with a specific ad strategy to reclaim maximum traffic. Analyze the exact needs of the user by shrinking the horizons of possibilities.

    For example, when a user visited your blog, it is important to figure out what product or service did the user showed interest in, how much time did the user spend on your blog, what is the intent of the user. Understanding the user’s need will help you qualify them by serving the ads which would hit them at the right spot.

    Consumer Attraction - Replug

    In another example, if a user came to our blog and viewed the product, we’ll focus on the specific feature he/she viewed and float related ads in their network.

    Retargeting is observed to be one of the most popular marketing strategies because of its distinctive approach.

    Replug makes marketing very easy for its users. It lets you create a social media campaign for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or your custom platform; by creating a very simple retargeting script. All you have to do is add a retargeting pixel ID in your campaign and it does the rest of the job for you.

    You can make your campaigns even more effective by using this short URL generator to create trackable links that seamlessly integrate with Replug’s retargeting features.

    Biddyco is a social advertising company which claims to have achieved 1,284% ROI in just 7 days, by retargeting. Check out their Kick in the Pants Technique and how they used this strategy to get rewarding leads. A step by step demonstration is explained in this article to help you start from the beginning.

    Related: 9 ways to multiply your sales with eCommerce retargeting

    Guest Posting

    Guest posting/blogging is an amazing way of reaching out towards the public. Guest posting is an exchange process of writing or posting your articles on someone else’s website or blog, someone who has a significant amount of followers. Likewise; you allow them to publish their content on your own blog.

    Guest Posting - Replug

    This association helps to build strong relationships among the bloggers. Providing others with quality content also helps improve your name and credibility. In addition to it, guest posting is proven to be great for search engine optimization as well. When you’re the host blogger and you’re publishing someone else’s blog article, you’ll use a link to their article somewhere in your blog. And we know how search engine friendly these links are.

    Buffer, a social media scheduling app, managed to grow its customer base from zero to 100k customers, all in 9 months. The Co-founder Leo Widrich shares his secret that he started off by approximately 150 guest posts… Sounds like a small number but it isn’t.

    Later on, with experience and growing success, he wrote blogs on bigger networks which got them bigger traffic.

    Tom Hunt, a TEDx speaker and founder of Virtual Valley, has written a very helpful post about guest blogging in which he shares 42 experiences and 42 lessons he learned from those.

    Neil Patel, a New York Times bestselling author, has shared some statistics about guest blogging which you might want to check out.

    Do the math for your own business, and start guest blogging right now.

    Infographics and Gifographics

    Visual Content - Replug

    According to the Social Science Research Network, 65% of us are visual learners. It is a common observation that visual information is more likely to be ingrained and remembered among the viewers rather than textual information. In fact, if you want to grab viewers’ attention towards an extensive blog post that you’ve written, it is better to take an aid from colorful infographic images.

    The best thing about an infographic is that it is equally informative but comprehensive, and also it is good to look at after reading some text-heavy information. Metaphorically speaking and stressing upon the value of an infographic, the comparison is the same as a word document vs a PowerPoint presentation.

    On social media platforms, infographics are likely to be shared 40x more than other types of content. Imagine how far the name of your company could go if you share your infographics regularly.

    Like Infographics, a new term Gifographics (also known as InfoGIFs) has been introduced by Neil Patel. Gifographics is a combination of two words GIF and Graphic-Visual Content. In other words, gifographic is an animated infographic. The reason for the creation of this terminology is to increase viewer’s engagement towards your content and make learning more fun.

    A very sophisticated and interactive infographic was created for the New York Times to group the characters of ‘Game of Thrones’ in a graph of Good, Evil, Ugly, Beautiful. Check it out and get inspired by it.

    Ceros’ lets you create fun infographics and gifographics for your businesses. Scroll through the following blog to check out their story of ‘Marketing Evolution’.

    Promotional Sales and Giveaways

    Who doesn’t love seasonal sales, free stuff, gift cards, and whatnot? People are charmed by such freebies and they themselves market your product by word of mouth (WOM) or via social media platforms. Unknowingly, the user feels more special about your product when they get good results in lesser prices and they prefer your products over your competitor’s.

    Promotional Sales - Replug

    The most recent trend ‘Like, tag, share’; has been adopted by most of the small-scale online businesses to get famous among their users. Such contests require users to advertise the brand’s name and as a prize, they get free stuff or gift cards.

    These contests could also be carried out with the help of CTAs. CTAs don’t have to necessarily be a rectangular pop up with contrastive colors, they could be anything that the user sees and feels the need to view your ad. In short, you have to give them an offer they can’t refuse. These kinds of CTA’s create a sense of urgency among the audience and drives them to participate… a win-win situation for both the parties.

    Campaign Consistency

    You must be familiar with the Marketing rule of 7. Back in 1930, studio bosses of the film industry noticed that its users needed to be nudged by advertisement several times to buy their movies. Today, the number has been generalized to seven; a user needs to see your advertisement at least seven times before signing business with you. If you’re consistent enough with your marketing campaign and create compelling ads, you may end up on-boarding many clients with you.

    A business ought to run different campaigns on different social media platforms; nevertheless, all their content should be consistent. If you have a WordPress theme for your business, use that in your advertisement.

    For example, use the same logo of your company in every advert campaign, use the same colors as that of your website theme, use the same style that you’ve set for your business. That helps the viewers recall and remember your brand name.

    Create a catchy slogan for the services your company provides and use it for spreading the word. Slogan campaigning has been the most famous strategy used by many companies. Slogan becomes an identity for your company and it is a fun way of engaging your customers.

    You just have to be creative. Remember, sky is the limit.

    Referral

    Your strategy should also be to engage your loyal customers. Referral programs help you increase brand awareness and your customer base. The basic idea is to provide a benefit to a customer if he/she refers your brand to their friends or family. It helps your customers gaining a benefit from you as well as it helps you in achieving long-lasting customers.

    Referral - Replug

    A study made by Social Media Software firm Lithium reveals that 92% of the people trust referrals from their friends and family rather than a random advertisement.

    So, you need your customers to create hype by talking about your brand in their social circle. This can be done by several referral programs in which you offer a discount or a free service. This helps people know about your brand without you actively selling your product or showing them in-your-face ads which might annoy the public at some point.

    Do you want to know how Robinhood referral got 1 million potential users even before their launch? They amplified their followers by creating a competition in which the users could get ahead in the queue by referring more people. That is what got them viral.

    Check out this blog to know about it in detail.

    Need an even bigger number?

    You must be familiar with Dropbox. Everyone uses Dropbox nowadays. Dropbox’s referral program won them around 3 million users in just 15 months.

    Dropbox raised their brand awareness exponentially just by using referral marketing. Although, the idea was not entirely their own. They got inspired by PayPal’s refer-a-friend scheme. While Paypal paid its customers with cash, Dropbox provided both the referrer and referee with free storage. Read more about this in an article shared by ReferralCandy Blog.

    Following the footsteps of Robinhood. Hotjar also created an ‘early access’ waiting list. Whenever someone tried to access Hotjar, they’d put them last in the line and ask them to refer Hotjar to their family and friends.

    The more the merrier, right?

    They incentivized this contest by

    • Providing free 6 months access to the users who referred Hotjar to 5 friends.
    • Free T-Shirt giveaway to the top 200 positions.
    • Free lifetime access to top 20 positions.

    They got a massive response from their users who wanted to overtake other contestants. Read their complete success story.

    Webinar Marketing

    Webinar Marketing is also trending among many service providers all across the globe. Webinars are helpful because they let you interact with your audience. You can host a webinar even remotely by arranging video or audio conferences with remote team. Many platforms allow you to multicast your webinar, i.e., you can communicate with multiple receivers. This lets you save so much of your precious time, which could be utilized somewhere else. You can also save time by using a webinar marketing agency, which handles promotion, logistics, and execution, allowing you to focus on content and audience engagement.

    Webinar Marketing - Replug

    Webinars have proven to be a good medium for building the name of your brand. You could start with free webinars and later on move to the paid version to be entertained by the premium features. These videos could be used in your Video marketing as well; save your videos and upload them on Facebook or YouTube, as videos are more helpful in quick learning and a better understanding of your product.

    According to Google trends quick search, the search term ‘Webinars’ has increased steadily from 2004 to this day.

    The term webinar is a subtle marketing technique. You shouldn’t be ranting about the amazingness of your products or services, rather you should gain the trust of your audiences by telling something useful and hinting about the values you could add into their lives. You do that by addressing their pain points and answering their questions.

    Marketo, an email marketing service, applies this rule in their webinars. Their motto is to create a value of their services throughout the webinar and give them a powerful stance to buy your services.

    If your target audience is new to your brand, you could attract them by giving them discounts on each sign-up or sending an e-mail at the end of the webinar.

    Webinars help you in creating a  personal bond with your customers by adding a  human touch to your brand.

    Inc. shares Russ Ruffino’s story of how his company converted the Webinar attendees into their clients and how it helped them in increasing ROI.  In his article, he has shared some tips and tricks which might come in handy for your webinar to become a success.

    Jenna Soard, the founder of YouCanBrand.com, explains that Webinars are the best source for client conversion. Jenna is considered the Webinar Rockstar and you are encouraged to read her success story to get started.

    Conclusion

    Like oxygen is important to our lungs, marketing is important to our brand. It is not easy to compete in today’s crowded industry… but then there are no shortcuts to success. The marketing gurus suggest to innovatively apply all the standard rules of marketing. Let your audience trust you and make them feel that you care. Adopt the newest ways of engaging with your clients and remember; change is inevitable. Never stop growing!

    We’d love to hear from you. Share your experiences if your business has benefited from these marketing strategies.