Social Media Marketing is constantly evolving, and so are the strategies and tactics behind it. Before, social media used to be a place to connect with the people around you, a place to share your thoughts, events, or anything that you wanted to. Today, it looks a bit different, with the same intent but more purpose. Businesses have joined social media en masse with the intention to connect with their audience at their convenience, to engage and nurture followers online, where they feel the most comfortable.
The best advertising is advertising someone else does for you, which is why influencer marketing for small business comes in handy.
Consumers are so bombarded and often a little distrustful of companies running around online, saying, “Buy from us. We’re the best.” You’re more likely to see a positive ROI when other people say how great you are. This is why you should consider adding influencer marketing to your marketing plans.
In the article, we’re going to tell you what to expect from the world of influencer marketing for small business, provide some tips for getting the best value from this marketing tactic, and help you find the right influencers.
We teamed up with a widely recognized and trusted manufacturing company in the lower mainland, to redesign and develop a fresh new website.
A comprehensive understanding of their values and goals aided us to thoughtfully design a new, fully responsive site, completely transforming the look while giving it a fresh modern feel, boosting traffic both organically and from their Google Ads campaigns too.
Ten years into the great social media experiment and 2017 was the year we saw Facebook hit the 2 billion user mark, the proliferation of real-time video across social platforms and the continuing email renaissance. With 2018 coming up fast upon us what better time to reflect on the past year, to dust off the crystal ball and to predict what 2018 will bring for marketers.
This post is divided into five sections to mirror the disciplines Out-Smarts focuses on websites trends, SEO – getting found when people search online, email marketing, social media and overall marketing strategy.
Website Design Trends
We know that Google is going to continue to emphasize the importance of mobile in 2018 so expect to see function taking precedence over form with a focus on usability and minimalist site navigation and content proliferating. It’s going to be interesting to see how the content is king crusaders balance their obsession with publishing content with minimalism and mobile. Expect to see more valuable content related to buyer intent rather than simply content for the sake of putting something out there.
Will 2018 be the year when small businesses finally catch up? 50% of small businesses still don’t have a website; we’re hoping this new year will be the one the laggards finally catch up. It is interesting that social media adoption for small business is much higher than website adoption. The popularity of social media is likely because of a low barrier to entry of social platforms. However, it is important to consider that you don’t own your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter pages (or any other social media presence you might have) the social media company owns it. What happens if they switch directions or go out of business? A website belongs to your business, not to a third party.
Watch out for more animation (logos in particular) and websites that incorporate GIFs in 2018 too – hopefully, they’re less cheesy than their Flash predecessors. Artificial Intelligence is going to be everywhere in 2018 too as enhancements make Chatbots get better and better at answering questions and simulating conversations with website visitors.
Search Engine Optimisation
Don’t let anyone tell you that keyword research is no longer important. It is and will continue to be, but there will be a shift in 2018 to focus more on semantic search, buyer intent and topics rather than specific keywords. SEOs will focus more on having their site show up at the right time when people are actually considering a purchase, rather than having the site show up to attract particular personas.
Another aspect that should be on your SEO radar in 2018 is voice search which means you need to hone your long tail keywords, i.e. keyword phrases that are hyper-specific to what you are selling.
Image search will continue to grow in 2018 so now might be the time to make sure all the images on your website have well thought out and optimized alt tags.
Email Campaigns
The email renaissance will continue in 2018. Get ready to watch videos embedded directly in email campaigns. Technological enhancements in email clients will continue to lead to more and more email apps that support embedded video. Right now less than half of all email clients can play embedded videos but thanks to Apple mail, iOS and Samsung this is changing. Up until now, most senders have opted to embed a fake play button in the email with a link to the video on a separate site or by GIF.
Including video in emails can lead to big increases in open rates – Campaign Monitor
Watch for more sophistication in list segmentation too. Segmenting campaigns so that specific audiences receive emails that contain content tailored to their unique perspective.
Social Media
2017 was the year of streaming video in social media; LinkedIn In and Twitter followed Facebook Live’s lead and began supporting live streaming video content. In 2018 watch out for growing adoption of these technologies and more creative live streams.
Over 8 billion videos or 100 million hours of videos are watched on Facebook every day (TechCrunch, 2016). – via Buffer
In 2018 we will also see the increased adoption of short-lived content, content that’s only available for a short period of time before it disappears, – like Instagram stories and Snapchat. Marketers must start developing strategies to maximize the reach and impact of ephemeral content as well as considering tactics to get this content noticed.
On platforms like Instagram and Facebook, only a tiny percentage of followers actually see the content you share on your page. To get noticed in 2018, you will need to invest in ads on these platforms. Consider video ads to spice things up a little.
Social media analytics, measuring tools and management solutions will become more sophisticated in 2018 with an emphasis on enterprise social marketing integrating all platforms.
How Marketing Strategies will Evolve in 2018
I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that 2018 will be the year that our obsession with all things digital and only digital will end. It’s also going to be the year we’re going to start calling our discipline marketing again (rather than digital). Marketing in 2018 will encompass all aspects of the marketing mix, both online and off and marketers will use the means most likely to help them attract their target audience.
Consider this, there are 65 million business pages on Facebook, 90% of businesses use social media. These are substantial numbers, but for marketers this means that it is becoming increasingly difficult, not to mention more expensive, to get noticed. If you want to attract your target audience’s attention in 2018, then widen your horizons and consider sending them a direct mail piece (depending on the audience) in a nice coloured envelope with handwritten wording. It will likely be the only physical mail the recipient gets that day (or maybe that week or month!), they’re going to open it, and if your copy is effective they will act on it!
Conclusion
2018 is going to be an interesting year; technological advancements will continue to speed up. To be effective as marketers, it’s going to be important not simply to jump on the bandwagon of the next big thing but to consider options strategically and with your target audience in mind (rather than from a product or service-centric perspective). That said, video popularity has been growing year over year and won’t stop. Cisco predicted that video would account for 80% of internet traffic by 2020. So if you do nothing else, consider how you might incorporate video into your digital approach in 2018.
As the Facebook population grows, more and more businesses are using Facebook Pages to promote their business in this forum and to reach out and connect with fans there.Your Facebook page may be the first contact a prospect has with you and it is important to stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is by customizing your Facebook page to include tabs that go beyond the basic “Wall” and “Info” tabs in the vanilla page set up. Once you have created these new tabs you can customize each page. Here’s how:
Customize Your Facebook Page
First thing you need to do is add the Facebook Mark Up Language to your Page. To do this, Facebook search “FBML” find the FMBL application and click to add it to your site.
Once you have added this, go to your Page and click edit. Under “Applications” you will see FBML. Click to edit to add a new tab.
The box title shows “FBML”, edit this to show the title you want to appear on the tab on your page. Click to save. The new tab will now appear on your Facebook page.
To edit and add content to the page click to edit your page again and click to edit on the pertinent FBML application you just created. Finally, add the code you want to appear on the page.
The easiest way to generate the code is to use a CMS editor. I used WordPress to generate the code for the connect tab content I created on the Out-Smarts Page.
To add images to your new tab page, upload them to WordPress and use the hyperlink functionality if you want to link the image to an external page (exactly like you would if you were uploading and linking an image to a blog post).
Once you are happy with the content, copy and paste the HTML code into your FBML window. To find this click on applications then edit as before.
Click to complete and save. Go back to your Facebook page and voila, you will have a new tab there and if you click on the tab the content you created in WordPress will appear there.
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