Using HubSpot Lead Flows To Improve Conversion Rates

There’s a common misconception that some businesses that pop-ups are always a bad idea. While it’s true that pop-up ads can be annoying, especially if they are disrupting the visitor’s website experience, they can also be very effective if you know how to implement them properly. For example, you’ll want to refrain from having pop-ups on every page of your site as this will probably annoy your visitors.

However, a strategically placed pop-up can actually make it easier to convert your leads. In fact, a recent study showed that pop-ups convert 1375 percent better than traditional opt-in forms. If you do decide to use pop-ups in an attempt to convert leads, then you should be sure to use HubSpots’s Lead Flow feature.

What Is Lead Flow?

Lead Flows are HubSpot’s version of pop-up ads. Lead Flows can be accessed in both free and premium versions of HubSpot and allow you to create custom pop-ups that will help you to engage visitors, increased web leads, and reconvert returning visitors. Not to mention that through the use of Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to collect contact insights and analytics, making it easier to nurture the leads that you’ve captured.

What Types Of Lead Flows Are There?

There is more than one type of pop-up, and Lead Flows offers a variety of different types that you can customize to fit your needs. This includes the following:

  • Traditional Pop-Up Boxes – Traditional pop-ups are the best way to immediately get the attention of your visitors and are a good way to promote new content offers, grow your email list, highlight specific pieces of content on your site, and to promote your social presence.
  • Drop-Down Banners – Drop-down banners appear as thin, full-width bars near the top of your page. Although direct, they aren’t as disruptive as pop-up ads. They’re great for sales and special offers, growing your blog subscribers list, and promoting upcoming events or webinars.
  • Side-In-Boxes – Side-in boxes are ads that slide in at the bottom left or right side of your page. They’re more subtle than other types of Lead Flows and are effective for promoting content offers or growing your blog subscribers list.

What Are The Benefits Of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

What Are The Lead Flow Triggers?

Instead of just having ads pop-up on every page, you can trigger your Lead Flows to appear based on certain actions that the visitor takes. This allows you to pinpoint what actions are more likely to result in a conversion, thereby allowing you to strategically present the visitor with a Lead Flow at an appropriate time. The following are the three types of triggers that you can set for your Lead Flows:website redesign process

  • Browser Exit Trigger – You can trigger the execution of a pop-up Lead Flow when a visitor exits their browser window. This gives you a last chance to capture leads who haven’t converted as they leave your site.
  • Elapsed Time Trigger – You can also set certain Lead Flows to trigger based on how much time the visitor has been on a certain page. The minimum amount of time you can set a Lead Flow trigger to is seven seconds.
  • 50 Percent Page Scroll – Last of all, you can trigger your Lead Flows when a visitor has scrolled past the halfway mark of a page (which shows that they are interested in the content of that page and are more likely to convert as a result).

There are plenty of other customization options available. For example, while pop-ups may be effective for website visitors, they may hurt the experience of mobile users. As a result, you can disable your Lead Flows for mobile visitors. By using HubSpot’s Lead Flows, you’ll also be able to track the leads who have filled out your Lead Flows. This makes it easy to follow up and to develop your strategy to ensure that your leads are being nurtured.

Contrary to popular belief, pop-ups can be effective if they are used appropriately and strategically. The best way to leverage pop-ups is through the use of HubSpot’s Lead Flows feature, which provides a variety of customization options to ensure that you can reach your leads without disrupting their website experience.

6 Best Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

As you may already know, Facebook Ads can be a very effective advertising platform, especially when you consider its overall cost-effectiveness (it’s a pay-per-click advertising platform, after all) and the ability to target audiences based on a variety of criteria (from demographics to location to interests and more). Facebook Ads has a lot of features that you’ll want to take advantage of, including their Facebook Video Ads feature.

6 Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

The following are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to implement:

1. Get Your Message Across Immediately

Don’t just assume that your viewers will stick around until the end of your video ads. According to Microsoft, around 19 percent of online viewers lose interest in video content after 10 seconds. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to get to the point as quickly as possible so that your viewers know why they are watching. Try to get your message across in the first ten seconds.

2. Optimize Videos For Lack Of Sound

A lot of people watch videos with their sound off. You want your videos to not only get the message across even if they’re silent, but to engage the viewer to the point that they will turn the sound on. To optimize for the lack of sound, show captions, add text overlay, and be sure to use powerful, moving images.

Video Ad FB

3. Keep Mobile Videos Short

Although some viewers may be more willing to watch a longer video ad on their desktops, this is not so for mobile users. Mobile users are often on the go, which means that they’re not going to have the patience to watch a video that’s minutes long. Try to keep videos under 15 seconds long to help ensure that mobile users actually watch your whole video.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

4. Customize Thumbnail Images

Many Facebook users will turn off autoplay on videos. However, just because some people won’t see your video ads play automatically doesn’t mean that they won’t watch them. You need to spark their interest by choosing a thumbnail image, which is a static image representing your video. Facebook will provide a number of options of still images that it pulls from your video ad. However, you’re not limited to these options–you can also upload a custom thumbnail instead. Make sure the image you use is of high quality and that it’s relevant to your ad.

5. Test Your Video Ads

To make sure your Facebook Video Ads perform to the best of their ability, perform A/B testing. You can create several versions of your video ads through Facebook by changing the creative, the placement, the product set, optimization events, and the audience. Test your ads for three to 14 days to get the most accurate results. Use the results to optimize your video ads so, thereby increasing their chances of performing successfully.

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

6. Analyze Performance

Make sure to analyze your video ads as you run them. The data you collect should help you when it comes to creating future video ads. For example, track which video ads had the highest levels of engagement, what times of the day your audience engaged with your videos, how many viewers visited your landing page after viewing a video ad, which videos were watched from beginning to end, and more.

Considering how effective video marketing is in general, you should be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s Video Ad feature. These are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to take note of before launching a video ad campaign on Facebook.

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Improving User Experience With Good Website Navigation Design

It’s not a stretch to say that your website is one of — if not the — most important element of your inbound marketing strategy. Without it, there’s very little that you can do. Because of this, it’s essential to make sure that poor web design doesn’t frustrate your visitors. Content quality will not mean as much if visitors have trouble viewing your pages or finding what they’re looking for. This is why you need to make sure you focus on creating a user-friendly website navigation design.

Making Your Website Easy To Navigate

When someone visits your website, no matter how they got there, you’ll want them to spend as much time on it as possible. The more they engage with your site, the easier it becomes to nurture and eventually convert them. As such, you’ll want to make navigation through your website easy. Good website navigation design makes it easy to find links to your site’s main pages, as well as  being able to navigate to those individual pages, conveniently. Awareness Stage

Even if you do have a navigation bar with drop-down menus, it is important to note that most users, today, tend to prefer scrolling.  They’ve become accustomed to scrolling because of the way most social media channels work. Therefore, instead of  visitors clicking through your drop-down menu, a scrollable menu allows them to simply move their mouse over the menu to make it automatically drop-down. This way, they don’t have to click three or four times to get to the page they want to go to. Alternatively, they can just scroll through their options until they find the actual page they want to click on.

It’s a better idea to keep content on one page instead of breaking it up on multiple pages. Even if it’s a long-form piece, forcing the user to click on buttons at the end of each page that says continue to page 2, page 3, etc., is a hassle. Since they have to click to get to the next page, in addition to waiting for that page to load as well. Simply allowing them to scroll through the entire article will make your page more user-friendly.

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company? 

Tips for Good Website Navigation Design

The following are a few more examples of how you can create a good website navigation design that will improve your user experience:

Use a responsive design Your website navigation design may be well thought out for your desktop users, but it may not translate well to mobile devices. This happens due to the fact that most websites use a horizontal design, whereas screens on mobile devices are vertical. By using a responsive design, your navigation menu can be designed to turn into a mobile friendly hamburger-style menu.

Incorporate breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs allow users to see what links they have followed to get to the page they are on. This makes it easy for them to backtrack to a previous page they were on if they got lost going through your site.

Link logo to your homepage Make sure that the logo at the top of your page links to your homepage. This makes it easy for visitors to go back to the beginning, without searching for a link to your homepage.

Always display a link to your contact page Displaying your contact information at the top of your page along with a link to your contact page makes you easier to reach.

Make links easy to click for mobile Use buttons for CTAs that are easy for people to click on when using mobile devices.

Do You Need to Redesign Your Website

When designing your website, make sure that you carefully consider your website navigation design. Easy to use and clear navigation will help to improve your user experience, thereby making it easier to keep visitors engaged and on your website.

Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

Over the past decade, there has been the perception that inbound marketing tactics, such as publishing blog content and expanding brand recognition by maintaining a strong social media presence, has eclipsed many outbound marketing tactics; however, this isn’t altogether true. Businesses are still having a lot of success with outbound marketing, especially TV advertising. The following are a few reasons why television ads can still play an effective part of your marketing campaign.

People Still Watch TV

While it’s true that many people (especially younger people) are spending more of their time watching streaming services, that doesn’t mean that there’s no audience to reach via TV advertising. Plenty of people still watch TV even though viewership has declined over the past decade. In fact, according to a UK study done last year, people still watch an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes of TV a day.

People Watch Live TV

While streaming services are attempting to build up their content libraries, there is one area in which they still lag behind TV, and that’s in the realm of live TV–specifically, sports. Live sports games broadcast on TV are still an enormous draw and an excellent way to reach certain audiences. Just take for example the Super Bowl, which allows a 30-second ad to reach roughly 100 million viewers. There’s something immediate and social about live TV that few streaming services have managed to replicate.

How To Transition From Traditional Advertising to Inbound Marketing

TV Can Benefit Inbound Marketing Strategies

The use of TV advertising can actually compliment your inbound activities. For example, you can use hashtags in your ads or display website addresses to encourage viewers to seek out more information online — something that’s easy for viewers to do since they often watch TV with their smartphones or tablets on hand.

Why Inbound Marketing Solutions Are Integral To Your Success

TV Will Never Die, It Will Evolve

Abandoning television advertising simply because you think it’s on the way out is not a good idea. Viewership may be trending down slightly and streaming channels may still be figuring out ways to eclipse their TV counterparts (for example, Amazon recently begun streaming NFL games), but that doesn’t mean TV is dying. An industry as big as TV doesn’t just go away–it evolves.

One of the reasons why streaming services are so popular is because they provide more customizability to their viewers. Viewers get to choose what they want to watch from the content that lives on each streaming platform instead of being forced to watch whatever’s programmed at certain times. TV has been resisting change for some time, but it won’t be long that the way TV works evolves; for example, once channels become available piecemeal (which seems inevitable) instead of grouped in packages, people will have much more control over what they’re paying for. This will also benefit advertisers since you’ll be able to more effectively target your demographics.

These are just a few reasons that you should still be investing in TV advertising as it remains and will most likely always remain an effective marketing technique.

Marketing Trends

What Experiential Marketing Companies Can Gain By Blending Experiential Marketing With Digital Works

Experiential marketing is becoming a popular tactic among companies who realize that audiences connect with brands more successfully if they are able to participate or engage directly with the brand. A great example of experiential marketing is Samsung’s efforts at the 2012 Olympics to introduce consumers to their new Galaxy S3. They set up booths throughout London where they allowed consumers to play with the phone or to have pictures of themselves taken with the phone that were then turned into personalized badges.

While experiential marketing is a very effective tactic in itself, experiential marketing companies should be sure to incorporate digital marketing to help increase the impact that it can have. The following are a few ways that experiential marketing companies can use digital technology to improve their experiential marketing efforts.

Promote Your Events

Using experiential marketing to engage your audience isn’t going to be very effective if you don’t have much of an audience in the first place. You should use digital marketing to promote whatever events you’re holding. For example, if your company is putting up booths in multiple locations during a specific event (such as the Samsung example during the London Olympics), then you’ll want to not only promote when you’re doing it, but the exact locations and times that you will be there.

You can do this by promoting the event on social media where it will get the most exposure. Make it possible to RSVP to the event so that you can track the number of attendants that you’re expecting. You could even promote the event, but not reveal the time and place unless someone RSVPs to create a more exclusive feeling. You can also use your email list to notify people of your event and what they can expect there.

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Use

Create Real-Time Content

Creating content during the event can be helpful for a number of reasons. First of all, it gives audiences who weren’t able to attend a chance to see the effort you’ve put into creating an experience. While they won’t have the full experience of attending, they’ll get a general idea of what it was like and will be able to learn about whatever your event was about. For example, you could live stream parts of the event.

Besides providing more exposure for your event this way, it can also help convince audience members who didn’t attend to show up to your next event (or if your event is being held over multiple days, it could convince people to show up at the next scheduled event).

Encourage User-Generated Content

Use the content that your audience creates at the event to promote it. This can be especially effective for demonstrations of new products. Simply have a hashtag available that everyone can use to tag the content they create, such as pictures or videos recorded on their phones. There are other ways to encourage users to create content as well. For example, one food company had a professional photographer at their event to teach audience members techniques for taking pictures of food. They would then post the pictures they took on Instagram using the official hashtag that the company created.

Experiential marketing is a fantastic way to engage consumers, but you should be sure to leverage digital technology to get the most out of your experiential marketing efforts. These are a number of ways that experiential marketing companies can use digital technology to help increase the overall impact of their experiential marketing efforts.

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Social Media Solutions: Understanding The Importance of Social Media Engagement vs. Following

Social media has become one of the most important marketing platforms over the past decade or so. This is because there are hundreds of different social channels out there, all of which cater to different demographics. If you can find the right social platform, you will find it much easier to find and target niche audiences. However, one of the common mistakes businesses make is focusing too much on expanding their followers instead of engaging with the followers that they already have.

Why You Should Focus On Engagement

Social media allows you to connect directly with your audience. That said, spending your time developing relationships with your audience is much more important than increasing your brand awareness. There’s a temptation to try and get the most followers as possible, especially if you’re competing with similar businesses who are doing the same thing. This, however, will simply turn your marketing efforts into a popularity contest.

By spending your time engaging with your current followers instead of chasing the followers you don’t have, you’ll find that your efforts will have a more lasting impact. By building your relationship with your followers, you will eventually build trust and brand loyalty. This can translate to repeat sales from the same followers. Additionally, once you’ve built relationships with these followers, they will turn into brand ambassadors. They will engage with your content by sharing, liking, and commenting on it, thereby exposing followers in their personal social circles to your brand.

5 Ways To Optimize Your Social Media

How to Improve Your Engagement

By focusing on engagement, your followers will help you get more followers. The following are a few Social Media solutions to help you improve engagement with the followers you have:

  • Post content on a regular basis – Use your social channels to post links to your newest blog posts. When followers share your content, it will be seen by more people. The engagement level of your content can also give you a good idea of what types of content resonates with your audience. This allows you to adjust your content strategy so that your content is more relevant to your specific audience.social media
  • Incite conversation – When posting content, ask a relevant question to what you’ve posted in order to encourage your followers to comment on it. You can also simply spark a conversation by asking general questions on your social pages. Twitter is a particularly effective channel for this strategy.
  • Always respond – If your followers take the time to post a comment, take the time to respond. Whether their comment was positive, negative, or simply just a response to something you posted, answer them. This shows them that you are actively engaged and that the conversation isn’t one-sided. Be sure to respond to negative comments as well instead of simply deleting them (unless they are purposefully inflammatory). Your followers will appreciate your efforts to deal with negative experiences in a friendly and professional manner. In this way, social media can be quite effective as a PR tool.
  • Hold contests – Social media contests are a great way to engage followers. You could do something simple like hold sweepstakes in which only followers can enter, or you can hold a contest that’s a bit more involved. For example, you could hold a photography contest on Instagram. You can even have the winner voted on by the followers themselves.

How To Use Social Media To Drive B2B Sales

Social Media Solutions = More Followers

Social media solutions that improve engagement will eventually help you to increase your followers as well. Be sure to use these social media solutions to help improve engagement with followers on social media.

earned media vs paid media

Inside Adwords: Exploring The Differences Between Smart Display Campaigns & Custom Intent Campaigns

The use of PPC (pay per click) advertising can be beneficial for countless reasons. Not only are PPC ads a great way to bring in more traffic, they are incredibly cost-effective and are particularly useful for trying out new keywords or copy. It’s why Google AdWords continues to be popular with advertisers. Let’s take a closer look inside AdWords to discover some of their newer PPC options, including their smart display ads and their custom intent ads.

Inside AdWords’ Smart Display Ads

Smart display ads are ads that are automated by Google. This helps to make creating display ads much easier since all you’ll need to do is submit your creative assets (such as images, headlines, subheaders, and copy) along with your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal and Google will determine what the best possible combination of these elements are in order to meet your CPA. Google will also automatically find placements for your ad.

There are a number of advantages to creating your ads this way. For example, benefits include:

  • The ability to test out different ad elements for other ad campaigns.
  • Test ads that haven’t been working to see if any elements are salvageable.
  • Find new placements.
  • Spend less time optimizing and managing your own ads.

However, it’s worth noting that there are a few drawbacks. Namely, you’re giving up a lot of control over your ad. For example, you can’t bid down, you can’t exclude placements, and you don’t have control over the devices your ads are placed on.

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Even though you do give up some control, what makes smart display ads worth using is the fact that Google will automatically test out different elements of your ad to find the best possible combination.

Inside Adwords’ Custom Intent Campaigns

The custom intent audiences option now offered by Google AdWords provides a more accurate way to target consumers who are looking to make a purchase right now. It’s the equivalent of being able to walk up to a customer who is browsing items inside of a physical store and engaging with them. Using custom intent audiences, you’ll have a much better chance of closing a sale since the audiences your ad will be targeting will be looking to buy something that’s similar to your product or service.

For example, if you’re marketing an airline service and want to target customers who are going on vacation, you could set your customer intent to target people who are looking to go on vacation in Hawaii. Not only can you target potential customers searching for flights to Hawaii on Google using keywords like Hawaii vacation or flights to Hawaii, but you can also reach them on YouTube while they are watching Hawaii travel videos.

Adwords’ Custom Intent Makes Finding Your Audience A Breeze

Using the custom intent audience feature is easy. When creating a display ad, simply select “target” and choose “intent.” You can then choose either ‘DIY” which allows you to combine links and topics in order to pursue customers who are most likely looking to buy what you are selling, or you can choose “Auto-generated,” which leaves the work to Google’s machine learning technology in order to create audiences that are exclusive to the data of your brand based on inference.

When creating your new audience, you’ll name the audience, enter any keywords or URLs that are related to your target audience, and then create it. Based on the custom audience you’ve created, you’ll be provided with useful information like estimated reach, associated keywords, and potential audiences according to phrase.

Although the custom intent audience feature can be extremely useful in reaching customers who are looking to buy immediately, it’s worth noting that this feature is only valuable as a short-term strategy. If you’re looking to nurture leads over the long-term, using this feature is not the best option.

Choosing Between Smart Display Ads and Custom Intent Audiences

When looking inside AdWords to determine what the best PPC option is for you, you need to figure out exactly what you’re goal is. If you’re trying to boost sales short term, then using the custom intent audience feature can be quite valuable. When it comes to smart display ads, there’s much more that you can use them for, whether it’s attracting more long-term leads, finding new places to reach your target audience, or identifying what elements of your ads are the most effective to help with future ad campaigns.

How To Transition From Traditional Advertising to Inbound Marketing

If your brand has been focusing on solely traditional advertising methods, then it’s time that you consider inbound marketing. Although traditional advertising, such as TV or radio commercials, print ads and billboards can all be successful strategies when properly utilized, they are short-term strategies.

Purely focusing on these advertising methods also means that you are missing out on an enormous online audience. It also means that all of your marketing budget is going into a short-term strategy. By also implementing an inbound marketing strategy, you’ll set your brand up for more long-term marketing success while increasing your brand exposure to a bigger audience. Of course, transitioning from traditional advertising to inbound marketing is going to require some work.

The following are the steps you’ll need to take to incorporate inbound marketing into your overall advertising strategy:

1. Understand The Advantages Of Inbound Marketing

If you don’t understand how inbound marketing differs from traditional marketing, then you’re going to end up applying the same type of strategy. Namely, your online presence will focus on promoting products and services. Posting online advertisements isn’t going to cut it. Online audiences differ greatly from those that you are targeting with traditional marketing efforts.

The idea of inbound marketing is to provide consumers with something valuable along with the information that they need to educate themselves about your brand, products, or services. By doing this, you’ll position yourself to be found by potential customers instead of having to find them. Inbound marketing also allows you to engage directly with your audience. This makes knowing what they want and need more important. They not only have a choice as to what content they consume, they can actually respond to your marketing efforts as well.

2. Use Your Available Data

Any data about your business and its customers should be carefully analyzed to help guide your inbound marketing strategy. This is because inbound marketing is all about optimizing your advertising efforts based on the data you have available. In fact, you should continue adjusting your strategies based on the new data that you’ll be collecting.

For example, you should use the information on your existing and past customers to expand your audience and create a buyer persona. By creating more in-depth buyer personas using customer online behavior data, you ensure that your content will be relevant to your specific audience. Your buyer personas should inform everything you produce and post online.

Five Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

3. Establish A Plan

Inbound marketing is so broad–it incorporates a wide range of strategies, including your website optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and more. You’ll need to have clear short-term and long-term goals so that you can judge the performance of your efforts.

For example, one of your long-term goals may be to increase brand awareness. By setting this goal, it will inform the marketing strategies you implement (such as being active on social media or using PPC ads) and will also allow you to judge your strategies based on that goal (such as page visits over time, conversions over time, number of social shares, etc.).

4. Repurpose Offline Content

Many of your traditional advertising efforts can be repurposed online. For example, the newsletters that you may have been sending out can be turned into email newsletters instead. Your copywriting team can transition from writing copy for print ads and commercials to writing blog content for your website. You can even use your research reports and white papers to create infographics and eBooks.

Once you’ve decided to transition from traditional advertising to inbound marketing, you’ll want to follow these steps in order to get started. Doing so will help establish a foundation for your inbound marketing efforts to build on.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

Understanding Growth Driven Design & Its Methodology

Your website design is arguably the most important element of a successful inbound marketing strategy. The website is the foundation of all your online marketing efforts, after all. When it comes to designing your website, there are two main ways to go about it. You can implement a traditional website design, in which you employ the best practices of website design into the creation of your site, or you can use a growth driven design.

What Is A Growth Driven Design?website redesign process

The big difference between a growth driven design and a traditional design is that a growth driven design focuses on the creation of a systematic and interactive website that can adapt to changing technology as well as to the changing needs of your audience over the years. This allows you to make informed improvements to your site based on continuous learning, visitor research, and regular testing.

While traditional website designs can be just as successful, they require complete redesigns in order to implement any major changes that you might want to make in the future.

The Three Phases of Growth Driven Design

The growth driven design process is all about constantly measuring the performance of your site and making changes based on what you’ve learned to improve that performance. The following are the three phases of a growth driven design:

1. Strategymarketing-make-or-break

The first step is to create a strategy by performing an audit of your current website, allowing you to see what works and what doesn’t. An audit will not only help guide your design, it will also help provide you with benchmarks that you can compare your new design to moving forward. Part of your audit should include user testing, interviews, and surveys to get a better understanding of how visitors interact with your site. Once your audit is complete, set measurable goals that will help define the results you’re looking for. Finally, revisit your buyer personas and buyer journeys to help guide your content strategy.

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company?

2. Launch Pad

Once your strategy is in place, create a launch pad. This is a site built using your strategy and wishlist. It’s not a finished product even though it’s completely functional for the end user. Essentially, it’s a working base that you can build on over time and allows you to track user behavior and begin the process of ongoing optimization.

3. Continuous Improvement

Using the information you’ve gathered from your audit and launch pad, you’ll continuously improve your website over monthly sprint cycles within an 11-month period. This last phase is made up of four stages:

1. Plan

Take note of how effective your site is and what changes have the best impact on your long-term goals.

2. Develop

Take the plan you’ve developed and implement it.

3. Learn

Review past changes to determine what worked and what didn’t so that you have a better idea of how to improve your site for the next spring cycle.

4. Transfer

Take everything that you’ve learned and share it with the different departments in your company, from marketing and sales to service and more.

Many brands are choosing to implement a growth driven design due to the ability to adapt to changing customer needs as well as a constantly changing online environment. However, this isn’t to say that a growth driven design is superior to a traditional design. Much depends on what your brand is trying to accomplish and what your specific marketing needs are. In some cases, a traditional web design may work just as well.

Understanding The Importance Of Brand Soul In Digital Engagement And How To Leverage It

One of the biggest challenges facing any business is losing the image of a corporate entity and creating an image of a brand that’s more personable and engaging. This is called having a brand soul. Without a brand soul, your audience will have trouble connecting with your brand on a personal level.

The following are 9 ways that digital engagement can help you to develop your brand soul:

1. Own your cultural landscape

Instead of considering yourself as a supplier of products or services, begin looking at yourself as part of the cultural landscape. You should believe that your product or service is adding something to the culture and you should treat your marketing efforts in this manner. You can leverage this idea through digital engagement by emphasizing the cultural components of your audience through social media. For example, posting pictures of your products being used in daily activities.

2. Stand for a social cause

Trying to stay neutral is an attempt to appeal to everyone, and that never works. Don’t be afraid to stand up for social causes that are important to your company. Doing so shows your audience that you stand for more than just profit. Take Nike as a recent example. While their social cause involved some controversy, they have taken a stand and it has certainly made them seem much less like a company that only cares about profits. The social cause they’ve stood up for may have lost them a few customers, but it’s greatly strengthened brand loyalty as a result as well.

3. Curate content

Digital engagement isn’t just about posting content that you’ve created. While your content may be relevant, it can seem a little like you’re just fishing for likes or shares. It’s important that you curate some of your content as well, meaning that you post links to relevant content on other websites. Doing so not only helps provide your audience with high-quality content, it shows them that you care about being helpful and it’s not all just about you. This, in turn, helps build trust in your brand.

4. Encourage Conversation Through Feedback

Encouraging feedback from your audience is a great way to learn about your audience, thereby giving you the chance to more effectively tailor your content to their needs. By encouraging feedback and responding positively (no matter how negative the feedback might be) you show your audience that what they think is important to you, thereby making them more willing to reach out and engage with your brand.

5. Reinvent service and support

Be proactive when it comes to customer service and support. In addition to providing a phone number, email, and social media channel through which your audience can contact you, consider adding a chatbot that can answer questions in real time or send customers questionnaires asking about the quality of the products or services they bought.

6. Guide your customers’ journeys

Make use of all of your customer data so that you can create content for every step of the buyer’s journey, no matter where they are, be it on your website, on mobile, or on one of your social channels. Use automation to trigger the best content, offers, or messages at the right time for each platform you’re on.

Using The Right Media Mix During Each Stage Of The Buyer’s Journeys

7. Personalize your marketing

Use the information you gather from your audience to personalize your marketing. This allows you to deliver content that’s more relevant to each individual reader, thereby allowing you to build stronger relationships with your leads.

8. Provide an immersive experience

One of the traps a lot of brands fall into is creating a non-memorable experience in which visitors read their content and move. Create content using a story format to make it more memorable. Don’t hesitate to use visual content as well, such as graphics, videos, and even gifs. This helps to create more of an immersive experience for the reader.

9. Be truthful

Always verify your facts, especially if you are using statistics. In the age of fake news, the last thing you want is to be labeled as dishonest due to inaccuracies in your content creation.

Digital engagement is an important part of establishing your brand soul and showing your audience that you are much more than just another lifeless corporate entity. These are just a few digital engagement strategies you should consider implementing to help build your brand soul.