advertising budget

Optimizing Your Advertising Budget: 5 Essential Factors for Success

The media landscape is constantly changing. New technologies and trends are emerging rapidly and existing platforms continue to evolve, providing more ways to spend your advertising budget. Today’s media plan looks far different than even last year, with more media channels, more devices, and even more opportunities to connect with shoppers. How do you find the most effective balance with an advertising budget and media plan that make sense now? Read more

Media Mix Marketing: What Is It and What Are the Benefits?

The marketing world is dynamic. New marketing tactics and trends constantly change how businesses market themselves. Consequently, marketers have embraced media mix marketing. Statistics show a 14% growth rate in digital marketing budget spending between 2020 and 2021 across industries. Besides, forecasts show a digital marketing annual growth rate of 9% from 2020 to 2026.

These figures encompass a mix of media marketing strategies available today. Businesses no longer rely on a single media marketing tactic to achieve their objectives. They can leverage a media mix marketing strategy for more versatility and visibility than traditional marketing methods.

Understanding Media Mix Marketing

Media mix marketing is a crucial part of business marketing and advertising. It combines all the channels a company can use to achieve its marketing goals and boost the branding message. It entails both online and offline media, such as the following:

  • The business’ website and social media channels
  • Email marketing
  • TV ads
  • Radio ads
  • Newspapers
  • Billboards
  • Direct mail

Leveraging a marketing media mix is a practical and effective way of reaching a wider audience. Besides, a media mix enables a brand to try new things confidently. For example, you may have tried to promote your brand through digital displays and seen results.

However, you may be interested in trying TV ads to test the response while keeping a safety net. Digital advertising isn’t static, so you must evolve your strategy to keep up with the competition.

Benefits of a Media Mix Marketing

One benefit of media mix marketing is enabling you to deliver the right marketing message to your audience. For example, if you want to target a broad market across the country, a media mix of national newspapers, television, and radio may be the right fit.

To reach a specific group of decision-makers, a mix of media marketing might include specialists’ magazines or exhibitions specifically for that target audience. Direct mail or a briefing session could be more effective for a smaller target audience of decision-makers.

Better Returns on Investment (ROI)

A compelling media mix can improve your business ROI while enabling you to test new campaigns. It prevents you from putting all your marketing or advertising budget in one place or relying on one method to reach a broad audience.

You can determine the best-performing method and invest more to balance out the underperforming ones for a better ROI. You can decide whether to optimize or eliminate ineffective marketing methods depending on the outcome.

Creates a Strong Brand Message

When you consistently use a combination of media channels to promote your company, you enhance your chances of creating a consistent brand. Sharing your brand logo, colors, message, and tone across different media platforms makes it easier for people to recognize it.

Better Understanding of Market Trends

As you try to mix different marketing techniques, you gain a better understanding of what other brands are doing in the market. You also learn how different channels affect your business and how trends keep changing with time. Creating new marketing strategies that work best for your brand is easy with this knowledge.

Improved Planning Through Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics provides more insights into what the future of an organization’s marketing efforts looks like. Combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can account for many variables, such as seasonality, industry trends, and the impact of advertising.

The data enables you to predict the effectiveness of campaigns for a clearer view of what to expect from your mixed media marketing strategy. It becomes easier to anticipate customers’ needs and desires for more personalized campaigns.

How to Choose the Best Media Mix?

When choosing a media mix, remember that the goal is to establish suitable communication channels to improve your customer base and sales. That is only achievable by paying attention to the following components of a marketing media mix:

  • People: Carefully consider the audience you want to reach with your messaging through your media mix. Do you want to reinforce a specific message to your existing customers or test a new market segment? Your marketing objectives can largely influence your decision.
  • Product: What do you intend to sell or market through your chosen channels? How effectively can you demonstrate what it offers through your preferred medium to fill a market gap?
  • Place: Place is the location where customers can purchase your product or service. While this may be a physical store, your mix of media marketing may comprise your social media platforms and website as the place where customers can buy.
  • Price: As you mix your media marketing channels, you can quickly determine the price in several ways, including factoring in the cost of the media mix. Remember to include other expenses like labor and distribution.

Ultimately, getting your media mix right requires carefully thinking through the strategies based on your budget, brand, product, audience, unique selling proposition, and in-house skills. Some tips to help you along the way are the following:

  • Consider your primary marketing goals
  • Think through the marketing funnel as different channels are effective at various points of the buyer persona journey.
  • Invest heavily in tracking and analytics to gauge the impact of each marketing channel.
  • Ensure you monitor the same metrics across the various marketing channels.
  • Validate the lessons you pick along the way by optimizing your media mix.
  • Analyze your target audience based on their pain points, location, demographics, and preferences.
  • Harmonize your mixed media marketing channels to boost your ROI.

Getting Started with Your Media Mix Marketing Strategy

With 84% of media planners already leveraging a media mix marketing and getting positive results, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same to boost your brand. Determining the best mix may be an uphill task, but not impossible. Analytics tools are available to help you improve and fine-tune the mix. Once you establish how changes in the blend affect the results, you can reallocate your budget to enhance the mix for better marketing performance.

color psychology

How to Use Color Psychology in Marketing

When it comes to building your brand, don’t underestimate the importance of color. The colors you choose are crucial to your brand identity. Just think about some of the most famous brands out there and the colors associated with them, such as Nike and black, Starbucks and green, and Target and red, just to name a few. The colors you choose will always be associated with your brand, which is why you need to choose them carefully (and why they need to remain consistent across all of your branding efforts). One of the most important things to keep in mind is that color isn’t just an aesthetic choice, it’s a psychological one too.

Using Color Intentionally

There are two primary ways to use color in your marketing efforts. The first is to make certain marketing elements stand out. For instance, adding a colored call-to-action button at the end of a blog post instead of using regular anchor text. If the button stands out from the background, it will immediately draw the eye of the reader so that they don’t miss out on your CTA.

The colors you choose for your website’s background and text is crucial as well. Not only does it impact the overall aesthetic of your website (which is important as it reflects on your company’s professionalism), but it also affects the ease of use. If you use two colors that are too similar (such as yellow text on an orange background) it becomes incredibly difficult for visitors to navigate your site. Your color choices should provide enough contrast so that foreground elements stand out from the background.

Finally, don’t overuse color. For example, choosing to use five different colors throughout your home page will create visual clutter that will overwhelm visitors. It works better if you choose no more than two colors that combine to create visual balance.

Digitally transforming your website with things like visuals isn’t easy. Read here to begin your digital innovation.

Using Color Psychology

Different colors elicit different feelings. By using certain colors, you can engage your audience by making them subconsciously feel a different way. Most successful brands choose their colors based on this idea. Take for example McDonald’s. As everyone knows, they use two colors: red and yellow. They complement one another aesthetically and are chosen for their psychological meaning. Red is often associated with friendliness, while yellow is associated with happiness, both of which are emotions McDonald’s embraced as a major part of their brand voice. Red also happens to be a very stimulating color that’s meant to trigger feelings of hunger. Combined, they attract attention from hungry customers.

Color Breakdowns

All colors have some sort of effect on the psychology of consumers. With that in mind, the following are a few of the different colors you could use in your branding and the psychological meaning behind them:

  • Orange – Orange is associated with physical comfort, motivation, and positivity. Payless Shoes and Home Depot use orange as their primary color for these reasons.
  • Green – Green represents harmony, peace, health, and growth. Financial institutions use green to promote growth (of wealth), while many health products and stores use green to promote health (such as Whole Foods).
  • Blue – Blue is closely linked to trust and dependability. Many technology companies use blue to promote the idea that their products are dependable, such as Dell, GM, and Honda. Companies like Facebook and All-State also use blue to promote trust.website design

 

  • Brown – Brown is used to create feelings of trust and security. It’s why UPS prominently uses the color for everything, including their uniforms and trucks.
  • Purple – Purple is associated with luxury and royalty, which is why brands that promote their products as luxurious use purple, such as Cadbury, Hallmark, and Louis Vuitton.
  • Pink – Pink represents compassion, love, and empathy. Pepto-Bismol and Victoria’s Secret both use pink to this effect for different reasons.

Choose Your Colors Wisely To Improve Your Marketing Efforts

As you can see, the use of color is incredibly important to your marketing efforts. Not only do your color choices affect the aesthetic of your website (as well as its ease of use), they are also vital to defining your visual identity. As such, be sure to choose your colors carefully as they will have a psychological impact on your audience.

social media marketing
website strategy

The Best Strategies for Website Engagement in 2021

The way people engage with businesses tends to evolve over time. At no point has this been more obvious than during the past year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. More people were either unemployed or working from home than ever before, resulting in more time being spent online. Because many people have transitioned to work-at-home, there’s a good chance that they will remain there. Because of this, website engagement is as important as ever.

However, this doesn’t mean that you automatically have their attention. You still need to find a way to engage them — and to keep them engaged. This is especially true when you consider that the average person spends no more than 15 seconds on any given website before they leave. With that in mind, the following are a few effective strategies for boosting your website engagement this year:

1. Eliminate Technical Issues

Knowing that the average user is going to have a short attention span, the last thing you’ll want to do is waste their time with technical issues. Technical issues, such as broken links or slow loading times, will frustrate visitors — especially first-time visitors. Most will leave your site a few seconds after encountering a technical problem, and odds are they’ll head straight to the site of a competitor. Make sure that all of your pages load within a few seconds and that there are no broken links.

2. Create Relevant Content

A technically sound website will help prevent visitors from becoming disengaged immediately; however, good content is what will keep them engaged for longer. Do not focus on promotional content. Online users are constantly bombarded with ads wherever they go, which means that if they go to a site that feels like it’s trying too hard to sell something to them, they will leave. Instead, create content that addresses their problems and needs. Good content that educates visitors will build your brand authority and trust as well. As a result, not only are they more likely to stay on your site for longer, they’ll be more likely to come back — and even to share your content on social media.

There is a lot of competition in websites between businesses. Here are more tips to keep your site competitive.

3. Make Your Content Easy To Read

Even if your content is of high quality, visitors may give up on it if you don’t make it easy for them to read. For instance, if your main page is just a wall of text, it will give visitors a headache as they try to read it. You should break your content up using headers, bullet points, numbers, and supplementary visual content. The easier it is for visitors to read your content, the more likely they’ll be to read it through to the end.

4. Optimize Your Website Engagement For Mobile Use

Despite the fact that more people are online from the comfort of their own homes than before, many of them will still be surfing the web via their mobile devices, such as their smartphones or tablets. On top of that, the country has slowly been getting back to normal since the vaccine rollout, meaning more people are leaving their homes with their mobile devices. As such, you need to make sure your website and all of your content is optimized for mobile use. Otherwise, it won’t display properly on smaller screens, making it a pain to navigate. Mobile users won’t stay on websites that aren’t mobile-friendly for very long as a result.

website design

5. Add Video Content

Human beings are visual creatures. As such, they tend to absorb visual information better. While written content is still quite effective, you should also invest in video content. People are more likely to watch through a short video than they are to read through a written blog post. This is especially true for mobile users.

6. Add Social Proof

Adding social proof to your website will create trust in new visitors. Most people will be a touch skeptical when they visit a new website they’ve never been to before. Social proof helps to reinforce your reputation. For example, positive reviews from well-known sources in the industry or social media influencers can help boost your trustworthiness, as can customer reviews or customer testimonials. The more social proof you have on your site, the more at ease visitors will be, making it easier to obtain website engagement.

7. Implement A Chat Feature

A live chat feature or a chatbot can go a long way towards making sure visitors stay engaged while checking out your site. With a chat feature, you can engage visitors the moment they arrive on your site. A chat feature can also help guide visitors by helping them find what they’re looking for, thereby making sure that they don’t leave out of frustration.

Keeping your visitors engaged is essential to making sure you don’t lose any potential leads. The more engaged your visitors are, the better of a chance you’ll have of nurturing them through the sales funnel. As such, be sure to consider implementing these strategies to help improve your website engagement in 2021.

  25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales
Inbound Marketing Strategies

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

Year after year, marketing videos grow in importance. Video has never been easier to consume for Americans, especially when considering the increasing quality of smartphones and tablets. Video is also the easiest way for people to absorb information. Additionally, according to a prediction by Zenith, the average person will spend around 100 minutes a day watching videos in 2021. The pandemic certainly had an impact on these numbers as well. People have more time on their hands to watch video content, especially those who have switched to a work-at-home environment.

Because of this increase in video consumption, a video marketing strategy is an absolute must. The following are some of the different types of marketing videos that you should consider producing this year.

1. Educational videos

Educational videos should be used to help inform your audience about a particular subject. No video marketing strategy will be successful without them. This is because the more informed your audience is, the more confident they will be in making a purchasing decision down the road. Educational videos provide them with the knowledge they need to understand your business and the solutions you offer. There are several types of educational videos, including:

  • Demo videos – Videos that demonstrate how your product or service is used.
  • Explainer videos – Videos that showcase why your product or service is needed.
  • How-to videos – Videos that provide step-by-step instructions on how to do a specific task.
  • Animated videos – Animated videos are a fantastic way to deliver information in an entertaining way, whether they’re explainer videos or how-to videos.

When is the Best Time to Post on Social Media?

2. Interview videos

Interviews are an excellent way to provide detailed information about certain subjects to your audience while also providing a personality to engage with. You can film interviews with both employees and upper management as well as experts that are relevant to your industry. What’s great about interview videos is that they are incredibly easy to produce.Marketing Video

3. Event videos

Certain events, like industry tradeshows, conferences, fundraisers, and round table discussions, can reveal a wealth of information. Film these events and edit them into event videos for your audience to enjoy.

4. Case study and testimonial videos

These types of videos focus on customers and their experiences using your product or service. Not only can you use them as social proof that your products or services work, but they make it easier to build trust with your audience. Potential customers are much more likely to relate to and believe what previous customers have said, after all. Using case studies and testimonial videos, you give customers the chance to explain what their challenges were and how your product or service solved those challenges.

5. Behind-the-scenes videos

A big part of creating a successful brand identity is presenting your company as being relatable. You don’t want your audience to think of you as a big faceless corporation, after all. Creating videos that depict your company behind the scenes is a great way to do this. It shows that there’s a human element behind the business. There are tons of ways to go about creating behind-the-scenes videos. A video of the day-in-the-life of the typical employee or a video of the manufacturing process of a product are great examples.

These are five different types of marketing videos you should consider creating in 2021. As you develop your video marketing strategy, remember that the quality of your content matters — and so does the audience that you’re creating it for. Always keep viewers in mind to ensure that your video marketing efforts are relevant.

buyer persona guide for business
targeted marketing

3 Ways To Use Targeted Marketing To Reach Qualified Prospects

Imagine, if you will, walking out of a model home and before you know it…you see an ad for a builder just down the street appear on your cell phone. You think to yourself, “Hmmm…coincidence?” It’s not. With targeted marketing, you can pinpoint potential customers down to an address where they have visited.

Targeted marketing is nothing new. Agencies and companies have been doing it for years. First through direct mail, then via email, using data points such as zip code, gender, household income, marital status, and age. But now, we have the ability to narrow our scope even more to truly reach those most qualified to purchase.

Niche Marketing Through Social Media

Recently, a new client came to Stevens & Tate needing to attract more students to its private school. We discovered several factors that determined whether parents chose to send their children to this school. They could afford it. It was close to their home or work. And it provided the type of education they wanted for their child. To reach this very specific audience, we advertised on social media. Social media sites such as Facebook gather a great deal of information about their users from information the users provide themselves. These sites also monitor behavior patterns. As a result, we were able to do niche marketing, advertising to select neighborhoods around the school and in local employment corridors. And we focused our message on the benefits this private education offered. After the first month, the school recorded an increase in attendees to the parent information sessions.

Learn more about Effective Marketing Strategies For A Changing Economy.

Targeted Marketing On Radio? Yes.

One of Stevens & Tate’s clients needed to build ticket sales for its classical music concerts. After researching the prior season’s data, we discovered that the majority of concertgoers came from a 20-minute or less drive of the venue. So we incorporated online radio into the media mix to aim our message at those who would have an affinity for the brand. The beauty of this targeted marketing plan was that we could reach listeners with a preference for classical music. We were able to narrow down our audience not only to those who lived in a specified geographic area but also to those who exhibited classical music listening habits. The result was a 25 percent increase in year-over-year show attendance.

Hyperlocal Marketing Pinpoints Your Audience

For a Chicagoland homebuilder with a new property in the city, we wanted to reach home shoppers living near the neighborhood as well as those holding certain job titles. Rather than choose a medium to advertise on, we chose a very small group of people to reach out to. Using a digital hyperlocal marketing campaign, we were able to serve ads to a very niche market segment—including those who had recently used a home finder app. We served ads to these individuals multiple times via multiple vehicles including desktop, mobile and in-app ads; emails; social media newsfeeds; and native content based on online search history. Since launching the program, sales at the community have increased 50 percent.

These are just a few examples of the power of a targeted marketing campaign. And new digital technologies are being unveiled all the time. At Stevens & Tate, we partner with multiple media sources to devise just the right targeted marketing campaign for each of our clients. If you are looking for an agency that can help you move from a shotgun to a rifle approach to marketing, contact Stevens & Tate and see if we are a fit.

Free Marketing Consultation

tiktok engagement group

How to Use TikTok to Reach Your Engagement Group: An Insight Into the Algorithm

Arguably the primary goal of social media marketing is to reach as many people in your engagement group as possible and to interact with them. As such, it’s important that you establish a presence on social channels on which this is possible. While almost all businesses use social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there are a few others to consider as well; for example, TikTok.

What Is TikTok?

TikTok is a video-based social platform that has exploded in popularity over the last couple of years. What makes the platform so unique is that users can only upload videos that are 15 seconds long. There is, however, an option to edit together multiple 15-second clips into a minute long video. It gained traction among teens because they could upload videos of themselves lip-syncing, doing comedy bits, and dancing. At first, the marketing opportunities on the platform seemed limited. However, the size of the audience simply cannot be ignored:

  • There are over one billion monthly active users worldwide.
  • There have been over 2.6 billion downloads of TikTok since its creation.
  • In January 2021, there were 62 million downloads of TikTok alone.
  • Users spend an average of 52 minutes on TikTok every day.
  • 83 percent of users have posted videos to TikTok.

TikTok’s advertising strategies are becoming more common. Read more here.

Why Should You Market On TikTok?

Advertising on social media platforms can cause numerous issues for users. The user experience can often be disrupted for the sake of the ad. Users on those platforms are often less likely to engage when annoyed by a barrage of advertising. TikTok is different in that ads are almost no different than the regular content posted on the platform. They can’t be longer than 15 seconds and they’ll appear on user feeds just like regular videos do. The user experience is not hurt because of this, as they appear just like other videos.

Why Should You Consider Using TikTok for Your Engagement Group?

Many people do not even realize they’re watching ads (especially if the content created by the brand is of particularly high quality). With this in mind, the following are just a few other reasons to consider using TikTok:

  • Reach younger generations – Younger generations rarely want to follow in the footsteps of their parents, which is why you won’t find a lot of Generation Z users on Facebook or Twitter. Instead, you’ll find them on TikTok, which is where a lot of Millennials are fleeing to as well. If you’re looking for a younger audience, TikTok is where you’ll find them.
  • Multiple marketing options – Despite the platform’s limitations (which were by design), there are still a few ad types that you can choose from, including in-feed videos, branded augmented reality (such as custom filters, stickers, and more), TopView ads (which appear at the top of user feeds), branded hashtag challenges, and sponsored content.
  • Flexible CPM – The cost-per-thousand impressions becomes cheaper the broader your audience is. The more you target your audience, the more it will cost; however, the ads will be more effective at engaging users as a result.
  • A level playing field – TikTok’s algorithm is based on identifying content that’s based on each user’s location, preferences, and viewing patterns. That is why user-created content goes viral so often on TikTok and it is why marketing businesses have a better chance of going viral as well.
  • Better chances of engagement – Outside of the algorithm, TikTok also allows you to go live once you reach a thousand followers. What makes this option particularly effective is that you can see how many followers are currently active so that you can determine when the best time to go live is.

use tiktok to reach engagement group

Tips For Using TikTok To Reach Your Engagement Group

There are some serious benefits to using TikTok; however, your success depends on your ability to leverage the platform effectively. The following are a few basic tips for using TikTok:

  • Know your audience – Develop your buyer personas so that you can more effectively target users that will be more likely to engage.
  • Identify influencers – TikTok influencers often have millions of followers. You can get them to post sponsored content that their users will see.
  • Create challenges – TikTok users love challenges. Branded hashtag challenges are a great way to get people to engage with your brand without being overly promotional. It’s also a great way to generate user-made content.
  • Go live – Going live on TikTok at the right time can make it easier to engage with followers who will drop everything to view to ensure that they don’t miss out.

Leverage TikTok To Reach Your Engagement Group Today

TikTok has a massive audience and is growing significantly year-by-year. Due to the algorithm’s design, companies have a level playing field against other businesses that already leverage TikTok. Just keep in mind that if you focus on creating high-quality content that engages your target audience, the chances of success on TikTok will be much greater.

 

social media marketing
B2B website

Three Videos Every B2B Website Should Have

Research shows that relevant, compelling content is a key ingredient for making your website stand out. While some websites may have great landing pages, they may lack other types of content. If you want your B2B website to beat the competition and increase sales with an effective video marketing strategy then you should include these 3 video types.

Visual is rapidly becoming the most effective technique in the web marketing mix. Video content can increase your online traffic by more than 40%, as it adds personality, digestibility, and context to your website. Here are three types of video you should include in your website in order to increase search engine visibility.

1. Customer case studies

A great way to market your business is through word-of-mouth from satisfied customers or business associates. Referrals enhance the element of trust that potential clients are looking for in a business. To create a case study video, request some of your satisfied customers to create a case study video, where they can describe the services or products that you offer and express their satisfaction. A case study video could convince your undecided leads that your business is the right fit for them.

[Read about Integrating Story Branding With Your B2B Marketing Strategy]

2. Your team in action

You can increase your prospects by visually portraying how your company performs a service. Potential clients want to know if you have the resources and the expertise to meet their expectations, and you can prove this via video. If you provide manufacturing services, for example, you can capture how specific machinery works. If you’re a marketing agency, you can post a video demonstrating how your team goes from brainstorming ideas to producing your final product. For potential clients, the sight of your employees in action offers a glimpse inside your business.

3. Instructional videos or tutorials

One way to demonstrate your expertise to potential customers is to produce instructional content. Create visual cues on how to carry out a certain service related to what your business does for other businesses. For example, if your company provides home decoration services, you can produce a video explaining the remodeling process. You can demonstrate how your crew handles equipment for the job, as well as “before and after” images of a remodeled house.

 

Every B2B website should include compelling video content to capture the interest of prospective business partners. These days, the majority of online users would rather watch videos than read about a product or service. Capitalize on this powerful but affordable medium in order to drive leads and increase sales.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

user generated content

Sourcing User Generated Content

One source of content generation you may not have tapped into yet is user-generated content. Content marketing is a critical component of any successful marketing strategy. However, it can take a lot of resources to produce your own content on a regular basis. Even if you’ve managed to regularly generate high-quality content, you should look for other ways to create new content for variety’s sake, such as high quality user generated content.

What Is User-Generated Content?

User-generated content refers to content created by consumers and not brands. Such content includes videos, pictures, reviews, articles, and more. For instance, if a consumer takes a picture of themselves using your product and posts it on Instagram, that’s user-generated content. The following are just a few of the benefits of user-generated content:

  • Free publicity

Your audience is essentially promoting your brand on your behalf. As a result, user-generated content can help increase brand awareness.

  • Free content

Creating your own content requires a lot of resources. User-generated content requires none — your audience is creating the content for you. While you don’t own it, you can share it and reap the benefits of it.

  • Positive word of mouth

Customers trust other customers more than they trust brands. Positive user-generated content can, therefore, help to boost your brand reputation by creating trust.

How To Source Usable Generated-Content

Considering how beneficial this free content can be, you’ll want to do everything you can to encourage it. However, the biggest challenge lies in the lack of control you have over the content. You can’t control the message, format, or quality, after all. But there are a few ways that you can guide your audience to create the content that will benefit you most. The following are a few tips on how to source high-quality user-generated content:

  • Encourage 

Don’t just wait for your audience to create content relevant to your brand. You need to encourage it. For instance, hold a contest on social media in which users vote on the best submission. You can then give the winner a prize. There are many ways that you can encourage content generation.

Utilize Marketing Audiences on Pinterest Today

  • Provide clear guidelines

If you’re looking for a specific type of content, then you need to provide guidelines. For example, if you want user reviews, consider providing a basic review format. Such a format could list three broad questions that users can answer in order to generate a review.

  • Provide content creation tips

Your audience does not consist of professional content creators. As such, provide tips that they can use to create higher quality content. For instance, if you’re holding a video creation contest on YouTube or on Instagram, provide your users with a list of basic filming tips. Such tips can help cut down on the amount of poor quality content that you might receive.

  • Offer an example

If you’re looking for a specific type of content, then provide an example. When users see what you’re looking for, it will help them create the kind of content you want. For instance, if you’re hosting a picture taking contest, upload a few pictures of your own that would be considered exceptional examples. By providing an example, you also make sure that users understand your instructions more clearly.

  • Identify the channel

Make sure that your audience knows where to send it. The last thing you want is users posting their content on different platforms or sending it to you via different channels. If you’re promoting a contest, specify what platform they should post to or what hashtag they should use. Provide detailed instructions on how to submit content. By making it clear what channel you’re using, it will be easier for you to track and organize user-generated content.

  • Open a line of communication

Provide a channel through which your audience can contact you. This channel should be specifically for users who are creating content. You can do this by providing a specific support email address, a phone number, or a page they can DM on social media.

  • Monitor performance

Track how the content users create for your brand is performing. By doing so, you can identify what types are the most effective. You can then adjust your guidelines and instructions to encourage the creation of that type of content.

Enhance your Strategy Today

User-generated content can go a long way towards boosting brand trust. Not to mention that it’s a great way to expand your content marketing strategy. As such, make sure that you encourage the creation of high-quality user content. You can do this by providing your audience with general guidance and encouragement to drive effective user-generated content creation.

25 Website Must Haves
pinterest marketing

Utilize Marketing Audiences on Pinterest Today

pinterest marketingPinterest is a valuable marketing tool, as 88% of pinners purchase something they have pinned, and 49% purchase 5 or more products they have pinned. Despite its effectiveness as a marketing tool, only 28% of marketers are already using Pinterest, so get ahead of the competition and start using this visual platform today.

Who’s Using Pinterest?

Pinterest has over 335 million  worldwide users and 88 million users from the United States. With over 200 billion Pinterest pins and 4 billion boards, users save 2 million shopping pins on boards daily. 71% of Pinterest users are female. In the United states, 40% of dads use Pinterest, and 80% of moms. The median age of Pinterest users is 40, however most active “Pinners” are below 40 years old. Gen Z adults and millennials are the most dedicated users, however Gen X users increased daily use by 10% from 2018 to 2019.

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Marketing on Pinterest: Homebuilding, Crafts, Senior Living, Real Estate, CPG, and more

Two thirds of pins represent brands and products, and 50% of users have made a purchase after seeing a promoted pin.  According to Mintel’s February 2020 Arts and Crafts Consumer Report, Pinterest is largely used to spread creativity through DIY crafts, creating a valuable marketing opportunity for craft and home decorating companies. Pinterest is also a valuable tool for homebuilders to reach consumers through typing in keywords linked to related visual boards of ideas and products. Additionally, Pinterest is a marketing tool to promote services as well, such as Senior living facilities. A platform that provides a unique way to visually display information, Pinterest provides a way for your brand to share health and caregiver related articles, exercise routines for seniors, home health care products, images from your service’s website, and even healthy recipes. As nearly 30% of Pinterest users have a 6-figure income, Pinterest is a  sufficient platform for real estate companies to reach their target audiences. In a study of 9 million consumers, consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing research shows that Pinterest households were 29% more likely to try a new product within the first 10 months of launch than non-Pinner households, and the Pinner “trial date” was 40% higher in the first 30 days of launch than non-Pinners. Experts say the study shows that people on Pinterest are more likely to try new CPG products. Overall, 75% of Pinners say they are “very interested” in new products compared to 55% with the same level of interest on other digital platforms.

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