What’s Trending In Marketing For August 2018

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This week in inbound marketing we look at Amazon’s incredible success on Prime Day that made history in all categories. Read more on the changes and trends happening in marketing this past month.

Noteworthy Marketing News

Facebook To Begin Testing New ‘Highlights’ Feature That Lets Users Save Stories

Taking a page out of Snapchat’s playbook and making it their own, Facebook has begun testing a new “Highlights” feature that will give users the option to save Stories to their profiles. Unlike Snapchat, Facebook’s feature will allow users to save their Stories beyond the standard 24-hour period a Story exists. Your saved Stories will appear as a horizontal bar on the user’s profile and display view counts as well. Facebook believes this feature will not only give users the opportunity to hold on to their favorite content, but will also “make it easier to express who you are through memories.”

 

social media

Instagram Testing Open-Ended Questions In Stories To Make Content More Interactive

In an attempt to make content more interactive on their app, Instagram is testing a new feature in which users can add open-ended questions in stories according to a recent write-up on Marketing Land. Instagram currently allows users to post polls with multiple-choice answers, but with this new feature, Instagram is hoping to increase engagement between users, while giving brands the opportunity to have more public conversations with followers.

 

Snapchat Partners With 4 News Discovery Platforms To Help Push Content Beyond The App

According to an article on Marketing Land, Snapchat has decided to partner with four news discovery platforms (NewsWhip, Tagboard, SAM Desk, and Storyful) used by media organizations to spread their news-related content on a wider scale and basis outside the app. The partnership will allow the four platforms to use Snapchat’s Story Kit Integrations to access and deliver news content posted within the app to thousands of storytellers and newsrooms. Along with Snapchat, the platforms will also be able to access content that is present on the app’s Discovery channels like NBC News and BuzzFeed to name a few.

Improving Your Marketing Program

20 Tips To Improve Your Website Redesign Process

Whether you like it or not, your website is often the first impression your audience gets of your business and your offering, so keeping your website up to date with today’s technological changes in mind is crucial if you want to draw in your target consumer. Our own Nicole Wagner offers an abundance of tips to help you improve your website redesign process.

 

8 Tips On Social Media Best Practices For Your Business

Today, the majority of marketers and brands recognize the value of implementing a social media strategy when it comes to engaging and connecting with their audience. In an article she wrote, Nicole Wagner presents the best social media practices to get the most out of those popular platforms.

 

What Is Digital Storytelling: How To Improve Your Effortsdigital storytelling

Storytelling plays an important role when it comes to presenting your products or services as a solution, while also helping consumers relate to your business on a deeper level. Similar to storytelling, digital storytelling involves using strategies across all online platforms to communicate your message to your audience. Dan Gartlan offers strategies for how to improve your digital storytelling efforts to build strong relationships with consumers.

 

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Even With All The Glitches, Prime Day 2018 Proves To Be Amazon’s Biggest Sales Day Ever

Amazon has done it again. According to a recent post on Marketing Land, Amazon reported that this year’s Prime Day was the biggest sales day ever surpassing last year’s sales as well as its Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales. Despite the glitches it faced, the company sold over 100 million products, and in the first nine hours gained more Prime members than any other day of the year in Amazon’s history. The products that sold the most worldwide were all Amazon devices—Alexa Voice Remote, the Echo Dot, and the Amazon Fire Stick.

Discover how to improve your brand marketing strategy using Amazon Alexa

multipurpose video campaignHow Overstock.com Created A Multipurpose Video Campaign

The digital era we are living in today has made it difficult to distinguish between brand and performance campaigns. For brands with dual goals, a multipurpose campaign might be the answer. In an article published on Think With Google, Overstock.com, the online home goods and furniture retailer, decided to experiment with mixing direct-response strategies with regular brand creative. Interestingly enough, the return on ad spending for the campaign was 3X its other campaigns—the result was enough to make them reconsider how they would normally approach digital video.

 

SLIF Attendees Share What Excites & Concerns Them About The Future

Senior living industry leaders attended the Senior Living Innovation Forum, a conference that takes place every June to discuss a variety of topics centered on the senior housing industry. Several attendees shared their insights and concerns about the future of the industry, and recognized that in order to fit in with the current times, companies and investors need to shift their attitudes and accept a new business model if they aspire to create larger market opportunities and increase innovation as well.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales

PPC landing pages

PPC Landing Pages and Other Trends You Should Know in 2018

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As 2017 draws to a close, another exciting and interesting year of PPC marketing will conclude soon. PPC landing pages still hold strong, but the other trends in pay per click marketing are worth analyzing as well. That also means it is time to anticipate the future landscape and direction of paid search, with some help of the smartest guys in the industry. Voice search and artificial intelligence were two of the hottest topics in 2017, and it is likely that we will hear plenty more about them in the next year, as well as PPC landing pages.

In 2018, Ilya Cherepakhin predicts that PPC marketers will get pushed on two important fronts. They will unleash the intelligence and power of audience management and make inroads into voice search. Although there are other challenges, such as smart bidding automation, multi-channel attribution and cross-device analytics, he contends that voice search and audience management are likely to open up bigger frontiers for success, besides the good old PPC landing pages.

Voice search, though still evolving, cannot be overlooked. Marketers will have to rethink and devise new strategies for natural presence and PPC. This is because voice technology will tap into a considerably different kind of user behavior compared to that of an average mobile user. The use of existing mobile search technique will not be enough. It would be essential to have new and more relevant marketing objectives, reconsider the type of products and services that are more suitable for voice users, and come up with better mobile experiences for these users.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a buzzword in the current year. In 2018, it will become an even bigger element of marketing workflows. A lot has been said about Google introducing the use of AI for both conversion optimization and attribution modeling. However, over the course of 2018, use of Google’s AI is expected to skyrocket. Many bid management platforms have started to adopt artificial intelligence into their algorithms too.

Check out this article about Video Marketing

Although AI is driving better performance and outcomes, it is important to keep in mind that at the end of the day, human interaction is very crucial. Over-reliance on AI can lead to a few big shakeups. In 2018, we can continue to anticipate more improvements in the automation of PPC fueled by more sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning. What experts find most exciting probably is that PPC advertisers will have much more options compared to the past to leverage the technology. This is because it is getting integrated into many third-party tools.

It is also expected that more marketers will add long-tail keywords in their search account, and strive to better understand if there is sufficient difference between regular text searches and voice search to justify additional builds. Although experts guess that there would only be relatively small gains, plenty of marketers expect the incremental gains will make it easier for them to attain their 2018 goals.

According to Jeff Baum, an important trend for many PPC marketers to concentrate on in 2018 will be the adoption of machine learning. With upgrade to its ad rotation settings, smart bidding technologies, and the roll out of numerous smart display campaigns, Google has indicated that machine learning will be crucial for improving performance.

social media marketing

social media strategies

Attract, Convert, and Close Prospects Using Social Media Strategies and Website Conversion Techniques

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LOMBARD, ILL., July 12, 2017– This September, Stevens & Tate Marketing will be emphatically represented at the one of the most respected associations of providers serving Illinois older adults, LeadingAge Illinois. Internet Marketing Director Nicole Wagner will be sharing her extensive online marketing expertise. LeadingAge 2017 is being held from September 26th to the 27th at The Hilton Lisle/Naperville in Lisle, Illinois.

At the show, Nicole will carry out a 90-minute presentation on how to attract, convert, and close prospects using social media strategies and website conversion techniques. According to the agency, the Internet has become a cornerstone of our marketing efforts, and although it is now easier to reach our audience, it may be harder to stand out from the crowd. How do we get the most out of our online marketing efforts? How do we make sure our social media platforms are as effective as possible? The session will help attendees determine their top marketing strategies in order to hit their top 2017 business goals.

Wagner will present essential strategies that will teach how to use social media to communicate with an audience on a more personal level, as well as optimizing a website in order to make it easier to find. Her educational sessions continue to be well received by all types of organizations because she emphasizes providing relevant and actionable takeaways that are targeted to each audience.

From Wagner’s presentation, attendees should be able to determine what their key marketing tactics are to achieve overall business goals, be able to create buyer personas of future residents and prospects, and understand the stages of the buyer’s journey and how to communicate to prospects through each stage. In addition, attendees will walk away with defined steps to improve their website and social media platform to meet their objectives. Nicole’s presentation is a great opportunity for LeadingAge members to learn proven techniques to improve their marketing performance.

LeadingAge Illinois is one of the largest and most respected associations of providers serving Illinois older adults, and the state chapter of the significant national organization. LeadingAge Illinois serves more than 500 providers including home and community based services (HCBS), senior housing, continuing care retirement communities (CCRC), assisted living, supportive living and skilled nursing/rehabilitation centers.

Stevens & Tate Marketing is a full service advertising agency specializing in meeting the ever-changing demands of today’s consumer. As experts in all areas of Internet Marketing, we know how to navigate through evolving trends and technologies in the online space today – and have decades of experience delivering results for businesses nationwide. Through our unique combination of strategic thinking, creative execution and targeted communications, we Make Things Happen.™

Nicole Wagner, Internet Marketing Director at Stevens & Tate Marketing (stevens-tate.com), leads an enthusiastic team in strategic planning, web development, social media and search engine marketing as well as Internet and mobile marketing. She can be reached directly by calling (630) 627-5200 or via email at [email protected].

Learn more about Stevens & Tate’s speaking experience.

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SUMMARY: Stevens & Tate Marketing Internet Marketing Director Nicole Wagner has been selected as a featured speaker for the LeadingAge Illinois 2017 Conference in Lisle, Illinois. As a repeat speaker for this prominent national event, Nicole will provide key insight into proven strategies on how to attract, convert, and close prospects using social media strategies and website conversion techniques.

 

social media marketing goals

How To Use ROI To Reach Your Social Media Marketing Goals

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Is the time and money you’re putting into your company’s social media marketing paying off? You might think you can only really guess as to the success of your social media accounts, but there are ways to measure how “worth it” your social media efforts really are. To accurately calculate your ROI, which stands for Return On Investment, you must take into account all resources. Measure efforts and interactions that go into your company’s attempts to reach their social media marketing goals. Return On Investment also helps when it comes to attraction marketing.

Resources

Resources include such factors as time, cost, and effort. In order to calculate how the total resources your company is funneling into your social media accounts, ask yourself the following questions: Approximately how many hours does your company spend working on social media per week? How much effort do your employees put into your social media accounts each week? How much money are you putting into each of your social media campaigns? Estimate the answers to these questions and put them in their own separate resource categories.

[Read our article about 8 tips on social media best practices for your business]

Values

Reach:

Now it’s time to calculate the value of your efforts in order to see how well your resources are paying off. The first factor you should take into account is reach, which is used to measure the size of your potential audience. Who are the people directly (and indirectly) in your social network? How many page views and click-throughs are you getting on your social media posts each week?

Engagement:

Next, to find your value, you need to consider is the engagement of your social media, or the number of interactions with your brand. For example, how many retweets are your company’s posts getting on Twitter each week? How many likes are your Instagram posts receiving? How many people are sharing your Facebook posts?

Audience Growth:

Finally, you must measure is your audience growth, or the number of new audience members that your social media accounts usually attract. Who follows you or is friends with you on your accounts, and by how much does this number increase each week? How many new visitors are visiting your website in a given week? How many visitors are subscribing to your email list? What is your lead-to-customer conversion rate?

Now you can calculate your Return on Investment by using this formula: ROI= (Value- Resources) / Resources.Is your ROI within the desired range, or does it fall short of the social media marketing goals you have for your company? Perhaps you should see which social media accounts are giving you the best results, and put concentrate your efforts towards these accounts. Maybe you need apply different strategies in order to ensure that your social media content is garnering enough attention. In conclusion, calculating our ROI will put you on the right track for improving your company’s social media presence.

social media marketing

facebook advertising strategy

8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business

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Why are social media best practices important? Social media has become a staple in our lives and popularity rules in this environment. It has become such an addiction that teens spend over 9 hours a day going through their social media pages. Social media is a tool that both individuals and businesses can manipulate to get the audience for their causes. Social media is a great tool for attraction marketing. Most business owners nowadays practice strategies aimed at optimization of social media platforms. Content displayed on social media platforms measures the response you get from your target audience just by the likes or dislikes you get.

We want you to get the most out of your social media platforms by enforcing these social media best practices. You will learn the secrets behind engaging and maintaining a media presence with loyal followers.

Social Media Best Practices

1. Keep an active presence

We all know that if you are inactive in social media in this digital world, you are irrelevant. Be active! Engage your audience, tell them about your brand story and show them snippets of what the brand represents. Remember however, not to disclose irrelevant information about your brand. There have been cases where too much information has overwhelmed audiences. It is important to explore all the possible avenues to let the world know why your brand is cool.

2. Keep interest

Now that you have gained a loyal following, show interest in your fans! When they reach out to you, follow back and always give personal feedback. This creation of goodwill will serve only to increase your brand’s following, earn you some popularity ratings, and maybe add revenue to your purse. Remember to thank your fans for keeping up with your venture. A brand based on humility and an understanding nature is always appreciated.

3. Concise please

We all love a good post, but if it is too long we get bored in the middle. According to a statistical review conducted on the strategies of effective tweeting, shorter tweets received 17% more following than long tweets. Although other sites do not limit your word count, you should keep in mind to pass your message in the intent you aimed it for.

4. Maintain your tone

What is your preferred tone, are you more of the serious, focused kind or the more casual faithful one. What message are you trying to pass along? Who is your demographic and what tone do you need to engage in to make them pay attention? You need to make them feel like they are part of your brand and your journey. Think about it.

To learn more about messaging read Share Your Message With A New Brand Strategy.

5. Know when to evoke silence

Sometimes media related war comes your way. It is crucial to identify which battles to fight and which ones to fold. You do not have to engage in all conversations involving your brand. If it’s a controversial topic that may not reflect the brand values, do not engage. Reviews have taken down businesses. Always try acting like “the gentleman” when it comes to social media.

6. Transparency helps

Honesty is the policy and the truth shall set you free. When it comes to social media, lies are a great faux pas. Remember that inclusion is important. Share live streams, create audios and videos that will help your followers stay in touch with brand your activities and updates.

7. Overshare faux pas

Please avoid being pushy or attending to the public’s frivolous whims. Remember that you cannot please everyone. Social media best practices call for precise, goal oriented messages. Posting too often mat look desperate and distracting.

8. Correct timing

Every social media platform has unspoken rules on when and how often to post. For Facebook, there is the famous, post twice a day rule depending on the number of followers. In Twitter, for maximum brand optimization, 1-5 tweets a day are efficient. If you are just looking for opinions, you can tweet till you fall. What usually matters in Instagram, is sticking to the consistency of the amounts you post. You cannot change from 10 posts a day to one in every two days and not see a drop in numbers.

All said and done, do have an interesting social media life and enjoy it to bits!

social media marketing

Senior Living Tips for Facebook Advertising

Senior Living Marketing Tips for Facebook Advertising

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Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world today with over 1 billion active users. The platform is ideal advertising space for all types of businesses and organizations and senior living is no exception.

The following are useful tips on how to create strong Facebook advertising for Senior Living Marketing.

1. Develop Your Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Creating buyer personas is one of the keys to having an effective marketing campaign. It helps you to clearly define what message will resonate with your audience in your advertising. Know who your personas are and you will better understand how to talk to them. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your community.

To Understand More About Establishing Your Buyer Personas, See Our Article Why Buyer Personas Are So Important.

2. Target Your Advertising

Now that you have developed your buyer persona’s you can use that information to directly target those types of people within Facebook. Not only can you run ads targeted by location and demographics within Facebook, you can also target by Behavior and Interests. For example, if your community is next to a golf course, you can run ads towards seniors who are retired and are interested in golf. This way you can focus your messaging to meet the audience where they are at today.

3. Show Off Your Brand’s Personality

Make sure when you are advertising on Facebook that you stay true to your brand and show-off your brand’s personality. Is your community about the activity? Show your residents being active? Are you near a college? Highlight this fact in your posts. Think about what will resonate with your audience and how you can make them feel comfortable and excited to visit your community.

4. Have Good Calls to Action

The Call-To-Action is the Most Important Element of your Facebook Ad. It is how you convince people to take the next step towards learning about your community. If you have a good image, it will draw people’s attention, but the CTA is where people will make their decision to actually stop and click. You want to make sure your CTA’s are as strong as possible and test to see what resonates with your audience.

5. Change Your Ad By Device

Facebook ads look different depending on what device you are browsing Facebook on. You want to make sure that your ads look their best on any device. Desktop ads should have a longer copy and link descriptions. Mobile ads should be shorter. Be sure to change up your artwork to match the medium it is being delivered in.

Seniors are becoming savvier when it comes to social media. They are looking to understand more about your community and what you have to offer. By thinking about your audience and what they care about and combining it with your own brand’s personality, you will be sure to do well with your Facebook advertising.

Learn To Use Social Media To Find New Leads

holiday digital marketing

Enhance Your Holiday Digital Marketing Strategy

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The Holiday season is the busiest shopping time of the year. More and more, shoppers are researching gifts, hunting for the best deals and making purchases online without stepping foot inside of a store.

Get the most out of your holiday digital marketing campaigns by using a combination of Email, Social Media and Retargeting. Read more

obtaining leads

Using LinkedIn to Develop Connections and Generate More Leads

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LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for business leaders. It currently has 350,000,000 usersand over 25 percent of users believe it has helped them generate leads. When used effectively, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for connecting with others and building a strong, robust network, for establishing your thought leadership to generate more leads. The following guide should help you get more out of LinkedIn.

Networking

LinkedIn is a great tool for networking. It allows you to build your own network, starting with the people you know directly, called 1st-degree connections. As you connect with more people, you also build an extended network comprised of the people known by your connections, these are known as 2nd and 3rd-degree connections.

Ideas for generating new connections:

  • Connect with everyone in your current database
  • Connect with everyone you receive a business card from
  • Connect with anyone you conversed with professionally that day

Building your network is important, because the options you have for communicating with other users depend on how closely connected you are. The larger your network, the more people you are able to interact with, and the larger your potential influence on LinkedIn.

Thought Leadership

After you have started to build up your network, you can take advantage of LinkedIn’s publishing and content marketing features. From your profile, you can post both updates and posts. Updates are like the traditional status updates found on most social media platforms, whereas posts are more like articles that are published to your LinkedIn profile.

By regularly posting topics of interest to you and your industry, you can use both updates and posts to demonstrate your thought leadership and develop credibility within your industry. Good topics for posts and updates include:

  • New Technology or Innovation
  • Regulatory Changes Impacting Your Industry
  • Industry Trends
  • Frequent Asked Questions
  • Commenting on Industry Controversy

Read more about “Content Marketing For Lead Generation”

Group Participation

LinkedIn hosts thousands of groups, covering an array of professions, industries and organizations. You should join the groups that are relevant to your business and become an active participant in those groups.

Participate in group discussions by answering questions, commenting on other’s posts and occasionally sharing your own content, but only when it is relevant. Becoming an active group member is a great way to communicate with others in your industry and find new connections and potential business opportunities.

Performance Tracking

In order for your LinkedIn initiative to be successful, you need to keep track of your activity and key performance indicators.

To track your activities, create a dashboard listing your weekly new connection reach outs, group conversations, comments, updates, posts, profile updates and recommendation reach outs. Filling out the dashboard each week holds you accountable and keeps you on pace towards finishing your goals.

After charting your activities, you keep another dashboard listing your key performance indicators. Keep a weekly tally of new connections, recommendations, article likes/comments, network rank, scheduled meetings and most importantly, any new leads.

For more information about using LinkedIn for business or to set up a LinkedIn Training Session, Contact Us.

search engine optimization

The Connection Between Search Engine Marketing and Social Media: How They Go Hand-in-Hand to Enhance Results

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It may not be surprising that search engine marketing is the greatest way to drive traffic to your website. In fact, take a look at your website analytics right now and I can almost guarantee that search engines are among the top five producers of website traffic. Now consider this: social media—overall content, interactions, and links about your brand—plays a significant part in the search engines’ algorithms to determine search ranking results. So, even if you have questioned using social media as part of your attraction marketing strategy before, I urge to you to look more closely at the impact you could make to your brand by getting involved in social to help your search engine results.

Obviously, the goal of search engine marketing is to help make your brand show up in top rankings within the search engines when people conduct queries. There are a few key actions that you can take to help make this happen. This includes:

  1. Making sure the backend code of your website is properly optimized
  2. Enhancing your website with current, relevant content—this is a significant factor in rankings
  3. Refreshing and updating your website content frequently
  4. Including more links from outside, reputable sources that link back to your website
  5. How often your website is shared in social media
  6. How often people visit your website from social media

Read more

Is Crowdfunding as a Social Media Strategy Here to Stay or Just a Passing Fad?

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Have you heard about the Veronica Mars Kickstarter miracle? In just 11 hours, the ever-loyal fan-base of the cancelled show guaranteed that their favorite adult Nancy Drew-esque sleuth would return, this time to the big screen, to the tune of $2 million. The excitement for some is palpable. What exactly is crowdfunding? Is this the sign of a new way of doing things?

According to Wikipedia, crowdfunding is  “the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding is used in support of a wide variety of activities, including disaster relief, citizen journalism, support of artists by fans, political campaigns, startup company funding,motion picture promotion, free software development, inventions development, scientific research,and civic projects.” Kickstarter is one of many burgeoning crowdfunding websites that have appeared on the internet in the last few years. And while the Veronica Mars Kickstarter project is not the first of its kind (there are 31 crowdfunded films currently showing at SXSW), the sheer amount of money raised speaks volumes for the power of the voice of “the people.”

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