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Ricky Ahuja   →  Blogs
March 20, 2020
March 20, 2020

Social Media Listening: Understanding What Consumers Are Saying About Your Brand

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Social Media

Brand awareness is a core factor in any brand’s social media strategy. Every brand wants to be a household name. However, this could work against a brand if the conversations going on about it on social media are negative. This is where social media listening comes in.

Social media listening involves monitoring various social media platforms for; mentions of your brand or products, discussions containing specific keywords that are relevant to your brand and even mentions of your competitors and other closely related brands. The next and most important step in social media listening is analyzing the data you’ve collected, drawing reasonable conclusions from the data and acting on them to improve your social media strategy.

How Will Social Media Listening Benefit Your Brand?

Consumer Engagement

Social media opens your brand to an ocean of potential customers. A lot of times, this can make it tempting to want to do all the talking – you want to present your brand to the world and show everyone what you have to offer. It is, however, important to remember that it is called social media for a reason, there are people at the other end and these people will engage your content. Social media listening helps you to not only respond to consumers but to respond appropriately so you can add value to your brand and increase customer loyalty.

Making Adjustments

If your brand is on any social media platform, this should mean you already have a social media strategy. Social media listening is key to improving your strategy. It will help you to figure out what works and what doesn’t work so you can streamline your efforts in the right direction and avoid wasting your time and resources. Social media listening can even result in you changing your target audience entirely.

Opportunities for Growth

Easy access to customer feedback is an invaluable advantage of social media.

Customers are bound to provide their opinions and you can find ways to improve your brand and customer service just by listening to these opinions. For instance, if you offer several products, customer feedback can point you in several directions such as the addition of a new product, an improvement on a particular product or even specialization whereby you focus on producing just one of the products and improving on it as much as possible.

Also, if there’s a lot of positive conversation going on about your brand, you can look for the reason behind this and build on it. If the conversation or general sentiment about your brand is negative, you can find the root of the problem and try to make amends. Doing this can nip potential disasters in the bud and ensure things don’t get out of hand.

Social media is a constantly changing playing field and social media listening is very important in making sure your brand remains relevant.

March 13, 2020
March 13, 2020

Developing a Social Media Strategy

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Marketing, Social Media

A social media strategy is arguably the most essential factor required for any business or brand that wants to take up social media marketing. Without a social media strategy, you have no way of assessing the effectiveness of your social media posts, mostly because you don’t have an idea of what exactly you want these posts to achieve. A social media strategy helps to focus your efforts and overall, increases the value of your brand’s social media presence.

So what is a social media strategy?

Put simply, a social media strategy is a layout of what you want to achieve using social media. You’re definitely going to be posting a considerable amount of content and, basically, your social media strategy answers the question “why?”.

To develop a strong social media strategy. There are a few things need to put in place.

Firstly, you have to specifically define your business objectives. Your business objectives could be to increase awareness of your brand, to attract traffic to your website, or anything else. It could be one specific objective or it could be two or three of them. It all depends on the overall goal that you want your brand’s social media presence to achieve.

Without defined business objectives, it will be difficult, if not impossible for you to precisely estimate the progress your brand is making by being on social media.

Another important thing you have to do is define your target audience. On social media, you can’t get everybody’s attention and really, you don’t need to because it’s very unlikely that everybody is going to be interested in what your brand is offering. When you know the attributes of your ideal consumer, you can avoid creating unnecessary content in a futile effort to please everyone. Your target audience will have a couple of things in common. This may be their age, location, jobs, income, etc.

Precisely defining your target audience will go a long way in determining a lot of things such as the content you post, the form your content is going to take (e.g. videos, pictures), the voice or tone of your posts (and brand), even the choice of social media platforms you are going to use should depend largely on the audience you want to reach.

Finally, constantly assess and improve your social media strategy as much as possible. This is where Social Media Analysis comes in. This involves gathering and analyzing data about your previous social media activities. It will also be helpful for you to analyze the social media data of that your competitors, especially if you are just about to begin using social media for your brand marketing. It isn’t the easiest of tasks but is crucial because it helps you to know what works, so you can focus your efforts in that direction, and what doesn’t work, so you can avoid these things. There are a lot of social media analysis tools available online and some are free so you don’t have to worry about the cost.

Implementing these things will go a long way in improving your social media strategy and by extension, your brand’s value.

March 6, 2020
March 6, 2020

Getting Attention on Social Media through Helpful Content

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Social Media

Social media is rapidly growing. Every single second, the internet is being flooded by new content via several different social media platforms. It’s the perfect condition for your content to get drowned. This, however, doesn’t have to be the case. Despite the overwhelming amount of information that is struggling for the finite attention of social media users, it is still very possible for you to attract the attention your brand needs.

To achieve this, the first thing you need to do is realize that you can’t get everybody’s attention. Trying to do so would be an effort in futility. Instead, define the attributes of your ideal audience. This is an indispensable step.

Defining your target audience will go a long way in helping you to create content that is helpful as well as relevant to said audience. It will also be the key to determining your choice of social media platforms, considering the fact it is impractical for you or your brand to be active on every single social media site.

To effectively define your ideal audience, you must pinpoint your core values as a brand. What is your market position? What makes you unique as a brand?

So now you know the audience you want to reach. The next thing you have to do is tailor your content to suit their taste.

Content is, arguably, the most important factor in any social media strategy, so you must get it right.

In the words of advertising innovator, Howard Gossage; “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” This quote can be useful to you when putting in the context of content creation. Your aim should be to interest your audience and keep them interested. Content created to achieve the aim of attracting the attention of your audience should be unique. Think out of the box. You know the audience you want, so put yourself in their place. What type of content would attract you if you were in their shoes?

However, apart from your content being catchy, it also has to be helpful. Helpful content will not only serve to get people’s attention; it will go a long way in making sure they stay interested.

To develop helpful content, you must connect with your audience emotionally. Empathy is key. Communicate directly with your audience. Don’t just speak, listen. Engage them. Ask for, be genuinely interested in, and respond appropriately to their feedback. While doing this, you learn more about your audience; You discover the things they react to positive and the ones they don’t; You learn what to do more of and what to do less of, or not at all. With this knowledge, you can move from the point of creating content based on generalizations to creating relevant, helpful content that will resonate with your audience on a deeper and more personal level. This will help you stand out to your audience and give them a reason to remember you.

March 4, 2020
March 4, 2020

Engagement as a Core Social Media Strategy

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Marketing, Social Media

The advent of social media has presented a huge turn around in the way businesses communicate with their audience. There is a vast amount of information fighting for the attention of the average social media user today. Advertising tactics that may have been efficient with mass media (e.g. radio, television) simply won’t get you anywhere with social media.

When mass media was predominant, all a company had to do was buy time or space and they could get the attention of the public. Now, however, things have changed. Even though you can still buy space on social media, this doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get any attention at all, mainly because of all the distractions available on the internet.

So what is the way forward?

To attract the attention of your target audience on social media, engagement should be a key consideration. Your audience should feel involved. Even if you choose to go the way of interruptive advertising, make sure your adverts have value and the capacity to appeal to your target audience and also incite a response from them. For instance, on Snapchat, you want to create filters that your followers can use. By letting your audience interact with your brand, they feel involved.

It is important to note, however, that although you can start the conversation about your brand, with social media, you can’t control it. You have very limited power over the information that is generated about your brand. Most times, a large amount of the conversation going on about your brand is generated by the consumers. Feedback about your brand products/services constitutes a considerable part of these conversations. To some, this may sound like a disadvantage, but consumer-generated information can serve as a powerful tool in making your ads more effective. Research has proven beyond a doubt that people’s decisions are influenced strongly by consumer feedback. And you can in turn influence this feedback simply by listening and responding.

Listening is key to the success of any social media strategy. One mistake brands commonly make is that they talk too much. You want to get information about your brand out there; you want your audience to know why you are the preferred choice. But while all this important, it is also key that you listen to what is being said about your brand and respond appropriately. As much as possible, reply to feedback and if you feel you’re not getting enough feedback, ask for it. Let your customers know that they are important to you and that you care about their opinions. Listening gives you an idea of what works and what doesn’t and helps you fine-tune your social media strategy so you can get the most out of it. This way, you can ensure your ads elicit a more positive response from your customers who are in turn more likely to generate positive conversation around your brand which more people will respond to. This way your customers will feel involved.

Motivational Quotes - Chad Wilton
March 3, 2020
March 3, 2020

Motivational Quotes – Chad Wilton

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Inspiration, Quotes

Motivational Quotes - Chad Wilton

Motivational quotes from Chad Wilton – Senior Vice President, Affiliate World Conferences, www.affiliateworldconferences.com

“Generosity is one of the strongest mindsets that can propel our industry forward. Not one person made it to where they are on their own, we all need to pay it forward. The karma scale always balance out, you’ll be surprised that when you need it most, someone is there to return the favour.”

Push And Pull Marketing Strategy
February 20, 2020
February 20, 2020

Push vs. Pull Marketing Strategy: Which Is Better for Your Brand?

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Marketing

With easy access to the internet, particularly social media, this is probably the best time to do business. Whatever it is you’re offering, whether a product or a service, there are about 4 billion people on the internet and this gives you a potentially large customer base. But there is one issue whatever your business is, there are other people out there offering products or services similar to yours.

So the question is, how can you get people to choose your product? This is where marketing comes in. The goal of marketing is to express your market position to your target audience as enticingly as possible. To do this, you need a strategy. Several different marketing strategies exist. These strategies can be broadly categorized as either Push or Pull.

What’s the difference?

A push marketing strategy is one that attempts to communicate your product value to consumers where they are. Through this strategy, the business takes the product to the consumer. Several social media platforms have features that support push marketing. For example, promoted Instagram or Facebook posts, promoted tweets, sponsored updates on LinkedIn. Also, a lot of social media platforms have algorithms that increase the effectiveness of your ads by sending them to select people whom you feel are more likely to be interested in your product. Factors such as age, location, etc. can be put into consideration when determining the ideal audience for your ads.

A pull marketing strategy is aimed at attracting the consumer to your product. Pull marketing goes beyond just talking about your product. It requires you to talk about what it is that makes your brand unique and why it is the best option for your potential customer. Since consumers are most likely to do a web search on a product they want to buy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a key point of focus in any good pull strategy so that you and your product are easily discoverable by interested customers.

So which of these strategies should you use for your brand? The best answer is both. The push and pull strategies are intertwined to an extent. What’s important is that you find the right balance for your brand.

If you’re just starting up, then what you need is awareness. It’s impossible for consumers to be attracted to a brand that, to them, doesn’t even exist. At this stage, push marketing should be your major focus. Get the word out there. Afterward, you should prioritize pulling customers in. Pull marketing is vital to brand building and will require a lot of patience. This is because, you don’t want to just make a sale, and you want to make sure you acquire long-term consumers. These loyal customers could do more for your brand than even advertising can.

Industry Insider by Ricky Ahuja
February 17, 2020
February 17, 2020

Industry insider tips from Stefan Georgi

Author By Ricky Ahuja Categories Industry Insider

A good story almost always wins. People aren’t captivated by features and benefits. They’re captivated by feelings and emotions. The easiest way to activate those things is through a story. This applies no matter whether we’re talking about long-form direct response copy, Facebook Video Ads, email blasts, or a Shopify page. Speak to the heart first and the mind second. This doesn’t mean that you won’t ever use logic to sell a product or service; great sales copy is a masterclass in logical argument, where you take your prospect seamlessly from Point A to Z without them realizing it. Rather what I’m saying is that you only have a few seconds to capture a person’s attention, and with emotional storytelling, you cut through the noise. With few exceptions, there are other people out there who sell a similar product or service as you do. Perhaps your product is better or more unique, but the consumer won’t automatically see it that way. At first, they’ll see you as one of many. The way you change that perception is by telling a captivating story. – Stefan Georgi

stefan

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