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BIMSThe holiday season is the busiest shopping time of the year. According to the National Retail Federation, the average American adult usually spends about $810 during the holiday season. Because of that, retailers and brands are fighting for consumer’s attention to drive up their sales.

Incorporate the excitement and spirit of the holidays into your social media campaigns. Here are some tips on how to take advantage of the holidays with the help of social media.

Help your customers get into the holiday spirit

Most people are sprucing up their homes and putting up lights and ornaments around their home. Why don’t you do the same and add some seasonal touches to your website and social media pages? Update your Facebook cover photos, Youtube channels, Google+ images and Twitter backgrounds where possible.

Holiday promotions

While the shopping season usually starts in September, most people don’t start until November. Others would wait until the first week of December before they start shopping. It’s never too late to capture a holiday shopper.

Share holiday promotions with your followers and give them something to look forward to.  Take advantage of social media advertising options such as Twitter sponsored tweets and Facebook offers if you really want to bank on your sale.

Give back to the community

Truly get into the spirit of giving by adding a charitable element to your holiday campaign. Use your platform as a business leader to draw attention to a cause. Get your employees on board and give back to your local community.

Give away prizes

The holiday season is a time for giving. Since people interact with businesses more frequently during the holiday season, this is also the best time to run a contest.

Contests and giveaways are a great way to create buzz around your product. They also help increase social sharing, engagement and fan base. Ask for shares and likes for entries into the contest for a chance to win. The monetary value of the prize is totally up to you, but make sure that you provide them something they will value and appreciate.

 

socialMediafroBusinessBy now, you already know the importance of leveraging social media to grow your business. However, it can be a waste of time and money if you don’t know what you’re doing. Instead of connecting with your target audience, your existing clients may be having second thoughts and potential prospects may get turned off.

These dos and don’ts will help you in building your social media community and start seeing results.

DOS

Be active

Active social media profiles can help build your brand. You can’t expect results if your page is inactive. Create great content that your audience will want to share. Post different things. Share tips on how to use your products, industry news and fun stuff. Make sure majority of your posts are non-promotional in nature.

Define your target audience

It is important to know you’re targeting audience if you want to maximize your sales. Learn as much as you can about your target audience.

Your customers are concerned about what you can do for them. Make sure your contents are tailored to your customer’s need.

Interact with your audience

Communicate with your target audience on a regular basis. Social media is about relationships so try to converse with your audience as much as you can. Don’t talk too much about your brand. Stop and listen to what people have to say. It should be a 2-way conversation, not a one-sided dialogue.

DON’TS

Share too much

Don’t overwhelm your feeds with too much advertisements or promotions. This can cause your followers to stop following your posts. People don’t want to be bombarded with advertisements and promotions.

Forget your spelling and grammar

What you put out there becomes a representation of who you are. Consumers value proper grammar and spelling. Grammar mistakes could hurt your brand’s reputation and turn off potential customers.

fcebook ads

Increasing Facebook likes can be a tricky process. With the algorithm changes, Facebook page engagement decreased over time; thus, making it difficult for business owners and marketers to reach their fans.

Since Facebook is one of the biggest and most popular social networks, you should be looking for ways to increase the number of people who like your page. Advertising using Facebook ads is one of them.

Facebook ads are the easiest and most effective ways to increase your likes. If you don’t already have some good Facebook ads strategies, you better get started.

Ability to reach smartphone users

Facebook has about 1.20 billion active mobile users as of December 2014. That’s a lot of people, and the number of users is increasing over time. Because of that, mobile should be your priority. By advertising on Facebook, you’ll be able to reach your audience right at the palm of their hands.

Enhanced audience targeting

There are billions of people on Facebook. That said, you need to make sure that you use at least the most basic of targeting when you set up any ad on Facebook. Otherwise, you’ll end up advertising to the wrong people and waste money in the end.

Facebook advertising allows you to target a specific group of people based on their age, gender, geographical location, interests and more. This gives you the chance to be more precise in your audience targeting. Think about your ideal customer and what they’re interested in. Decide who you want to reach before creating an ad.

Heightened audience engagement

Before, you only needed to come up with great content and wait until you get all the likes you deserve, but all that has changed over the years. Now, you have to promote your content to ensure that your existing and potential customers see it in their newsfeeds.

Your primary goal is to capture the attention of your target audience and get them to engage with your posts. In addition to ads, you need to make sure that your content are interesting because users only see posts from pages they engage with. Build trust with your followers and get them to share, like or comment on your posts.

 

BIMS_11.10We all know what ROI stands for. Unfortunately, not everyone understands its meaning and importance.

If your company is spending money on social media marketing, you want to measure your ROI. This is important so you have an idea what exactly it is you’re getting out of the time, effort and resources you commit to your campaign. It helps you measure the efficiency of your social media marketing efforts.

To show you how you can track your social media ROI, here are the steps you should take to help you gauge the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign.

Identify your goal

Different organizations will have different goals. Before you can track and measure your ROI, you first need to identify your goals. Is it to generate more product trials, get signups for your newsletter or increase traffic to your site?

Track your goal

Each of your goals can be measured using specific metrics such as traffic, engagement, reach, lead generation etc. It all depends on your goal.

There are certain tools that can be used to measure the effectiveness of your actions. You can track follows, likes and share in Buffer. Website actions such as signups, downloads and sales can be tracked in Google Analytics.

Quantify social media return

Add up all the expenses, including the cost of boosting a Facebook post, running a promoted ad and everything that go into generating content and maintaining social media presence.

Determining how much you have spent will help you determine whether you’re getting a positive or negative return on your social media marketing efforts. Now, calculate your ROI using this formula: (Earnings – Costs) x 100 / Costs

Adjust tactics

Monitor the impact of your social media efforts using the formula given above and then adjust your tactics as needed to improve your social media ROI.

social-media-toolsSocial media is a necessary part of marketing these days. Having a strong brand presence on social media is of great importance.

As a business owner or a marketer, you probably have a lot of on your plate and maintaining a constant social media presence can be difficult.  To make the process easier, the best thing you can do is to use a social media scheduling service. Even if you’re stuck in a meeting, you can still keep your status updates and tweets flowing.

Here are 4 tools for auto-scheduling your social media posts.

Sprout social

Price: $59 per month

Sprout Social is an engagement and management tool for social media.  It gives you a clear overview of response rates and follower demographics.

You can also use this tool to schedule and post updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Sprout Social provides a 30-day free trial. But if you wish to continue using it, you’ll have to pay a whopping $59 a month.

Hootsuite

Price: Free; Pro version – $8.99 a month

Hootsuite is a big player in social media management. It schedules your posts based on your previous social history so you’ll reach the largest number of followers. You can also edit the times and days before they go live.

Hootsuite lets you to schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google +. However, free users are only allowed to add up to 3 social networks. The Pro version, which starts at $8.99 a month, allows users to schedule up to 350 updates at once and add up to 100 social accounts.

Buffer

Price: Individual account – free; Business plan – $50 per month

Buffer lets you schedule 10 social updates all at once. This tool will spread your content throughout the day or week, making sure you have a solid social media presence even if you don’t spend much time in front of the computer.

As a bonus, Buffer also provides analytics from your social media posts. It works with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Timely

Price: Free

Timely allows you to choose the number of posts you’d like to auto schedule per day. Add to that, it also reviews responses from your previous tweets to determine your most optimal posting times. Timely only posts to Facebook or Twitter.

bims_10.20If you’ve been maintaining a blog on your website, you have probably built up a pretty hefty archive of old blog posts. Even with the abundance of blog posts, studies reveal that fresh contents outrank older contents, both in terms of clicks and search engines.

Does it mean that you have to create more blog content? Not necessarily. You can reuse, repurpose and reinvent your blog posts. Here’s how to breathe new life into an older blog post.

Create a killer headline

Creating a title is easy, but if you really want to capture the attention of your target audience, then you need to make it compelling.

Take a look at the title of your most popular posts. Do you think it is good enough to compel people to read the rest of the article? Is there any way you can make it more appealing or relevant to the article? Now, go and create an attention-grabbing title.

Keep the content updated

The world is constantly changing. Some of the information you have offered in 2012 are now irrelevant or outdated.

Revisit old posts and delete any parts that are no longer relevant. Also, you might want to incorporate new information and brush up on what has changed in the industry. This is especially beneficial if you’ve seen continuous interest in a certain post.

Look for the evergreen content

If a certain blog post has garnered the attention of the public, then it’s definitely worth coming back to for a spruce up.

Marketers focus on creating evergreen content because it still has an appeal even after months or years after it was created. Consider modifying the original article instead of publishing a new article with the same content. Duplicate content on your website is a bad idea. Once you’ve made some adjustments, publish it as new.

Repurpose into a new format

There’s no reason to waste the time you spent creating those blog posts. You can repurpose the content and turn it into a slide presentation, ebook, podcast, infographic or a short video. Remember, not everyone chooses to consume information the same way.

 

 

 

Generating leads for your business is not an easy task. It requires a lot of work. If it would make you feel better, we’d want to let you know that there is a ton of other marketers who are also struggling with the same troubles.

In this article, we have rounded up some of the most common lead generation problems along with the solutions to help you get things rolling in the right direction. Read on and we’ll tell you more about it.

Low traffic

Your ability to produce a steady stream of traffic is important as it affects your ability to turn visitors into leads and leads into paying customers.

If your traffic is leveling off, then optimization is necessary. That being said, you might want to conduct keyword research. On-page SEO practices like the use of keywords in your title tags, headers, meta-description, links and URL will help you boost your search engine results ranking.

Unqualified leads

Producing tons of leads is great, but it’s the quality of incoming leads that will influence the success of your business.

The best way of addressing unqualified leads can only be summed up in 2 words: buyer personas. In order to capture the right leads, you first have to determine your target audience and capture their attention.

Tight budget

If you think lead generation is challenging, it could be even more challenging if you are working on a tight budget. When the money tree shrivels up, you should have a plan in place in order to sustain lead generation.

If you are focusing on traditional methods or PPC, we’re not surprised why you are sweating profusely. Well, we’re not insinuating that inbound marketing is free, but there are a lot of methods that you can use without sucking up your entire budget.

Lead generation doesn’t always have to be costly. This is especially true if you think smarter, not harder.