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In order to get the most out of your digital marketing, it is essential to know how to use social media for your business. There are currently almost 5 billion people using social media platforms. Each of these spends an average of 2.5 hours per day on their platforms of choice. These hours offer perfect opportunities to target new customers and build brand awareness. Do you know how to take advantage of these opportunities? Follow these tips for social media mastery. 

Brainstorm your ideas

It is vital to emphasize the ‘social’ in social media, even in the beginning as you develop your strategies, tactics and content. Bring your team together and get everyone’s input. Some team members may be excellent copywriters but may not be comfortable with social media. Others may be social media natives with strong ideas on how and where to post for best results. Talk it out, get creative and throw all possible ideas on the table before you start to hash out a strategy.

Decide which platform best suits your company and content

Your success depends on using the right platform. Some businesses will be better off reaching their customers on Facebook, while others should stick to a mix of Twitter and LinkedIn, for example. Think carefully about the kind of work you do, the sector you are in, and the preferences of your target market.

Build relationships to grow and expand

Many people make the mistake of focusing only on numbers in their social media: more followers, more fans, etc. Don’t get us wrong, the numbers are important, but it is more important that you are targeting the right people – those who will become committed customers and longstanding members of your community. When you build a community, its members will engage with you, and spread the word about your brand, helping the community to grow organically. You may even want to bring social media influencers into the mix.

Pay attention to trends and be interactive

Social media trends move and shift with alarming rapidity. It is no good posting the same kind of content, in the same way, all the time. It is essential that you pay attention to what your community and other people on social media are doing and saying, and keep up with the trends – even better, learn to anticipate them. You may want to bring an influencer on board to help. 

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with social media for your business, and all aspects of digital marketing, including your content marketing strategy and more.

Social media marketing is the best way to build brand awareness and develop a loyal fan base. However, you can’t simply “wing it” through your social media marketing. It consists of several core skills and tactics that you need to master. Social media marketing courses are the best and quickest way either to learn the fundamentals or to upgrade your marketing efforts.

Where should I begin?

There are many social media courses available, covering every skill level from beginner to advanced. It makes sense to start with a beginner’s course if you are a newcomer to social media marketing. If you have already been working in the field for a while, and are looking to get better results, you can either take a refresher course, or go back to basics – you may find that there are a lot of basic concepts that you don/t know about yet.

How do I know which course is right for me?

To help you choose the right social media marketing course, consider your current skill level, desired skill level, and budget. These three elements should help you zero in on the course that you and your team need at any given moment. Whatever your current skill level is, you want a course that will take you up to the next level. With your end result in mind, you can then look at the cost-vs-benefit balance among all the options, and make an informed choice. 

The different options available

There are way too many social media marketing courses available for us to list here, but here are four of the best:

• Social media marketing certification from HubSpot: The HubSpot Academy offers a wide range of courses covering all aspects of the field. This particular one is a well-rounded social media marketing course that teaches you everything from strategy to social media listening, social media advertising, and more.
• Hootsuite’s social media training: Many social media marketers probably already use Hootsuite to schedule their posts. This course will turn beginners into competent marketers, and help established ones take a more strategic, and technically competent approach to their posting.

• Social media marketing mastery by Udemy: Udemy has a course for pretty much everything, and this one is a really comprehensive one that will turn you into a social media expert. 

• Social media marketing foundations (LinkedIn): LinkedIn offers this for free on its Learning Platform, and also provides access to several paid social media courses from intermediate to advanced skill levels. This course offers a quick, free overview of everything you need to know about social media.

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with your social media marketing, and all aspects of digital marketing, including your content marketing strategy and more.

Content marketing is not just about trying out various tactics and hoping they will benefit your business. Content must be used carefully and strategically to meet your business goals. A content marketing strategy is therefore vital to your success. How do you develop a content marketing strategy? Here is a step-by-step guide.

Who is your target audience?

The first thing you need to do is get very clear about exactly who you are trying to reach with your content. Do you have only one audience, or several audience segments? Whoever your ideal customers are, you must understand how to reach them and design your content accordingly. Once you completely understand your audience, you can choose the appropriate channels to reach them, as well as planning the content itself.

Define your main goal

What do you want your content marketing to do? Is your main objective simply to raise awareness of your business, do you want to build your list of potential leads, or are you more interested in converting the leads you already have? Although you will be tempted to try and develop content that serves multiple purposes, it is important that you narrow your focus.

Brainstorm ideas

Once you fully understand your audience and know exactly what you want to achieve with your content, you can start getting creative. Bring your team together and start throwing around ideas about topics, channels and tactics. At this stage, there should be no limit to the possibilities. All ideas should be considered. Once everyone has raised their suggestions, look at everything with your audience and objectives in mind.

Choose your content management system

It is very important that you choose an effective and easy-to-use content management system (CMS) to execute your strategy. CMSs enable you to handle creation, publication, analytics and more. There are many CMS options available, so choose the one that best suits your purposes and budget.

Publish, manage and maintain your content

Finally, it is time to take your content, put it out there and monitor the response. Draw up an editorial calendar to help you publish carefully planned, well-managed, balanced and diverse content. You should also create a social media content calendar to complement your main content.  

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with your digital marketing campaigns, including developing an effective content marketing strategy and more.

Every piece of content you create for your website and other online platforms forms part of your content marketing funnel. Each communication is designed to move your audience members from one phase of the funnel to the next. Therefore, it is important to know what all the different sections of the funnel are, and how to create content for each one.

The content marketing funnel consists of four sections or phases, starting from the first interaction and progressing to the point where the prospect becomes a paying customer. These four sections are Awareness, Evaluation, Conversion and Delight. Let’s take a closer look at each one in turn.

Awareness

When potential customers first enter your funnel, you can safely assume that they are completely new to you, and have previously been unaware of your brand and what you do. At this initial stage, it is your job to make them aware of your products and their benefits. The awareness phase, also known as the Top of Funnel (TOFU) stage, is the point at which you educate your audience about who you are and what you do.

Evaluation

When your audience progresses to the middle of the funnel (MOFU), they reach the Evaluation stage. Here is where the audience members consider whether they really need your product or service. Your content thus moves beyond the introductory material to more in-depth discussions of your products’ benefits. Typical communications at this stage would include case studies, white papers, emails, events and webinars.

Conversion

If your customers have made it to the bottom of the funnel, they are clearly interested in your products. Now you have to give them reasons to buy. You can tell them about special offers and compare your products to those of your competitors, clearly highlighting the benefits you offer. Always make sure that you have a clear call to action and that you make purchasing as easy and attractive as possible.

Delight

The final part of the funnel is about retaining customers once you have converted them, keeping them happy and enabling them to provide feedback that will help you bring in more people like them. Your content should keep customers engaged and encourage them to interact and refer their friends.

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with your digital marketing campaigns, including building and maintaining your content marketing, managing your social media marketing and more.

Let’s take a moment to discuss some new SEO, digital marketing, social media marketing and mobile marketing ideas.

Few industries evolve as rapidly as mobile marketing. With consumer habits and mobile technologies changing so fast, your mobile marketing needs to stay a step ahead of your competitors and remain relevant with mobile users. According to industry forecasts, targeted mobile advertising spending in the United States is forecast to surpass $32 billion by the end of 2023.

One of the big trends for 2021 is conversational chatbots which respond to customer questions by mimicking human interaction through a combination of pre-programmed scripts and artificial intelligence. User Generated Content is also growing this year and can be a very powerful weapon in your mobile marketing arsenal; while social commerce and shoppable advertisements integrate commerce into the social media platforms for a seamless shopping experience.

Product Launches Using Mobile Marketing

As consumers upgrade devices to take advantage of carriers’ 5G technology, mobile marketers must be prepared to exploit its capabilities.

Using mobile marketing for a product launch just makes sense. You can easily define a target audience and marketing plan to expose your product to targeted users over time. You can target according to geographical area (by using geofencing) as well as many other demographic criteria, providing opportunities to tweak your message.

How Do You Measure the Success of Your Mobile Marketing Campaign?

At the start of the campaign, make your key performance indicators (KPIs) as a social metric for your success. KPIs work best when they can be measured frequently and are easy for everyone to understand and work with.

There are other quantifiable metrics you can use too: interaction rate, mobile payment methods, codes, and coupons; click-throughs from a mobile site to your regular site; click-to-call rate, retention rate, and behavioral differences which can easily be tracked through cookies.

Ensure that the various elements of your site infrastructure lead to mobile optimization. In other words, bear in mind – when designing your site and your campaigns – that consuming content on mobile devices is different than it is on a desktop. For example, you need shorter sentences, engaging headers, and relevant media, like high-quality images and videos. Make it easy for users to skim through content.

Forecasts indicate that targeted mobile advertising spending in the United States will surpass $32 billion by the end of 2023. Remember that your mobile marketing strategy is a crucial pillar of your overall marketing objectives.

To help you apply these ideas to your business, WSI New Media Marketing offers a wide range of mobile marketing and responsive web design services. Contact our friendly team now at 336.763.4006 or online.

Where are you going with your SEO, digital marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing post pandemic? Start by asking what baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z are doing on social media.

During the pandemic, social media became critical to marketing. While spending on traditional advertising is on the decline, social media spending increased from 13.3% of marketing budgets in February 2020 to 23.2% in June 2020 — a 74% increase.

Social media platforms are now the main source of information and have surpassed print and other digital media platforms. The pandemic was a catalyst to the rise in social media usage with ever more people relying on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to stay up to date – not to mention the explosion in TikTok.

Recommendations for a Post-Pandemic Future

Having a bold presence on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media platforms is vital. Social networks offer marketing strategies that give a unique ability to connect and bond with customers in meaningful ways.

If there’s one thing we learned in the pandemic, it was that agility and adapting quickly were the best traits marketers could exhibit. We saw more innovation than we have seen in decades, and this should continue. We should learn from our responsiveness and remember that it can save or pivot our businesses again in the future.

Undeniably, social media marketing provides you with a platform to brand, sell, and market your products and services.

A powerful social media marketing strategy must include a process for identifying new features and channels so that you can quickly create content for them. One such example is Instagram Reels, which has “reel-ly” taken off!

Today, research yields fast results so that you can pivot a campaign in no time at all. You can identify influencers and creators who resonate well with your audience and work with them to create engaging content.

This is a good time to give your ads, emails, videos, webinars, and podcast episodes an overhaul to let your customers know that you are in touch with their needs and ready to face a brave new post-pandemic world.

Do you feel you lack social media talent? No problem! WSI New Media Marketing and our agency partners can help you realize the true potential of social media and brand advocacy. Contact our friendly team now online or at 336.763.4006.

Mobile marketing is on the up-and-up thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone. As a savvy marketer, you need to know what your options are, and figure out what is best for your business.

These ubiquitous phones can do more than the phones of yesteryear, so staying updated with the latest trends is essential. However, marketers must remember that not everybody has the very latest phone, so you need to cater to everyone to maximize your campaign’s reach.

How To Optimize Your Mobile Marketing

Here are five basic tips:

1. “Horses for courses” applies to social media marketing too. Every platform has its own limitations so don’t try to use the same material across channels that work differently. Also remember that social media marketing should be concise and instantly understandable. Consider data limitations for some users so have optional extensions for rich content.
2. Create a clear call to action (CTA) so viewers can be converted to clients. Conversion rates can be improved by using only one CTA and avoiding navigation links that could be distracting. Go back to basics and use contrasting colours.
3. Make your message stand out from the many others on every channel by being relevant and personal as well as designed for SEO. Use information you know about your customer like their names, previous purchasing data, etc. Add your personal signature too.
4. Encourage two-way communication by enabling the receiver to instantly and easily reply to the campaign. In this way, you have opened a conversation from which you can glean data, receive valuable feedback and encourage loyalty.
5. Use the data you obtain to continually test, measure, and improve.

Some Very Successful Mobile Marketing Campaigns Listed

One of the smartest digital marketing strategies of 2021 is Anheuser-Busch’s pivot from brewing beer to manufacturing hand sanitizer during the COVID-19 pandemic: They announced to the Twitterverse, “We have a long history of supporting our communities and employees – this time is no different. That’s why we are using our supply and logistics network to begin producing and distributing bottles of hand sanitizer to accommodate the growing needs across the United States.” This endeared the brand by reaching the hearts and minds of Americans.

Another ingenious mobile marketing campaign was the collaboration between dating app Tinder and British Football Club, Manchester City. By partnering with the men’s and women’s leagues, Tinder planned to interact with fans using games, AR experiences and stadium events. The global fanbase of the team pairs well with Tinder’s global reach (now in over 200 countries and 40 languages).

Take some inspiration from the brilliant campaigns out there and put your marketing creativity to the test. Anything is possible in today’s digital world.

Get in touch with New Media Marketing to help you set up mobile marketing strategies that deliver real ROI that improves your customer affinity and engages your employees.

One of the most important goals of digital marketing is to boost search engine rankings through creative SEO strategies. There are several ways to do this, and the various methods are being constantly improved upon. While it is important to improve SEO rankings organically to a certain extent, by developing strong, relevant content, you can also use a variety of tools to help push your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). Let’s take a look at five of the best SEO tools currently available.

SEMRush SEO toolkit overview

SEMRush is a well-rounded toolkit for the overall management of digital marketing platforms. It contains tools that enable you to manage content, conduct competitive research, manage social media and carry out strategic and precise SEO strategies. The SEO component can be used to conduct market research and competitive analyses on your closest competition. You can get accurate reporting on what your competitors are doing with regard to rankings, keywords, and other factors, and develop your own SEO strategy accordingly. The toolkit includes several useful functionalities, including site auditing, position tracking, keyword research tools, backlink analytics, and more. 

Google search console overview

The Google search console overview provides the best way for you to track your SERP performance at a glance. It gives you a summary of all the most important metrics, including search performance, index coverage, and mobile usability metrics. Using this high-level overview, you can get an accurate picture of your performance and the areas in which you need to improve.

SEO Spider overview

SEO Spider was developed by a UK-based website search agency called Screaming Frog. It enables you to “crawl” through web pages and extract key information for SEO analysis. It is highly user-friendly and compiles and presents complex SEO information in a way that is easy to understand and interpret. Analyzing web pages with SEO Spider helps you to create and modify SEO strategies for best results.

Majestic SEO tools overview

Majestic SEO is a tool that specializes in link analysis. If your main aim is to analyze and understand backlinks with respect to your website, then Majestic SEO is the tool you need. In fact, Majestic claims to have the world’s best backlink checker. Unlike other tools on this list, Majestic SEO is not a comprehensive, all-in-one SEO tool; it is exclusively dedicated to link building. You can analyze your backlinks and devise a strategy to build more – and better – links. It measures backlinks with five different metrics: Trust Flow, which measures the quality of links to a particular website, Citation Flow, which measures the number of links connecting the website, Visibility Flow, which helps you find editorial-style links on sites with high Trust Flow rankings (as opposed to simple, directory-style links), and Topical Trust Flow, which measures the site against others with similar subject matter.

Moz Pro overview

Moz Pro is a comprehensive SEO toolkit with a range of functionalities for analyzing and improving SERP. Open Site Explorer and Keyword Explorer are two of the tools offered in the Moz Pro package, and they are particularly good for addressing the main issues of SEO. These tools enable you to gain valuable insights into your rankings and boost your SEO efforts in a strategic and targeted way. 

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing and search engine optimization company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with your SEO, social media, and other digital marketing tactics and strategies.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have revolutionized global commerce. Mobile marketing, which has been on the rise for several years, has seen a steep rise in adoption during 2020. Marketers need to stay up to date with these trends as they accelerate into the latter half of 2021. 

How COVID-19 is changing human behavior

COVID-19 has proven to be the most significant life and society-changing event of our times. Within one short year, we have all shifted our behavior – not always consciously – to new ways of living, being, and doing due to the disease and its various fallouts. Many of these behaviors were already on the rise, and the pandemic accelerated their ascendency. Others have been more of a surprise. The five main tenets of the new normal are:

• Reduced trust and confidence: The pandemic has fostered a belief that all people and places carry an implicit threat. People are ever more on guard about who they deal with and how – whether individuals or companies. Decisions about purchases and other daily actions are loaded with more anxiety and are thus taken with far more care and time than was previously the case.
• The health economy: Preoccupation with health, safety, and hygiene permeates every part of society, from government to individual households. Every business needs to show that they make health a priority, regardless of the specific products and services they specialize in.
• The increased importance of the home: Enforced isolation has made the home the center of life and even work. People will start to spend more on making their homes ready for the increased time they spend there. 
• The changing role of authority: The pandemic has polarized views on institutional authority. While dependence on authority has increased under enforced lockdowns and tighter regulations around travel and commerce, there is also a rising uncertainty about the competence and intentions of authority figures. This trend could go either way, depending on the handling of the COVID crisis. On the whole, increased dependence on government, corporations, and collective opinion and behavior may drive private and commercial behavior.
• Accelerated virtualization: The crisis has sped up the move towards the virtual world that was already well underway before the pandemic began. Communications, education, work, and commerce are all becoming ever more centered in the online world. Mobile devices are becoming more critical as access nodes to the virtual arena, equipped to enable every aspect of virtual life from socializing to consuming and more.

WSI New Media is taking brands to the next level

With these trends in mind, leading digital marketers, WSI New Media Marketing among them, are adapting their approach to digital marketing, especially social media marketing and mobile marketing. Here are some of the main trends we are watching this year:

Internet of things (IoT) app integration

The combination of IOT and mobile apps will have a marked impact on most aspects of commerce. Everything from production management to the retail experience is transforming due to the integration of devices with the virtual realm. Easier online shopping, automated checkout systems at actual brick-and-mortar stores, home automation and wearables, are all transforming the commercial landscape irreversibly.

Beacon technology

Beacons are among the latest developments in proximity marketing and location technology. These Bluetooth devices transmit information to devices in their vicinity, making location-based search and interaction more straightforward. From the marketer’s point of view, beacons improve offline attribution with GoogleAds, assist with data gathering that can be used to access and target local markets and facilitate out-of-store marketing. 

Mobile commerce

Sales from smartphones are likely to dominate eCommerce this year. In addition, more and more consumers are turning to mobile apps to do their shopping. Mobile devices also facilitate social commerce, closely linking mobile and social media marketing. As people turn increasingly to virtual shopping, it is mostly via their mobile devices that they will be accessing their products and services.

 Artificial intelligence (AI)

The emergence of search tools such as Siri and Alexa are the most obvious examples of how AI has penetrated the mobile arena, but they are just the beginning of developments in this regard. AI is likely to affect app and mobile device development at every level, resulting in smarter, better performing technology that adapts more quickly and more accurately to consumer tastes and demands. 

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with your SEO, social media marketing, mobile marketing, and other digital marketing tactics and strategies.

Social media remains one of the most influential forces in the world today, and this situation is unlikely to change during the course of 2021. If anything, social media will continue to ascend as the most popular, immediate and most far-reaching mode of communication. As we are now nearly halfway through the year, the dominant trends have already become apparent. Some of the most notable are the increased popularity of ephemeral content, the continued growth of social commerce, the dominance of video content, recycling of user-generated content and the role of social media in the realm of “fake news.” 

Recycling user-generated content

The power of user-generated content (UGC) has become readily apparent over the past few years. It works so well because it encourages engagement and makes users feel that they are contributing members of a community, rather than just a passive audience. Marketers can leverage UGC to great effect, using it to deepen their current audience member’s engagement and draw in new members through reshares. Viewers want social currency, a feeling and perception that they are insiders in a community that matters to them. The best thing marketers can do is provide them with opportunities to do so. Offering a platform for their content and sharing the best examples of it is a perfect means to that end. Make sure that the content also serves your brand, of course. Then both you and your users can enjoy the benefits. 

Fake news acceleration on social networks discussed

“Fake news” became something of a buzzword over the past four years, and the controversy came to a head in 2020 with all kinds of false allegations surfacing on social media about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, and the presidential election, among other things. Social media became a way for fake news to spread like wildfire. The accelerated spread that social media facilitates meant that unverified  claims could go from one side of the world to another in record time – and rapidly become accepted by millions of audience members as undisputed fact. Social media platforms and governments have been forced to take action. Facebook and Twitter have ramped up their moderation efforts.. Social media marketers will need to be cognizant of the stricter regulations on content.

Social media’s usage predicted for 2021

From the point of view of the social media marketer, there are several emerging trends that may well be game-changers this year. We will focus on three of them:

• Social commerce is ascending: Social commerce has already been around for quite some time, but not all marketers have leveraged it successfully. In fact, digital marketers continue to plan and implement excellent online strategies that don’t involve social commerce at all. In 2021, social, conversational and live commerce is set to become central marketing strategies. The tools are already available on social media platforms. It’s time to learn to take full advantage of them.

• Social messaging is becoming the standard for customer service: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, various types of remote communications, from Zoom meetings to conversational marketing, are becoming the norm. Customer conversations have quickly moved away from call centers and emails to social media platforms and messaging apps. It is vital that marketers take full control of these platforms and use them to enhance their customer experience.
• Micro-influencer marketing is becoming more important: As far as influencer marketing is concerned, brands are becoming more interested in influencers with smaller followings, who speak to focused niche audiences. These micro-influencers offer greater value for tighter marketing budgets.

WSI New Media Marketing is a full-service digital marketing and search engine optimization company in Greensboro, North Carolina. Contact us for expert help with your SEO, social media, mobile marketing and other digital marketing tactics and strategies.