How to build your brand on Instagram

Great social media strategies need continuous follower growth, engagement, and actions, e.g. clicks. And Instagram just might be your best opportunity for achieving this quickly. SEO should always be an important part of your online marketing strategy. But let's face it, you're unlikely to beat the big brands with enormous budgets for a spot on page one of Google's search results anytime soon. Source: ArthurStock This is why social media can be a powerful ally to smaller brands when trying to grow your reach and presence online. You don't need a huge budget to still be effective, using, for instance, Facebook ads. But as powerful and inexpensive as these can be, the sad truth is that organic reach and engagement on Facebook has plateaued in recent years.

Where to Turn? Instagram.

Consider some statistics compiled by…

Brand storytelling examples showing how a successful brand story takes consumers on a hero’s journey

No one’s heart is wooed by product capabilities and financials alone. What you need is a good story — it’s the key to making your brand a living, breathing thing. Investors, employees, and consumers will rally around a story, and the best business leaders understand that storytelling has the power to change minds and spark action.

Take High Brew Coffee, for example. Its story could easily have been about its product: canned cold-brew coffee. But that’s not very original, and it certainly doesn’t capture the imagination. Instead, High Brew’s story is all about adventure — founder David Smith was inspired to start the business after enjoying cold-brew coffee during warm nights navigating the Caribbean on a sailboat with his family.

When investing in content marketing, it’s necessary to go beyond describing what…

Which day(s) and times work best for maximum impact for B2B and B2C?

"Which day of the week is best for sending email?" has been a common question since marketers started email marketing. As with a lot of questions about good practice, the right answer is : "it depends", but it's fun to speculate. Ideally you want your email to arrive in the inbox of as many people as possible when they're sitting at their desk or picking up emails on go via smartphone. Greater impact will also be helped when there is less competition in the inbox from other email marketers. So Saturday and Sunday can be best for this.

[si_guide_block id="5508" title="Download Paid Member Resource – Email Marketing Strategy Guide" description="This comprehensive guide shows you how to take your email marketing strategy to the next level, covering a lot more than tips to improve your creative and copy, although we do…

Use NPS follow-up insight to convert Detractors and Passives

The ability to quickly gauge your enterprise’s overall health with a single NPS score is useful to let you know whether you need to make any changes. However, a lone NPS score is not enough to tell you what changes you need to make. The Net Promoter Score has become a popular customer loyalty metric, but you need more than a simple measure of the likelihood of receiving customer recommendations to help you identify organizational problems in enough detail to chart a course for corporate success. That’s why the metric’s proponents are now recommending you ‘close the loop’ with follow-up questions that get to the root of your customers’ neutrality or lack of satisfaction.

‘Close the loop’ with a NPS-integrated solution

Enterprises looking to transform their Net Promoter Scores into actionable insight should be considering…

Facebook will penalize posts linking to web pages that deliver a poor experience by not surfacing them in the newsfeed.

Facebook started rolling out an update last week designed to prevent people from seeing posts that take them to low-quality website experiences. They've announced they will be penalizing the organic rankings of these posts so they appear far less in the newsfeed, and they will be stepping up the enforcement of rules on ads that prevent people paying to advertise spammy or malicious sites. Facebook announced they are doing this because their users are unhappy with being taken to sites which are just 'click-bait' designed to draw visitors in and then get them to click on an ad. In an official statement, Facebook reported that: We hear from our community that they’re disappointed when they click on a link that leads to a web page containing little substantive content and that is covered in disruptive,…

Chart of the day: Facebook reach 1.9 billion monthly active users

Last week Facebook released its Q1 2017 results, reporting it has hit 1.9 billion monthly users as of the end of the march quarter. Their monthly active users have risen by 17% YoY, despite the rise in competition Facebook has seen consistent growth. What was surprising about this report was the rapid growth Facebook have see in the Asia-pacific region. When comparing the two charts its hard to not notice the significant growth for the Asia-Pacific, with almost double the amount of monthly active users. This growth will be due to the focus Facebook have put on areas of lower connectivity, to reach their goal of building a strong global community. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO said "We had a good start to 2017,…

Trust Is Your Most Valuable Asset, So It’s Time to Embrace the Most Trusted Source: Other People

Social media has reinforced the common belief that many of us have: other people like me the most. Marketers have caught on and are looking to capitalize on that desire for the spotlight and the chance to celebrate people who are putting themselves out there for the world to see. Social posts, featured reviews, photos, and other content are now coming from customers and marketers are happily sharing these to give each person their moment in the Sun. All of this user-generated content (UGC) is being touted as the next big thing in content marketing, and we think it’s particularly useful for e-commerce brands. Your e-commerce shop relies heavily on user reviews, word of mouth, positive shares, and social buzz, which is UGC in a nutshell. Your fans and followers are already creating and consuming social content…

Use these Social Media Campaign Tools to run more effective Social Media Campaigns

Social Media campaign tools give you flexible campaign and advertising tools for running campaigns on all the major social media platforms. They provide a quick and easy method for setting up customer engagement campaigns, from templates for quizzes, surveys, and sweepstakes to white label options with full CSS editing and iFrame functionality. These tools can focus on a number of campaigns goals (e.g. driving engagement or collecting leads) and have powerful social sharing features out the box but with custom options ensuring each campaign can be tailored accordingly.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Whilst these tools provide a quick and easy option for many brands, ultimately these tools act as a third party between you and the customer limiting your control of the customer…

Instagram’s algorithm update and why it’s good news for marketers

Most businesses are on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but now need to be concerned with the new power player, Instagram. Instagram is one of the fastest growing social channels, it was recently reported that it now has 700 million active users per month and sees 95 million photos uploaded every day. With this ongoing increase in popularity of Instagram, even businesses who haven't traditionally used Instagram like business-to-business companies should consider it for engagement. At Smart Insights we have seen good organic sharing of our infographics and industry trends on Instagram via a smartinsights hashtag, so we've decided to 'take the plunge' and I've recently set up a Smart Insights Instagram account - follow us to learn and be inspired by all things digital marketing.  In 2016 Instagram announced a major algorithm update which is still important to success. The update took many…

What data science taught us about 211 email subject line phrases

Once you click the send button, your email subject line is the most important part of your campaign. This is a fact. Think about your own experience in the inbox. Mine is something like this: Look at inbox Look at sender name Look at subject line Make a decision whether or not to open it and read the content Your sender name is important as it conveys your brand value. But it’s not something you can change easily. Your subject line is important because testing and optimising them drives response rates like nothing else. But, there’s a common problem with subject lines. Dotmailer research reveals 26% of email marketer’s time is spent on email creative, 21% on deployment, and only 8% on testing. And, over 70% of email marketers don't split test their subject lines very often. Here’s the thing: if people don’t open…