If your business isn’t currently using social media, now is the time to consider why that is. These days, online presence is everything, and interacting with your customers in a variety of ways can win you valuable sales. Maintaining an effective social media campaign takes a bit of work, but many companies believe it to be worth the investment in time and effort. Here’s our summary of the main social media platforms, and things you should think about before deciding to sign up:

Facebook

Interacting with your customers via Facebook gives you the opportunity to share content , advice and opinions, entering into a conversation with people who are interested in your brand. You should make sure that your posts are interesting and original, and that you respond to any communication in a timely and professional manner, as it will be seen by a wider audience.

Twitter

Share short 140-character messages and links with followers, enabling you to send (and receive!) instant information about offers, products, news, or anything else you think your customers may be interested in. You need to ensure you tweet frequently enough to show that you’re current and up-to-date, but not so often that you become annoying – most companies find that 1-3 tweets per day is about right.

LinkedIn

This is a business networking site, a B2B social network, which is great for building new connections and generating sales leads. The more time you invest in making your LinkedIn profile relevant and engaging, and in interacting with other users, the better the results you’re likely to get from it. You can get by simply by creating a profile, but to really get noticed you need to regularly update your status, participate in discussion groups and even try out paid advertising.

Pinterest and Instagram

These are image-driven social networks, so are particularly useful and relevant for e-commerce and lifestyle products, and perhaps less so for industrial or commercial businesses. Using images to promote your brand allows you to be creative – even if you don’t have a visual product or service to market, you can find images which celebrate your company values, local events, and anything you think may be interest.

Using social media can be good for your business in a number of ways:

• Customer Service and Insights: Your customers may contact you for support or with pre-sale queries, allowing your response to help boost the reputation of your brand. You can gain a valuable insight into who your customers are and how they feel about your business.
• Increased Brand Visibility and Trust: Potential customers who see that you are on social media know that they have an easy way to get in touch, and that you’re approachable.
• Promote Your Content and Drive Website Traffic: Being talked about and mentioned on social media shows that you have a popular brand, and that you have something worth sharing.

Why You May Choose NOT To Use Social Media:

Ultimately, Facebook, Twitter and any other social media platform can only be an effective tool for your business if you use it effectively. Done badly, infrequently, or half-heartedly, it can actually cause more harm than good. Nobody wants to click onto a company Facebook page only to find it hasn’t been updated for months, messages from customers haven’t been responded to, and all the offers you’re featuring have already ended. Once you commit to having a profile on a social networking site, you need to invest the time and attention needed to keep it current and interesting – if you can’t do that, it may be better not to have one, and definitely don’t link to an unmaintained profile from your website.

I Want To Give It A Go – What’s Next?

If you’re a complete beginner in the world of social media, it can be a bit daunting to know where to begin. Many companies select one of their younger employees to be a ‘social champion’, as they’re likely to already have a good understanding of how each channel should be used effectively.

Some companies outsource their social media, employing an agency or online marketing professional to keep their profiles alive. If you would like to explore this option please contact us at Amity and ask for Laurence who will be happy to discuss social media with you.

It’s hard to get ahead if no one sees the incredible work you’re making. We break down how to get people to your website, and get on their radar.

“How can I get more website visitors?”

This is one of the most common questions I hear from clients, frustrated at the lack of business their website brings them.

Often, there isn’t much wrong with the site itself — it’s professionally designed, and the portfolio is full of gorgeous work. But it just sits there, in an obscure corner of the Internet, being quietly ignored.Taking a website from zero to a few hundred or even a few thousand visitors a month is not easy, but it’s eminently doable — as long as you recognize a harsh truth about the Internet:

The online world is an attention economy. Attention is finite, and therefore scarce. So if you want people to pay attention to you, you need to earn it.

You can’t expect your work to speak for itself. Most of the time, it won’t. You need to accept that marketing is part of your job, just as much as making.

But the game changes when you start applying your creativity to your marketing — it becomes more fun as well as more effective. Here are four ways to use your creativity to attract the right kind of visitors to your website.

1. Create an amazing blog.

Note the word ‘amazing’. I’m not talking about a blog you only update when you’ve got a new client or exhibition, or something new to sell. I’m not talking about a personal diary where you to post your musings on art, life, and the universe. I mean the kind of blog that grabs people’s attention by delivering outstandingly valuable, useful, or entertaining material — consistently.

Instead of writing, ‘here’s my latest work’, write about:

• “Here’s how I made it” – with pictures and/or video. Like this or this or this.
• “Here’s what inspired it” – if you like it, chances are your audience will like it too. Like this or this.
• “Here’s how you can make one like it.” Like this or this.
• “Here’s a gadget that makes my work better (and could help you too).” Like this.

Instead of burying your opinions in long paragraphs of diary-style ‘musings’, put them out there loud and clear:

• Devote an entire blog post to nailing ONE idea.
• Start with a compelling headline.
• Ask yourself ‘So what? Why should anyone care?’ — and make that the start of the post.
• Give concrete examples.
• Invite comments by ending with a question. For example: I’m a designer. Use me better.

And don’t forget to ask for the subscription! Repeat visitors are the best visitors, so one of your goals is to build an audience of loyal subscribers. Ask people to subscribe and offer an email option to make it easy.

2. Give (some of) your best work away for free.

Just so we’re clear: I’m not one of those internet hippies who tells you “information wants to be free”, so you should give away all your best work and forget about being paid. (Have you noticed those guys tend to have a comfortable salary or professorship?)

But for most creatives obscurity is a greater threat than piracy. If no one’s ever heard of you, they won’t even bother to rip you off, let alone pay for your work.

So take advantage of the spreadability of digital content by giving away something valuable and encouraging people to share it with their contacts:

• the first chapter of your novel (or even an entire novella)
• a free report or e-book, full of insanely useful information
• one of the best tracks from your album
• a design template
• high-resolution images
• a series of tutorials
• videos that anyone can embed in their site

Use a Creative Commons license to make it clear what people are allowed to do with the work. And make sure it’s something genuinely valuable. If you feel slightly uncomfortable about giving away something so good, you’re on the right track. Otherwise, why would anyone get excited enough to tell their friends?But don’t give away the farm. Make sure you have plenty in reserve — products, services, artworks — for the folks who want to take things further and buy from you.

3. Borrow someone else’s audience.

Why build an audience from scratch when you can borrow one that someone else has spent months or years assembling? No, it’s not unethical — in fact, the ‘someone’ in question will love you for it.

Writing high-quality guest posts for popular blogs in your niche is one of the most effective ways to get yourself on the radar of the people you want to reach. Your ‘payment’ is a link back to your site — make a great offer and you could land hundreds of new subscribers with every guest post you write.

And make sure it’s your best work. This is your chance to make a big impression — don’t blow it by sending out second-rate articles and keeping the best stuff for your own site.

4. Get your content into circulation.

Have you noticed that of the three tips so far, only one of them is centered around your site? (No. 2 may start on your site, but the real magic happens when people start sharing it with their friends.) If you really want more visitors, you have to go out and find them.

Social networking sites are not just for networking — they are ideal places to get your content (blog posts, videos, free reports, etc) in front of other people. Use Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ to share links to your content. Make use of portfolio sites like Behance to showcase your work in places where people go to look for it.

And be generous — share more of other people’s content than your own. That way, you not only help others (good digital karma!) you also position yourself as a go-to authority, a source of cool stuff who people want to follow.

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None of these methods is a quick fix. They require time, effort, and persistence. But the good news is the benefits are cumulative – as your blog attracts links and subscribers, as your free content gets into circulation, and as you get known as a rising star in your niche, you’ll find yourself attracting more and more new visitors for every hour you spend on marketing.And no, website visitors don’t necessarily equal customers — otherwise there’d be a lot more Internet millionaires! Read my next article on turning visitors into buyers here.

There are so many acronyms in marketing: SEO, CTA, OMG. Only joking. In an industry where jargon can become your own worst enemy, isn’t it time we all start speaking plain English again?

Mostly, as clients you don’t want to know how our marketing agency can ‘optimise your above the fold page with a compelling CTA and SEO’; how we can ‘use PPC and PR to drive customers’. Well, you do, but not in such acronym-heavy, sigh inducing lingo.

As marketing agency professionals, we all get bogged down in jargon and it prevents us from achieving both buy in and budget.

What’s wrong with advising clients that yes, we know our jargon, but no, we’re not going to bore you with it. What we will do is to use all our knowledge to help customers find your business online and in the street, in the printed and broadcast media and in the shops.

For the sake of clarity and just for fun, here are our top twenty over used acronyms and buzzwords in the marketing industry.

1. CTA – Call To Action – what you’d like clients and customers to do when they read your campaign message.
2. PPC – Pay Per Click, also known as Paid search – those top three ads on Google you see in your search results.
3. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – making sure people find you when they’re searching relevant keywords.
4. Keywords – words that are relevant to how people search for your products and services on google, probably not including your brand name.
5. Long Tail keywords – we’re not making this up, these are ways people search you when they don’t necessarily know your business name, so instead of searching ‘Wrapped’, you might search ‘strategic marketing agency’.
6. PR – Public Relations – all about third party endorsements from opinion formers (see below), building and maintaining reputation.
7. Opinion formers – important people with either lots of readers (print journalists and bloggers) or lots of followers (on social media).
8. Content marketing – great content i.e. stories and useful info on your website and social networks helps people find you and trust you.
9. Social – Social media – all that twitter, facebook, pinterest, tumblr and Instagram stuff. Important for finding potential customers and helping them find you.
10. Blogging – people writing up interesting things about whatever it is they love to do. Pretty much every industry has important bloggers writing about it.
11. Pinning – a bit like a facebook ‘like’, just with pinterest.
12. Shareable content – When you create content that’s useful and useable, or funny, people like to share it with their networks.
13. Word of mouth – when everyone’s talking positively about your brand or product either in the pub or on the internet. A good place to be.
14. Above the fold – The first bit of the website you see when you log in, without scrolling down.
15. Brand noise – all that competition from other brands out there, all those messages people read, see, hear about, watch and share online.
16. Brand clutter – when it all gets too much and everyone is saying the same thing, people get bored. This is where really targeted marketing can help you.
17. Sell in – Selling in ideas for stories to either journalists or bloggers.
18. Brainstorm – an oldie but a goodie.
19. Inbound – getting people to visit your site by you creating useful, useable, shareable content and posting it on your website and on your social networks. It’s the opposite of outbound marketing, or telling everyone how great you are yourself with advertising. It’s more about giving your customers helpful content that will make their lives easier or better.
20. KPI – key performance indicators. Don’t use an agency unless they’re prepared to discuss these, they are essential ways to review success and a good way to show the way forward when deciding how much budget should go on a particular marketing activity.