15 Social Media Marketing FAQs

Social media has become a vital part of our daily lives. And companies who make the best use of these channels find they engage new customers and retain existing ones. But how do you make sure your social media marketing is on point?

We’ve compiled this list of common social media marketing questions to help you put together your strategy and reach your target audience.

1) Should I Be Marketing on Social Media?

In today’s digital world, there are few brands that won’t benefit from a social media presence. Your customers will expect you to be on at least one social media platform in the same way that they expect you to have a website.

Over 55% of the world’s population uses social media, including 81% of Americans. If your company isn’t marketing on social media, you’re missing an opportunity to engage that huge audience.

2) Which Social Media Platform Is Right for My Brand?

This will depend on the nature of your business. Each social media platform has its own unique feel and audience, so some will fit your brand better than others. Look at where your target audience hangs out and plan your social media marketing accordingly.

B2B companies will likely want a presence on LinkedIn. Those targeting older customers might do best on Facebook, while the under-30s embrace a wider range of channels, including SnapChat, Twitter, and TikTok. Millennials often use Instagram, in addition to other platforms[1].

3) Does Social Media Marketing Cost Money?

You can create social media profiles and post for free. But even this form of social media marketing, known as organic, requires staff time. Marketing on social media can be a low-cost way to grow your audience, but it isn’t free.

Some platforms also limit the organic reach of businesses. Facebook is notorious for this, but other social media sites are going the same way. It’s increasingly common to need to pay for advertising to gain traction on social media.

4) What Should I Post on Social Media?

The key to doing well on social media is to strike a good balance between promotional posts and sharing valuable content. Your followers won’t stay engaged if you are constantly trying to sell something to them.

The best content offers additional value to your audience. That could be education or entertainment, or a mix of both. Just make sure it is relevant to your brand. When you do post promotional content, make it a soft sell unless you are using paid-for advertising.

5) How Do I Grow My Social Media Following?

Growing your audience on social media can take time and there’s no quick fix. But you’ll do best if you:

• Post consistently
• Respond to comments and DMs
• Encourage engagement (e.g., through polls, quizzes, question boxes, and asking people to like/share/comment)
• Use the full range of posting options, including feed posts, stories, videos, and images
• Use relevant hashtags
• Follow and comment on similar accounts
• Run giveaways and competitions
• Add follow buttons to your website and email marketing

6) How Do I Measure My ROI from Social Media Marketing?

First, set some goals for your social media marketing. Obviously, we all want to attract new customers, but social media is often about growing brand awareness and generating leads, rather than a hard sell.

Once your goals are set, regularly monitor the KPIs that help you assess your performance. Some options include:

• Follower growth rate
• Engagement rate
• Click-through rate
• Website traffic
• Sales
• Leads generated
• Email subscribers

7) Should I Pay to Advertise on Social Media?

You don’t have to do paid advertising to market on social media, especially if your brand already has an established presence and an engaged following.

But it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach people organically via social media. If you aren’t seeing the response you’d like, it might be worth experimenting with some paid social media ads. The conversion rate is often high too, making it worth the cost.

8) Should I Work with Social Media Influencers?

Influencers put a lot of time and energy into creating beautiful, valuable content for their followers. Working with them means you can take advantage of their expertise and their engaged audience.

80% of marketers say working with influencers is an effective marketing strategy. But it does come at a cost. Influencers rely on brand partnerships for their income, and few will work for product alone, especially if they have a reasonable following.

If you are considering working with influencers, be sure to find people who fit your brand and target audience.

9) How Much Time Should I Spend Marketing on Social Media?

Social media marketing is a time-consuming activity and can be a full-time role in larger companies.

Even smaller brands should expect to spend an hour or two each day on social media marketing. This isn’t only creating content but also engaging with your followers, replying to messages and comments, and evaluating your approach.

10) Should I Use a Scheduling Tool for Social Media?

Scheduling tools can help you save time and manage your social media marketing more easily. Most will let you manage all your social media profiles from one place, as well as scheduling posts in advance. Some even offer a free plan to get you started.

11) What Is the Purpose of Marketing on Social Media?

Social media can bring you new customers directly. But it is often used to grow brand awareness and keep existing customers engaged. If you are thinking in terms of your sales funnel, social media will likely sit near the top in the awareness/interest stage.

12) Should I Be Using Video on Social Media?

While they take longer to produce than a static image, posting videos on social media is becoming a necessary part of using these channels successfully.

YouTube is now one of the most popular social media channels, with an appeal that spans all ages. And the launch of TikTok and the introduction of Instagram’s reels demonstrate the growing trend for video.

13) How Do I Convert Social Media Followers into Customers?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy that will reliably convert social media followers into customers. You’ll need to test different ideas and monitor the response from your audience to discover what works best for your brand.

Don’t forget to take a look at your competitors. When you see what strategies work best for them, you can start to adapt them to your own brand.

14) How Should I Deal with Negativity on Social Media?

Not all engagement on social media is positive. You’ll inevitably get the occasional complaint, snarky comment, or negative feedback.

Firstly, don’t stop posting on social media just because you are worried about negativity. It can be hard to deal with, but one or two dissatisfied people shouldn’t upset your whole marketing strategy.

When negative comments do occur, stay polite and friendly. Respond as soon as you can but try to move the conversation to email or direct message instead of continuing to exchange comments publicly.

15) What Mistakes Should I Avoid in Social Media Marketing?

Inconsistent posting is one of the biggest mistakes in social media marketing. It is better to be on fewer social media channels and post regularly than be on all of them and spread yourself too thin.

Another mistake is not responding to comments. Social media is a conversation, so you’ll need to make time to reply to your followers.

And a third is trying to sell to your followers without offering them any other form of engagement. You’ll soon lose people if they feel like you only see them as a dollar sign.

If you need more tips or help growing your social media presence, let us know! You can learn more about our social media services here.

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[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/

Your Homepage: Why First Impressions Matter

Essential Elements Your Homepage Needs

The homepage is the face of your website. It’s the first impression so you need to make it count—and you don’t have a lot of time.

Research tells us that you have 15 seconds to make that good first impression. That’s the average amount of time people spend on a website. If you want to bust that average and have people return, here are some essential elements your homepage should include.

A Logo

This is obvious, right? Every homepage has a logo. Or does it?

If you’re questioning the need for a distinct, easily identifiable logo, consider the implications for your homepage. Every visitor will expect to see a logo at the top left or center of your header.

They will also expect that logo to serve as a link to your homepage from anywhere on your site.

A Great Headline

Make sure your visitors know what you do right away. A headline should contain enough information to encourage them to explore further. It should be an H1 headline or custom size and font so that it stands out from the rest of the text.

Keep your headline concise and specific. It should tell your visitors what you do and what makes you different using between five and 20 words. Be sure it appears above the fold.

If that sounds like a tough task, it is. Write lots of headlines and let them evolve as you go. There’s nothing wrong with taking time to come up with something great, or in changing it if you discover something you like better.

User-Friendly Navigation

The simpler your website navigation is the better. Nowhere is that more important than on your homepage. You want a basic menu that gives your visitors easy access to the important pages of your site.

Think about how potential customers interact with your homepage navigation as well. How much scrolling is required to get to the meat of the page, the placement of elements for easiest access, and how design supports function are all important considerations.

Pictures

The visual elements on your homepage, from a hero image to video or graph, should feel authentic to your brand. Avoid stock images and focus on pictures that support your brand identity.

If you choose to use graphic displays to illustrate your core business, make sure they are legible on mobile screens.

Hero images are bold and tempting. If you use one of these large images at the top of your homepage, make sure it isn’t forcing valuable elements like headlines and calls to action below the fold.

Company Summary

You need a short description of your business. Tell your website visitors what you do and how you do it. Keep this section concise and support it with visual elements if necessary.

A few sentences with a well-chosen picture are far more effective on a homepage than a dense block of text.

Differentiators

You can include this in the summary or break it into its own small section.  But somewhere on your homepage should be a short description of what makes you special.

A differentiator can be a location, an exclusive process, or something else that makes you stand out from the crowd.

Contact Information

If you hide your contact information away on an interior page only, you force your potential customer to search for it. Making it easy to find gives a new visitor an easy way to reach out directly from your homepage.

Homepage contact information can be a condensed version of what visitors find on your Contact page. Try using a basic contact form and consider including a phone number and physical address.

This information makes you reachable and provides information about your business and your accessibility to your customers.

Call to Action

What do you want your visitors to do? Do you want them to visit a certain page or product? Do you want them to contact you for services? A call to action (CTA) is one of the very important, essential elements your homepage needs.

Use clear language and buttons or other obvious links to direct your customers into the sales funnel. The call to action is one of several elements that should be above the fold so visitors don’t need to scroll to see it.

A web design services professional can help you determine ideal placement and presentation.

Testimonials

A few words of praise from past or current clients or customers are surprisingly powerful. Like customer reviews, testimonials are a form of social proof. Social proof provides outside validation of your trustworthiness.

Reviews can be difficult to incorporate into a well-designed homepage. Testimonials can be pared down to a single sentence or two and combined with a picture to give them even more weight.

Social Media Icons

Hopefully, you’ve chosen a social media platform (or several) on which to build a presence for your business. These curated feeds give potential leads or customers another look into what you have to offer.

Social media also provides insight into your style and personality. Making those platforms easily accessible on your homepage allows visitors to learn about you on their platform of choice.

Awards or Certifications

If you are in a business that requires licensure or offers certification, display your credentials on your homepage. They reinforce your trustworthiness as well as your expertise.

If you have received industry or community awards, include those as well. Potential customers are interested in your level of expertise as perceived by others. Community service awards speak to your values without the need for a lot of exposition (which you can save for inner site pages).

Samples

Depending on your business, including examples of your work may be one of the essential elements your homepage needs. If you offer any sort of creative product, images of exceptional finished projects are a great way to give your homepage a visually interesting design element.

These images also give your potential customer a snapshot of your body of work. Choose projects you’re proud of that are generally representative of your portfolio.

Your homepage makes your website’s first impression. Make sure it invites visitors to not only come in, but to stay longer than those elusive 15 seconds.

If you need help with implementing essential elements for your homepage, we offer web design services at an affordable cost! Contact us today or visit our Web Design service page to learn more.

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is the most popular PPC platform today, that is pay-per-click, previously known as Google AdWords. Google’s Ads can be seen in the form of a Paid Search ad or an Ad for a product placed strategically on a website. Paid Search ads are those placed at the top of a Google Search Result page with the small “Ad” icon, or they are on Google Maps. How exactly do Google Ads work? How do they generate sales? Read on to learn about how you can grow your sales through Google Ads.

How does Google Ads work?

With Google Ads, keywords are bid on to boost traffic to your site. Keywords are the words or phrases that your targeted audience is searching for when they go to Google to find an answer to a question or need. For your website to appear in response to their search, you must bid on that keyword. Some keywords are more competitive than others, meaning they are searched more often, and as a result will cost more per click. To make the most money from your keyword, choose a niche, long-tail keyword based on a high search volume in your desired location by your desired audience.

To get started with Google Ads, you must create your first campaign. Google will tailor the process to meet your specific goals and needs, whether that is to get more calls to your business storefront, to increase website visits, or to encourage transactions. Lastly, you can set a daily budget for your campaign that will limit the amount of money you spend.

Call for action

To drive sales and generate leads, use Google to create direct-response campaigns that will push for a specific action, like buying your product or offering an email address for a free e-book download. Use Google Search Network where your ads appear on search results pages, as described above or Google’s Contextual Targeting which matches your ads to relevant sites in the Display Network using keywords. This broadens your reach and visibility by placing your ads where your target audience is already looking. With Google’s Search Network type of advertising, it is up to you to place your ads where you think they will perform, bid strategically on keywords, and write the copy of the ad in a compelling manner that encourages your potential buyer to take the next with your product.

How can you make money passively?

To truly start making money with Google, beyond the organic growth in website traffic from your Ads, try Google AdSense. Different from Google Ad where your website or product makes up the ad, AdSense uses relevant ads to different products or brands and advertises them on your website. This program allows you to input coding into your site that will display paid ads on your website. Different from Paid Search marketing, AdSense allows you to make money when visitors are already on your website, perfect for content-heavy blogs or e-commerce sites. The ads are tailored to your industry and content, so they appear as natural and helpful to users as possible, and they are known to be less intrusive. Google handles the program itself, so all you have to do is input the code and watch your revenue grow, making this a low effort, passive form of advertising.

What types of ads can you create?

Google AdSense works with two types of ads you can embed into your website. The first is Auto Ads where Google automatically places ads where they would best perform based on your website’s layout. The second type is the Responsive Ad, where Google’s technology scans your site and places ads where they are the most likely to perform well and generate the most revenue. They are optimized to fit your user’s screen, whether that’s desktop or mobile. Responsive Ads are a slightly more nuanced and complex version of Auto Ads, depending on how much investment you are willing to make on your advertising campaigns. Remember, Google AdSense works best for websites with lots of content and traffic. If you’re just building out your website, focusing on Paid Search advertising will get you that necessary traffic first.

Better than Facebook Ads?

Google Ads and Facebook ads may not be as adversarial as one may think when it comes to online selling and digital marketing. They often work well together. But what sets them apart from each other? Google Ads works on the principle of “paid search” while Facebook works off of “paid social”. Both platforms offer different types of marketing, with Google bringing you to new customers and Facebook bringing new customers to you.

Ultimately, there is unlimited potential when it comes to using Google Ads to help your small business generate leads, sales and revenue. You can position your compelling ad where it’s most likely to perform, or you can let Google place ads on your blog or high-traffic website for a more passive revenue stream. Whatever your goals are, there is a Google campaign program that will positively impact your company or website’s traffic and profit.

How a Good Website Makes Sales

Ecommerce is booming right now and showing no signs of slowing down. Both established businesses and new ventures are investing in their websites, and for good reason. With more people than ever shopping online, websites have become high value assets for generating leads and driving sales.

A good website doesn’t just make money out of thin air, though. There are methods in marketing and web design that have to be applied in order for a website to maximize revenue. To remove the guess work, we broke down the most important qualities that go into a sales-driving website.

Let’s go through them and assess how they all work together to make that all important sale.

Easy navigation for best user experience

Web design starts with structure and navigation. The easier a website is to navigate, the better it can keep visitors engaged. Good navigation includes things like a properly labeled navigation bar, unobtrusive sidebars, visible hyperlinks and a clear call to action where needed.

Site visitors should be able to move between the homepage, business page, product page, contact information and transaction point with as few clicks as possible. The homepage and transaction point in particular should never be more than one click away.

This makes it easier for visitors to move around your site, but it also makes the site itself easier to maintain and update without breaking navigation flows.

A credible resource for customers

Your website will host visitors who are at every stage in the sales process. Some may find your business through social media and go to your site ready to buy, while others might only see your site for the first time when Google returns it as a search result. Either way, the website should build trust with potential customers.

Blog pages are a great way to build website credibility with customers. Blogs are a good way to present your expertise while talking about topics directly related to your product. Being able to provide visitors with insightful information can turn a website from a basic pay point to a valued resource for your target audience.

The more people trust a brand, the easier it is to make a sale.

Strategic calls to action (CTAs) to maximize sales

We mentioned calls to action as an important part of good navigation, but their core purpose is to close the deal and make the sale. A call to action isn’t a command, though, because no one likes being told what to do, let alone what to buy. Think of calls to action as the red carpet you roll out once a lead is ready to buy.

Navigation, credibility and product quality are the tools that convince customers to buy. A call to action should come right after the convincing stage. In blogs, calls to action usually come as an encouraging phrase with a link at the end of a post. They can also be threaded throughout the post, so long as they appear at the places where a customer might be ready to take the final step in the sales process.

Responsive design for efficient sales flow

Responsive design is meant to work hand in hand with easy navigation to create the smoothest user experience possible. Features like high resolution images, moving graphics and embedded videos might look great on a website, but having too many at once can slow down loading times.

Slow loading times make a whole site less responsive. That hurts more than just sales.

Search engines like Google weigh up a website’s loading time, among other things, to determine which ones to recommend to users. This makes a responsive website important for engaging existing leads as well as finding new ones.

SEO-friendly content to boost visibility

So response time is one of the things the Google algorithm considers in search results, but there’s another factor that’s just as important: content.

When search engines are deciding on which websites to display on the first results page, they assess a site’s keywords to determine how relevant it is to the user search. The combination of keywords and phrases that the algorithm filters for is known as metadata. It exists in a site’s HTML code and, more importantly to visitors, in the public text on a website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about making a site more attractive to both search engines and customers, which is why SEO best practices benefit both. SEO is about presenting relevant keywords, but it’s also about writing and structuring text for readability.

Generally, SEO favors shorter paragraphs, subheadings to break up long text every 200-400 words, keywords in headings and subheadings, as well as clean copy. Notice how these are elements that site visitors want to see too – that’s why search engines value them, and why your website should too.

Good design leads to sales

For a site to make sales, it needs to be built to turn strangers into buyers and buyers into loyal customers. As online shoppers become savvier, the ecommerce sites that meet their rising standards and deliver a quality experience are the ones that’ll get ahead.