Category: Social Media

No one visits the store that’s hidden on a back street without a sign by the door. Most people like to do their shopping in just a few places, whether that’s at the mall or online. If you’re operating a business in 2021 and you don’t have a social media presence, that’s almost like choosing to open your store in the middle of nowhere.

To attract more new customers and keep your current customers engaged, you need to make sure people can find you and that you have a strong social media community. There are plenty of platforms out there, but it’s important that you start with the apps where your target market customers are spending their time. Once you’ve found out where your customers are, follow these five steps to grow your community.

Be Easy To Find

First, you need to make it easy to find you. It’s important that you’re consistent across all platforms, since you might need to run both a Facebook and a Twitter page, for example. Use the same page name wherever you can and make it obvious in the images you use as well that it’s the same company.

Include icons that link to all your social media pages on your website. Make those icons very easy to find. This goes both ways; you also need to make sure that it’s easy to find your website on your social media pages.

You should also make it easy for customers to find your physical business location as well (if you have one). Post your hours clearly, as well as your phone number and email address. You should be both easy to find and easily reachable.

Post With Purpose

Posting with purpose is the most important step in growing your social media community engagement. If your content isn’t adding value to the lives of your visitors and customers, then there’s a huge issue. Spamming customers with ads all the time or frequently asking them to take surveys is a sure way to lose your followers.

Research what your customers are interested in and develop a content calendar that takes their needs into account. Create posts that provide valuable information and that promote your business. You can include a helpful fun fact as the caption on an ad for a sale you’re running, for example. The important thing is to balance promotion with valuable information. Keep your followers informed and entertained if possible, and don’t over-promote.

Like And Reply

Once you have comments on your posts, it’s time to start liking and replying. You’ll want to delete comments from bots, if you get any, because they make it more difficult for your customers to communicate with you and each other.

Make sure you like each comment you receive and reply to it. If you receive a negative comment, you should diplomatically offer to resolve the issue. Always be polite and remember that anyone can screenshot anything that’s public.

By liking and replying to the comments your customers post, you’re showing that you care. This strengthens the relationship between you and your individual customers, which affects the whole community.

Sweeten The Deal

Once you have a dedicated following, you’ll notice that there are certain people who interact with your posts more than anyone else. On Facebook, these are the “Top Fans” of pages. You should definitely nurture these relationships.

Offer these customers coupons and explain to your whole social media community that you appreciate how they have consistently spent time interacting with your business. It’s a great way to thank your supporters while also incentivizing other followers to interact more often, especially if you directly state that more coupons are coming out in the future!

It’s also a smart idea to consider partnering up with influencers who can promote your business to your target customers. By sponsoring a post on an influencer’s page, you might get a lot more views, clicks, and purchases than you expect!

Be Personal

After planning out your posts with purpose, being personal is the next most important step in growing your social media community. By revealing details about yourself and your values, you will give your followers the opportunity to feel more connected to you.

Strengthening your relationship with your community is key. You want to have a good

relationship with the people who support your business. You want to learn from them and you want them to learn from you. There’s a reason why you started your business. Share what you’re passionate about and you’ll see how it helps you build your community.

Stay Consistent And Authentic

When you follow the steps of being easily findable, posting with purpose, liking and replying, sweetening the deal, and being personal, you’ll see how your social media community grows. Cultivating a social media community is a lot of work. You need to consistently follow a strategy while staying authentic It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Social media can take your business to the next level.

The storefront is one of the most important eyecatchers of any brick and mortar business, as this is what makes or breaks the first impression of any passerby. What follows, of course, are interactions and transactions that strengthen the business’ branding and relations with their clients and partners.

It is not a surprise that the Information Age has revolutionized this landscape of catching eyes and improving relations. After all, the digital landscape has already made itself part of the environment the majority of us need to tread through both our personal and professional lives. This speedy growth of the internet realm makes it increasingly important to have what is called a “Digital Presence”.

A digital presence, simply put, is quite like having a digital storefront. It is concerned with how you “show” your business online. Of course, it roots far deeper than that. And, of course, not all digital presence can be considered good or beneficial. The following are a few good examples of good online presence that any business should attempt to achieve.

A Well Maintained Website With Good Traffic

First thing’s first: a business needs a good visual representation of their business, and nothing embodies this branding more than a website. A website can become anything you want it to be, and it is usually this freedom that can prove daunting when creating your first business website.

The function of your website may vary, from promoting to a wider audience, to securing transactions. Regardless of purpose, however, your website should be able to tell your potential clients and partners who you are, what your business is about, and what products or services you offer. Give them a form to contact you with, so that any inquiries, suggestions, and feedback may be entertained.

If you have a range of services, throw in some pictures and descriptions, if you can. A blog that gives a sneak peek on your business’ concerns would be a good touch to relate to your would-be consumers, as well. Such details and content expressed coherently not only reaches out to your customers and sets their expectations, but these details also set you apart from other businesses.

Having a coherent look and feel on your website is another good way to keep your audience’s attention, and giving them a good user experience (no site errors, smooth navigation from one page to another, visible and intuitive buttons and functions) would be the cherry on top.

A good-looking website will not be enough, of course. What makes a website good is the amount of traffic it manages to attract and retain, and, ultimately, to convert into interested and willing clients. For this, your business will need…

Advertising That Converts

Digital ads are rampant in the online world. They exist to promote products and brands to people scrolling through search engine results and social media sites. Although some ads may be quite common, they don’t always catch people’s eye or attention. A good tip for online ads would be to use noticeable colors, ones that set you apart.

For text ads, use catchy and relevant taglines. Such ads not only increase visibility (and clickability), but also increase brand recognition and contribute to your business’ identity as a whole. You wouldn’t want your business to be seen as one that is “out of touch” with its target market, would you?

Interactive Social Media Communities

Marketing used to be a one-way endeavor. Although word-of-mouth promotion exists, the difference between today and before boils down to the possibility for businesses to openly and publicly interact with its customers. This builds a strong sense of community around what businesses can offer. Utilizing the “social” in social media will not only help you widen your reach, it will also help you get to know your consumers more, on a more conversational level, too.

Visible Business Listing

Finally, a visible business listing will allow for a more professional viewership of your company’s values and offerings. Posting about your company on business listing platforms will help you push your SEO rankings further up, and make your business more visible to those who search for what you offer.

Working on your digital presence is definitely not going to be an overnight job. As with anything of great value, it will take a refined vision, hard work, and a few ounces of patience to get your business to the sweet spot of the internet.

One of the easiest and most effective marketing tools you can use is an email newsletter. It allows you to build your brand, engage with your customers and even close sales. As you send email newsletters on a regular basis, you’ll also be able to build a relationship with your customer base and demonstrate an industry knowledge, creating more trust and leading to higher sales volumes.

Here are a few of the areas that you should focus on when crafting your email newsletter.

Plan It Out

To start off, you need to plan out your email newsletter. It seems easy to just write it up and send it out, but that won’t get you the result you’re looking for. First, know what kind of newsletter you want to send.

Whatever the focus of your email newsletter will be, keep it consistent. If you’re sending out a newsletter focused on business tactics and tips, you shouldn’t include a recipe for your grandmother’s cornbread.

You also have to give your customers a reason to sign up for your newsletter. You can incentivize them by offering a discount or coupon. Once you do that, be sure to set expectations from the get go, as for how often you’ll be sending newsletters and what content the readers can expect.

You should also figure out the look of your email newsletter. Pick a color scheme, one that follows the same look as your official website. You should stick to this color scheme going forward. You should also pick out a newsletter template that you’ll stick to. This will make your newsletters predictable for your readers.

Start Strong

With everything planned out and ready to go, you can finally write your newsletter. Nothing will kill your open rate like not starting strong. The first thing most of your readership will see is the subject line. These are statistics from leading data about newsletters:

• 35% of the recipients will open an email newsletter based solely on the subject line.
• 69% of people report emails as spam based on subject lines. That means your email subject line has the power to make or break you.
• 82% of marketers say a personalized subject line leads to more opens
• 75% of experts agree that a personalized subject line drives higher click-through rates.

Consider a few subject line options and try testing them out. Over time, you’ll hone your skills and know what will work best for your readers.

Along with making your subject line engaging, you have to pay attention to the opening of your email to grab their attention. If they aren’t interested in what you have to say, they’ll click away.

Context Clues

The content of your newsletter is crucial to building a successful following rather than having a bunch of people unsubscribe. To set yourself up for success, you need to connect with the reader, showing them how your brand and your products can provide them something of value or improve their lives.

Keep your content and your design short and simple so the message of your newsletter is clear. This will also help you personalize your content.

Throughout your newsletter, stick to the goal and focus of your newsletter. If you are jumping between topics or trying to cover too much ground, you’ll lose your audience. Instead, focus on being relevant.

Whether it’s highlighting new products or teaching your readers how to do something, make sure you’re on topic and relevant, it’ll matter to the reader. You want to keep your newsletter about 90% educational and 10% promotional.

Another thing you can do to connect with your reader is to offer a behind-the-scenes look at your operation. Introduce them to your workers. Show them your packed stock room. Send them pictures of your notes. Whatever your behind-the-scenes view is, give them a peek. It’ll help them feel a part of your business.

Visuals

While the content of your newsletter is critical to keeping your readers reading, visuals can certainly help. Adding simple things like pictures, graphics,, and animations can give you new ways of condensing information in an easy-to-read format. You might also consider using a brand mascot that helps with brand recognition.

An important part to adding visuals is adding alternative text to them. Better known as alt text, this is a way to add a short description of your visuals in case your readership has their images turned off for emails or in case you have readers with visual impairments.

This will also keep you from having chunks of blank space in your newsletter, keeping it more visually appealing and easier to read.

Nail The Closing

Just like you need to start strong, you have to finish strong. Consider closing with an offer, discount, or coupon. This will help incentivize your readers to keep reading in the hopes of another savings.

You might also have the offer connected with your primary call to action. Making sure you only have a single call to action is important or you’ll split the deck on what people choose to do.

You need to include links to your brand’s social media pages. This further allows your readers to engage with your brand. It can also help you in offering social proof, or demonstrating that a large group of people your readers trust would recommend and use your brand. This can improve the chances of your readers making a purchase.

Final Touches

Once you’ve sent the newsletter, you have to track, test, and optimize each one. That’s how you will know what to use in the future. You also have to come up with a way to send your email newsletters consistently. If you aren’t sending them on a schedule, your readers will likely miss them in their inbox.

As you do these things, you’ll find your email newsletters becoming your favorite marketing tactic. Along with marketing, it’s a way to connect with and form a relationship with your customer base. This will help you as a brand to grow and thrive.

Romance is in the air and it’s time to celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day once again. During a pandemic, it can be difficult to know how to celebrate appropriately. But this year, businesses can mark the holiday with a paper or digital Valentine’s Day campaign that celebrates love, affection, and a promise of a future together. Put your own spin on these five ideas and make an impression on your customers this Valentine’s Day.

If You Ship A Product: Embrace The Personal

Some businesses (especially small businesses) already include personalized or handwritten notes as part of their product packaging. It’s a great way to show your customer you care about them as an individual customer, and that you appreciate their business.

In the weeks before Valentine’s Day, include a paper valentine in all orders shipped out to your customers. How personal the message will be depends on the size of your businesses (you might not have time to send a handwritten note with each order, and that’s okay!). Consider including a picture of a company pet with a sweet message, or send “Best Wishes For A Happy Valentine’s Day!” Don’t forget to include your customer’s first name.

If Your Business Is Online: Show Your Love Digitally

For businesses that don’t ship products directly to customers, there are plenty of other ways to share the Valentine’s Day spirit, but digitally. Launch a Valentine’s campaign by adapting your original marketing posts for the holiday. Use Valentine’s-oriented (hearts, flowers, chocolates) images in your social media posts, on your website, and in your marketing emails.

You could also do a “Countdown To Valentine’s Day” and include a cute picture with a quote, or highlight one of your services for each day. Share photos of your office decorations and ask your customers how they’re celebrating this year.

Host A Valentine’s Charity Match

Spreading the love just got a lot better. Host a charity match where for every dollar spent (on specific products or during a specific time frame; it’s up to you!) you match the contribution and donate it to a charity of your choice.

Showing your customers you care about your community indicates that you are a business with values. If you care enough to donate, then you probably care enough to offer a great product or service, and a great customer service experience as well.

Donating to a charity for Valentine’s Day shows you love and care for more than just the bottom line. It’s a great way to showcase the mission behind your business.

Celebrate The Singles

For many who are single, Valentine’s Day can be an isolating holiday. You can develop your Valentine’s marketing campaign to include content that makes single people feel bad about not being in a romantic relationship.

Choose a day or two to highlight self-care for people who are single and people who are in relationships during the Valentine’s season. If there’s a way to tie in your product or service to self-care, that’s fantastic! Let your customers know how they can put their health and needs first with your business.

Share Your Appreciation

Valentine’s Day is all about showing love and appreciation. It’s a great opportunity for you to show how much you value your customers. You can send a simple message of thanks to your customers, letting them know how much you love being in your business and how they make that possible.

You can also show your appreciation by offering a valuable coupon. Or you can use a “Share the Love this Valentine’s Day” message to offer discounts to customers who refer a friend.

Whatever direction you go, make sure to let your customers know you appreciate them and that you want to thank them for helping make your business possible!

In Conclusion

By sending personalized paper messages, running a digital Valentine’s Day campaign, hosting a Valentine’s Day charity match, celebrating the singles, and showing your appreciation, you can reveal more of your personality to your customers. Giving your customers a reason to connect to you is a great way to grow your business!

Hello everyone!
The New Year has kicked off, bringing new challenges, experiences and successes to us all in some form or another.

Here at Flocksy, we are dedicated to helping your business knock it out of the park in the coming year, and continuing to make the creative projects on your to do list not just easy, but fun as well.

We are confident that exciting things are ahead, for both your business and ours, as we pave new roads together in 2021!  

Sincerely,

Sam Ryan 

CEO/Co-founder 

Featured team member design of the month:

This cool custom brand graphic was drawn from scratch by Flocksy team member Sunardi for a current client

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Having a social media presence can be the most significant and influential boon to your marketing business and overall brand. If you’re trying to secure a massive amount of followers, the key is to know when to post, who’s in your network, and what platform you wish to shout to the world. Timing is everything with social media.

Forget about person to person, eye to eye, and face to face contact. The new connection is all about who’s online and when, which makes social media a necessity in everyone’s lives. The collective’s social media consciousness has amped up in the wake of society’s overwhelmed, introverted ways of doing business.

Oftentimes, users behind the screen feel more at ease in their relationships and conversations than in an up close and personal situation.

Why The Need For Influence?

The effect of social media on business marketing and overall communication efforts shows that the ability to evolve and be present in real life social situations, or a coming-of-age business progression isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When you want to influence the public-at-large, in today’s world, the best measures are through an influential and engaging platform. Go viral, by all means. 

Answers lie within each social media platform, network, capabilities, and the audience’s perceptions of each. During the onset of Facebook in 2007, it was simple and user-friendly, and boasted no measures of trying to outscore competitors. It simply became a venue where people from all over the world could connect, discover, and be friends.

How times have changed! Not only has Facebook grown to be a billion dollar business, but LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and numerous other social mainstream connections are always on the cusp of something greater, more exciting, and definitely more influential in the industry’s platform.

If this evolution continues, the social media world of connecting and relating will surpass what ancestors never thought possible: Social media is the new handshake and sharing of a glass of wine.

The Effect Of Social Media In Marketing

Whether you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so, social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Its ability to transform a conversation and subsequent emotional wellness is highly documented. However, social media has a dark side.

There’s been studies and research of users who swear by their onscreen connections and how social media fosters anxiety, depression, false narratives, and possibly liabilities unforseen in real time. Whatever you post on a daily basis gets scrutinized by your peers, by your family, and by your employers.

It’s no wonder that people get upset when they’ve been unfriended or disconnected, or unliked in certain circles, and this goes for all media platforms. Going forward in the world of social media will see a rise in the world’s population engagement. The growth rate is exponential and it’s only going to expand by leaps and bounds. 

Marketing and advertising everywhere and anywhere depends on a message ranking high on social media. It’s become a distraction and attraction of the healthiest kind in business, trends, and brands. There’s LinkedIn, which has notoriously been the platform for business owners, employers, and employees alike.

Connections made on LinkedIn typically follow a path of the latest trends in business, job placements, scenarios relating to what’s happening on Wall Street or within our economy, and users posting their own job celebrations and messages. It’s with these daily communications that LinkedIn remains at the top of the heap for connecting with the like-minded in business.

Twitter, on the other hand, is an entity all on its own. Recently, the major hub of quick messages and knee jerk responses has come under the spotlight due to their inability to censor what’s proper and what’s harmful to citizens around the world.

Twitter was designed to be something of a bold and brash way to deliver responses and comments. It’s out of control and potentially damaging to society as a whole. Doubtful it’s going anywhere downstream, as Twitter’s following gets more users every day relying on the hashtags to promote their message.

Instagram is owned by Facebook, and has surpassed primary users based on the ability to use images to tell a story. It’s easy, it’s exciting, and it gleams with gloss and shimmer. For those not on Instagram and continue to regularly post on Facebook, there’s a sense of missing out on attracting those connections who solely rely on Instagram and have abandoned Facebook for one reason or another.

The Etiquette Of Social Media

Before the explosiveness of social media and users depending on it to be at the forefront of their main connecting tool, each company involved spearheaded a type a sort of ‘launch’ outline that social media was to be used to find a job, search for old friends, show vacation photos, display celebrations of family life, and have healthy discussions on what’s trending in the mainstream.

Unfortunately, social media has gone through a metamorphosis that includes hate, criminal activity, divisiveness, silly antics that turn users off, dating and mating, and misquoted or misdated information. There’s been an avalanche of users posting unresearched, untrue, and unmitigated thoughts and comments. As much of a positive tool that social media helps society’s lives on the daily, it also has a dark side.

As a marketer, let’s hope that your momentum with social media is rooted in proper dialogue that includes knowledgeable banter, intelligent data and research, resounding ideas, humorous memes, and sites that are worthy to join.

The Finale

As everyday postings and hashtags, and the common word about an individual’s life, is publicized, social media continues to rank as the number one platform for inspiring and engaging an audience. Your status spreads like wildfire, your influence is revered in numerous social circles or groups, and because of modern technology in society, your livelihood is also up for public debate.

Don’t let that dissuade you. If anything, the world of social media is here to stay. The audience engagement is something our current lives cannot do without, and if there’s anything to gain from a social media platform, it’s the ability to see and be seen.

Here’s to success by keeping the conversation and connection thriving!

You’ve come up with a brilliant idea for your next marketing campaign. You know exactly how you want to sell your product: the features you want to highlight, the unique selling proposition you’re going to emphasize, and the marketing copy you’re going to use.

But there’s just one problem: you don’t have time to develop the campaign for multiple platforms. Your to-do list is a mile long, and adding more marketing tasks to it is going to over complicate your life. You can’t delegate the task to anyone else: it’s all up to you. Where should you focus your marketing efforts?

Should you write the campaign for Instagram? Facebook? Twitter? TikTok? Or email?

Taking a look at the statistics can help you to find out exactly why you should prioritize using email for your marketing campaigns.

Do Customers Open Their Emails?

We know that email has been around for years. But is it the most effective way to reach customers?

What’s the first thing you do when you log on to your computer? For many people, the answer is that they immediately check their email. In fact, 99% of email users check their inbox every single day.

Statistics show us that not only do 99% of consumers check their email every day, but workers spend, on average, 28% of their workweek reading or responding to emails. That’s a lot of time spent looking at their inbox.

However, sometimes marketing emails are prevented from reaching consumer inboxes. Why? The spam filter sends them straight to no-man’s land.

Don’t give up on email yet, though: there’s good news. Email clients have become more effective at separating spam messages from genuine marketing communications. Therefore, nowadays it’s more likely that your outreach emails will land where they’re supposed to be: in your customer’s inbox, ready to capture their attention.

Email vs. Social Media

Some people might be tempted to think that, even though emails are landing in customers’ inboxes, there’s still no comparison between the power of email marketing and the power of social media. To find out for sure, let’s take a look at the statistics.

According to Hootsuite, 45% of the global population is active on social media. That’s a good chunk, but it doesn’t quite compare to email users.

What’s even more interesting is that on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, companies are seeing an engagement rate of less than .6%. People will see an ad, or the word “Sponsored,” and just scroll past the post. Even if they’re following your business account, they might not read your posts.

On average, customers open their emails at a rate of 22.86% and click-through at a rate of 3.71%. That’s much better than the social media engagement rate of less than .6%!

Social media might be flashy and fun, but it’s not as reliable as email. Algorithms might work in your favor; or, they might bury your carefully-crafted messaging so that it never reaches your potential customers’ eyes.

You’ve spent precious time and energy working your marketing campaigns. Don’t waste your effort by relying on social media algorithms to convey your message to the right customers.

It’s also important to realize that a social media platform can delete your account at any time (remember those pesky Terms and Conditions you agreed to?). That means that you might lose all your followers, and all those potential leads could disappear.

When you build your email list, you own it. Customers can unsubscribe (and they do), but ultimately, you are still in control.

How To Leverage Email To Your Advantage

We know that consumers consistently check their emails and that you have more control over email than you do over social media.

So, how do you take the power of email and put it to good use?

The first step you should take is to analyze your email list and create a segmented version. Segment your potential leads into groups based on the factors that make the most sense for your business. Consider their purchase history, geographic location, demographics, industry, occupation, position or seniority level, past engagement activity, location in the sales funnel, and the amount of time since the last brand interaction.

Once you have your segmented email list, you can change your messaging. Don’t use a general, vague sales message. Craft your marketing email so that it specifically appeals more to each segment.

Then, after you have your email crafted just for each segmented list, you should further personalize them as much as you can. Fortunately, there’s software available that can help you easily personalize the subject line, preview text, email body, call-to-action, and sign-off.

Keep in mind that recipients are 26% more likely to open emails that have subject lines tailored specifically to them.

Remember, above all else your emails should be valuable to your customers. Don’t give them a reason to unsubscribe by sending too many emails or emails that are worthless!

Conclusion

Ultimately, email is an extremely powerful tool because people check their inboxes daily, because social media is unpredictable, and because emails can be usefully tailored to segments of your customer list.

Don’t believe the pessimistic and incorrect idea that because email isn’t trendy, it’s not worth your time. Email is a fantastic way for companies to communicate with their customers and to prove how their products can meet their customer’s needs.