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Day 16: The complete guide to Instagram marketing

08/03/202101/19/2016 by scmarketing

Why Instagram matters to marketers

Listen up, Instagram is revolutionising the visual web as we know it. The platform, bought by Facebook in 2012 for a nice 1 billion dollars, is a simple app that allows its users to share artsy photos in an instant. With over 200 million active users and 60+ million photos shared each day, it’s evident that consumers can’t get enough of it. In turn, brands like L’Oreal, GE and Warby Parker have achieved success marketing on Instagram. The number of businesses exploring using Instagram, as a means of marketing, has grown exponentially over the last decade.

So, how can you tap into Instagram to strengthen your brand awareness? This guide offers research backed best practices for developing an Instagram strategy. we explore examples from top brands that are using Instagram to win over their audience.

1. Peel back the curtain on your life at your company
Post images of your desk, the view from your office, or post a video at the company Christmas party. Let your followers feel like they know what’s happening at your company.

2. Think DIY
Educate your audience by creating a collage of product images, or show the creation process of your service/product through a video.

3. Show travel motifs
Instagram users love landscapes and photos of the open road. Find stylish ways to showcase your products in the natural environment.

4.Make bitesize versions of existing content
From a snippet of a TV interview or a quote from your latest blog post.

5. Think outside the box
Don’t just post a plain picture of your product, think of creative ways to showcase your products.

6. Food Pictures
Post overhead pictures of your meal, trust us, people love food.

7. Hashtags #
Use relevant hashtags to help people find your images.

8. Post content featured by your consumers.
We’ll talk more about this later.

Monitor metrics

How Much traffic is the link in your bio getting? Gather Social referral data from Google analytics.
What is the average/ current range of likes that your photos receive?
What is the average number of comments that your photos receive?
What is the ratio of comment and likes for you photos?
How many followers do you have?
Evaluate your branded hashtags. How frequently are they used?

Quick tips

Keep in mind that all photos uploaded must be of a high quality, don’t just post for the sake of posting.Instagram has a variety of filters to choose from within the app. The Mayfair filter results in the most engagement, whereas the Toaster filter results in the least engagement.
Don’t feel limited to those 20 filters. Many brands opt to edit and capture photos outside the app itself. Furthermore, don’t limit yourself to only uploading pictures. You should also use other features, such as Instagram stories, to connect with your audience.

Build community and affinity through consumer engagement

Our study found that top Brands’ Instagram posts generated a per follower engagement rate of 4.21%. that means Instagram delivered these brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more that Twitter,” Nate Elliot, Forrester.

A Brilliant way to boost engagement is asking questions to your audience. Take a picture of two products and ask them which one they like better.

Remember to keep the conversation going. Don’t forget to reply to your followers’ content. Participate in popular hashtags that are relevant to your business.

Top 5 hashtags

#love
#instagood
#me
#tbt
#follow

Harnessing user-generated content is quickly becoming one of the most effective tactics used by social media marketers.

Consumers share and trust real pictures and content more than direct brand outreach. Plus, you reduce the amount of work dedicated to producing all those images and videos, while drastically increasing your engagement rate.

At least half the photos that Ben & Jerry’s shares through their account today are from community member – Instagram business blog.

Post content from your Instagram profile to your Twitter account

Cross posting straight from the app can look messy on Twitter. Instead, upload the image separately to Twitter for easier sharing. Link your Instagram account to your Facebook page. Share your content directly to Facebook.

Share photos with blog posts

Does your brand have a blog? If not, you should. Read why here. You can embed Instagram photos and make it easy for fans to follow you, no matter where they find you. Use the Instagram app to pull photos right from Instagram

We hope you found this guide useful and good luck with your Instagram Marketing!

Social Media marketing agency

Incorporating social media into your marketing strategy can raise brand awareness and online presence. If you feel you need support in getting your business noticed on social media, then get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss your needs further.

Day 15: 5 steps to utilise your CMS for SEO edit

11/08/201901/15/2016 by scmarketing

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a major, ongoing concern for any website, and making sure your site is structured and formatted correctly to achieve the best search ranking possible is very important. Luckily, if your site utilises a Content Management system (CMS), you can use its built in features to make sure you are using the best SEO methods.

Here are 5 ways to make sure your CMS site is receiving the best rankings.

1.Control the URL for every page

The automatic URL a CMS creates for the pages on your website won’t always be formatted in a way that the search engines can read, therefore not telling them what’s on the page. This can be a big problem, for as far as the search engine is aware you could be talking about flying bananas, and not something related to your business. However, a CMS site will allow you to manually define the URL for each page, so you can be sure that the URL contains specific keywords for the pages actual content. This will the help the search engines understand the context of your page, which will better inform how it should be ranked. The URL name is always going to be important, as it’s a key factor in creating a web presence.

2.Define Metadata

Metadata is incredibly important for further telling the search engines what is on your page. This includes the title, keywords and description. A CMS provides the capability to define the metadata manually for each page, helping you tell the search engine about your important content.

3.Set up redirects

Creating redirects from one URL to another is something that a CMS site will let you do, making sure anyone trying to access a page which has changed its URL will be sent to the right place. This is especially helpful following a site redesign, which often uses new URLs for new content. Setting up redirects from a page’s old URL to the new URL will make sure the search engines don’t find any broken links and penalise you for this.

4.Broken link reports

A CMS site will inform you any time there’s a broken link. Links to pages that have moved or changed can hurt your search engine ranking, so regularly reviewing these reports and fixing the issues with broken links is essential to make sure you’re getting the best SEO value.

5.Dynamic sitemap

A site map is a page that lists and links to every page of your website. This is essential for the search engines being able to index all your site’s content. A CMS site provides easy functionality for automatically creating and updating dynamic sitemap using XML or HTML. By using this feature, you can ensure that the search engines are always able to access your content and understand your site’s structure.

If you successfully use these features provided by your CMS, you can easily ensure that the search engines will index all the pages on your site, by providing them with all the right information, you will be able to focus your attention on creating great quality and engaging content.

If you have any questions please contact us.

Day 13: External links

08/03/202101/10/2016 by scmarketing

What is the importance of external links to SEO

An external link is a link that points at an external domain.

• Top SEOs believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power.

• Search engines consider them as a third party vote.

• Top SEOs don’t believe that “title” link attribute is used for ranking purposes.

Many top SEOs agree that getting external links is one of the most important strategies to attaining high ranks. This comes from the idea that getting external links is one of the hardest metrics to manipulate, and therefore, one of the best ways for search engines to determine the popularity of a given webpage. This idea was first used by the search engine Alta Vista and then later improved by Google.

If you think of external links as being votes, every time someone linked to your site, it would be like receiving a vote. If you only had a few links pointing back to your site, the search engines would think that the information on your site isn’t very good, as not many people will be ‘voting’ for you. Just like receiving votes, the more you have the more you will succeed, and in this case, getting to the top of search engine rankings.

Today, the major search engines use many advanced metrics to determine the value of external links. Some of the metrics include:
• The trustworthiness of the linking domain.
• The popularity of the linking page.
• The relevancy between the source page and the target page.
• The anchor text used in the link.
• The amount of links to the same page on the source page.
• The amount of domains that link to the target page.
• The amount of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page.
• The ownership relationship between the source and target domains.

In addition to these metrics, external links are important for two main reasons:

1. Popularity

Whereas traffic is a “messy” metric and difficult for search engines to measure accurately, external links are both a more stable metric and easier to measure. This is because traffic numbers are stored in private server logs while external links are publicly visible and easily stored. For this reason and others, external links are a great way of determining the popularity of a web page. This metric is combined with relevancy metrics to determine the best results for a given search query.

2. Relevancy

Links provide relevancy clues that are incredibly valuable for search engines. The anchor text used in links is usually written by humans, who can interpret web pages better than computers and is usually highly reflective of the content of the page being linked to. This will be a short phrase (e.g., “Online Marketing Croydon”) or the URL of the target page (e.g., http://www.online-marketing-croydon.com).

The target and source pages and domains cited in a link also provide valuable relevancy metrics for search engines. Links tend to point to related content. This helps search engines establish knowledge hubs on the Internet that they can then use to validate the importance of a given web document.

External Recources
http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link

Digital marketing expert Croydon

We are a digital marketing agency based in South London working with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector to help get them noticed online. Drop us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826.

Day 12: Blog, blog and blog

07/05/202112/04/2015 by scmarketing

The importance of blogging for your SEO strategy

A lot of website owners are sceptical of having a “blog” page as they believe a blog is something for teenagers.

You should forget this misconception as a blog is probably the most important page to ensure you get noticed among the rest of your competition.

Remember, you can always call it “news”, “what’s new”, or whatever you wish.

You don’t have to spend long writing the articles, they can just be short snappy updates, posted one or two times a week. Obviously the more you do the better results you will have, but as long as they have all the right content, they will work magic for your site’s performance.

Here are 4 reasons why you need to blog:

• Drive traffic to your website

• Increase your SEO/ SERP

• Position your brand as an industry leader

• Develop better customer relationships

Drive traffic to your website:

Your blog gives you the opportunity to create relevant content for your customers. Use this as a marketing tactic to drive traffic back to your website.

Make the blog on your website the foundation for all of your social media platforms.

Your business might be on Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, LinkedIn, or anywhere else. Post links – with relevant visuals – of your blog articles to your social sites. Give your social followers a reason to click through to your website.

Additionally, post inbound links directly in your blog articles, to drive traffic to specific landing pages of your website.

Increase your SEO/ SERP:

Blogs increase your SEO. Fresh content is still a key to beating your competitors in the search engine results page.

Use keywords in your articles. List out the keywords, topics, and categories you want your business to be found with. Use these words, and related expressions when writing your posts.

Of course, whether you actively seek these out or not, blogging regularly about your business, industry, product or customer lifestyle will naturally increase your search keywords. Being intent about your words will only increase results.

Keywords and topics on your website are a significant way in which Google (and other search engines) find your site for these searched words.

Position your brand as an industry leader:

Well written articles demonstrate your company as an industry leader. By posting topics which resonate with your market and show your knowledge, you are marketing your skills for your business, service or product too.

If you are a retailer, for example, write blog posts about your products. Your customers will get to know you as the knowledge source for the products they want.

If you are B2B, post articulate, well researched articles about your service. Become the hub, or the place to be, for your industry.

You are building trust, too. The more you can show that you are well-versed in your field, the more likely your consumerr will trust you to supply what they need.

Your customers additionally benefit from learning via the information you provide them.

Develop better customer relationships:

Blogs provide another source to deepen the connection with your customer. By connecting directly on your website, your clients are able to get to know your business or product from the comfort of your online home base.

Use this. Again, build trust by being a source of information. Consumers like to be informed, and appreciate that you are the one teaching them.

Additionally, just as on your other social sites, respond to comments and interact with your consumer. If they have questions about a product you are writing about, respond to them directly on your website. Unlike many social sites, a blog is generally searchable on your site for some time. Your website comments last longer than on a Twitter response or Facebook post. Other customers will see your interactions too.

Content marketing agency

Talk to us about your content marketing needs and we’ll ensure that the best combination of channels and tactics are utilised to make you stand out from the crowd. A reliable digital marketing agency in Croydon, Smart Cow will be glad to answer any further questions.