Published on: 03 May 2019
Last Updated on: 23 March 2021
Stories are everywhere, look around you, wherever you are, there is a story. They are no longer confined in the movies and books, stories have gone beyond such confines. Think about a tale that captivated you last, maybe it was in a blog post and that grabbed your attention, captured your mind and emotions. Despite anything else going around you, it had your full attention. That tells you how powerful a tool it is and why it’s indispensable in your marketing strategies. The best platform to tell stories and win visitors through social media marketing.
Importance of Storytelling in Social Media Marketing:
Continue reading and see how you can revolutionize your marketing approach
Showcase your uniqueness:
Beyond the headshot and some catchy slogans, people want something that is interesting. They are tired of photos and videos that every other company uses to woo visitors; they want something that is captivating. For instance, on an ordinary day, you could take a few snapshots of your work area and probably share a few tips on what motivates you. Such mini-stories will tell people how serious and how dedicated you are to productivity. Whatever industry you are in, you need to showcase what you have and how skilled and creative you are.
Take advantage of visuals:
Videos and generally visuals are powerful tools that you can rely on for social media success and storytelling. Having such content makes your posts stand out while adding another layer to your narrative. According to research, visuals could increase visitors’ willingness to read by more than 80%. In fact, big brands believe that visuals are crucial to how the company’s brand story is relayed.
Put yourself in the shoes of the reader:
You have your post ready for posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media. Why don’t you spice it up with some story surrounding it? This will resonate with your followers and many will find a reason for investing in your product. Look at the issues that your customers have and let your tailored PR team do for you mini-stories that focus on their needs and ensure that the stories are solution-based. Again, you need to look into how you can add some emotion and intrigue to the pedestrian posts. Most importantly, you must ensure that all your stories have the consumer at the center of it all. Get creative with the story and this will improve the engagement. If for instance, you are doing a pitch, the creativity in it will tell a prospect whether you are the best fit or not.
Make it personal:
Research shows that personal marketing is on the rise. This is because people are likely to trust another person more than they trust a faceless brand. People want to hear the story from family, friends than from a mere advertisement. A story ensures that you create a personal brand that resonates with your audience. A story is incredibly important in that it shows people the face behind the posts.
In every one of your posts, ensure that you’ve some captivating story that will keep your social media audience glued and yearning for more. Get a good PR company or hire a leading social media agency to help you generate stories that will make a difference in your marketing.
I enjoy writing and I write quality guest posts on topics of my interest and passion. I have been doing this since my college days. My special interests are in health, fitness, food and following the latest trends in these areas. I am an editor at Content Rally.
Marketing is an essential part of business growth because people will buy your service only when they know about your existence. And people will know about you only when you promote your business on various platforms where they are looking for your product or services. Therefore, marketing tools play an essential role in spreading brand awareness.
Digitization has provided an equal platform for every large and small business; all you need is the right knowledge and skills to use marketing tools to grow your business.
What are Marketing Tools?
Marketing tools are techniques, strategies, and materials used by marketing specialists of brands to create, enhance, and promote their products and services in order to expand their visibility. They are used for market research, generating leads, data analysis, content creation, SEO, and other categories of marketing.
To increase productivity and make marketing time cost-efficient, there are various marketing tools in the form of software that helps you with various activities related to marketing.
Here We Have Listed Ten Must-Have Marketing Tools:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
HubSpot CRM
Zendesk
Social Media Tools
Buzzsumo
Buffer
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
SEMrush
Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension
Content Creation and Design Tools
Canva
Adobe Spark
Lead Generation Tools
Unbounce
Instapage
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
These tools let you interact with your customers through data analysis of gathered information. They compile data from various communication channels such as the company's websites, calls, emails, live chats, and other marketing materials posted on social media platforms. The data analysis helps a business know about customer behavior, their needs, and demands to provide them better services, which is an integral part of growing a business as they help to form business growth strategies to retain customers and drive sales.
1. HubSpot CRM: being free, every small business can have access to this incredible free tool. The tool saves a lot of time for the sales team as it gives you complete visibility of your entire sales pipeline on a clean and visual dashboard. It lets you connect to the prospects through free meeting scheduling, live chat, email templates, click-to-call functionality, and more.
2. Zendesk: it is an easy-to-love sales tool that will boost the productivity of your sales team, make data-driven decisions, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. Additionally, you can build and manage a pipeline that aligns with your business.
Social Media Tools:
social media helps to expand enormously, as most of the world's population is an active member of at least one social media platform where you can connect to them on a personal level. Therefore, it is highly important to manage what you post and how your followers respond to your content. Social media tools help you schedule your posts and get the right analytics from the posts, even from the channels where it can be hard to get the information.
3. Buzzsumo: The tool explores premium content that can help you get more likes, links, and shares. It analyses a vast amount of data to enhance your social media marketing strategies. Moreover, it helps you find influencers who can be an asset to your campaign. Another most important feature of the tool is that it tracks comments and trends to make a real-time connection with your audience.
4. Buffer: it is one of the most affordable and intuitive tools to manage your social media activity. It analyzes the data, helps your plan and schedule your posts, filters out important comments, and responds quickly to them. Additionally, it lets you track down your activity and analyze your progress to make better strategies.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
SEO is an integral part of digital marketing, as only an optimized website of content is visible on the search engines such as Google, which are the primary gateways for customers to enter a conversation with your brand. Therefore, you need SEO tools to manage and plan various SEO-related tasks such as keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page ranking.
5. SEMrush: It is an award-winning tool used worldwide as a single platform to do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing. Specifically for SEO, it uncovers millions of local, and national keywords, analyzes any domain's backlinking profile, tracks your SERP position on a daily basis, and runs technical SEO audits.
6. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension: this add-on browser is easy to install and is compatible with both Chrome and Firefox. The extension shows monthly search volume, CPC, and competition data of keywords on multiple websites. Therefore, it will save you time that you can utilize to strengthen your business growth strategies.
Content Creation and Design Tools:
Content such as social images, logos, blog posts, or eBooks is the most influential way to attract people's attention to your brand. And there are many tools to create them.
7. Canva: the tool lets you create professional designs with premium features such as brand kit and background remover. It lets you can plan, create, and edit the content on your own or with your team. Additionally, the Built-in comments feature helps you communicate, work, and resolve suggestions in real-time. Therefore, with Canva, you can create world-class designs and share them with the world in just a few clicks.
8. Adobe Spark: it is a collection of three web/mobile apps, namely Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video, to allow the creation of social graphics, flyers, logos webpages, videos in various themes, and other types of content in no time. It has thousands of templates that any beginner can use to create effective content.
Lead Generation Tools:
To expand your business, you need to generate leads, and it is the most challenging part of marketing. Lead generation tools will help you make the lead generation process easy and simple as their automated features increase the process of conversion.
9. Unbounce: with this tool, you can launch overlays on top of any web page that has a call-to-action feature. You can customize the triggers and targeting rules to choose who sees the offers and when. This feature helps to make your brand reach the relevant audience whose chances of conversion are maximum. Additionally, you can personalize your overlays by making your copy adaptable to what your audience searches for.
10. Instapage: the tool lets you create and optimize relevantly, on-brand, mobile-responsive post-click landing pages and experiences without the help of a developer. It helps to increase visitor engagement and conversion with unique landing page experiences for every ad and targeted audience.
The main motive behind using these tools is to enhance the productivity of your sales department. You can make the best use of these marketing tools by hiring an expert who knows them in and out to save your time by focusing on your product and services and letting them do the rest of the job.
The best part about these marketing tools is that they are affordable, and some of them even offer free trials and templates. So, even if you are short on funds, you can still make use of these marketing tools to grow your small business.
Author Bio:
Joe Martin is a long-time contributor in the tech industry as a leader at Adobe, CMO of CloudApp, and SVP at Scorpion. With his business and marketing degress from Utah and Stanford and his work in tsech he brings a unique balance of strategy and execution to help businesses large and small grow.
There is nothing that drives business success better than social media marketing. With billions of users signed in to different platforms at different times, there is no doubt that reaching your target audience is not a vicious cycle.
However, you might scribble social media at the helm of the list that contains the tools you will use for your digital marketing plans, but you will not get desired results if you don’t do everything right. With a recent study showing that social media referrals contribute to over 30% of a website’s traffic, this calls for you to be armed with the latest tips and techniques that will place you ahead of your rivals.
Have you read an array of blogs, sites, and other sources of information, but you tend not to achieve social media marketing success that you desire? Stop stressing and keep reading! Below are a few social media strategies that nobody will tell you about.
5 Unusual Social Media Tips That No One Will Know About:
1. Write long posts :
Weird, right?
You are used to writing a few sentences that explain your products or services and how to purchase them and you consider your work done, huh? To achieve more success in social media, you need to write longer posts that will give more valuable information to your target audiences.
If the primary social media platform for your business is Twitter that has failed to back down on its 140-character limit, you can use it alongside other platforms such as Facebook and Google+ that allow longer conversations. This way, you will have the capacity to engage more with your audiences.
2. Come up with Facebook groups :
Today, organic search for official pages for brands continue to diminish among users. Therefore, you need to adopt a new strategy if your desire is to remain relevant in your industry. You can do this by creating Facebook pages. With them, group members will be able to receive notifications whenever you update new information.
3. Include a personal touch on your tweets :
With thousands of feeds that continue streaming with no end on tweeter, most of your tweets can go without notice. However, if you customize them with catchy font color and line breaks, you will capture the attention of your audiences. In a bid to break the monotony of short-form messages on this platform, you can include a fun symbol or fun emoji, a small undertaking that can see your brand gain a competitive edge over your competitors.
4. Don’t rely on social media platforms :
Social media users have their personal preferences. Since Facebook recorded a user population of over 2 billion people last year, don’t tend to think that it is the only platform you can easily reach your target audience. No! Signing up for social media is free; hence you should take advantage of this fact and sign up for as many platforms as you can. Then, regularly share valuable information in as many networks as you can. Ultimately, your brand will gain a huge following which will lead to the attainment of your digital marketing goals and objectives.
5. Be weird!
Yes, social media is not a place to be serious at all times.
Unlike your competitors who will always be super-professional in their marketing bid, try as much as possible to be less formal and humorous. At times, share information that will make your audiences laugh, smile, and/or get inspired. This will make them admire the authenticity of your company, a move that will boost your authority and credibility.
When you implement the unusual techniques mentioned above, be ready for massive social media success that you will only measure using tools such as those found in this.
Read Also :
This Is Why Social Media Is Essential In The B2B Sales Process
How Social Media Can Boost Up The E-Commerce Industry
How To Master Social Media For Businesses & Entrepreneurs
Mailing lists have been one of the most cost-effective methods of targeted business promotion activities. Mailing lists will never become redundant in b2b because of the need for businesses to get in touch with other businesses. Nothing can change the need for soliciting new business through cold calling and email marketing efforts. And without contact details, it would not be possible to get in touch with the targeted entities to promote products and services.
Access to information on different categories of b2b entities :
One of the most important requirements in mailing lists is the need for having access to specific information about the b2b entities. Details such as the size of the business, exact nature of the business, accurate contact information, the domain of the business and other information are of great importance. A marketing effort that is targeted has better conversion rates of leads into actual business relationships. This is precisely why it is important to have a mailing list of companies by industry.
Making The Right Pitch To The Right Clientele :
Another advantage of using a segmented mailing list is the ability to create a pitch as per the needs of the targeted company. For instance, a business that needs to sell a service may have options and resources to handle both large-scale operations and operations on a smaller scale to meet the requirements of small-sized entities. However, when mass mailers or brochures are mailed out to clients, it may not be a good idea to mention services that are intended for another segment. By using a mailing list that is clearly segmented as per the size of business and volume, it is possible to send the relevant information alone. This will have a better chance of converting a lead, rather than sharing information that may not be relevant to everyone.
Mining Of Information From Credible Sources :
By using the services of the featured site, users get the advantage of information that is credible and verified. Most of the databases comprising records of our businesses and other businesses are compiled from public sources, cleaned, and verified before being made available to clients. This process of verifying and cleaning of information needs to be carried out by a dedicated team to offer the assurance of the accuracy of information. The featured site takes care to cross-check the information before making it available for users. This ensures that mail and calls do not bounce due to incorrect information.
Data for all industries and business :
The featured site offers mailing lists with data on most of the b2b categories of business that will be of use to businesses. Entities keen to tap into new territory will find the availability of credible information to be of great use in their marketing efforts. A business that manufactures products or makes available serves that can be used by all sectors of industries will find the need to make the right pitch to all industries. However, the pitches may itself differ from industry to industry, and this may require segmentation. With the availability of databases containing information about all aspects of the business, it is possible to identify the right resource who needs to be contacted. Marketing efforts differ across hierarchies in business. For instance, a c-level executive will need to be approached in a manner that is different from a manager.
Relationship building exercise :
Many businesses rely on mailing lists with the understanding that efforts to acquire new business may not actually succeed immediately. However, mature businesses are aware of the need for building relationships with clients over a period of time and using the relationship as a basis for converting the relationship into a business-client relationship. This can be achieved by dispatching informative newsletters and updates on the products and services, in addition to the latest information about the specific industry. By remaining in contact and engaging the b2b clients, it is possible that at some of the time in the future, the clients would find the need to use the service or the product. And it is also important to understand that clients may not necessarily avail of all the services or products, but may make a small beginning through a micro-conversion. This can slowly scale into a full-scale conversion.
