Tag: marketing

8 benefits of using an Instagram business account (and how to set it up)

Instagram is a must-have social media platform for many businesses, but do you need an Instagram business account?

The visuals-first app generates about 1 billion active monthly users and is particularly popular among consumers 34 and younger. Features have diversified since its founding in 2010, with Instagram Stories, Reels and more available to engage with your target audience.

You can opt for a personal or business account on Instagram. The platform has more than 200 million business accounts that users visit daily. In fact, about 90 percent of Instagram users follow at least one business.

The following are eight benefits of using an Instagram business account.

Scheduling posts

The ability to schedule posts due to having an Instagram business account is huge. Scheduling helps you save time and be more efficient as a content creator and publisher.

Various third-party applications, such as Hootsuite, can make it easy to connect and schedule away. Finding the right tool for you can make all the difference in your social media presence.

Check out these 11 free (or almost free) social media management tools that can help you do it all on social media with a limited budget.

Access to Instagram analytics

Data matters in digital marketing, particularly in social media, such as Instagram. It’s all about understanding your followers and what content resonates with them.

An Instagram business account gives you acces to dive deep into your audience’s profile views, your total reach, your post impressions and even the demographics of your followers.

With this information, you can pivot your content strategy accordingly.

Get a better understanding of Instagram Insights with our guide.

Instagram Shop features available

If your business sells products specifically, you’ll want to be able to leverage Instagram Shop features within your strategy.

With Shops, you can upload a product catalog, tag your products and (depending) you can even process sales directly within the Instagram app. In addition, you can set up: 

  • Collections of products (such as “new arrivals” or anything else that makes sense for your business)
  • Shoppable Reels
  • Brand affiliations that can then share and sell your products for a commission (with controllable permission for who can tag your products)

Plus, you’ll have additional insights data related to Instagram Shop specifically.

Ability to add a contact button

Instagram business accounts can add a contact button on your profile so that when a user clicks it, they can either email you, call you or view a map of your location.

You also can sync your public contact information with your Facebook business page, which means that when information needs to be updated, you only have to do so in one place.

In addition, Instagram business accounts can use action buttons, including “Order Food,” “Book Now” and “Reserve,” if appropriate for your business.

Showing your industry on your profile

With an Instagram business account, the industry you selected that best represents your business when creating your linked Facebook page will show on your Instagram profile.

Of course, this is editable within Instagram.

Adding links to your Instagram Stories

If you’re using a personal profile, the only clickable link you can share is on your profile. An Instagram business account changes this.

You get the option of adding link stickers to your Instagram Stories, which allow you to multiple images and/or videos in a vertical format, where you can layer on various doodles, text and/or interactive stickers. They last 24 hours before disappearing, but they can be pinned to your Instagram profile in Highlight groupings and last longer.

Since about 75 percent of Instagram users take action after looking at a post (such as visiting a website), this feature can help users easily do what you’re compelling them to do with your content.

Age verification

If your business is in a restricted industry (such as alcohol), your Instagram business account can set a minimum age. 

This is important because you can then ensure that you aren’t showing your content to potential underage Instagram users.

Instagram advertising

If you have a marketing budget to spend on your Instagram presence in any way, an Instagram business account will enable you to run advertising campaigns and boost posts on the platform.

Facebook and Instagram and intricately linked in this way. You can build campaigns in the Facebook (now Meta) Business Manager that can serve on both platforms.

In addition, Instagram Shoppable posts allow users to tap on product tags to view a full product description with a “Buy Now” button. This makes it easier than ever to purchase from your business through the app.

How to set up your Instagram Business Profile

In the Instagram app, navigate to “Settings,” then click “Account” and “Switch to Professional Account.”

You’ll want to select the category that best describes your business, and then select “Business.”

And that’s it! You’re ready to roll.

In conclusion

While there are big benefits to switching over to an Instagram business account, keep in mind that there are two features you will lose when you convert, which is the ability to:

  • Make your posts private
  • Link multiple Facebook profiles since you’ll only connect to your business’s Facebook page

Dive deeper to better understand the differences between personal, creator and business Instagram accounts.

Then, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 signs that your branding is broken

Your brand is your business’s identity. So, your branding is the reflection and culmination of your business’s personality, appearance, voice and overall vibe.

It takes about seven seconds for consumers to make an instant decision about whether or not they like and trust your brand. Keep in mind that consistent branding across all channels can increase your revenue between 10 percent and 20 percent. Brand consistency means that consumers get the same impression and experience when interacting with your business regardless of the marketing or communication channel.

A successful brand is clear, compelling and consistent.

Check out our nine tips if you need to build your brand from scratch.

But it’s entirely possible for a brand to not work how it’s intended, which can impact your overall consumer engagement and sales conversion rate. The following are five signs that your branding is broken.

No brand style guide

Think of a brand style guide as the rulebook for how your business presents itself to the world.

You can use your style guide as a reference to help maintain branding consistency no matter which of your team members is involved. About 59 percent of consumers prefer to buy from brands they trust, and consistency is a huge part of that.

Your style guide would include key branding elements, a collection of visual examples and more, depending on what you want and need.

Check out our five tips to create a brand style guide for your small business.

Your branding is visually inconsistent

Your visual brand identity includes your logo, company colors, chosen typography and any imagery that exudes the look and feel of your brand across all marketing channels. That includes your website, social media accounts and anything else.

As previously mentioned, a brand style guide can make a big difference on this front.

When done right, your company becomes unique and recognizable among your competitors. Visual branding consistency helps put your target audience at ease and builds trusting relationships over time.

Ask yourself:

  • Does your website reflect who your business truly is?
  • Are your typography, photo selections, colors and logos matching across all channels?
  • How do your visuals make your audience feel? Positive or negative?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then you know where to start.

Visuals are powerful. Check out these six ways that visuals can increase your email conversions.

Big drop in the middle of your sales funnel

Acquiring leads simply feels good for any small business. But if your increase in leads doesn’t result in an increase in revenue, there’s a disconnect.

If you’re noticing a drop within your sales funnel, it could mean that what you’re saying in your marketing is different than what you’re actually offering. Your messaging could be too aspirational. Take a look at where that conflict could be happening. Something inconsistent is happening in the messaging with your leads.

That being said, if you’re struggling to even get leads into your sales funnel, that’s a signal that your branding is broken as well. It means that your brand is not resonating at all with your target audience.

Check out the seven benefits of using a sales funnel in your digital marketing.

Obsession with your competition

Understanding your competition can benefit your business and marketing strategies. But there’s a difference between understanding your competition and obsessing over your competition.

If your branding exists mostly in relation to your competitors, who they are and what they’re doing, then you’re living in their shadow and not creating your own presence and identity.

Some signs of this include citing your competition in your marketing messages or spending a majority of your marketing planning discussing your competition.

But again, there is a time and place for analyzing your competition. Find out more about what a proper competitive analysis is and how you can start yours.

Lack of repeat business

If you’re bringing in new business but can’t build customer loyalty, this is another sign that your branding is broken.

Just a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to at least a 25 percent increase in profit. You want to keep your customers purchasing from you once you acquire them. But as important as it is, customer retention is a big challenge for many businesses.

There could be a brand disconnect that is holding your growth potential back.

Check out our six tips to improve your customer retention rate and grow your revenue as a result.

In conclusion

If your brand is broken, you can definitely fix it. You don’t have to ride it until the wheels fall off of it and your small business. While rebranding may cost some time and money upfront, the potential to reach more clients and generate more revenue is worth it.

Just make sure that you:

  • Define your business’s purpose, vision, mission and values.
  • Identify better, compelling brand messaging.
  • Upgrade all visual elements as needed.
  • Develop (and use) a brand style guide.

As you’re evaluating the effectiveness of your branding, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 benefits of using CRM software for small businesses

Businesses of all sizes consider CRM software as a near-vital tool because of its ability to make communications more consistent, efficient and relevant.

CRM (which stands for “customer relationship management”) software gathers customer interactions in one central place to improve the customer experience and overall customer satisfaction. Simply put, it helps businesses manage, track and organize their relationships with customers. CRM software stores customer data, such as user behavior, how long someone has been your customer, any purchasing records and potentially notes on sales interactions. This data can then be used to optimize your digital marketing strategy and processes. 

Because this type of software tracks the behavior and actions of your current and potential customers, it can then guide that consumer through your sales funnel, depending on how you decide to set it up.

It simply makes all of your customer interactions that much more effective. So, it’s not surprising that about 91 percent of companies with more than 11 employees now use CRM software.

Not convinced? The following are six benefits your small business can have by using CRM software.

Improved customer service

At the heart of CRM software is the intention to improve business-to-customer relationships.

Your CRM manages and organizes all your contacts while gathering important data points, such as demographics, purchase records and previous messages across all channels. This information is then easily accessible to anyone on your team who might need it, which ensures that your customer service representatives can easily understand every customer they interact with and reference past interactions, which provides a better experience for the customer.

In other words, access to relevant customer data empowers your customer service representatives to earn greater customer satisfaction.

Check out our six ways to improve customer responsiveness to boost your customer service even more.

Increased sales

Because CRM software can streamline your sales process with automation of key tasks and analysis of sales data within the same place, this can clearly help increase both your sales and productivity.

Lead nurturing, for example, can be an arduous and complicated process, but your CRM software can automatically manage this process, while also sending your team alerts for when they should reach out to the potential customer. You can then ensure that you’re getting the right messages out to each contact based on his or her buyer behavior and actions.

It’s all about establishing a step-by-step sales process that can easily be tweaked along the way as needed to optimize for sales.

See our 16 tips to help increase your sales conversion rate for inspiration.

Boost your customer retention

Customer retention is incredibly important for your business. Just a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to at least a 25 percent increase in profit.

Customer retention is about maintaining your current customer base and increasing loyalty by offering better products or services and other benefits.

You can use your CRM software to encourage repeat business from your customers by leveraging your CRM’s automation features and behavior tracking to identify both issues and opportunities with your customers.

Check out our six tips to improve your business’s customer retention rate.

Contextualized data

It’s one thing to have analytics, it’s a whole other thing to have context with your data. That’s the power of CRM software, which typically offers built-in analytic capabilities so that you can better understand the data available with actionable steps that you can take.

Metrics include click-through rates, bounce rates and demographic information, among others. These all can help you judge the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns and pivot as needed. And the visualizations of data that many CRM software options provide can help as well.

Better productivity and efficiency for your team

Because CRM software uses automation technology, menial tasks (such as email drip campaigns) no longer have to be handled by your and/or your team. That means that you can then focus on other tasks, such as creating content.

CRM software also helps ensure that no tasks slip through the cracks. You can rest assured that all important emails are always sent to the right people.

Organization leads to better customer segmentation

Having a list of even just a few hundred contacts can be unwieldy and overwhelming. This is especially so if you have thousands of contacts.

CRM software can automatically segment your contact lists based on the criteria you set so that you can find and message the ones you want at any given time. Sorting can include gender, age, location, buyer stage and so on.

It’s all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. 

In conclusion

Clearly, CRM software can help streamline your customer interaction and sales efforts. Make sure that you thoroughly research available CRM options before committing to one. What features do you need? How much does it cost? Is it user-friendly?

As you’re exploring possible CRM software for your small business, consider leveling up with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 tips to improve your customer retention rate

Strong customer retention is just smart business.

The cost of losing one customer equates to seven times the resources used to convert them. Customer retention is about maintaining your current customer base and increasing loyalty by offering better products or services and other benefits. Customer retention tactics include loyalty programs, discounts, special offers and targeted marketing campaigns.

Simply put, just a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to at least a 25 percent increase in profit.

You want to keep your customers purchasing from you once you acquire them. But as important as it is, customer retention is a big challenge for many businesses.

The following are six tips to improve your customer retention rate and keep your business strong.

Invest in great customer service

Clearly, bad customer service can lose you customers. But what’s needed to deliver great customer service that will increase your customer retention?

Start by understanding your customers’ needs. What platform do they prefer to contact you on? What other insights about your customers could help you?

You’ll also want to set and communicate customer service standards with your team. These standards should not just promote a positive customer service experience but also a consistent one.

Check out our six ways to be more responsive to your customers.

Share your company values to build trust

How your business operates, the quality of your products or services and how you treat your customers should all be a reflection of your company’s values.

And while your values may be completely intertwined with how your business operates, the more you can share your values with your customers, the better.

Shared values between businesses and customers help build trusting relationships. The relationships you can build with your customers directly impact your customer retention.

Check out our six ways to grow consumer trust.

Over-deliver on customer expectations

Offering decent quality at a reasonable price is not enough these days. Consumers do expect more because they have more choices than ever before. If you don’t meet their needs, they’ll purchase from someone else.

How can you personalize your customer’s experience and be proactive throughout their purchasing journey? It all starts with knowing what your customer wants. Getting feedback through surveys and reviews can help you identify areas that can be improved.

Just remember that you never want to over-promise in any way to your customers. But whenever you can, you want to surprise and delight by over-delivering. Go above and beyond.

Regularly collect customer data

Data can help you understand the needs of your customers. Surveys are an effective way to encourage customer engagement and learn more about them. You’ll also be able to identify dissatisfied customers before they decide to never purchase from you again.

Besides collecting this data, it’s important to act on it. How can you improve? What do your customers need from you? 

Check out our eight tips to create a successful customer survey for your business.

Communicate with your customers in multiple ways

Regularly sharing information about product or service updates is imperative, but the more ways you can do this the better. 

Your target audience can be reached across multiple platforms. So, consider how you can best communicate through webchats, social media, text messaging, email and so on.

Of course, personalization can make your content that much more effective.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing for inspiration.

Celebrate and reward loyalty

There are many ways that you can acknowledge, celebrate and reward brand loyalty among your customers.

Brand loyalty involves more than just retaining your customers, though. It’s about providing an experience that your customers won’t find anywhere else that will keep them coming back.

Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business, and take your customer retention to the next level.

In conclusion

While attracting new customers will always matter, you can’t forget about your existing customers. Customer retention not only saves you money on new-customer acquisition, it also generates larger profits for your company.

As you’re developing a strategy to boost brand loyalty for your business, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 omnichannel marketing tips to help grow your business

With shopping habits rapidly evolving, it’s more important than ever for your multiple marketing channels to work together to engage consumers and ultimately lead them to purchase from you. Enter omnichannel marketing.

Even if customers are in your physical store, about 42 percent of in-store shoppers search for information online while browsing in-store. In addition, consumers reference up to 10 sources of information before making a purchasing decision.

As part of your digital marketing strategy, your brand likely already has various marketing channels. Omnichannel marketing is all about leveraging your multiple channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. This is where omnichannel goes beyond multi-channel marketing because multi-channel treats each channel as separate and independent. Omnichannel requires you to think through how each channel can complement another and work together to create a personalized experience for the consumer whether you’re connecting with them through desktop, mobile devices or brick-and-mortar stores.

For example, a customer could be direct messaging with your customer service representative on Facebook and then purchasing from your website. Or, you text a customer an offer to compel the completion of his or her purchase after abandoning the shopping cart on your website. You want to offer a seamless brand experience regardless of platform and preferred buying method.

Omnichannel shoppers spend between 50 percent and 300 percent more than traditional shoppers. In addition, omnichannel marketing campaigns generate a purchase rate that’s about 287 percent higher than single-channel campaigns. Companies that use omnichannel marketing also maintain about a 91 percent higher customer retention rate, year over year.

Clearly, your brand should not miss the opportunities that omnichannel marketing offer. The following five omnichannel marketing tips aim to help you grow your business across platforms.

Research and understand your target audience

To create a successful strategy in omnichannel marketing, you must understand who your audience is so that you can effectively build relationships with them across channels.

Who are they? Where are they from? What are their goals and challenges? Which devices are they using? What content do they love? Which platforms and/or channels do they use most?

Social media listening, customer feedback (through surveys and otherwise) and your data analytics tools (such as Google Analytics and social media metrics) can arm you with the information you need to make smart choices about how to best engage with your audience.

Then, you’ll want to use that information to segment your audience. This can include basic demographics, such as age, gender and so on. It also could be based on geographic location. There are many ways to segment your audience. Find out more.

Not sure who your target audience is exactly? Check out our seven tips.

Audit your technology

Depending on the software you’re using for your point of sale system (POS), customer relationship management system (CRM) and so on, it might be time for an upgrade.

If you’re systems do not or cannot integrate, that can be an issue that will hinder your omnichannel marketing tactics and performance.

DailyStory (which features email and SMS text marketing, segmentation, personalization, automation and much more) integrates with your favorite applications, such as Shopify, WordPress, Salesforce, etc. You also can connect to thousands of other applications using Zapier.

So, when someone joins your subscriber list, a welcome email can automatically send. Or, if a customer abandons his or cart on your website, an automated reminder can be sent to them via text or email. The sky is the limit.

Evaluate, choose your channels

If you’re new to digital marketing (perhaps your business just launched), omnichannel marketing can feel especially overwhelming.

Start simple. Start small. Then, build and grow from there.

Identify up to three channels and develop a campaign that will run for a set period of time. Consider the potential touchpoints you’ll have with your target audience on those chosen channels (hopefully the ones where your audience spends the most time). That way, you can stop hesitating, get something into action where you can then evaluate its performance and how you can improve for the next campaign.

Omnichannel marketing also involves customer service across multiple channels, so consider how you can best meet your customers where they are, whether that’s Facebook Messenger, email, live chat, Twitter DMs, etc.

Even if you have existing channels already in play, it’s never too late to evaluate what channels are working and which might actually be hurting your brand reputation (because you can spend enough resources on them to properly maintain). More isn’t always better. Quality over quantity always.

Optimize your content

Gone should be the days of copying and pasting the same social media post across platforms. Every platform (whether it’s a social media network, your blog, videos on YouTube, you name it) should be treated uniquely. This  can be based on the features available, target audience there and platform expectations. For example, going live on video and answering customer questions on the fly about a new product or service is something you could easily do on Facebook or Instagram. But you wouldn’t do the same on TikTok, Twitter, a mass SMS text message or even your blog.

Consideration for every place you publish content should be in play as part of your content marketing strategy in general, but it’s especially important for omnichannel marketing. 

Thinking through your content with the omnichannel lens, you want to offer:

  • Engaging and personalized content that supports customers through each stage of their purchasing journey with you.
  • Researched and information-filled solutions to help customers compare products or service and make decisions.
  • A range of content that supports the needs of your targeted customer.
  • Content that’s optimized for the channel and device that it’s beeing consumed on.

While you’re brainstorming, check out our seven tips to level up your overall content marketing.

Measure, measure, measure

Data is everything in omnichannel marketing. The only way you can improve and evolve your efforts is to track the performance of all omnichannel campaigns across platforms.

This isn’t just about reading an analytics reports. Consciously test tactics, request customer feedback and act on the information you’re learning as you move forward.

Typical key metrics to monitor can include email open rate, social media engagement, sales conversion rate and customer retention. But it really depends on the nature of your omnichannel marketing campaigns themselves.

Don’t forget to set goals at the beginning of each campaign. That way, you can have a better sense of whether your efforts are effectively growing your business.

In conclusion

If you’re not leveraging omnichannel marketing in some way as consumers and technology (and buying habits) continue to evolve, you’re missing out.

Think through how you can meet your target audience where they are and how those different channels can complement each other.

As you’re exploring the potential of omnichannel marketing, consider leveling up your overall digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 tips for marketing to Millennial consumers

Often the punchline to a joke, Millennial consumers should not be overlooked.

Born between 1981 and 1996, creative and tech-savvy Millennials are transforming our marketplace. Millennials care about saving, peer recommendations, reading and researching before they buy and environmentally rewarding experiences.

In fact, Millennials were the largest generational group in the U.S. in 2021, with an estimated population of about 72 million. And their spending power has been estimated at about $2.5 trillion as of 2020.

Is your business thoughtfully targeting and engaging with Millennial consumers?

The following are 6 tips to better market to Millenial consumers and grow your business accordingly.

Leverage social media

Millenials, like their Gen Z counterparts, are obsessed with social media, so starting with a strong strategy for your social media channels is a good place to start.

To engage with Millennials, consider:

  • Using Facebook Live and other streams to host authentic interactions between your brand and your audience.
  • Connecting and working with influencers, who can help increase your brand awareness.
  • Running a contest that encourages users to share photos of themselves using your product or service (also known as user-generated content).

Share elements of social proof

Social proof refers to potential customers assuming that what others are doing is correct based on how often they see those actions. In other words, social proof is about looking to others to figure out the right way to interact in any given situation.

You can leverage positive social proof to influence consumer behavior and generate more sales.

Millennials are highly impacted by social proof. About 91 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds trust online social proof reviews as much as recommendations from someone close to them, while 63 percent of consumers indicated they are more likely to purchase from a website with product ratings and reviews. (The 18- to 34-year-old range overlaps with the Millennial age group.)

Online reviews and testimonials are key ways to showcase social proof to Millennial consumers.

Learn more about social proof and nine ways that you can use it in your digital marketing.

Create opportunities for personal connections

While Millennials embrace social media, text messaging and instant messaging apps, they also crave personal connections. And this extends to their relationships with brands.

You want to build trust with your Millennial consumers. This can include:

  • Replying to comments on social media posts.
  • Answering direct messages (quickly) to your social media accounts.
  • Hosting live videos to interact in real-time with your audience.

About 44 percent of global consumers will spend at least $500 or more each year with the brands they trust most, with nearly 29 percent saying they will spend more than $1,000 per year.

The more consumer trust you grow with Millennials, the better off your business will be.

Check out six ways to build consumer trust.

Be real

Authenticity is everything online, especially for Millennial consumers. Ditch imagery that looks so polished it feels fake. The authenticity of your images in a Photoshop world is huge.

You also should look for ways to tell real-life stories related to your brand and your products or services. Share stories about how your brand began, why your company’s mission is what it is, who your employees are and so on. 

Is there an opportunity to inspire? For example, perhaps there’s charity work that you can share or something else that generates positive feelings about your brand.

Keeping it real and being honest with your audience through your content and interactions will resonate with Millennials. It helps them relate to you.

Create and share mobile-friendly content

Everything must be mobile-friendly these days but especially when hoping to connect with Millenial consumers. This on-the-go generation wants and needs to find information quickly on their smartphones.

About 98 percent of Millennials own and use a smartphone daily. You’re missing out if your website isn’t optimized for mobile use.

Remember that:

  • The faster your website-loading speed, the better.
  • Video can help tell your brand story and more, with product how-to guides, expert interviews and behind-the-scenes viewpoints.
  • Your formatting (bullet points, short sentences, headings and more) should make your content easily skimmable for mobile users.

Check out our 16 tips to make your website mobile-friendly.

Avoid overly selling to Millennial consumers

Aggressive selling can be your enemy in digital marketing, especially with Millennial consumers. Instead, focus on creating and sharing high-quality and relatable content that helps them solve their problems (which, in turn, encourages them to purchase from you).

Think through what problems Millennial consumers face, how your solution (through products or services) is unique, how your brand can improve their lives and what the buyer should do next.

In conclusion

While digital savvy, Millennials aren’t so different from other consumers. They want to feel valued and be treated like more than a number. Remember to prioritize personal, authentic connections with Millennial consumers. It’s all about building a trusting relationship and showing how your brand’s products or services can improve their lives.

Need to level up your digital marketing process? Consider DailyStory. Our application features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Email checklist: 8 things to check before sending

Even the smallest mistakes in your marketing emails can ruin an entire campaign.

There’s nothing worse than the feeling of hitting “send” and then realizing that you sent the wrong link to your entire contact list.

It happens more often than you might think.

About 33 percent of marketers send weekly emails, and 26 percent send emails multiple times per month. That’s a lot of chances for mistakes. And those mistakes can embarrass your brand, affect the email recipient’s perception of your company and prevent your email from achieving its goal.

An email checklist can help. Email marketing mistakes are easy to avoid when you know what to look for.

The following are eight things to check before sending your marketing email. This checklist can help ensure no mistakes get past you.

Send a test email to yourself

In general, you always want to send a test email to yourself and open it on multiple devices. This way, you can go over all the email content as it appears in an email client interface before your email subscribers do.

This gives you the best opportunity to see how everything looks and test all aspects of your email.

Confirm that you’re sending to the right contact list

It’s important to confirm that your email is going to the correct inboxes. Of course, your email has to start with a clear goal in mind. That goal will direct the right messaging for the right people. 

If you’re sending to the same message to all your contacts, it’s time to segment your contact list and personalize your messaging. DailyStory can help.

Remember that your customers and leads are all at different stages of your sales funnel. You wouldn’t send the same type of message to a past customer that you would a new lead, for example. 

Check for broken and forgotten links

One of the biggest mistakes that can be made is to send out a marketing email with a broken or forgotten link. A broken link is when the link either doesn’t work or is incorrect in another way. A forgotten link is when the link is missing entirely.

Forgotten links are common on clickable images, social media buttons and call-to-action buttons.

Manually check every single link before you send your email to your target audience.

Confirm your personalized greeting

Personalization is powerful in email marketing. The ability to address a mass marketing email with a recipient’s first name can improve your open rate and potentially your conversion rate.

However, if a customer gets an email that says, “Hi {first name],” and not his or her actual first name, it looks unprofessional. And they likely won’t continue reading.

Double check all dynamic tags in your email to confirm that your personalization works. This is a must for your email checklist.

Check your grammar and spelling

This is typically the testing commonly thought about, confirming that your email has good grammar and spelling. This is because no matter what your content, if it has grammar or spelling errors, then your business will appear unprofessional and lose respect.

It’s all about proofreading. Sending a test version of your email to others on your team can help get additional eyes on your copy.

Tools also can help. A free spell checker can catch any spelling errors, but keep an eye out for homophones, words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings. For example: flower and flour, or deer and dear. These can potentially slip through spell checkers. Grammar checkers, such as Grammarly, can help identify poor grammar in your copy as well.

Deliver clear value (and CTA)

It’s important to confirm that every email you send has a point and offers clear value to the recipient. Otherwise, you risk your subscribers opting out from receiving your emails entirely.

This goes beyond the spelling and grammar checks. What are you offering? It could be a tip, a discount code, a link to a helpful article or guide or something else (as long as you don’t sound spammy).

The value should be aligned with your email marketing goal and larger goals for your business. 

Of course, this value is capped off with a strong call-to-action. What do you want your recipients to do? Keep it simple, direct and compelling.

Optimize your subject lines and preview text

No matter how good your email content is, it doesn’t matter if your recipients never open your email to begin with. Your email checklist should include subject lines and preview text.

Your open rate largely comes down to your subject line. How are you catching your recipient’s attention and compelling him or her to open your email? 

Subject lines need to be strong and sound conversational. You don’t want to sound overly sales-focused or robotic. It’s about creating excitement.

Also, keep the length of your subject line as breif as possible. Recipients should be inspired to find out more.

Check out our 12 tips to write subject lines that won’t be ignored.

In addition to subject lines, the preview text can assist in compelling recipients to open your email. Preview text is a short snippet from your email text that displays in the inbox next to your email’s subject line. 

Of course, you don’t have to let it default to the first 140 characters or so from your email copy. The preview text copy can be customized to display a message that supports your subject line in achieving a higher open rate.

Check your images and design

Blurry images or bad formatting can ruin your email. So, it’s not all about checking your written content. You also want to confirm that all visual aspects of your email work and work together.

Keep an eye out for pixelated or squashd images, and make sure that all images have associated alt text and display how you want them to. (Alt text will help if your images don’t render properly.)

In addition, you’ll want to consider:

  • Formatting, such as bulleted list appearance and whether there’s too much or not enough white space
  • Colors since background colors might not render for all recipients (so white text on a dark background might be illegible for some recipients)

Check out six ways visuals can increase your email conversions.

In conclusion

Every email matters. It’s important to confirm every aspect of your marketing email before sending to ensure success. The cost of mistakes is too great. Set up your own email checklist so that you can stay on top of your email marketing and ensure that everything you send is as professional and effective as possible.

Check out our 16 email marketing best practices than can make a positive impact for your business.

As you’re setting up your email checklist, consider optimizing your overall digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email and text message marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

11 steps to create an effective business website

Regardless of the type of small business you have, an effective and engaging website is critical to your brand’s success.

With almost 2 billion websites on the internet and U.S. users visiting more than 130 web pages per day, you have stiff competition to not only attract users to your website but convert them into customers as well.

Whether you’re building a new website from scratch or want to improve your existing site, the following are 11 steps to consider.

Lock in a good domain name

“Good” is subjective, but your domain name (otherwise referred to as your website address) can greatly impact the success of your site. It’s often the entry point to your site, so you want to have a domain that’s easy to use and remember, as well as benefits your search engine optimization (SEO).

In general, this means that you want it to:

  • Be easy to spell
  • Use the proper domain extension, such as .com rather than .net unless it’s more appropriate to use .gove, .edu or .org
  • Be as short as possible
  • Avoid numbers and hyphens
  • Be unique (so that you’re not too similar to another website’s domain or breaching any registered trademarks) and memorable

Dive deeper with our Domain Name 101 guide for beginners.

Purchase proper website hosting

Simply put, a website hosting provider (or website host) offers the technology and services necessary for a site to be viewed on the internet. Ultimately, your domain name gets connected to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they see (and can interact with) your website, which is stored on your hosting account.

Website hosting services vary in cost from about $2 to more than $100 per month, depending on what you’re looking for.

Essentially, there are three server types to consider:

  • Shared server, which can cost the least but can be problematic because you’re sharing a server and its resources with other customers. This can impact the performance of your site. Plus, if another website that’s sharing your server gets hacked, you risk getting hacked as well.
  • Dedicated server, which can be the most expensive but offers the best possible website performance. It’s when the physical server machine is entirely dedicated to your site, so all the resources are yours, which offers more security as well.
  • Virtual private server (VPS), which is somewhat of a compromise between shared and dedicated servers. A VPS is one machine that is partitioned to act as multiple machines, which makes it more affordable (like shared hosting) but with better security and performance potential (like dedicated hosting).

In addition, you’ll likely want phone and/or chat support available from your website hosting provider in case you experience an issue, as well as an easy-to-use server interface. This allows you to more easily view and make changes to your server contents without having to hire a professional server administrator.

Some popular website hosting providers include (but are not limited to):

Clearly describe your business in a prominent place

No matter how dynamic your vision is for your website, don’t forget the basics. Who are you? What is your business about? How do you help customers?

A business description must be prominently displayed on your website so that it’s the first thing visitors see. All imagery should be visual representations of your brand and services or products. While the text needs to be as concise as possible, visuals can really help convey exactly what your business is about.

In addition, ensure that “About Us” web page links are displayed in both your main and footer navigation menus. This makes more in-depth information about your business easily accessible for visitors who want to learn more.

Select your content management system

To put it simply, your content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that you use to create and manage your digital content within your website. A popular CMS that you’ve likely heard of is WordPress. But others include Wix, Squarespace and more.

A good CMS will help you maintain your website without requiring you to have a lot of technical knowledge. Of course, different systems are used for different reasons, such as available features and your budget.

Thoroughly review available CMS platforms that you find interesting. Will you get all the features you need for a price you can afford?

Pick an e-commerce platform (if you’re selling online)

Not all small businesses sell products or services online, but if you do, you need the right technology to do so. An e-commerce platform allows users to financially transact with you online.

Some popular options include (but are not limited to):

Design your website for engagement, efficiency

Designing your website can feel overwhelming at first, but it’s helpful to do your research first. Identify sites that you like. What aspects of their design can you incorporate into your own website? How do your competitors’ sites look?

Once you have a sense of the design features and functionality you want, keep the following best practices in mind:

  • Use compelling visuals and easy-to-read, large-enough fonts
  • Avoid any clutter
  • Compress your graphics for faster website loading
  • Keep your target audience (and what they’ll use your website for) in mind throughout the designing process
  • Maintain your branding throughout the website
  • Keep your menu navigation system simple and intuitive
  • Make it easy for visitors to understand what your business is, how to contact you and where to find you

Optimize for SEO

Once you have designed your website, you’ll want to consider your website’s SEO, which is a set of practices that ensures search engines both index and rank your website appropriately so that it appears when users search for terms (i.e. keywords) related to your business.

The better your website design and content is, the higher your website will appear in search engine result pages.

SEO is an ongoing process. It’s never a one-and-done or set-it-and-forget-it approach, not if you want to be successful. 

Check out our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners, as well as seven tips to improve your website’s domain authority.

Install key webmaster tools

Being able to monitor the performance of your website is critical to your success. You can analyze traffic data by installing Google Analytics. We also recommend Google Search Console.

These tools can help you understand:

  • How many users visit your website in any given period of time
  • The bounce rate of your website, which is the percentage of users who arrive at your website but leave after viewing only one page
  • How many views the pages of your website receive
  • How long users spend on your website
  • If there are any broken links on your website
  • How long it takes your web pages to load
  • Any keywords that are leading search engine users to your website

See our nine tips to get the most out of Google Analytics. Plus, find out how to check your Google Search rank for free.

Optimize for mobile responsiveness

More than one-third of all American consumers shop online via a mobile device. In addition, Americans spend about 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their smartphones. These numbers will only continue to grow. 

You must optimize your website to deliver a great user experience on mobile devices. If your web pages take too long to load or if the mobile version of your site is clunky, cluttered or confusing, you will immediately lose your  visitors.

Check out our 16 tips to make your website as mobile-friendly as possible.

Create (and publish) quality content consistently

Content is king, as they say. And the days of a static website with little to no content publishing being enough are long over.

Consistently publishing content that resonates with your target audience matters to search engines. This can be done through a blog section of your website, for example.

Content can include customer testimonials, how-to articles and more.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing on your website and beyond, as well as our 19 tips to drive traffic to your new blog.

Create a maintenance plan for your website

Once you create your small business website, your work isn’t over yet. Not only do you want to regularly publish new content, but you also want to ensure that everything is in working order and that all technology being used is up to date.

Proper website maintenance is important. This can include checking your webmaster tools data consistently, confirming that your software is always up to date, running security scans to confirm there is no malware or hacking and backing up your website regularly.

In conclusion

Your small business website should be a dynamic representation of your business that engages visitors and easily enables them to find key information about your business or even purchase from you.

Remember that throughout any website creation or updating process, you’ll want to collect feedback from colleagues and customers so that you can tweak anything necessary to improve the user experience. When in doubt, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and look at your website with a fresh set of eyes. What can be improved? What can be made more clear?

As you’re creating or optimizing your website, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Growth marketing: What it is and 4 ideas to inspire you

Growth marketing is all about your long-term strategy, but the term itself can lead to confusion regarding its true meaning.

Because marketing is what’s done to grow a business, shouldn’t all marketing be growth marketing? The answer is no. Growth marketing is a strategy-based, data-driven approach to achieving sustainable success and improving revenue for your business over the long term.

It’s about setting goals and continuously testing and experimenting to hit them, with the ultimate goal being to generate tangible business growth.

Keep in mind that about 45 percent of organizations don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. By considering the approach of growth marketing for your own business, you’re already lightyears ahead of nearly half of other companies.

In growth marketing, you want to focus on all possible touchpoints between your brand and the customer. To put it more simply, it’s less about the purchase itself and more about the customer’s experience after becoming your customer. This means that in growth marketing, you should be looking for opportunities that will make a lasting impact.

Key aspects of growth marketing include:

  • Being consumer-centric
  • Putting strategy first
  • Retention and upselling in addition to traditional acquisition
  • Evidence-based decisions rather than opinion-based
  • Consistent and regular performance monitoring and testing, such as with A/B testing

For example, if you have an e-commerce business that is not making enough money because your customers only buy one or two products, a growth marketing mindset would focus your marketing efforts on retaining those customers, compelling them to purchase more and more often (through cross-selling and upselling), measuring those efforts regularly and making decisions based on that performance. And these efforts can, of course, involve such tactics as email marketing, SMS text message marketing and so on. 

Growth marketing benefits include making better decisions, enhanced brand perception and achieving your business revenue goals.

The following four growth marketing opportunity ideas are intended to inspire you for your own business.

Omnichannel marketing

In growth marketing, it’s not about only optimizing an individual marketing channel. It’s about optimizing multiple channels across the customer journey.

Look at the entire user experience when it comes to your brand. Is it unified and consistent throughout each touchpoint you have with a customer?

This is considered omnichannel marketing, where your goal is a seamless customer journey, whether that’s in a physical store, online or with interactions with any sales or customer service representative in your business. 

How can all of your channels work well together to deliver that seamless experience?

Customer loyalty

Customer retention is huge for any business. It means that the customers you acquire will continue purchasing your products or services.

To grow retention, brands must continually earn customer trust by demonstrating that they are more than just a name and a dollar sign.

When exploring a growth marketing mindset, consider a customer loyalty campaign that aims to keep your engaged customers coming back for more.

Perhaps you have a membership program that you can incentivize with exclusive access, sneak previews or tiered status rewards. It’s about making the customer feel special, and that will elevate their perception of your brand.

Customer onboarding

About 40 percent to 60 percent of software users log in once and never return again. Proper customer onboarding can help give you more opportunities to wow new customers and make every touchpoint count.

Never assume that your product or service is obvious to use. Even if it is, what advice can you give customers to make their experience even better?

Is there a way to collect data from customers upfront on how they intend to use your product or service so that you can better serve them with personalized onboarding?

Consider onboarding an opportunity to nurture customers, and it can be as simple as an email drip campaign and/or custom recommendations that include articles and webinars. 

Customer referral programs

Customers who are referred by other customers have a higher retention rate and are more likely to refer more customers to your brand.

In growth marketing, a strong referral program can be key. Of course, how yours looks depends entirely on your brand and your products and/or services. 

If you already have a customer referral program, is it everything it should be? Does it offer enough of an incentive? Are you promoting it well among your existing customers?

If you don’t yet have a referral program, think through what that should look like for your business. Be sure to make it easy enough for customers to actually do, and that the reward is compelling. 

For example, Tesla’s referral program gives customers a referral link that they can share, and that link rewards both the referring customer and the new customer. Instacart does the same thing, too.

Referral programs are essentially all about rewarding customers who believe in your mission.

In conclusion

Remember that a key component of growth marketing is constant testing and experimentation. Go into it with a scientist’s mindset. If I do this, what happens? And if I do that, what happens?

For example, if you do have an existing customer referral program, how is it performing now? If you change one thing, does that increase the referrals within a month or not? 

Just keep in mind that you still want to be consistent as a brand no matter what testing and experimenting you’re doing. Strategic planning will help with that.

As you’re exploring growth marketing, consider leveling up your digital marketing process with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 things you should know about BeReal

BeReal is one of the latest social media apps to create a buzz.

It generated more than 56 million downloads in 2022, catching the attention of TikTok, which launched a feature (TikTok Now) that is reminiscent of what’s making BeReal popular. 

But what is BeReal? Essentially, the app prioritizes more authentic, in-the-moment content. Originally launched in 2020, BeReal offers a “new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life.” Gen Z users (specifically 18- to 24-year-olds) are the majority of BeReal’s base.

The following are six things you should know about BeReal.

The daily BeReal notification is global and random

BeReal sends you a daily alert asking you to post a picture within two minutes that shows whatever you’re doing at the moment. This alert is sent at a random time each day and at the same time to all users globally.

While users can post after the two minutes is over, the text below that shared photo will say that the deadline was not met. For instance, the text could say: “3 hours late.”

You’re actually taking a ‘double photo’

To take the prompted photo when alerted, you open BeReal and snap a selfie with your phone’s front camera, while the back camera captures the view in the other direction. 

Images are only visible to your contacts on the app for 24 hours.

You have ‘friends’ not ‘followers’

On BeReal, you don’t have followers. You have “friends,” which means that only the people you personally add can see your posts. In addition, you can’t see your friends’ photos until you upload your own. 

Keep in mind that there are no friend/follower counts, removing the temptation to build “influence.”

The app also has built-in emojis, and users can react to and comment on each other’s images. There’s also a “RealMoji” feature, which is a photo taken with the front camera of the user’s face reacting in some way. It allows users to see their friends’ real-time reactions to what they’re doing at that specific moment.

No filters or photo editing

Part of what is making BeReal so popular is its lack of filters and editing. You also can’t import edited photos, so you can only capture an image from within the app in real-time.

You can retake the photo up to 10 times, but the app will tell your friends how many times you’ve retaken the photo before you uploaded it.

BeReal has a Discovery section

While users specifically connect with the people they know, BeReal does have a discovery section. It enables you to see other posts from around the world from other users who have their privacy settings unlocked.

It emphasizes the mundanity of the world, where other apps (like Instagram or Twitter) tend to promote over-the-top lifestyles and images.

No advertising

BeReal does not host advertising on its interface. Depending on your perspective, this can be a good or bad thing. For users, it can feel like a relief to not navigate any ads in an app. For brands, it immediately removes an obvious way to connect with users on BeReal.

Only time will tell how long the ad-free experience will last on BeReal and how funding for the app will evolve.

In conclusion

Just like with any other newly popular social media app, the best thing to do is to try it out yourself. Only then can you better understand the nuances and value of BeReal and how it may or may not fit into your brand’s digital marketing strategy in the future.

Check out the eight most common social media mistakes that you should avoid.

While you’re exploring BeReal, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 differences between traditional PR and digital PR

These days, there are two different types of PR: traditional and digital.

PR, which stands for public relations, refers to a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and the public.

Choosing whether your business should focus on traditional PR or digital PR (or a mixture of both) can depend on several things, including the:

  • Channels you want to use.
  • Audiences you want to reach.
  • Metrics you want to track and more.

While both types of PR share the same goal of increasing brand awareness, they differ in their executions.

The following are six differences between traditional PR and digital PR so that you can decide what’s best.

Different channels

Obviously, as the name implies, traditional PR focuses more on “old school” channels, such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio. Although they’re considered “old school,” don’t underestimate these channels. Millions of Americans still consume traditional media. On the flip side, digital PR uses “new school” channels, such as social media, websites and blogs.

Because of the different channels, the different types of PR involve different methods:

  • Traditional PR relies on press releases, reputation management and trade shows to spread messages.
  • Digital PR relies on social media marketing, digital outreach and content marketing to reach audiences.

Knowing which channels you want to pursue can help you decide on the type of PR you want to use.

Reaching different audiences

While millions of Americans still consume traditional media, and traditional PR channels are instantly more recognizable (i.e. your local TV station), you can still reach a broader audience with the various digital PR methods available. For example, just a handful of social media post shares have the potential to snowball into so much more.

In digital PR, you also have the ability to target specific demographics with digital and social media advertising, ensuring that the money you’re investing is being spent as efficiently as possible.

Subtle versus direct messaging

Because of the nature of content marketing and social media, your brand has the opportunity to be creative and also subtle in digital PR. This is because you can publish pieces of content that build upon each other over time. In fact, it’s discouraged to be overly selling in a majority of your online content. Instead, you should focus on the value that you can give to consumers, which can develop a relationship that can eventually result in sales. This approach can also benefit your SEO.

Traditional PR has to be more direct because of its format and specific goals. You have limited space and time to convey a message that is tied to your business goals.

Feedback and engagement opportunities

Traditional PR methods can feel a little bit like a one-sided transaction with few opportunities for direct feedback and engagement. Consider a radio commercial or magazine ad. That is a broadcasting-style message, with no direct opportunity for your target audience to engage directly with it. Yes, you can encourage them with a specific call-to-action, but those interested will have to take that extra step to pull out a mobile device to scan a QR code or enter a URL address.

With digital PR, it’s very easy to receive feedback and engagement directly, whether it’s through social media, a comment on your website or blog or something else. You get a better chance to encourage authentic interactions and conversations. These will help build trusting relationships with your audience over time.

Cost

Digital PR offers a variety of low- to no-cost methods to convey your messaging and reach your intended audience. Time and effort are the biggest resources needed. But of course, there are costs associated with different online tools and any budget that you’re applying toward online advertising campaigns.

Check out our six tips to maximize your social media advertising budget.

Traditional PR, on the flip side, can have a higher cost when it comes to advertisements and commercials. But don’t forget that you can release press releases for little or no cost. You also can get creative and pen a guest column for your local newspaper, for example, to establish yourself as an industry expert.

Performance monitoring and metrics

Digital PR definitely has the advantage of easy access to real-time monitoring of engagement, impressions and reach. This is regardless of the platform that you’re using.

Check out the 26 social media metrics you should track across platforms, as well as our nine tips to get the most out of Google Analytics.

Traditional PR is much harder to track and often is derived through data provided by traditional media channels. For example, newspapers can give you their circulation numbers. However, there’s nothing else available to help you understand how many people actually saw your newspaper ad specifically.

In conclusion

Of course, there are benefits to both traditional PR and digital PR. Simply understanding the differences can help your business decide where to invest and whether a mix of the two serves your goals.

While you’re exploring the differences between traditional PR and digital PR, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

11 ways to better engage with Gen Z consumers

If your business is targeting Gen Z consumers, you likely already know that what might work for most consumers won’t necessarily work for this audience group.

Roughly speaking, Gen Z includes individuals who were born between 1997 and 2012 and make up about 20 percent of the U.S. population.

Gen Z consumers are true digital natives with their own distinct perspectives and behaviors. They especially take time to evaluate all of their options before committing to a purchase. Because of all of that, you have to consider them specifically within your digital marketing strategy. And it’s worth doing because they are a fast-growing consumer segment that you don’t want to miss engaging with.

The following are 11 ways to better engage with Gen Z consumers.

Focus on conversations

Gen Z is very focused on having authentic conversations rather than growing their friend count. Seeking personal connections through social media, they largely lean toward such platforms as TikTok, Twitter and Instagram.

Whether your brand is on any or all of these social media platforms or not, it’s important to not only fully understand how each one works (which can be very different) but how Gen Z users are using them. Think about how you can have authentic conversations as a brand on these platforms. Each platform could require its own strategy.

Check out our take on which is better to reach teens: Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok.

Focus more on helping than selling

Similar to the idea of having conversations with instead of just broadcasting and talking at your Gen Z audience, prioritize the goal of helping consumers with your content. It can’t all be about selling. Gen Z consumers will simply tune that out.

How can your brand itself (as well as your products or services) help these Gen Z consumers in their everyday lives? What challenges are they facing? What interests do they have? Leaning on whatever data you have on your current Gen Z customers can help you with this.

Content-wise, think about creating guides, tutorials and tip-based blogs and social media posts that directly relate to helping rather than selling.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing. 

Prioritize mobile marketing to reach Gen Z consumers

Gen Z consumers account for about 40 percent of all mobile users. In fact, many even rely on mobile wallets and social payments, so they expect to have a seamless mobile experience when making purchases.

You’ll want to take a look at whether your website loading speed is fast enough, whether your mobile website view is responsive and easy to navigate and whether you offer secure payment options. As far as your strategy is concerned, consider including push notifications if you have a mobile app that your customers use.

Check out our 14 expert tips to improve your mobile marketing.

Regularly freshen up your website

Because Gen Z consumers are native digital users, they can tell when/if your website looks dated. If it does, they might not end up purchasing from you and opt for one of your competitors.

You don’t have to overhaul your website every quarter or anything drastic like that. But even the smallest aethestic tweaks or improvements for user experience can go a long way. Always seek feedback from your customers on the look and utility of your website so that you can incorporate those improvements as well.

Adjust your wording and voice as needed

We are definitely not suggesting that you start using slang that makes you look like the wannabe-cool parent type.

Instead, first consider your brand personality and voice. Is the way your brand speaks through social media and other online platforms relatable to Gen Z consumers?

Beyond that, remember that you’ll likely need to incorporate language regarding mobile payments since this is a top method of purchasing for Gen Z. Example phrases include “on-demand orders” and “tap to pay.” (Of course, you want to make sure that your systems are set up to support these methods as well. Don’t just talk about them.)

Be as visual as possible

Gen Z consumers are all about visuals, especially videos. Just consider the nature of TikTok and Instagram Reels. Even YouTube. In fact, about 81 percent of Gen Z consumers consider Instagram or YouTube as their preferred social networks of choice.

The bonus of more visuals is that they help convey your branding and message that much more powerfully. Experiment with the short-form vertical video that fits into Instagram and TikTok.

Beyond reaching Gen Z consumers, check out our five reasons why your business should be creating more videos. Also, these 10 types of videos that you can use in your marketing strategy can help inspire you to get started if you haven’t already.

Experiment with interactive content

To capture the attention of Gen Z consumers, you need a mix of creativity and interactivity. Enter interactive content.

Younger consumers want to tap, swipe, click, etc. when they see your posts. Give them something to do. Using polls, for example, not only gets attention from Gen Z but also helps you learn about your audience.

Other features that can help make your content interactive include stickers and sliders. But the key is to experiment as much as possible. See what works for you and your targeted Gen Z consumers.

Tags can help engagement

Tagging is important to Gen Z consumers. This includes:

  • Enabling customers to tag themselves at your physical location.
  • Asking customers to tag their friends and family to invite new potential followers to your social feed.
  • Encouraging followers to share user-generated content with a branded hashtag.

Gen Z consumers want to get involved with the brands they support. Tagging (and hashtagging) helps with this.

Check out our six tips you should know to master Instagram hashtags.

Leverage FOMO with time-sensitive posts

Tapping into your audience’s fear of missing out (otherwise known as FOMO) can be particularly compelling for Gen Z consumers.

It’s about leveraging the fear we all have of losing out on amazing opportunities, experiences and so on, no matter what they might be.

FOMO taps into our human nature. As a species, we are typically risk-averse, especially when it comes to our purchases. We don’t want to spend money on a product or service that doesn’t measure up to our standards and expectations.

However, on the flip side, it’s this same risk-avoidance tendency that leads to the possibility of regret in the future for not having taken an opportunity.

One way to do this is to make your content (or even promotional offers) time-sensitive. Instagram Stories is a great platform feature to use for this purpose.

Check out these nine FOMO techniques that you can use in your digital marketing.

Sharing positivity

This might sound simple, but it’s important to note: Gen Z consumers appreciate positive experiences and supporting social causes. The more your brand not only embraces that but shares it as well, the better.

What brand collaboration or charitable cause can your brand get involved with? Consider your company mission. You don’t want to do anything or chose something that doesn’t make sense for your brand.

Feel-good moments that you can share go a long way with Gen Z consumers, who can feel more connected to your brand as a result.

Show off your humor

Gen Z consumers also want to support brands that they see as fun and cool. It’s about finding humor in the era of internet memes and GIFs.

Of course, leveraging humor into your digital marketing strategy is easier said then done, and it might not be right for your brand personality and voice anyway.

But if it is, humor can be an incredible part of your campaign because:

  • It helps your audience lower their defenses against ads
  • Helps you connect with your audience
  • Encourages social sharing of your content

It’s important to think through when humor is appropriate in your marketing. Check out our tips for when humor can be the right tactic to use.

In conclusion

Don’t overthink your efforts to engage with Gen Z consumers. When you sit down to plan out your approach, remember that you want to find the connection between what Gen Z is looking for and what your brand has to offer.

As you’re revising your Gen Z strategy, consider leveling up your digital marketing process with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

12 digital marketing strategy tips during a recession

No business wants a recession to happen, but they are inevitable. 

Any shrinking of the economy can spur necessary changes not just in business plans but in your digital marketing strategy as well.

Since 1945, the U.S. has gone through 11 recessions officially.

While many businesses tend to cut as many expenses as possible to improve their short-term financial standing, your marketing strategy is critical to the overall success fo your business. Therefore, resist the temptation to slash your marketing budget in extreme ways. Instead, think about how you can maximize that marketing budget during an economic recession that not only saves you money but adapts to changing consumer behaviors.

Remember, if you cut too much, you stunt your potential business growth. Specifically, cutting marketing expenses in the short-term can hurt your business in the long-term. For example, you could see decreased market share and share of voice, decreased brand awareness and missed opportunities.

So, let’s focus on working smarter. The following are 12 digital marketing strategy tips that you should consider during a recession or economic downturn.

Audit campaign (and channel) performance

While the best practice is to regularly monitor the performance of your digital marketing campaigns and channels, you should take a closer look when entering a recession.

Are all channels hitting your desired KPIs (key performance indicators)? You want to get a sense of what’s working (and should be done more) and what’s not working (and should either be optimized or eliminated altogether).

If you are working with a reduced marketing budget, you should ensure that you’re investing your limited resources wisely. There’s no room for error, and you want to identify the channels and initiatives that deliver the biggest ROI (return on investment). Definitely cut any “excess fat” from your marketing expenses, and relocate portions of your budget to the channels and/or campaigns that are working.

Your digital marketing audit can include analysis via Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console, Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics and anywhere else your brand has a presence and/or is spending money.

Check out these 26 social media metrics you should track across platforms.

Conduct a competitive analysis

During a recession, it’s more important than ever to know what your competition is doing (for better or worse).

A competitive analysis is essentially a strategy where you identify your competitors and research their products/services, sales and marketing strategies. Of course, your analysis can be as simple or as complex as you need to satisfy your goals behind it.

Have your competitors cut back on their marketing and advertising? How are they communicating with their customers? Of course, this can serve as inspiration for your own marketing efforts. But you’ll also get a sense of whether you can optimize an advantage if your competition has scaled back in any way.

Check out these 16 tools to make your competitive analysis easier.

Adjust your marketing goals

Your goals matter. And what you’re aiming to achieve with your marketing during a recession could be very different from what you want to accomplish in a strong economy.

Make sure to take the time to evaluate what matters most to your business and how your digital marketing can support this.

To help you better assess the appropriate marketing goals for your business during a recession, consider using analytics to understand the scope of your digital marketing efforts.

Check out our seven expert tips to set achievable marketing goals for your small business.

Optimize your recession marketing plan

Even when the economy is not experiencing a recession, you want every dollar of your marketing budget spent well, working smarter not harder.

Beyond cutting initiatives that aren’t performing, you can optimize your recession marketing strategy by focusing on targeted marketing, where you’re sending a specific message to a specific target audience group (i.e. segmentation and personalization as mentioned before).

Targeted marketing isn’t isolated to one specific marketing channel. If you’re using a platform like DailyStory, you can easily target personalized emails and text messages to very specific groups of consumers within your contact list based on the data you have on them. Targeted marketing can be executed via social media advertising as well.

In addition to targeted marketing, make sure you’re monitoring patterns around days of the week, times of day and even geographic locations (if relevant) that deliver the best engagement and conversions for your brand across channels. Remember, though, that every channel can be different.

Find out how often your brand should be posting on social media.

Adjust your messaging to reflect consumer spending changes

Successful digital marketing considers your target audience first. If the consumer behavior of your audience changes, so should your messaging.

Consider how consumer spending typically changes in your industry and how that will impact your business. For example, if your target audience is particularly price sensitive and will likely move to low-cost options within your industry, then you should highlight those not just in your campaigns but also generally on your website. On the flip side, you could promote the added value that your brand’s products or services offer if that could resonate with your audience more. Or, you could highlight flexible payment or financing options. It just depends on your business, your industry and your target audience.

Check out our three ways to tweak your marketing message during a recession.

Market to your existing, past customers

Rather than invest a lot of your marketing budget always trying to find, engage and convert new customers, consider your existing and past customers. In fact, targeting that group is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business during an economic recession.

This marketing could aim to drive new sales from existing and past customers or upsells.

These customers already know and trust your brand. Therefore, they’re more likely to buy from you again.

And in addition, you should already have some data on these customers that you can use to segment them and deliver more personalized messages.

Check out our six tips to grow brand loyalty for your business.

Invest in your educational content

During a recession, consumers tend to take longer researching products and services before spending to ensure their getting the best value. 

You should optimize for that shift in behavior with educational content that can help customers determine how to find the best solutions for their needs. This means focusing on your content marketing.

Examples of educational content you can offer include (but are not limited to):

  • Educational blog posts can help consumers define their problems and understand what solution they need, as well as help you rank higher in search engine results. Consider common questions your business gets asked already as topics.
  • Case studies can show potential customers how your products or services have helped others in a very specific way.
  • Comparison charts can greatly help consumers understand the value of your products or services as compared with your competition. 

Content marketing is an excellent part of any recession marketing strategy because of the relationships it can help build between your brand and potential customers.

Embrace local SEO

If your customer base is located in a specific geographic area, another cost-effective recession marketing strategy to consider is local search engine optimization (SEO).

Local SEO is when search engines rely on signals (such as local content, social profile pages, links and citations) to provide the most relevant local results to the user. It’s all about delivering the best and more relevant local search engine results.

Improving your local SEO can lead to increased leads and foot traffic at your physical business location. That means that you’re connecting with local customers who are actively searching for your products or services.

Some of the actions you should take to boost your local SEO include:

  • Setting up and/or optimizing your Google Business Profile with your up-to-date brand information that includes name, address and phone number.
  • Uploading photos and videos to your Google Business Profile listing. Visuals are a powerful communication tool for consumers.
  • Requesting reviews from your customers on Google, Yelp, Facebook and any other service-ranking platform that makes sense for your business.

Dive deeper with our 11 local SEO tips to help you beat your competition.

Use more videos in your recession marketing

Videos are powerful. About 85 percent of all internet users in the U.S. watched online video content monthly on any of their devices, while 54 percent of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support.

See more reasons why businesses should create more videos.

Even more important than that, videos can better communicate the value of your products or services than any amount of copy (if done well). Remember that in a recession, value is everything.

Some ideas include:

  • Video demonstrations to show potential customers how to use your products.
  • Videos about your employees as well as showing them at work for your customers, conveying the quality of service and care you offer.
  • Videos answering commonly asked questions.

Check out these 10 types of videos that you can use in your marketing strategy.

Professional videos can be powerful, but don’t underestimate the DIY power you hold with a smartphone, decent lighting and an easy-to-use video-editing app.

Leverage remarketing for more conversions

Remarketing simply refers to the practice of targeting individuals who’ve already visited your website with ads on Facebook, Google or elsewhere.

Think of the last time you viewed a product for sale on a website but didn’t buy it. Then, you kept seeing it everywhere as you browse elsewhere online. That’s remarketing, also referred to as retargeting.

It’s clear why it can be such a powerful tactic. These leads have already shown some level of interest in your business offerings, and now, you’re reinforcing your messaging to convince them to come back and complete the purchase, whether it’s a product or service. Because you’re already targeting warm leads, your overall advertising spend should be that much more effective, with a great ROI.

To get the most out of remarketing, consider using in your ads:

  • Images and copy that speak to the needs of your target audience.
  • Special discounts and offers.
  • Educational content that can help consumers research their options.

Granted, remarketing is valuable even in a good economy, but it can be especially helpful during a recession.

Consider tiered pricing

Creating tiered pricing (if you don’t already have it) during a recession can help bring in new clients and also help existing customers save money (so that you don’t lose them entirely).

Many businesses offer at least three different pricing tiers with additional perks with the higher-priced tiers. That way, customers have options when they may not need all features and are trying to save money. Depending on the product or service you’re offering, a free version could be made available with very limited scope and features. If a customer likes the free version, they are easier to upsell to at the right time.

Don’t make too many changes

While you’ll want to change your marketing strategy to accommodate shifting consumer behaviors and a possibly smaller marketing budget, try to avoid making too many drastic changes at once.

Big changes, like rebranding, could be confusing to consumers and make it appear as if your company isn’t doing well. Remember, you’re always trying to build a trusting relationship with your customers. Consistency is key.

In conclusion

A recession can feel scary and intimidating for any business owner, but remember that you want to optimize your digital marketing during this time, not slash it entirely.

Embrace what’s working and cut what doesn’t. You can be more efficient and also successful with the right choices.

As you prepare to stay successful in your marketing efforts during a recession, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 ways to handle social media negativity

Social media negativity is a fact of life for both individuals and brands. 

As a brand, however, you want to make sure that you handle any negative comments appropriately. Any misstep can become a problem for your business.

About 94 percent of consumers admit that they will avoid a business that has a negative review. And negative reviews don’t just happen on platforms like Yelp. They occur across social media as well, whether it’s a formal Facebook recommendation, an informal Instagram post tagging the business and sharing the customer experience or simply a negative comment on one of your brand posts on any social media channel.

The following are five ways to handle social media negativity related to your brand, regardless of whether it’s a negative review, negative comment or something else.

Always respond to negative comments or posts

First things first, you should always respond to any social media negativity directed toward your brand. If you avoid them, they can snowball into the perception that your brand doesn’t care.

Address the negativity quickly, be apologetic, polite and offer to move into a private communication channel in order to address the issue in more detail. (That way, your audience knows you’re handling the issue, but the related details remain private between you and the customer.)

Of course, your team shouldn’t have to guess when and how to respond to social media negativity. You can start by crafting templated responses that address common frequently asked questions so that everyone is on the same page. Identify which questions come up from your customers the most (as well as any positive and negative feedback you expect to get or have seen in the past). You can then plan out a few responses to any given negative situation so that you have different templated options available.

Just make sure that you update these templated responses from time to time. And, in addition, always personalize a templated response for the user you’re responding to. It can be as simple as using his or her first name and summarizing his or her complaint to show that you are listening before you apologize and offer a way to help.

Use facts (not emotions) when responding

As a brand, you must remove all emotion out of your response to social media negativity, which can easily be upsetting or angering. Stick with your templated responses (personalized as needed), and leverage facts to address any potentially misleading information. 

Remember, while you’re responding to a particular user, you’re also addressing your entire audience who can see your response. Keep the facts simple and straightforward to clear up any confusion that could have been caused by the user’s social media negativity.

Never delete negative comments

If you delete negative comments, you risk angering people even more and looking like you have something to hide.

Neither is good for your brand.

Respond instead of delete. Of course, if there’s a specific internet troll who is harassing your brand (and there’s no private or public remedy to be had), there are tools across platforms where you can report the post or comment, report abusive users and even ban them from engaging with your account.

Always report harassment

Speaking of wayward, abusive trolls, there is a fine line between criticism and harassment.

While Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all have community guidelines regarding user behavior that you should be familiar with, you should also post your own “rules of conduct” related to your social media presence and your online community. Keep your guidelines direct and clear. 

If there is a user that is being abusive and making the rest of your audience uncomfortable, you should consider the next steps of reporting and banning, as available on the social media channel it’s happening on.

Depending on the harassment, you may need to involve your legal team on a case-by-case basis.

Learn from your mistakes

No one is perfect, including your brand. If social media negativity has brought an issue to light, consider it an opportunity to fix it. In that sense, negative comments and posts can be a true source of information regarding a problem with your product, your customer service or something else that could be happening on a larger scale.

If this is the case, then you’ll want to include in your response that a mistake was made that you want to fix and whatever steps you’re taking to resolve the issue.

Over time, this sort of responsiveness and follow-through will benefit your business moving forward.

In conclusion

Social media negativity can feel daunting, but as a brand, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to address it. View it as an opportunity to engage with upset users or customers and turn them into brand supporters due to your proper handling of their issue.

Check out our 11 tips to best respond to negative reviews specifically. 

As you make a plan to better address social media negativity, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, which includes automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

4 tips to help get you verified on Facebook

Considering Facebook is the biggest social media network, it makes sense if you want Facebook verification on your page.

Facebook has 2.91 billion monthly active users as of 2022. This is actually a 6.2 percent increase from its 2.74 billion users in 2021, which was already a year-over-year growth of 12 percent from 2019.

With the potential to reach so many users, Facebook verification can help your page build credibility and a trusting relationship with your target audience. Facebook verification is the process of getting a profile or page verified to show other users that it represents your authentic presence on the platform. A blue checkmark appears next to the name of a verified account.

In addition to building trust, Facebook verification helps public figures, brands and companies who are susceptible to being impersonated with fake pages establish that they actually are who they say they are. A common example is the real Facebook page for a celebrity versus pages run by fans or imposters.

Facebook also prioritizes verified profiles and Pages in its search results, which can improve your brand’s reach.

While anyone can technically get verified on Facebook, there are strict verification requirements you must meet in order to get approved. However, these are only the bare minimum and are no guarantee that you’ll get verified.

To officially apply for Facebook verification, you would: 

  1. Open the Facebook verification request form.
  2. Choose your verification type, whether you’re looking to verify your personal profile (if you’re a public figure) or your Facebook page.
  3. Confirm your authenticity with credible documentation, such as a driver’s license, passport, etc.
  4. Confirm your notability by selecting a category for your business page or profile so that Facebook can ensure that your profile or page is something people are interested in or searching for.
  5. Add the country where you or your business is most well-known.
  6. Add your audience and “also known as,” which is an optional step, but keep in mind that the more information you give, the easier it is for Facebook to confirm your verification. For your audience, you can enter basic information about your audience demographics. If you have no other “aka” names for your business, though, you can leave that blank.
  7. Add up to five articles that show your Facebook page or profile is in the public interest. This is optional as well, but by including popular social media accounts, articles that talk about your business, Wikipedia profiles or anything else, you’re proving that people are interested in, following or talking about your brand.
  8. And submit!

But again, Facebook verification is not guaranteed. (Fortunately, you can reapply after 30 days if you get denied.) The following are four tips to help you get verified the first time on Facebook (and stay verified).

Be professional

When it comes to being professional on Facebook as a brand, there are a few things to consider, including:

  • The overall impression of your Facebook page or profile matches the image your brand presents elsewhere.
  • You’re only sharing on-brand, related content to your page or profile. No off-brand logos, personal posts (depending on the context), low-quality images, incorrect grammar and spelling, anything that doesn’t reflect your brand voice, etc.

Put yourself in a customer’s shoes when looking at your page or profile. What do you see? Better yet, ask a colleague for an unbiased opinion with a fresh set of eyes.

Maintain up-to-date business information

Before even applying for Facebook verification, you want to make sure that your entire Facebook business profile is complete. This includes working links to your website (and working links from your website back to your Facebook page).

But on top of that, you want to keep that information as up-to-date as possible. Perhaps you created a new website, moved store locations, changed business hours, added new products or services or something else. Regardless of what might change with your business and offerings, you’ll want to reflect that on your Facebook presence. 

Post engaging content regularly

Content (and engaging content in particular) is everything on social media. Without it, your Facebook page is a shell business listing that likely will not receive Facebook verification.

Of course, when it comes to content creation and publication, you want to keep your audience in mind, as well as their needs, challenges and interests. 

Check out our 10 tips for creating engaging content.

When it comes to frequency, consistency is critical. You don’t want to publish several posts in one day and then not post again for weeks. 

A content calendar can help keep you organized, but also check out how often you should be posting on social media, especially Facebook.

But beyond providing engaging content, you’ll want to engage with your followers as well. Reply to comments and direct messages, comment on relevant posts from other users, offer Facebook Lives that are specifically an opportunity for you to answer questions from customers and potential customers, etc. An engaged audience shows Facebook that you’re a notable brand that people follow. This contributes in your favor for Facebook verification.

Follow Facebook’s community standards

Do you know what Facebook’s community standards are? In short, they’re a robust list of guidelines that you should get familiar with (if you’re not already) that outline the acceptable use of the Facebook platform.

If you’re violating these standards, you obviously risk not getting verified. If you do get verified and then violate the community standards, Facebook can revoke your verification.

Reviewing the guidelines, turning on two-factor authentication and staying true to your Facebook marketing strategy will help you get (and stay) verified.

In conclusion

If you don’t get verified the first time that you apply, you can apply again in 30 days. However, we do recommend that you use those 30 days to review what you can improve about your Facebook presence before applying again. In fact, you may receive from Facebook at least part of the reason that you weren’t verified. If this is the case, you’ll want to address those issues as soon as possible.

Check out our seven tips to get verified on Instagram.

As you begin to optimize your Facebook presence for possible verification, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. This can include automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

 

5 tips for successful brand collaboration

Successful brand collaboration can help your company grow its online reputation (in a good way) and reach a wider audience.

But if your partnership is weak or not the best fit, your collaboration will fail, which could cost you your reputation or even your profit.

A brand collaboration refers to the partnership between at least two brands or a brand and an influencer to promote a specific product or service to get the attention of your target audience on a larger scale.

About 71 percent of consumers enjoy brand collaborations, so it’s worth the effort to reach your marketing goals.

The following are five tips for successful brand collaboration.

Carefully select your partner brand

Simply put, there is more to brand collaboration than discovering a potential partner brand that is fresh, exciting and has a significant following online.

The goal is to thoroughly research the brand you are considering working with. Will this partnership give you the chance to break out of your brand’s comfort zone and reach a new audience? Or, will this partnership help establish your brand as an industry leader? How can you benefit each other?

You should avoid working with anyone who’s already worked with your competition. You want your brand collaboration to feel natural for both parties, and that won’t necessarily be the case if your partner has worked with your competitors.

Ideally, both brands should bring something valuable to the table. 

Unclear of exactly what your brand has to offer? Check out our nine expert tips for branding from scratch. You also can view our five steps to determine your brand personality.

Plan your brand collaboration campaign

Planning is everything. Even before you decide on a partner brand to reach out to and propose a collaboration with, you should have some idea of what you want to accomplish.

Consider your goals and the opportunities surrounding them. Once you have at least outlined a plan, you can better select a brand to partner with and bring solid ideas to the table.

You should give your potential partner brand the opportunity to bring its own ideas to the table, too. The best collaborations are a give-and-take that can help you both develop the best possible campaign.

Create and use a clear contract (and guidelines)

Consistency is key to a successful brand collaboration campaign. In order to achieve and maintain consistency while staying committed to authenticity, you must negotiate the details of how your partnership will work and cement that in a clear contract.

Thinking through what each brand will be doing, how it will happen, how often it will happen and what that will look like should all be included in basic guidelines in your contract. Don’t forget about tone of voice, creative elements and which social media (and other) channels you’ll be using.

Any exchange of pay or coverage of expenses should also be part of your contract.

If there’s anything that’s unclear, talk through it to come to an understanding that works for both brands.

Aim to create something valuable

Successful brand collaborations create something that is valuable or at least interesting for your target audience.

Whether that’s fun or entertainment, or perhaps it’s unique and inspiring. Regardless, think through how your brand and a brand partner can come together to not only catch consumers’ attention but leave a memorable impression as well. 

The more engaging you can be together, the more likely you’ll compel your audience to take a specific, desired action.

Measure your performance

Of course, there’s no way to tell whether your brand collaboration is working or not if you’re not monitoring the performance metrics.

Especially if some metrics are only accessible by one brand and others are only accessible by your brand, it’s important to discuss in advance how you’ll gather and analyze all relevant data.

Depending on the length of your brand collaboration, you can easily pivot during the campaign based on the data to better optimize your efforts.

In conclusion

In the end, a successful brand collaboration comes down to active management before, during and after the campaign. There are a number of moving pieces when two or more brands come together to collaborate. Keep everything as simple as possible and promote communication between all partners as much as possible.

As you begin to explore brand collaboration, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

7 tips for finding the right influencers for your digital marketing

Influencer marketing is easier said than done, especially when it comes to finding the right influencers for your brand and digital marketing campaigns.

Simply put, influencer marketing involves increasing brand awareness, targeting new and niche audiences and increasing impressions and reach through a partnership with an online influencer. An influencer is an online personality with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media. Of course, social media is a broad term. Truly, an influencer can exist on any online platform, including his or her blog. Ideally, this individual has at least 10,000 followers (but this amount can vary).

Influencer marketing has expanded to a $16.4 billion industry, and about 93 percent of marketers have used influencer marketing in their campaigns. Instagram alone has an estimated 500,000 active influencers. The success behind this style of marketing is that it isn’t perceived the same way as traditional marketing.

When done correctly, influencer marketing is a natural extension of an influencer’s personal brand. This is the case even when links, keywords and other standard marketing tactics are used. With the right partnership, you can tap into the trust that a community has with a particular influencer to boost the reach of your own brand.

But there’s a real risk to feeling like you’re not getting your money’s worth from influencer marketing campaigns. And truly, your brand can look bad if or when working with an ill-fitting influencer.

Of course, marketing in general is never guaranteed, but successful influencer marketing all starts with partnering with the right influencers. The following are seven tips for finding the best influencers organically for your brand and digital marketing goals.

Start with a Google search

It might sound simple, but Google really is a great place to start when seeking the right influencers to potentially work with.

You can search for such terms as:

  • “[Your industry] experts”
  • “[Your industry] speakers”
  • “[Your industry] bloggers”
  • “[Your industry] influencers”

Of course, if you’re looking for more locally based influencers, you can include your state or city in the search as well.

The results you get could be vast, and you’ll then have to narrow down your potential list through researching the influencers you find. But you also could have to expand your search if you’re not getting enough results to work with.

Conduct a hashtag search on Instagram

Instagram is still the preferred social media channel for brands that engage in influencer marketing. So, searching hashtags on Instagram that are related to your industry, product, service or competitor will not only potentially discover viable influencers whom you could work with. You’ll also see related content from different points of view that can inspire your own influencer marketing campaign approach.

An Instagram hashtag search is important because it could lead to social media profiles that your might not have found doing a Google seach alone.

Check out our six tips to master Instagram hashtags.

Explore influencers’ followings

Influencers tend to follow each other on social media platforms. Viewing the Twitter lists of known influencers (perhaps those who might be too big for your brand to afford now) can help you discover other influencers who might be a better fit overall (not just financially).

Of course, this same logic can be applied to exploring the “following” tab of any influencer’s Instagram account as well. It’s just about seeing what connections can lead to the discovery of influencers you might not otherwise know about.

Learn more about social media platforms as they relate to influencer marketing.

Examine your competition’s followers and engagers

By paying close attention to your competitors and their followers, you ensure that you’re not missing any opportunities to reach every possible audience you can.

Who’s engaging with your competitors by liking, sharing and commenting on their content? Who’s following them? The right influencer for your brand could be found in these groups on various social media channels.

Of course, this examination could be part of a larger competitive analysis, which can inform your digital marketing strategy beyond just influencer marketing.

Don’t forget about your own followers and engagers

While those who follow and engage with your competition could include quality influencers you’d like to work with, don’t forget about your own followers who are already engaging with your brand.

Review your follower lists across your social media channels for anyone with a relatively large following of his or her own. Even if they’re not labeling themselves as an influencer, there’s still the potential that they can be compelled to share your content or work with you in a bigger way on a consistent basis.

Browse speaker lists for industry-related events and conferences

Whether in-person or virtual, events and conferences that feature speakers in your industry can be a treasure trove for discovering influencers.

In many ways, the event or conference in question has already done the initial research that these potential collaborators are relevant to your industry (and potentially your target audience) in some way. So, all you have to do is research and decide who is specifically best for your brand.

Keep in mind that there’s no guarantee that a speaker will partner with you. However, they could still connect you to someone else who might be a good fit and is willing to collaborate.

Leverage influencer-finding tools

Of course, discovering the right influencer for your brand doesn’t all have to be a manual endeavor. There are a number of tools available that can help you monitor and discover influencers, including:

There are more tools out there, of course. But evaluate each tool and decide which one best suits your goals and your budget.

In conclusion

Finding relevant influencers is an important step but still just the first step to a successful influencer marketing campaign. Remember that you should still do your homework on any influencer you’re about to collaborate with. You also should have a clear plan and agreement in place that supports your brand’s campaign goals.

Check out our seven tips to know before starting your first influencer marketing campaign.

While you’re seeking the right influencer for your brand, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 ways to attract customers to in-store shopping

Despite the growth of online shopping, there’s still value in the in-store shopping experience.

And if your business depends on actual foot traffic more than online sales, it’s important to attract customers to your physical store location.

After the COVID-19 pandemic (when online was the predominant way to shop), about 65 percent of consumers still prefer the in-store retail experience when shopping. In fact, impulse buying is more likely to occur in physical stores.

Because online shopping offers an easy, fast and often personalized experience, your in-store experience has to go above and beyond for consumers to see value in brick-and-mortar shopping. It’s about taking the opportunity to offer real-life, touch-and-feel experiences that build deeper relationships with your customers.

This need might feel overwhelming. The following are six ways to attract customers to in-store shopping rather than online shopping with you.

Invest (or reinvest) in-store design

Every store is different, but investing in thoughtful, memorable store design pays off. Of course, how you approach a redesign can range from hiring an interior designer to displaying visually engaging merchandise.

The key is that you’re elevating the in-store experience visually. Effective store design can lead to about a 40 percent increase in sales.

Even your lighting can make an impact on how your customers feel and the overall in-store shopping experience. One study cites a 12 percent increase in sales for one retailer in Germany that installed a new lighting scheme.

And it never hurts to think about which areas could be photo worthy for your customers, where if done right, your store easily could get posted and shared on Instagram and other social media networks. (You can then leverage this user-generated content on your own channels.)

Take a look around your physical store with fresh eyes. What do you see? You can even distribute a customer survey to find out what your customers think would improve your store design if you’re not sure where to start.

Become a community hub

Building a community out of your target audience isn’t just for social media. It can be done in your physical store as well.

If you can, create a space within your store that can host meetings, gatherings and so on, both formally scheduled and informal happenings. 

This gives you the opportunity to engage with new audiences (and bring in new customers) by hosting in-store events with various groups. And depending on how open and accessible the area is, customers may feel compelled to sit down and hang around longer as they talk with friends or work on their laptop.

Make sure that your community space is comfortable and accessible. It should be a space where people would want to spend some time. Of course, free WiFi never hurts either.

To take this idea even further, consider a dual purpose retail space. For example, this could be a cafe within your retail store. This does take considerable more work but could deliver bigger results if it’s right for your brand.

Offer customization, personalization services

About 62 percent of American consumers prefer gifts that feel more personal. By adding gift customization and personalization services in-store for customers, you may attract consumers who are looking for that something special for their loved ones.

What this looks like depends on the type of retailer you are and the products you’re selling. For example, a store with skincare products could offer the opportunity (and materials) for customers to put together their own gift baskets with whatever products they choose, walking out with a complete gift ready for giving.

Embrace all the senses

If you’re only focusing on what customers see while in-store shopping, you’re missing out on all the other senses that could compel them to not only stay longer but to return more often. And both actions can result in more in-store sales.

Creating a multi-sensory atmosphere specifically could encourage shoppers to spend an extra six minutes in your store and increase your sales by about 10 percent.

Consider the five sense:

  • Sight
  • Sound
  • Smell
  • Taste
  • Touch

Again, just like gift customization, how you embrace multiple senses depends on what makes sense for your brand, your store and your products.

What music are you playing? Does it create a positive atmosphere? Is there a comforting or invigorating scent to your store? Can customers taste samples of your products? Or, do you offer free mints at the door, for example? What is the seating like, or is there any seating at all? Can they touch your products?

Remember, you want to deliver a memorable experience that any customer entering your store would want to repeat. Start scanning your physical space for those opportunities.

Interact one-to-one with customers

Clearly, whether online or in-store shopping, the customer experience can make or break your business.

About 93 percent of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand again if they offer excellent customer service. And when it comes to in-store shopping, this is your opportunity to interact one-on-one with your customers. It’s inherently different than any online shopping experience. It’s all about that human interaction.

Customers feel special with undivided attention and personalized advice as they’re shopping. About 49 percent of consumers have made impulse purchases after getting a more personalized experience.

Think about how you can deliver a more personal one-on-one experience for your customers without being overwhelming.

Make your store pet-friendly

If it’s right for your brand, welcoming your customers’ pets into your in-store shopping experience can build a loyal and trusting connection with your customers.

Whether it’s a pet-friendly area or having some water bowls out, as well as treats available, for animals, it’s up to you.

Just keep in mind that you may have some legal limitations when it comes to allowing animals into your store. Check with your local health and safety boards to ensure that everything is on the up and up.

In conclusion

Technology will always be a factor for businesses, whether you have a physical store location or not. But with a store, you have the opportunity to level up the in-store shopping experience that your customers crave. You’ll build deeper connections and ultimately grow your sales.

While you’re evaluating how to best attract customers to in-store shopping, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

8 tips to create a successful customer survey for your business

Customer satisfaction can make or break your business, so a customer survey can help you understand how your customers are feeling and where you could potentially improve.

Customer surveys are simply a method of soliciting customer feedback so you can measure your customer satisfaction, understand their expectations and conduct market research. (The principles of a successful customer survey can also be applied to employees.)

About 81 percent of companies that deliver customer experience excellence outperform their competitors, and 86 percent of consumers are willing to pay up to 25 percent more for a better customer experience.

When it comes to customer surveys, response rates can reach past 85 percent when respondents are motivated and the survey is well-executed.

The following are eight tips to create a successful customer survey that delivers actionable insights for your business.

Brainstorm the purpose of your customer survey

Of course, the first step to executing a successful customer survey involves identifying a clear purpose. Resist the temptation to dump every possible question and objective into a single customer survey. You’ll just overwhelm your respondents.

Instead, define your overall objectives, what you expect to get out of the customer survey and what you plan to do with the information you receive.

Some common goals include:

  • Getting feedback on your product or service.
  • Benchmarking customer experience metrics.
  • Improving your sales or customer support experience.
  • Testing your branding decisions.
  • Understanding customer satisfaction as it relates to customer retention.
  • Measuring interest in new types of products or services.

If you have multiple goals or objectives, prioritize them and decide which one you’d like to start with in a specific customer survey. You can always address other, lower-priority objectives in future surveys.

Check out our nine brainstorming techniques to help you generate clear, better ideas.

Choose your customer survey type

Once you know your objective, you need to choose the type of customer survey you want to create. This will also determine who you’ll want to survey.

The following are some of the types of customer surveys you can use:

  • Customer satisfaction surveys, where you can better understand and monitor how your audience feels about your products, services and brand itself. This includes New Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys. Remember that each customer is at a different stage in the customer experience lifecycle, so there’s not a single type that will effectively offer the insight you’re looking for.
  • Branding surveys, where you can get a sense of how to move forward with branding decisions, especially if you’re rethinking the overall look and feel of your business brand. The insights you get can help you develop your marketing strategy and confirm whether your product or service experience is actually aligned with your brand values. 
  • Employee engagement surveys, where you can gauge the buy-in of your employees. Your employees are just as important as your customers, so their engagement is critical to your business results. This type includes Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys, pulse surveys and 360-degree surveys.

Keep in mind that soliciting feedback in a customer survey (or even an employee survey) can feel unexpected or out of the blue for respondents, so regardless of the type of survey you choose, you’ll want to explain why you’re conducting the survey and offer clear instructions if necessary.

Keep your customer survey short and simple

The type of feedback you can generate through customer surveys is limitless, but this is not a one-shot deal. You don’t have to gather as much data as possible right away.

Think of customer surveys as a conversation, just like social media. Asking a ton of questions upfront will only overwhelm your audience. They’ll then lose interest and bounce. Then, you won’t get any of the feedback you’re looking for. 

Consider survey “fatigue.” You don’t want yours to take longer than five minutes to complete, with no more than about 10 targeted questions.

You can always follow up with future surveys. How often you survey can depend on your industry, but be wary of surveying too frequently as well. Fatigue can happen through surveys that are both too long and/or too frequent.

Keep everything short, simple and only as needed. No fluff.

Embrace questionnaire best practices

When it comes to the questions themselves, there are general best practices you’ll want to pay attention to so that you can solicit true responses that can be positive and negative. These include:

  • Starting any customer experience surveys with a question that asks for an overall rating of the interaction that’s being addressed. You can then follow up with an open-ended question.
  • Avoid any biased questions that can influence your respondents to answer in a certain way or make it difficult to respond honestly.
  • Vary the types of survey questions you use. Mix open-ended questions with multiple choice, scale questions and anything else so that feedback can be well-rounded and help get at the “why” behind it.
  • Only ask one question at a time. Simplify your question as much as possible so that you’re not inadvertently asking multiple questions within a single question. For example, “Was your experience fun and helpful?” You’d do better asking those two questions separately so that respondents can better express whether it was fun and then whether it was helpful.
  • Keep most of the questions optional.
  • Avoid complicated sentences or any jargon in your questions.
  • Do not ask overly personal questions. Consumers are increasingly more security- and privacy-conscious. Confirm that you’re not asking needless demographic questions or anything that could be considered offensive or embarrassing. Your questions can be perceived very differently across multiple demographics and culturally diverse backgrounds.
  • Check every question for spelling and grammar errors. You want everything to look as professional as possible.

Pick your customer survey distribution channels

How you distribute your customer survey matters. In general, you should aim for the channel or channels that your respondents use the most. This could be email or SMS text messages, but don’t be afraid to be creative.

For example, you could have a scannable QR code printed on your receipts or a sign in your physical store location that links to your customer survey.

The goal or intention of your survey could also impact your delivery method. For example, you would likely email an employee engagement survey directly to your employees. It wouldn’t be linked publicly. 

Of course, if you’re missing responses from a specific demographic, consider reaching out one-on-one in different ways, which can make a huge difference in your response rate. An incentive (like a discount or gift) can also help.

Test your customer survey with colleagues first

Before you send out your customer survey, you must test it yourself and by sending it to colleagues who can give you honest feedback. Select colleagues from various backgrounds to get the most perspectives possible. Encourage them to dig deep and challenge you on everything they experience in your survey.

You’ll want to confirm that every question reads as intentioned, that it takes no more than five minutes to complete and that the customer survey renders well across multiple devices. It also helps to read the survey questions out loud. 

You can never test too much because once you send your customer survey, it’s out there, and any issues will impact the quality (and quantity) of feedback you receive.

Prepare for feedback analysis

For a successful customer survey, you should consider how you’ll segment your feedback data and what comparisons you’ll want to make. 

Thinking about the analysis process while you’re drafting questions can help you get the most out of your survey. 

Some segmentations and comparisons you can consider include:

  • Customer segments, where there could be a difference in responses based on how much a customer has spent with you, what they’ve purchased and how long they’ve been with you.
  • Geography-based segments, where there could be a difference in responses based on the city, state or country of your respondents.
  • Interaction channels, where there could be a difference in responses based on how this customer has interacted with your business, whether that’s online or in-person.

Some existing data could be automatically imported into the survey interface depending on the platform you use, but you could also ask for it. Just keep the survey as short as possible if you do have to ask some qualifying questions that will help you better analyze your results.

Always thank respondents and inspire action

A simple “thank you” can go a long way. So, thanking your respondents after they complete your customer survey is critical.

Of course, when you’re thanking respondents, you also have the opportunity to inspire action. That action can be reviewing your business on a third-party platform with a direct link to make it easy. You also could offer direct contact information for your customer service team in case there could be an issue your respondent might want to resolve.

In conclusion

When creating your customer survey, keep your target audience and goals in mind. Then with enough testing, you can feel confident that your survey will generate the type of feedback that you’re looking for and can cleanly analyze.

While you’re crafting your customer survey or any other survey, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. DailyStory features automations, dynamic audience segmentations and more. We can help you get your survey to the right respondents. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 signs to spot fake Instagram accounts

Fake accounts are a fact of life on social media. But how do you spot a fake Instagram account so that you don’t waste your time and (more importantly) don’t get scammed?

More than 2 billion people use Instagram once a month, making it the fourth most popular social app worldwide. About 8 percent of Instagram accounts are reportedly fake.

Of course, there are many possible reasons behind fake accounts, including:

  • Selling fake products or services
  • Impersonating others, as known as catfishing
  • Inflating follower numbers
  • Using bots for automated activity

Having too many fake Instagram accounts following you can drag down your engagement rate. It also can get your Instagram account potentially shut down since Instagram can assume that you’re buying followers, which goes against its terms of use.

In addition, by spotting fake Instagram accounts, you’ll better avoid typical scams, such as:

  • Phishing, in which a fake account will message you a link and a reason to click on it, but by doing so, a virus attached to the link and steal your login information and other data.
  • False brand collaborations that aim to steal your bank account information.
  • Fake competition prizes, loan offers and more that also aim to steal your bank account information.
  • Emotional scams, where the scammer attempts to get close to you and earn your trust as a friend or romantic interest in hopes of being sent money later on.

Fortunately, fake Instagram accounts aren’t terribly difficult to identify. However, the appearance of fake accounts can vary depending on the purpose and the people behind them. The following are five signs for you to spot a fake Instagram account.

Examine the Instagram account

A good place to start is by looking at the suspected account’s Instagram bio. Because fake accounts often are created en masse, there likely will be no bio description or a very generic one.

Often, photos are stolen from real people. Running a reverse image search on such tools as Google Images or Social Catfish can help you identify stolen photos (and the real account that’s the source of the photos). Depending on those search results, you can better understand whether an Instagram account is fake or not.

Of course, the lack of any profile photo is a sign of a fake account as well.

Also, take a look at the account name. If a few characters or letters have been changed (or if the account name seems odd in general), it’s likely a fake Instagram account.

No original posts found

Most fake Instagram accounts either rarely or never post. Remember, bot accounts are created at a high volume to boost follower counts. So, posting content isn’t a concern for many fake accounts.

Granted, not everyone posts a ton on Instagram. But when leveraged with other red flags: If a suspected account has little to no posts, it’s likely fake. If the profile is private, you can still see the post count as a visible number at the top of the account’s profile.

If there are some posts, they may consist entirely of promotional content and suspicious giveaways. They also might be of different people in the sense that photos of attractive women who look similar but are not the same person. Either way, be wary of these types of posts. They’re likely indicative of a fake account.

High number of followers but low engagement

Fake accounts can easily buy lots of followers and likes to help look like they are popular, real accounts. But dig through the liked posts. Are there any comments? If so, what do those comments say? Irrelevant or spammy comments don’t count.

Low-quality engagement is a clear sign of purchased followers, and while real accounts can buy followers, too, it’s a red flag for fake accounts, for sure.

On the flip side, having zero followers is a sign of a fake account as well.

Following a high number of accounts

Bots often are set to follow thousands of Instagram accounts, so a high following count can also be a red flag that the account you’re looking at is fake. Keep an eye out for an out-of-whack following-to-follower ratio.

On the flip side, the account could be following zero other accounts, which could signal a fake account as well.

Relatively new account

Unlike Facebook, which can show a “joined” date on profiles, you’ll have to dig a little bit to understand whether a potentially fake Instagram account is fairly new.

Start looking through available posts (if there are any). If they’re all pretty new and/or batches of photos have been uploaded at about the same time, it’s likely the account is fake.

In conclusion

If you find that an Instagram account is obviously fake, you can easily report it by navigating to the account’s profile, clicking on the three dots on the right side of the screen and selecting “Report.” Follow the instructions given. 

Reporting can help reduce the number of fake Instagram accounts following you if you’re noticing a high occurrence of those.

Beyond reporting fake accounts, you’ll also be able to save yourself and/or your brand the time and hassle of potentially being scammed. 

Check out the 14 biggest mistakes companies make on Instagram so that you can avoid them. You can also grow your Instagram followers the right way with these seven tools.

While you’re examining potential fake Instagram accounts, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

6 ways to grow consumer trust (and your resulting sales)

Consumer trust matters. As a business, it’s in your best interest to invest resources into building trusting relationships with potential and current customers.

Consumers do hold businesses to certain standards and want to build relationships with the ones that they believe in. They don’t want to be let down.

About 44 percent of global consumers will spend at least $500 or more each year with the brands they trust most, with nearly 29 percent saying they will spend more than $1,000 per year.

The more consumer trust you grow, the better off your business will be.

The following are six ways to grow consumer trust, as well as your resulting sales.

Deliver a quality product and/or service

Truly, the first step to building consumer trust is to sell a quality product and/or service. The higher the quality, the more your customer can trust you and purchase from you again.

Consider the needs of your target customers. Your products and services should reflect those needs. 

It’s important to consistently audit the quality of what you’re selling so that you can ensure that your expected quality is maintained for the benefit of the customer.

Deliver surprisingly good customer service

Customer service is a powerful tool to grow consumer trust in your business. This is your opportunity to demonstrate value and legitimacy to your customers and potential customers.

Don’t just exude good customer service. You want to deliver great customer service that impresses consumers and makes them want to come back to you again (and again).

This includes committing to customer interests, compassion and accountability. You have to show that you care in all your communications and interactions. Make it easy to reach your customer service team. Patience is imperative, but responsiveness also matters.

Check out our six ways to become more responsive to your customers.

Highlight (positive) reviews and testimonials

Of course, you’re going to talk about your businesses positively. But what about your customers? 

Not surprisingly, consumers give more weight to customer reviews and testimonials than what a business says about itself. These are forms of social proof, which refers to potential customers assuming that what others are doing is correct based on how often they see those actions. In other words, social proof is about looking to others to figure out the right way to interact in any given situation.

Real customer experiences are often seen as more objective. By acquiring and sharing those experiences, you’re leveraging the credibility of your customers to build consumer trust with your target audience.

Check out 17 of the best social proof tools to help you boost trust and resulting sales.

Embrace honesty and transparency

No company wants to be viewed as shady or dishonest. To help show your honesty and transparency, make sure that your marketing is not misleading or making promises that you can’t (or won’t) deliver on. Be very clear in both your copy and your images. 

Of course, all your business practices should be straightforward and ethical. Be upfront about your pricing and how your products and/or services can actually help potential customers.

If your business makes a mistake, own it and fix it as soon as possible. It’s all about working in the best interest of consumers. 

Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.

Ask for feedback (and act on it)

When you ask for feedback from your customers, you’re giving them a stake in your business and showing that they matter. You’re letting them know that they matter beyond the money they’re paying you.

This can involve sending out customer surveys, asking for feedback after a customer service interaction or even handing a sign with a QR code in your physical business location for customers to scan and easily submit feedback through, among other methods.

Of course, if you’re getting consistent feedback about something that needs to change or could be improved, it’s important to act on that. Being asked for feedback builds consumer trust, but making changes based on that feedback goes even further with your customers.

Share your company values

What are your company values? Do your customers know what they are? Understanding what’s important to your company can help grow consumer trust. 

Make sure that you have a clear statement of your company values that’s easy for consumers to find. It can be on your website, as well as featured on your social media accounts in various ways.

Granted, it’s one thing to talk about your company values and something else to actually act according to your values. In those moments of action, you can share that across your digital marketing.

In conclusion

There’s no magic bullet when it comes to consumer trust. Consider the customer’s purchasing journey with your business and address any missed opportunities that you can leverage to support that relationship. In addition, remember to walk your talk. If there’s something that you promise in your marketing, deliver on it. If there’s something that you say your company cares about, show it.

As you’re boosting consumer trust for your business, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation, email marketing, SMS text message marketing and so much more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 tips to get verified on Twitter

Twitter, like most social media platforms, aims to help cut through bots, trolls and misinformation by various means, such as Twitter verification.

And if your business is active on Twitter, you might be wondering how to get verified and earn the blue checkmark badge next to your account handle.

Twitter verification involves a manual review by Twitter of your account to assert that your profile is credible, authentic and of interest to the public. This means that Twitter can confirm that your account is not impersonating, manipulating or spamming anyone in addition to not violating any copyright or trademark laws. Of course, Twitter verification doesn’t mean an endorsement of your business. It’s all very similar to getting verified on Instagram.

Accounts that can be considered for verification include those used by businesses, politicians, celebrities, musicians, influencers, journalists and so on. Having a big following alone, though, is not a guarantee for getting verified.

Twitter is the world’s seventh favorite social media platform, so to be validated on Twitter helps build trust with your target audience and could lead indirectly to an increase in followers since verification is a sign of authenticity and public interest.

Keep in mind that Twitter announced a new verification program in 2021 after pausing the program in 2017 when a white supremacist’s account obtained a Twitter verification badge, causing a scandal for Twitter.

While anyone can apply for Twitter verification, not everyone will be approved. Minimum follower counts are required, but they do differ between regions to make the verification process more equitable.

Dive deeper into Twitter’s current verification policy.

The application process is relatively simple. Navigate to “Account Settings” on Twitter and select “Request Verification.” Then, you can follow the prompts to submit your application for review.

But again, Twitter verification is not guaranteed. The following are five tips to help you get verified on Twitter the first time you apply.

Optimize your Twitter profile

Of course, you should already want your Twitter account to reflect your brand. What more can you do to optimize your profile? 

You can start by writing a brief-but-descriptive bio that includes your company’s location and a link to your website. In addition, make sure that you’re using high-quality images for your profile photo and cover photo.

You also can pin your top tweet. This then becomes the first tweet users see when visiting your profile, so the tweet you choose matters.

Maintain an active account

If you’re tweeting sporadically, you’re not setting yourself up well for verification. Beyond tweeting more (but still thinking about quality over quantity), you should consider:

  • Responding quickly to direct messages, mentions and comments.
  • Liking, retweeting and commenting on other users’ content.
  • Following and engaging with verified Twitter accounts.
  • Using hashtags to participate in trending conversations.

When applying for Twitter verification, Twitter does look at how your account engages with other accounts. So, ask questions, post polls and mention other verified accounts to encourage them to join the conversation.

To boost the quality of your own brand content, leverage photos and videos. This is especially important considering that you only have 280 characters to work with. Visuals can help communicate more beyond those 280 characters, and you’ll likely see higher engagement as well.

And with more tweets comes a higher risk of spelling and grammar mistakes. Double-check all copy in your tweets before posting since Twitter doesn’t allow you to edit a tweet after publication (and you wouldn’t want to have to do that as a brand anyway).

Plan and execute a Twitter marketing strategy

To help you stay focused and efficient with your content and engagement on Twitter, creating and executing a separate marketing strategy for Twitter is helpful.

You can start by:

Check out our eight expert tips to market your business better on Twitter.

Avoid shortcuts

You might be eager to get your Twitter account verified, but resist the temptation to take any shortcuts. This includes buying followers and relying on bots, you name it.

You want to keep it real, authentic, credible and reliable as a Twitter account, so avoid any seemingly spammy tweets as well. 

Be patient and trust that embracing Twitter’s best practices will not only result in Twitter verification but will help you stay verified as well.

Ensure that everything you tweet is public

While Twitter gives the option for users to change their privacy settings, you want to make sure that as a brand, all your tweets are open to public viewing.

Private tweets limit interaction and engagement, but private tweeting also signals to Twitter that your account is not of public interest.

In conclusion

While there’s no guarantee, getting verified on Twitter is one thing. Staying verified on Twitter is a whole other thing. It is possible to lose your Twitter verification badge if you don’t continue to follow Twitter’s rules and community guidelines.

View Twitter’s “rules of the road” to get a better understanding of the expectations.

In addition, check out the 14 biggest mistakes businesses make on Twitter.

As you begin to optimize your Twitter presence for possible verification, consider leveling up your digital marketing process, which can include automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

How marketing jobs have evolved over time

Marketing is one of many industries that has evolved over time alongside technology.

For example, traditional marketing and advertising relied on bringing ads, billboards, and window advertisements.

Now, we have digital marketing and advertising that requires a different set of skills.

While the core skills, such as design and copywriting, are just as important, a change in medium and method has created new jobs across the world. 

The history of certain marketing methods begins with the first sales. For example, influencer marketing isn’t a new concept. Some celebrities in ancient times, particularly gladiators, were used in advertisements to bring in more customers and influence buyer decisions.

Of course, marketing has been around since the time of trading. Sellers simply didn’t realize they were marketing their products.

But what does that mean in terms of marketing jobs? Let’s look at a few ways marketing jobs have changed thanks to new marketing technologies. 

Types of jobs

marketing-jobs
The internet changed everything in our daily lives, but also with marketing jobs.

The invention of the internet changed everything for every person across the world. It changed how we do our jobs, communicate, and entertain ourselves.

In marketing, it meant the switch from relying solely on traditional print marketing methods. With digital marketing jobs, marketers rely on certain skill sets, such as graphic design, web development, and apps, to create successful marketing campaigns.

Everyone involved in the process has a different set of skills. For example, a graphic designer uses different programs to design marketing collateral, while a website developer uses coding skills to make a design into a functional website or application.

Ultimately, the types of jobs available have changed. For example, companies no longer rely on print advertisements to get the word out about their brands. Instead, they can use various digital marketing techniques like SEO, SEM, digital PR, and more to boost brand awareness and increase conversions.

Work location

When marketing and advertising utilized traditional methods like print advertising, they relied on their teams to be in-office to communicate. But decades ago, the internet didn’t exist, so people couldn’t work remotely.

Now, marketing firms have remote or hybrid teams allowing employees to work anywhere in the world. These remote opportunities also allow freelance marketers to work with several companies at once to benefit different companies and teams.

Check out our nine tips to better manage your remote team, as well as our 11 tips to more productive in your remote work from home.

Data analysis

Traditional marketing can be difficult to measure.

For example, if you invest in a billboard marketing strategy, you can’t measure every person who visits your business because they saw a billboard. However, you can measure the increase in business, although that’s not an exact science.

With digital marketing, you can measure everything, allowing marketers to prove their worth to companies and employers. For example, a social media marketing specialist can prove how much they’ve grown the follower count, increased brand awareness, and even boosted conversions through advertising.

Data analysis can enhance trust among marketers, clients, and employers, making their jobs even more important since their results are measurable.

Check out our nine tips to get the most out of Google Analytics. Plus, don’t miss our guides to better understand your metrics within Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Importance of soft skills

In the past, employers relied on a worker’s hard skills to get the job done. However, soft skills matter more now than ever because more employees advocate for better company culture.

Soft skills relate to how you work, including how you interact with colleagues, solve problems and manage your work.

A job is no longer only a job. Workers want to be treated well and have a good experience where they spend eight hours of their day.

Therefore, employers are now looking more closely at their employees’ soft skills to ensure a healthy work environment and may even improve the business. For example, anyone dealing directly with clients or customers must have soft skills, as customers care more about their experiences when doing business with a company.

Growth

Marketing jobs offer tons of growth they may not have had in the past. Because marketing was limited to geographic location decades ago, it may have been difficult for people to get jobs in their area.

However, with the use of technology, the marketing industry has created more jobs for marketers. Now, someone in a different country can work for any business without moving a great distance to be part of the team.

Opportunities

Along with growth, marketing offers more opportunities now than it ever did.

In the past, companies may have had their own small marketing teams or worked with agencies. Now, companies can hire anyone, no matter where they’re located, allowing them to build remote teams.

In addition, marketers can now choose to work in offices for agencies, companies, or at home, depending on their needs.

Flexibility

More marketing agencies are offering their employees flexibility. In the past, marketers had to work a full-time, 9-to-5 job.

But now, marketers can work part-time or get more vacation time. While marketing is a necessity for most businesses, it’s not an urgent need. Therefore, there’s no reason an employee can’t work from anywhere in the world or at any time as long as deadlines are being met.

In addition, while agencies still need individuals in the office during regular business hours to answer client calls and emails, it’s no longer necessary for employees to be in the office at all times.

The role of women

Fifty years ago, women had a more traditional role and rarely worked in marketing and advertising. If they did, they were secretaries who weren’t involved in campaigns. Women were housewives and mothers, but they weren’t advertising executives.

Now, as gender roles have changed over time, so have the jobs in marketing. More women than ever before are entering creative and technical job roles, allowing them to pursue their passions.

Will marketing jobs continue to evolve?

As technology evolves, marketing jobs will follow in its path. Keeping up with the changing times and technologies can help marketers be the first in new positions, allowing them to learn new skills and earn more money.

When companies switched from traditional marketing methods to digital strategies, many marketers were left behind because they chose not to change with the times.

While digital marketing will be around as long as the internet is, strategies and methodologies will continue to change. Don’t get left behind.

To stay competitive, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. This can include automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

About the author

Ashley-Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a freelance writer who loves to share knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, wellness, and financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.

Recession: 3 ways to tweak your marketing message in a poor economy

Considering that the economy moves in cycles, a recession is likely to hit your business at some point. You have to consider how to tweak your marketing message when you find yourself in a difficult economy.

Notice that we’re talking about adjusting your messaging and not cutting your ad spend from your marketing budget. Of course, you’ll likely have to evaluate your overall expenses, but businesses that want to succeed in the long run would not cut their entire advertising budget. Be smart with your spending during a recession.

Companies that continued to advertise during a two-year recession in the 1980s saw 256 percent higher sales than their counterparts post-recession.

Beyond smart spending, your marketing message is critical during uncertain times. The following are three ways you should tweak your marketing message in a difficult economy.

Be human as a brand (and funny)

In a recession, stress is higher than ever for your consumers. It’s easier than ever to alienate your target audience with an out-of-touch message.

Stay human by finding ways of conveying that purchasing your products or services will not break the bank. You can even cite current economic conditions to underscore that you understand what your customers are going through.

And, of course, whenever you can lighten the mood with a bit of humor, all the better. Just make sure that your humor is both appropriate and actually funny.

Embrace a purpose beyond just selling

A difficult economy shifts a lot of consumers’ focus to seeking meaning beyond just buying more stuff.

In fact, about 42 percent of Gen Z consumers are more loyal to brands that address social inequalities. 

Of course, purpose-driven content appeals to economically stressed consumers of any age.

During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rise in mission-based and cause-related marketing, 42 percent and 41 percent respectively.

As a brand, what do you stand for? Is there a cause you can start to embrace and support now? Success in mission-based messaging requires authenticity and consistency.

Leverage social listening during a recession

Tuning into the concerns of your target audience and addressing them in your recession marketing message can help you be far more engaging.

In other words, lean on your social listening tactics. Social listening is essentially audience research. You monitor your brand’s social media channels for any customer feedback, mentions of your brand and discussions surrounding specific keywords, topics, competitors or industries that are relevant to your brand.

Social listening is a two-part process. You have the monitoring on the front end, but then you dive deeper with analysis and actionable responses. There’s an engagement there, but also the goal to implement long-term strategy changes based on what you’re learning. 

When navigating a difficult economy, social listening is that much more important. The behaviors and concerns of your target audience are constantly evolving, but even more so during a recession. Your job then is to understand that and address that with your content.

How is the economic downturn affecting your customers’ families, jobs and personal lives? How can your brand help?

Check out nine of the best social listening tools for brand marketing.

In conclusion

Remember that during an economic recession, it’s easy to panic. But instead of slashing all your marketing spending, be bold with your content and spend in a smart way to reach your audience. Keep in mind that content can be much more affordable and effective than billboards and TV commercials.

Content marketing works during a strong economy, but it especially works during a struggling economy.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing.

As you explore how to better connect with your audience during a recession, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 ways to approach automation in your marketing strategy

Marketing automation technology has come a long way over the years. But your automation is only as powerful as the thought process behind it.

Automation in marketing refers to any email, SMS text message or other marketing messages (or tasks) that automatically happens in response to a user’s actions that were made or not made. For example, when a lead joins your email newsletter subscription list, a welcome email is automatically sent to that new subscriber.

And marketing automation is the No. 1 most effective digital marketing technique (after content marketing).

Without planning, your business can miss key opportunities with your target audience.

The following are five ways to approach automation in your marketing strategy.

Leverage your marketing automation platform

Not only do you want to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your marketing automation platform features, but you also want to make sure that you’re using the right platform for you.

DailyStory offers the ability to easily design and build sales and marketing automations (such as drip campaigns, happy birthday offers, or more complex automations that integrate with Slack and other tools), all in an easy-to-use drag-and-drop designer.

Think of your marketing automation platform as a data sponge. The more data it has, the more automations it can accurately run on your behalf. Therefore, data collection is huge. This can happen within your platform of choice in a number of ways, including native integration, manual imports of data and custom API integrations.

The key is to get as much data as you can from your main systems into your marketing automation platform.

Thoughtfully approach your automation campaigns

There are so many ways and options for automation within your digital marketing. It can feel overwhelming to not only think of your first automation but to also ensure that you’re automating everything that can help you serve your customers and grow your business.

First, keep it simple. Think about the life cycle of your leads. Then, as you’re considering that journey, look for opportunities where you can use data and context together to increase your conversion rate of those leads.

Then, it’s time to dive a little deeper by focusing on campaign-specific automation flows, pre-sales automation flows, sales automation flows and opportunistic-campaign automation flows.

Campaign-specific flows

This automation flow contains one to three emails that relate specifically to the point of your intended conversion. For example, you’re offering a free eBook that leads can download by entering their email address. Your emails in this campaign would then reference the topic of your eBook and show how your business can help them in this regard. Once the lead completes this series (but hasn’t yet signaled that they want to purchase from you), he or she moves into the pre-sales automation flow.

Pre-sales flows

This automation flow can be a little more generic and spread out over a longer period of time. It’s because you are nurturing leads who have finished their respective campaign-specific flows without signaling that they want to make a purchase.

The goal is to continue to engage with them (and keep your business top of mind) without overwhelming them (and causing them to opt-out). Therefore, this flow could include about a dozen emails and/or text messages over several months.

Consider ways to educate and engage with these leads so that their interest in your products and/or services can grow, and they become interested in possibly purchasing from you (and enter your sales automation flow).

Sales flows

Once a lead is potentially interested in purchasing, he or she can move into this automation flow. This is a key time to be as strategic as possible to encourage a sale. 

Whether this is a targeted discount offer, a personalized message or something else, you want to be appealing.

Opportunistic-campaign flows

This type of campaign flow is triggered when specific data points become available and can be used with clear context to improve the effectiveness of future communications.

For example, with that same eBook mentioned before, your lead downloads it. Then, that lead signs up for a free service you’re offering where more information about the lead is shared with you. You can then leverage that data to trigger a hyper-focused email series. This series can show exactly how your paid service can directly benefit that lead. The more personalized you can get, the more effective you can be.

Opportunistic flows are about using context to be that much more persuasive.

Treat every email in your automation like a newsletter

Once you start creating automation flows, there’s a risk of falling into a trap of creating emails just for the sake of it. But don’t fall into this trap.

You should treat every email with the same care and attention that you would an email newsletter that would send out to your entire database.

Your automated emails should have well-written copy, a clear call-to-action and a clean design for both web and mobile consumption. It always helps to run every email by another member of your team for feedback so that you know everything is up to your brand standard and optimized for your goals.

See the anatomy of an effective marketing email, with 10 parts you should consider.

Double (and triple) check your automated flows

Because you are setting up automated marketing campaigns, it’s imperative to check and test everything possible. That way, you know everything looks and acts the way you want.

For your automated email, check the:

  • Subject line
  • Copy
  • Email has a clear purpose
  • Call-to-action
  • Buttons and/or links directing to the correct web page(s)
  • Links have UTMs for tracking purposes
  • Graphics and whether they load properly
  • Email itself loads correctly on both Android and iOS mobile devices

For your automation flow, check whether the:

  • Correct segment is being targeted
  • Logic behind each step and trigger in the flow is correct
  • Leads eventually leave the flow and what prompts that
  • Relevant contact fields get updated based on the outcomes in your flows

It never hurts to double and triple-check everything tied to your automated marketing. Otherwise, you risk the wrong message going to the wrong lead at the wrong time. This can lead to confusion and (even worse) an opt-out.

Test and monitor continuously

Once you have your automated marketing flows in place, it’s easy to move on to other tasks. Truly, one benefit of automation is that you don’t have to do anything within a campaign manually. This saves a lot of time, but don’t set it and forget it.

It’s important to regularly optimize with A/B testing and then monitor the results so that you can improve any aspect of your flows as warranted. 

Most marketing automation platforms, including DailyStory, support A/B testing, which is the process of showing two variants of any particular element to different segments of your audience at the same time and comparing which variant is more successful. A/B testing is also known as split testing and can be used in many different ways. This includes websites, emails and so on. 

See our nine tips to make your A/B testing more effective.

7 tips to get verified on Instagram

For many of Instagram’s nearly 1.5 billion users, Instagram verification is a critical validation.

Instagram verification, otherwise known as that blue check on a user’s profile, is a signal to other users that your profile is the only one representing your brand.

More officially, Instagram says that getting verified means that the visual-first social media platform has confirmed that your account is “the authentic presence of the public figure, celebrity or brand it represents.” It does not equal an endorsement from Instagram.

This verification proves that your profile is not a fake, unofficial or fan account. In addition, it helps your brand stand out.

But you must qualify for Instagram verification. While the exact requirements for getting an Instagram verification badge are unclear, there are some guidelines provided by the platform itself that it takes into consideration when reviewing your application. 

While rumors have swirled regarding how many followers your account needs to have to get verified on Instagram, there is no reason to delay applying for Instagram verification if you meet the guidelines, regardless of the size of your following. (Keep in mind that even if your Instagram account is linked to a verified Facebook page, you’ll still need to apply separately for Instagram verification.)

The application itself is relatively easy:

  • Log into your Instagram account.
  • Go to Settings.
  • Click on “Account’ and then “Request Verification.”
  • Fill out the required fields.
  • If denied, you’ll have to wait 30 days before requesting verification again.

But before you start applying for Instagram verification, the following are XX tips that you can use today to help you get verified on Instagram.

Complete your Instagram profile

Your Instagram profile plays an important role in your verification process. Make sure that it is 100 percent complete. Include a:

  • Well-written bio
  • Profile photo that represents your brand, business or yourself
  • Relevant link

If it’s already complete, ask a colleague to review it. A fresh perspective can identify any opportunities for optimization of your profile that you might not be thinking of.

Avoid cross-platform links in your bio

While we recommend including a relevant link on your Instagram bio, Instagram does not want verified accounts to encourage users to add or follow other social media profiles (such as Facebook or YouTube) in their bios.

That being said, you can still add links to your website, landing page or other web pages. Just avoid linking to your other social media profiles.

On the flip side, it can help to add links to your Instagram profile on your brand’s website, within marketing emails and/or on your other social media profiles. The links to your Instagram account from your other social media profiles especially help validate your profile ownership.

Keep your Instagram account active and uniquely you

Of course, the hope is that if you’re interested in getting verified on Instagram, you’re likely active on the platform. But if you’re not very active, then it’s time to increase your activity in a consistent way.

Regular activity is imperative for Instagram verification. Make sure that you’re posting visually appealing and relevant content for your audience (whether in your feed or in Stories), engage with your followers in comment threads (even on their posts) and monitor your Instagram performance.

Of course, being active on Instagram only gives you the opportunity to consistently reflect your brand personality and everything that makes you unique. When looking over your Instagram content strategy, what helps you stand out, not just from your competitors but also from any impersonator accounts? 

Think about your:

  • Brand voice
  • Visual style
  • Overall feed aesthetic
  • Content theme
  • Hashtag strategy

One easy way to stand out as uniquely you is by sharing behind-the-scenes content that gives your followers an insider’s look at your brand. You also can encourage followers to tag you in their posts, which also helps validate your account as being yours.

Leverage your earned media and SEO

Earned media

Because part of what Instagram is looking for is your notoriety (that you’re a widely recognized brand), earned media can help with that. Earned media is any material written about you or your business that you haven’t paid for or created yourself. The most obvious example is a news article.

Start by Googling yourself and/or your brand and see what comes up. Anything that is relevant should be shared on your account in some way. But if nothing comes up in your searches, you’ll want to create and execute a PR strategy to help change that.

This will take time, but it’s worth the effort (and not just for the Instagram verification).

Check out our eight tips for writing a press release that gets noticed.

SEO

Your notoriety is also helped by your searchability. In other words, the better your search engine optimization (SEO), the better chance you’ll get verified on Instagram.

It’s not a bot that manages your verification request, it’s an actual person. And Instagram does its research. Beyond earned media, what else would someone find when searching for you? Does it positively reflect on your brand and how widely known you are? 

If not, it’s time to turn that tide so that any verification research goes in your favor.

Check out our 12 SEO marketing tips for beginners.

Grow your other social media profiles

While you might be focused solely on Instagram, your presence on other social media platforms can be a factor in your Instagram verification. The stronger the presence on other platforms, the better.

Of course, there’s no magic bullet for growing your following on any social media platform, but a few best practices include:

  • Leveraging any earned media coverage (such as a news article) to your advantage.
  • Showcasing your brand personality through a consistent voice and theme.
  • Posting consistently and frequently.
  • Creating and sharing engaging content.

Check out seven of the best tools to help grow your Instagram followers.

Identify impersonator profiles

One of the factors that Instagram considers for verification is the potential (or actuality) of your account being impersonated.

Instagram itself says that accounts representing well-known figures and brands are verified because they have a high likelihood of being impersonated.

So, it’s in your best interest to keep an eye out for any impersonating, fake profiles falsely identifying themselves as you or your brand. Report them to Instagram, but you’ll also want to document them for the sake of your verification as well.

Do not buy an Instagram verification badge

Do not get tempted. The only way to get verified on Instagram is to apply through the app (or through Meta’s media partners). If you try to shortcut the process or buy your way in, you’ll be wasting your money and risk getting penalized for violating Instagram’s Community Guidelines and Terms of Use.

In particular, giving false or misleading information during the verification process can actually get your account removed from Instagram entirely.

In conclusion

If you do get verified on Instagram, know that you absolutely can lose it as soon as you’re found to not be following Instagram’s Terms of Use and Community Guidelines (or if Instagram finds that you gave misleading or false information on your verification application).

So, you do have to play by the rules, stay active and publish unique and engaging content to maintain your verified status.

If you do not get verified on Instagram after applying, don’t worry. You can re-apply for Instagram verification after 30 days. Use those 30 days to continue working at our tips so that your account can hopefully be approved next time.

Remember, while Instagam verification can be a great asset in your overall marketing strategy on the platform, it’s just one piece of it. Keep all your tactics and plans in place so that you can continue working toward your goals, regardless of whether you’re verified or not.

As you begin to optimize your Instagram presence for possible verification, consider leveling up your digital marketing process, which can include automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Evergreen: What is it and how important is it?

If you’re a marketer, you know the importance of content through your marketing strategy.

Content can be used to bring new website visitors and convert them into paying customers. The better your content, the better their results.

Evergreen content is a type of website content you create for your digital marketing that remains interesting and relevant over time. People will be interested in this type of content for many years to come. This helps you take advantage of content and use it to continuously attract new website visitors.

Anyone running a content marketing campaign should plan content that will always generate interest from their target audience. In most cases, evergreen content refers to blog content. However, it can be used throughout your marketing strategy to attract more customers. 

What is evergreen content?

evergreen-content
Evergreen content discusses topics that are always interesting to the audience.

Evergreen content is any content, whether a blog, infographic, or video, that retains its relevancy over time. This type of content discusses topics that are always interesting to the audience.

For example, anyone who wants to learn how to build a website might read evergreen content in 2022 or 2025 since the same tips will still apply.

The same is true for many different topics, including pet care, child care, and other topics that allow you to create informational and valuable content for readers to digest. Evergreen content stays fresh no matter the year or season. It can help readers answer a question or learn about a topic.

Evergreen content does not discuss seasonal topics tied to a time of year or trendy events in the news. For example, an article about consumer trends in 2022 is not evergreen content because it discusses a particular year, and consumer trends are subject to change over time.

Importance of evergreen content

Evergreen content stays relevant long after it’s created, and because it’s not tied to a specific time period or trends, it continues to attract traffic to your business website. A few benefits of evergreen content include:

  • Future-proofing your website and blog: Evergreen content is always interesting to your audience, allowing your blog to stay relevant no matter what’s going on in the world. This can have a growing impact over time, continuing to attract new visitors. 
  • SEO Improvements: Evergreen topics are searched for more often than seasonal or trendy topics. With other types of content, the search volume for keywords and clicks on articles typically dies down after a few months or when the topic is no longer trendy. However, evergreen topics can help you improve your SEO efforts to rank higher on search engines and promote growing traffic to your site. 
  • Increases website traffic: We’ve already mentioned this a few times, but one of the main reasons you produce content is to increase your website traffic. Evergreen content is better at increasing traffic than other types of content because it’s always reluctant. 
  • Provides value: Evergreen content is always valuable and addresses a common question your visitors have. You can position yourself as a trusted resource and thought leader in your industry by providing customers with continuously valuable content. 
  • Generating leads: Evergreen content can improve your lead generation efforts by helping you demonstrate your expertise and build customer trust. The more you educate and provide valuable content, the more your audience will trust you, encouraging them to take action on your site and convert into leads.
  • Easier promotion: Evergreen content can be promoted over and over again on social media and through other digital channels. With minimal changes to the original content, you can continue to push content every so often to generate more interest. This can be especially beneficial after updating old content. 

What types of content can be evergreen?

Any content can be evergreen; remember, it’s not the type of content that matters. Instead, you should focus on the content topic to ensure that it’ll stay relevant over time. The best types of evergreen content include:

  • How-to guides: Guides are a great way to generate leads because it allows you to offer something in exchange for potential customers’ personal information. E-guides and how-to guides can always be relevant depending on the topic. For example, you can write a guide for feeding your pet, and new pet parents will continue to read it. However, if you write a how-to article for something that’s seasonal or trendy, you won’t get regular visitors or leads from it. For example, a guide on how to make Christmas ornaments will likely only get visits during the holiday season. 
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): The FAQ section of a website or web page is essential if you want to improve user experience (UX). However, it can also be used as evergreen content. Asking the most asked questions about your brand, business, or industry can make for good evergreen content, especially if you can help customers easily answer common questions without leaving your website. 
  • Videos: Videos can also be evergreen, depending on the topic. Of course, you should have a good mix of different types of content on your website to attract all types of visitors. Video topics can include everything from how to use your product to general topics about your industry. 

Start creating evergreen content

Evergreen content relies on your topic’s ability to stay relevant over time. So, you should always start by brainstorming different topics.

Think about your audience and niche to determine what types of topics they might be most interested in learning about. You can also consult search engines and look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section for similar topics. For example, if you’re a pet company, someone might be interested in how often they should walk their dogs. In this case, you could write an article about how often to walk a dog based on several factors. You can even use experts to help you create more valuable and trustworthy content.

Of course, remember to check the performance of your content regularly. You can use various tools to learn more about top-performing content. This will help you determine which topics your audience is most interested in.

Level up your overall content marketing with our seven tips.

While you’re evaluating your evergreen content marketing strategy, consider leveling up your digital marketing strategy. DailyStory specializes in automation, email marketing, audience segmentation and more. Level up your process, and schedule a free demo with us today.

8+ content marketing metrics you should track

Content marketing plays a key role in many digital marketing strategies, but what metrics should you be following to ensure that what you’re doing is working?

Content marketing is essentially described as the creation and publication of content in order to build an audience and generate sales leads. In other words, you’re leveraging content that you’re creating to create brand awareness and educate audiences.

While 80 percent of content marketers use metrics to measure performance, only 65 percent have KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure performance, and only 43 percent measure their content marketing ROI (return on investment).

So, while many brands may be using content marketing, plenty are still figuring out how to measure success.

Of course, your metrics matter. Content production, strategy, distribution, promotion and any related software all cost time and resources. Are you getting your money’s worth from your content? 

If you’re new to Google Analytics, check out our nine tips to get the most out of the analytics platform. 

The following are eight-plus content marketing metrics you should track to ensure that the content you’re sharing is working the way you want it to.

Website referral traffic

A common content marketing metric is website traffic, but go beyond just the total numbers of visitors. Take a look at how these visitors are finding your content. 

To see where your traffic is coming from in Google Analytics, use the Channel report. You’ll be able to see how users are finding your content, whether that’s organically or through social media, search engines, etc.

This will give you insight into whether your social media promotion is working, if your SEO needs a boost or if a popular email newsletter is linking to you. 

In other words, website referral traffic can help inform your content marketing strategy overall.

User behavior

User behavior is actually a collection of metrics that can give you insight into reader engagement and content performance, especially when paired with other metrics, such as website traffic. 

You can find the following user behavior metrics in Google Analytics:

  • Time On Page
  • Bounce Rate
  • Pages/Session
  • New/Returning Visitors

The power of user behavior metrics does come from the pairing up with other larger metrics, but they can help you better understand the performance of your content.

For example, you have a blog post that is receiving a lot of traffic from search engines, and visitors are spending significant time on the web page. From that you can infer that your post is matching the search intent of these users, which is a win.

Shares and backlinks

When it comes to any brand awareness goals, it’s important to understand how far your content is reaching (beyond traffic on your website). You can get an understanding of this by tracking social media shares and backlinks (which are hyperlinks that point from one website to another). 

These metrics show whether users are willing to share your content with their personal audiences and networks.

You can measure social media shares on such tools as BuzzSumo, and you can measure backlinks on such tools as SEMRush, BuzzSumo and more.

Check out our seven tips to grow quality backlinks and boost your SEO.

Google Search impressions and click-through rate

In Google Search Console, you can (and should) track impressions and click-through-rates of your content in organic searches.

These metrics can help you understand whether the keywords your content is ranking for actually lead to how many users saw your search result and how many clicks resulted from that. 

You can find these metrics in Google Search Console by filtering by a specific landing page and then looking through the queries linked to that page. Click on Performance, then Search Results and then Queries.

Check out our four tips to boost your click-through rate in Google Search.

Keyword rankings

Speaking of keyword rankings, this is another content marketing metric you should be tracking. You’ll want to monitor your core keywords and their rankings at least monthly.

Ranking improvements can reflect positively on your content marketing performance. You can use Google Search Console to find this metric. 

If you’re not sure what keywords should be on your priority list, start with keyword research. Check out these 11 free SEO keyword research tools you should consider.

Lead generation

Lead generation is all about your content bringing in new sales leads to your business. In other words, it is the process of getting people interested in your business and gradually nuturing them into becoming paying customers. 

To measure lead generation in Google Analytics, you’ll want to set up your goals in the platform. This allows you to follow such things as demo requests, Contact Us submissions and more. This can then be used to help determine how many conversions come through a blog or other piece of content.

Premium content is not only a key part of any content marketing strategy, but it can directly increase lead generation. Learn more about what it is and how you can leverage premium content in your marketing.

Customer retention

New visitors are great, but don’t forget about your loyal, returning visitors. These are the consumers whom you’re building a relationship with that can lead to purchases in the future.

These are warm leads that you can’t ignore. What content is appealing to them? To find out in Google Analytics, click on Audience, then Behavior, and then New vs Returning.

Speaking of returning visitors, check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.

Email opt-in rates

Email subscriptions might not be the first content marketing metric you’d think of, but it matters because your subscriber number reflects how many consumers found enough value in your content to want more of it delivered to them directly.

DailyStory is just one email marketing tool that can help you track your subscribers, their engagement with your emails and more.

In conclusion

Remember that the power of your content marketing metrics is only as strong as the goals you’re setting around your content.

Don’t have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals? Check out our seven expert tips to set achievable marketing goals for your small business.

As you’re getting serious about tracking your content marketing metrics, think about your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

7 holiday marketing strategy tips to optimize sales

Digital marketing has become the primary way to spread the word about your holiday offers and savings. 

And since the holidays are a hectic time for consumers, it’s critical to develop a holiday marketing strategy sooner than later that will help you stand out from your competition.

Two key days during the holiday shopping season are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which combined have been projected to generate more than $10 billion in sales. Of course, these days “Cyber Monday” has expanded into “Cyber Week,” which generates about 17 percent of total holiday spending. About 58 percent of Cyber Week purchases are made by totally new visitors.

The following are seven tips to help your digital marketing shine this holiday season and not miss any opportunities to stand out and succeed.

Start early

If you wait until the holiday season is about to begin, then you’re already too late. Aim to start working on your holiday marketing strategy and materials in August or September.

This will enable you to prepare what will be the most effective for your business since you’ll have appropriate time to think through everything and create what is needed. That way, you can focus on the actual execution during the holiday season itself.

Set your holiday marketing goals

The success of your holiday marketing starts with the setting of specific goals that you set in advance. 

Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve? 

Think through how to make your goals S.M.A.R.T.:

  • Specific
  • Measureable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

For example, you may want to beat last year’s holiday sales by a particular percentage. Or, you want to increase your email subscribers by a desired amount. Just make sure that the goal(s) are something that serves your business.

Check out our seven expert tips to achievable marketing goals for more.

Make your holiday marketing memorable

In order to stand out from your competition, you may need to do a little bit more than post about a big sale around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

You want to connect with your audience. And in order to connect, reflect on how you can touch upon the values that your brand shares with your customers and potential customers.

After all, engagement is based on meaningful human connections. And if you’re not compelling your target audience to engage with your holiday marketing content, then it’s going to be that much harder to convert them into purchases. 

Beyond the discounts, limited-time offers and promotions, think about the broader message you want to convey in your holiday marketing that both represents your brand and brings your customers along for the ride.

Create or use a content calendar

Once you have an overall plan, a content calendar is a fantastic way to get (and stay) organized for your holiday marketing. This is where you can get more specific in the “what,” “when,” “where” and possibly even “who” behind planned assets.

A content calendar can help you plan and maintain your content marketing strategy across platforms. Specifically, a content calendar is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish your upcoming content. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be, with the option to include:

  • Upcoming content pieces
  • Status updates
  • Planned promotions
  • Partnerships
  • Updates to your existing content

Check out our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.

Schedule emails and social media posts in advance

When business might be slower in the months before the holiday season begins, use that time as an opportunity to create and schedule all your holiday marketing assets in advance.

Of course, the obvious assets are emails and social media posts. But maybe you’re thinking about publish a holiday-specific landing page or pop-up ad (both of which DailyStory can help with). Whatever you plan to create, do so early and get everything as ready to go as possible.

The act of scheduling itself so that everything publishes automatically at the best possible time can save you a lot of time (and prevent missed opportunities that can happen if you’re publishing assets manually).

See these five ways you can approach automation in your marketing strategy.

Leverage cross-channel marketing

The beauty of digital marketing is that it includes multiple channels that can be used to boost each other within a specific holiday marketing campaign in order to get your message out to more of your target audience.

The idea here is that you want to cover all your bases. How can your emails complement your social media? How can your SMS text messages connect with warm leads from your emails or social media posts? 

In your holiday marketing strategy, think through the customer journey and where you can better connect with them along the way to better convert for a sale. Then, measure every element of your campaign so that you can build off of how everything performed going into the next holiday season.

Use personalization and segmentation

Personalization involves using the data you have about your audience to understand how your content best fits their needs or interest. (Personalization in the simplest sense can also be the use of a customer’s first name in a marketing message.)

Segmentation, then, is the targeted delivery of messages to only those you’re looking to share a specific custom message with. 

For example, a customer who hasn’t purchased from you in the past three months could be sent a “we miss you” email with a discount offer to entice him or her back.

Personalization and segmentation can be used to level up your holiday marketing as well. 

Within your holiday marketing plan, consider where you can personalize and segment your messaging. The more specific you can get, the more effective you’ll likely be.

Learn more about personalization and segmentation. 

In conclusion

The holiday season is a critical time to get noticed by your target audience and convert leads into sales. Don’t be afraid to experiment and even try new platforms. Just make sure it’s all detailed in your holiday marketing plan.

Dive deeper with our Digital Marketing 101 Guide for Beginners.

As you begin to plan and prepare your holiday marketing, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 last-minute Small Business Saturday marketing ideas

Small Business Saturday should be marked on every small business owner’s calendar. 

To put it simply, Small Business Saturday is a special day each year when people are encouraged to shop small during the post-Thanksgiving weekend to support their local economies. It applies to all types of small, local businesses.

The holiday was started by American Express in 2010 during the recession and became recognized by the U.S. Senate and all 50 states in 2011.

While about 39 percent of Americans celebrate Small Business Saturday, about 57 percent make it a point to shop at local businesses.

You don’t want to miss an opportunity to share your small business story with your target audience. But you might be busy and find yourself running out of time to do anything special for Small Business Saturday itself.

Don’t worry! We have you covered. The following are five last-minute Small Business Saturday marketing ideas that you can make happen with limited time and a limited budget.

Highlight your business story

Owning your identity as a small business can be as simple as posting a video or image on social media (or an email drip campaign if you have enough time or blog post) that shares the story behind your business. 

How did it get started? Why was it created? What are some of your favorite memories? Biggest challenges? What makes you different from big-box stores? How do you support the community? Who are the people behind your business? What is the relationship with your customers like?

There’s no limit to what or how you can share your business story. Even just a few thoughts can engage your audience in a meaningful way.

Offer a compelling discount or special

To stand out from the crowd of other small businesses marketing for Small Business Saturday, a compelling discount, offer or gift might be needed.

Think about your audience and what might appeal to them. Could it be a discounted packaging of a couple of your services or products? Is there a special gift you can include for any orders that cost more than a specific amount? Perhaps free refreshments in your physical business while customers shop?

You also can reflect and consider anything that’s worked well in the past. 

The key is that you want to blast your offer across your social media channels, email newsletter, in-store signage, etc. Wherever you can share it, including in relevant Facebook groups, do so.

Just make sure that whatever your offer is, it’s something that you can deliver on.

Collect email addresses in-store from customers

Regardless of how you set up your physical business location for success on Small Business Saturday, collecting email addresses from your customers should be a must.

This could be as simple as having a printed-out sign-up sheet (if you don’t have a device and online webform to use). You could even offer a special discount simply for signing up for your email contact list.

Remember that these customers are supporting you on Small Business Saturday, so you don’t want to miss out on signing them up for your email newsletter so that you can stay in touch (and encourage them to purchase from you again).

Confirm that you’re listed ahead of Small Business Saturday

Having an active, correct Google My Business listing ahead of Small Business Saturday is both critical and easy to do.

About 46 percent of all Google searches are looking for local information, while 88 percent of searches for local businesses on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours.

Check out our 12 ways to optimize your Google My Business profile.

Of course, listings go beyond just Google. Don’t forget Facebook, Yelp and any other platforms that are relevant in your community.

Host a giveaway

The best giveaways typically require a bit of time to plan and execute, but if you keep it simple enough, your giveaway can still be successful.

You can encourage user-generated content, such as photos with your product, to be posted with a specific Small Business Saturday-related hashtag. Then, whichever photo gets the most likes, you can repost it and give the “winner” a prize or special discount.

There are a number of ways to run a quick, efficient giveaway. Just make sure that you’re keeping everything legal.

In conclusion

If you’re limited on time ahead of Small Business Saturday, don’t fret. Decide what “low-hanging fruit” you can use in your marketing to seize the opportunity to engage with your audience and increase your sales.

As you’re marketing ahead of Small Business Saturday, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory and our 21-day free trial. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

26 social media metrics you should track across platforms

Are you paying attention to the right social media metrics?

Social media marketing can help you achieve your business goals, but it’s important to track your social media metrics to understand what’s working and what’s not.

About 43 percent of consumers increased their social media use to discover new products.

Of course, the best metrics to track on social media relate to your specific goals. But in general, the following are the 26 top metrics to track, based on social media platforms.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social media network, with nearly 3 billion monthly active users as of July 2022. Of course, the sheer size of the audience makes it a favorite platform for marketers. But even though it’s popular, it’s also easy to feel overwhelmed when tracking your Facebook performance metrics. Here are five social media metrics you should track on Facebook:

  1. Reach and impressions, which are the number of unique users who saw your content and the number of total times your content was seen (regardless of whether one user saw it multiple times), respectively. Tracking these numbers gives you a sense of how large of an audience you’re reaching and can help give context to other Facebook metrics.
  2. Likes and reactions, which are a form of engagement that give users the opportunity to express their support for a page or a post. “Likes” used to refer to interactions with both Facebook pages and posts but Facebook has since expanded the options to engage with posts. These “reactions” span from “angry” to “love.” They act as social proof that your audience is connecting with your content, and Facebook uses them as a ranking signal to potentially show that content to more users in their news feeds. You also can get a sense of user sentiment about your content by monitoring your post reactions.
  3. Video views, which reflect when a video is played for at least three seconds. To count as a video view, the video needs to be 100 percent on screen in desktop browser mode and at least 50 percent on screen on mobile devices. Within the video-view metric, Facebook offers 3-second video views (when a user paused for your video but did not complete it), 1-minute video views (when a user watches for a significant period of time) and total minutes viewed. This is an important metric to monitor to understand how your video content is performing.
  4. Link clicks, which happen any time a user clicks an external link in your post to access more content. This could be to your website or another web page or site. This differs slightly with Facebook ads, where a traditional link click is called an outbound click and “link clicks” refer to clicks a user has made but still stays within the Facebook platform (such as filling out a form from a lead-generation ad but is still on Facebook). If your goal is to drive traffic to your website or someplace else, this metric reflects your success in those efforts.
  5. Comments and shares, which refer to the number of replies users have published on your content and the number of times users have sent your post to others on Facebook Messenger or shared on their own feeds. This acts as social proof that users are connecting with your content. It’s a bigger interaction than a like/reaction. You also can gauge user sentiment from comments on your posts.

Dive deeper into understanding your metrics on Facebook.

Instagram

A visual-first platform owned by Facebook, Instagram now is the fourth most-used social media platform, with 1.22 billion monthly active users. It’s also particularly popular for consumers 34 years old and younger. Here are four metrics you should track on Instagram:

  1. Impressions, which are the number of times your content is seen by users who are logged into Instagram, even if a user saw it multiple times. This metric shows how effective your content is at getting the attention of your audience and beyond. It also helps give context to other metrics on Instagram.
  2. Reach, which is the estimated number of unique users (who are logged into Instagram) that saw your content. This metric is about users, not views, but will show you how large your audience actually is and can help give context to other metrics.
  3. Video plays, which are the number of times your video or reel was played by an Instagram user. Keep in mind that because many videos are short and play in a loop automatically, this metric can be higher than expected based on that content’s reach. It’s important to gauge whether all your video efforts are paying off.
  4. Post interactions, which are the number of likes, saves, comments and shares on any particular post. This metric does not include deleted interactions. To include deleted interactions, look at “content interactions” instead. This is all about understanding how well your content is connecting with your audience and can actually help boost your impressions and reach within the Instagram algorithm.

Dive deeper into understanding your metrics on Instagram.

Twitter

A micro-blogging social network, Twitter has about 396.5 million users globally. About 92 percent of the content on Twitter is posted by 10 percent of its users. So, while Twitter might not be the most popular social media network, it has a very engaged section of its users. Here are four metrics you should track on Twitter:

  1. Impressions, which are the number of times your tweet appeared on screen, whether that’s through a user’s timeline or via a hashtag. You can view this metric for your account as a whole and for individual tweets. This metric can give you a sense of how many users viewed your content.
  2. Engagement, which is the number of times users have retweeted, quoted, replied to, liked or clicked within your tweet. This metric shows how effective your content is.
  3. Link clicks, which are any click on a URL or card within your tweet. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website or somewhere else, this metric can show how successful your efforts are.
  4. Profile visits, which reflect the number of users who visited your profile either through a tweet, search or other ways. This metric indicates the number of users who want to learn more about you, whether they ultimately follow you or not.

Dive deeper into understanding your metrics on Twitter.

YouTube

A video-only social networking and broadcasting platform owned by Google, YouTube has more than 2.5 billion active monthly users. If you’re already creating video content, you definitely want to create a YouTube presence and share it there as well. Here are three metrics you should track on YouTube:

  1. Total watch time, which equals the total amount of time that all users have spent watching your video. This metric can help indicate how well your content is connecting with users. You also can see how total watch time compares between your subscribers and non-subscribers for more understanding.
  2. Video views, which is defined by Google to be “the number of legitimate views for your channel or videos.” This can refer to views that users initiate, such as by searching or clicking on a thumbnail. This metric can reveal how compelling your video is to potential viewers.
  3. Engagement, which is any interaction with your content beyond accessing it, such as likes, dislikes, views and comments. This metric shows how well your content connects with your audience.

Check out our 20 tips to grow your YouTube subscribers.

TikTok

Seemingly the “new kid on the block” in terms of rising popularity, short-form-video platform TikTok has a particularly large audience among Gen Z and Millennials. Depending on whether this younger demographic is part of your target audience, you may want to consider a presence on TikTok. Here are four metrics you should track on TikTok:

  1. Total time watched, which is the cumulative amount of time users spent watching your video. You’ll only see this for individual videos. However, by regularly monitoring this metric, you’ll see how successful new video content is.
  2. Engagement, which is how users interact with your content. This gives you a sense of how effectively your content is connecting with users. The higher the engagement, the higher your reach will probably be. 
  3. Video views, which are the number of times users played your video. As soon as a video begins to play, that counts as a video view (unlike some other social media platforms). This metric also counts repeat plays, including video loops. Video views essentially act like impressions on TikTok, so you can see how large of an audience you’re reaching.
  4. Hashtag performance, which reflects how many viewers found your video through a particular hashtag. This is important because the hashtags you use on your videos can impact your view count and engagement. Using the right hashtag matters. Tracking this metric will help you make more strategic decisions along the way and potentially attract more viewers.

Check out our 15 tips to market your brand on TikTok.

LinkedIn

With more than 830 million users in more than 200 countries and territories, LinkedIn is the largest social network for professionals. The platform is definitely a must for B2B (business-to-business) marketers. Here are three metrics you should track on LinkedIn:

  1. Impressions and unique impressions, which are the number of times at least 50 percent of your post was visible on screen for a logged-in LinkedIn user for at least 300 milliseconds and the number of times your post was visible to the same standard for unique users, respectively. These metrics show the size of your audience and how visible your content is to them.
  2. Engagements, which reflects video views, clicks, reactions, comments, shares and more in a section on LinkedIn called Update Engagements. You’ll get a sense of how well your content is connecting with your audience through this metric.
  3. Engagement rate, which is based on the following formula: number of interactions plus number of clicks plus number of followers acquired divided by number of impressions. This metric shows the percentage of impressions that result in engagement actions. Of course, the higher that percentage, the more effective your post is.

See our six tips to be more effective with your marketing on LinkedIn. Plus, check out the six biggest mistakes businesses make on LinkedIn so that you can avoid them.

Pinterest

Founded in 2009, Pinterest currently has about 478 million monthly active users. Think of Pinterest as a visual search engine, housing tons of photos, graphics, links and inspiration for nearly anything you might want to find. Yes, it’s popular for recipes and DIY projects, but there really is more to it than that. Here are XX metrics you should track on Pinterest:

  1. Impressions, which show the number of times your pins have appeared on screen, regardless of whether a user clicked to open it or not. This metric is available on an account level or by individual pin, and it helps illustrate how effectively your content is reaching an audience. It also can help provide context for other metrics.
  2. Engagement, which is defined by Pinterest as the number of “saves, pin clicks, outbound clicks, carousel card swipes, secondary creative (collections) clicks and Idea Pin foward/backward swipes.” In the simplest sense, Pinterest is saying that engagement is any time a user interacts with your pin in any way instead of scrolling past it. Monitoring this metric helps you understand how well your content is connecting with your audience.
  3. Outbound clicks, which are the number of times a user clicked on an outbound link (to your website, for example) from your pin. This metric matters is one of your goals is to drive traffic to your website or another web page outside of Pinterest.

Check out our six expert tips for marketing on Pinterest.

In conclusion

Monitoring your social media performance is imperative if you want to achieve your marketing goals. The challenge can be navigating so much data across platforms. Keep your goals in mind, as well as these top social media metrics. That way, you can focus on the most important information for your campaigns.

As you begin to drill into your top social media metrics, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

5 steps to determine your brand personality

Brands have personalities just like humans do. But if you’re a little unsure how to define your particular brand personality, you’ve come to the right place.

A brand personality involves the human characteristics of a brand, which your customers can relate to and connect with. Every brand can and should have a voice, color and other attributes that evoke different emotions.

Without a defined brand personality, consumers will have a harder time figuring out whether you’re the right business for them. That’s definitely not a decision you want to complicate.

On the flip side, a strong brand personality can increase your brand loyalty and customer retention. (Check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.)

Remember, your brand only has seven seconds to make a good first impression.

About 46 percent of consumers in the U.S. say that they would pay more to purchase from brands they can trust. In addition, about 64 percent of women and 68 percent of men have felt an emotional connection with a brand. This can occur when you grow interest, trust and optimism from your potential customers and customers.

Essentially, there are five types of brand personalities:

  • Sincere, generous, thoughtful, honest, wholesome, cheerful, down-to-earth, warm and value-oriented (such as Cadbury, Hallmark and Amazon)
  • Excited, easygoing, lively, trendy, imaginative, spirited, daring, intrigued and youthful (such as Mountain Dew, BuzzFeed, Red Bull, Tesla and Nike)
  • Rugged, rough, outdoorsy, adventurous, athletic, tough and sporty (such as Jeep, Harley Davidson, Woodland and Yeti)
  • Sophisticated, elegant, luxury, charming, high-class, timeless, glamourous and renowned (such as Dolce & Gabbana, Mercedes, Chanel and Rolex)
  • Competent, accomplished, reliable, successful, intelligent and authoritative (such as Google, Microsoft, Volkswagen and Intel)

Not only does a defined brand personality resonate with your target audience, but it also can set your marketing strategy path. Once you know “who” your brand is, the opportunities to share that become clearer. Your brand’s personality will help you make the best decisions for every aspect of your business.

The following are five steps to determine your brand personality and better connect with potential customers.

Understand your target audience

So much about branding drills down to the people you’re hoping to reach and serve with your products and/or services.

By digging into the demographics and behaviors of your ideal customer, you can get a better sense of how your brand could relate to that customer. The more relatable you are to him or her, the better.

Keep these questions in mind:

  • Who is your audience?
  • What journey are they on?
  • What are their core desires?
  • What are their characteristics and behaviors?

Not exactly sure who your target audience is? Our seven tips can help.

Identify your brand’s role

Once you understand your target audience, it’s time to determine what role your brand should fill for them. For example, your brand could be your audience’s guide, motivator, friend, protector, inspiration or something else. 

Before you jump to any conclusions, consider how your products and/or services affect your customers’ lives. Here are a few questions to help you identify your brand’s role:

  • Is your brand more of a leader, or does it play a supporting role in customers’ lives?
  • What special effect does your brand create in your customers’ lives?
  • If your brand had a personal relationship with your ideal customer, what type of relationship would that be? A family member? Friend? Someone else?

Brainstorm related characteristics

Once you decide on your brand’s role, list out all the characteristics that role exemplifies as it relates to your target audience.

Don’t hold back when listing characteristics. The point is that you get every thought written down. Quantity over quality.

Once you’ve exhausted all possible ideas, review your list and fine-tune it. Highlight what really speaks to you. Consider whether there are any related characteristics before you narrow down to your favorite characteristics that resonate most for you.

Visualize your brand personality

It’s time to create a mood board to visualize your brand personality, starting only with your favorite characteristics that you brainstormed earlier.

In the simplest sense, a mood board is a collage that contains a variety of images, text and any other items that ultimately will define your brand and communicate your brand personality. It also can help bring this developing personality into focus.

You can easily create a “mood board” using Pinterest, where you can easily pin visuals that represent your characteristics. The goal here is to bring your brand personality to life.

Just like when you were brainstorming characteristics earlier, now is the time to gather more than you need and then fine-tune to what feels best to you. This can include images, colors, visual metaphors (such as a tiger for being “fierce”), art, words/quotes, letters, texture, patterns and shapes.

Also, be sure to include any brand guidelines, such as your brand colors, fonts, logo and any other related brand materials that you have. If you are still developing your official brand, our nine expert tips can help.

Develop your brand voice

Now that you’ve visualized your brand personality, you need to develop a brand voice that supports and conveys that.

How do you speak to your target audience? Once you have an idea, it’s time to outline specific guidelines that highlight your tone, the type of multimedia images you would share and even jargon use, among other considerations.

Check out our eight tips for reflecting your brand’s personality through your brand voice.

In conclusion

Your brand personality can be pivotal in helping you stand out from your competitors. It’s worth the time and effort to understand it for yourself so that you can then communicate it through every asset in your digital marketing efforts and beyond.

Of course, we recommend setting a brand style guide to keep your brand personality, voice and more consistent across platforms and over time. This consistency empowers a stronger digital marketing strategy.

Check out our five tips to create a brand style guide.

As you begin to nail down your brand personality, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

17 LinkedIn content ideas that you can post

If reaching professionals is a goal of your digital marketing efforts, offering diverse content on LinkedIn is a crucial tactic to explore.

LinkedIn now has more than 830 million users in more than 200 countries and territories, calling itself “the world’s largest professional network.”

But the type of content that a LinkedIn audience of professionals would best engage with is not necessarily the same as what’s popular on other social media platforms. The most popular content types on LinkedIn are: 

  • Long-form content (such as native articles and blog posts)
  • Third-party content
  • Native video
  • Text only
  • Photos and illustrations

But these are just content types. If you’re hitting a wall while brainstorming content ideas for LinkedIn, you’re in the right place. The following are 17 LinkedIn content ideas (categorized by content type) to help you mix up your content and connect with your target audience.

Long-form content ideas for LinkedIn

One of the best ways you can hit your goals with your content on LinkedIn is to offer value. Creating native articles on LinkedIn itself and/or sharing blog posts is a great opportunity to dive deeper into topics that relate to your industry, showcase your expertise and matter to your audience. Here are four ideas that you can run with:

  1. Detailed whitepapers
  2. How-to guides
  3. Research reports
  4. Case studies

The goal isn’t the length of the content. Make sure that every word engages your audience.

Third-party content ideas for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent platform to share relevant content from other sources. In other words, you don’t have to create everything yourself. With curated content, the sky is the limit. Just make sure you’re pulling from trustworthy sources. Here are three ideas for you to seek out and share:

  1. Adjacent-industry content, where the topic isn’t directly related to your industry but is still relevant. For example, you could be in the retail industry, but news articles about supply chains and shipping logistics still make sense and matter to your audience in the realm of retail.
  2. Expert opinions, where you’re sharing the thoughts and opinions of experts in your industry.
  3. Tips, tricks and life hacks, where you’re helping your audience with everyday problems that they encounter.

Check out our four tips for finding what to share on social media, as well as 12 tools that can help.

Native video content ideas for LinkedIn

Video content must be part of your digital marketing strategy, not just on LinkedIn but in general. About 54 percent of marketers say that video is the most valuable content type for achieving social media marketing goals, and about 85 percent of social media users want more videos from brands. Fortunately, LinkedIn now has the ability for you to upload videos natively into the platform. Here are four video content ideas that you can play with:

  1. Short clips from webinars to show your expertise first-hand.
  2. Spotlight your team. The more you can share their professional journeys and expertise, the more your audience can relate to your brand and the people behind your brand.
  3. Spotlight your customers in testimonials where they share their experience with your product and/or company.
  4. Behind-the-scenes videos that showcase your company culture.

Just make sure to include subtitles on your videos whenever relevant since a majority of users watch videos on mute.

Text-only content ideas for LinkedIn

Just because long-form content gives you the opportunity to dive deeper into topics that can provide value to your followers doesn’t mean that you should ignore the opportunity of short text-only posts. Here are three ideas to help you be as engaging as possible without the “icing” of other types of content:

  1. Tips and how-to’s are great for this content type if you can keep them short and sweet.
  2. Quick company updates
  3. Product and other announcements

The key is to be as short and impactful as possible. Every word counts.

Photo and illustration content ideas for LinkedIn

Getting visual on LinkedIn is just as important as visuals on any other social media platform. A photo (or graphic illustration) is worth a thousand words. And possibly even more than that because it can help catch the eye of your target audience as they’re scrolling. Here are three ideas that you can try:

  1. Data illustrations because everyone loves data, but everyone loves a visual representation of data (so that they can understand it) even more.
  2. Celebrate achievements, such as industry awards, company growth, anniversaries and more. A simple graphic illustration of these milestones can be very eye-catching.
  3. User-generated content, where you can leverage the photos shared by customers and employees (with proper credit, of course).

You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create compelling illustrations. Check out these 11 free graphic design tools for the non-designer.

In conclusion

Don’t overthink your LinkedIn content. Keep your target audience in mind and keep experimenting. Engage wherever it makes sense on the platform. And remember, you can always repurpose your evergreen content so that it’s new again in the eyes of your followers.

Check out our six tips to be more effective on LinkedIn, as well as six mistakes businesses make on LinkedIn that you want to avoid.

As you’re exploring how to mix up your LinkedIn content, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.