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The kings of spam fall from the throne: How does email marketing work?

You need to use the right email marketing. Each of us receives a lot of spam in our email inbox from completely known sources. When promoting your business, you shouldn’t.

Buried in the garbage

The situation is similar to flyers and mailboxes. You get up in the morning, go to the store. On the way back, check the mailbox. First, there is a circular motion with your hand to throw out the tons of flyers that are dropped into your inbox every day. Right after you finished the garbage, which you didn’t even need to look at, because in 99% of cases it offers something that you are not interested in, you select the mail that is addressed to your name. In addition to bills, you can find magazines for which you pay a subscription, postcards, which are somewhat less common these days, and notifications about the arrival of shipments. It often happens that you receive a letter addressed to you, which is actually not intended directly for you, but rather a promotion of some kind of pillows, travel agencies with discounts or invitations to free “lunch”. The very fact that the letter is addressed to you, and not really to you, but to thousands of other people with the goal of buying something does not inspire much confidence. The company that offers the service begins communication with you through the lie that the letter is intended for you.

Beans

Enjoy a free lunch while looking at our washable pillows

In the email world, things work the same way. If you have a Gmail or Yahoo account, their spam filters filter out the spam themselves, but there’s always that small percentage that ends up in your inbox. People view their email account as a very private matter and you cannot initiate communication with them by lying to them that the email is for them. Some even go so far as to title the email with “(Private) See…”. Such and similar names can deceive us at the moment and prompt us to open the email, but soon we realize that it is abuse.

Just as you open real letters that you receive from the relevant institution (electricity, water, tax bills), friends or from those legal entities with whom you have directly registered to receive mail, you do the same in your email account. We start from the fact that you will certainly open an email from a friend or from sites whose mailing lists you are signed up for.

How do you get people to sign up for your mailing list?

addtext_com_MDQxNDM3NzYzMjM

The question arises, if you are in business, selling a product or service, how to get people to sign up for your mailing list. There are several ways.

If there is a physical location where you offer products and services, you can create a promotion or sweepstakes that requires your customers or potential customers to leave an email address on the form in order to participate. After that, you can constantly upgrade the email list in a similar way. Of course, you have to convert the emails received in this way into an electronic format.

Another, simpler, way is to get email addresses online using your company’s website, search engines, and social networks. First you need to create some kind of content that will benefit people. It can be a free e-book, a text tutorial, a video tutorial. We have a massage client. We create an electronic exercise book for people who spend a lot of time in front of the computer. People leave their email address to download the book.

On your site, you create a special page that is called a “Squeeze page” in marketing circles. The goal of creating the station is to get contact information or some other information that is important for the company from the visitor. These pages are specially planned, designed, and quality accompanying text is created for them. From a technical point of view, creating a page like this requires some programming knowledge or the use of ready-made, usually commercial plugins for some of the content management systems.

We assume that the visitor came to the page through a Facebook or Google AdWords paid campaign. The page must have such functionality that it instructs the visitor that if he wants to download the book we have prepared, he must first fill out the form. After he fills out the form, he receives an automatic message from the website containing a link to the book. The email address itself and other contact data remain entered in the database provided for that purpose.

To quickly create a mailing list, paid Facebook promotion is usually practiced. By clicking on the post, the visitor comes to the “Squeeze page” that we created. In this way, depending on the quality of the content, that is, the “bait” that we have prepared in order to get an email address, depending on the quality of the Facebook promotion and the appearance of the “Squeeze page”, we will collect a certain number of email addresses.

The number of collected emails also depends on the already mentioned factors, but on how much people need the service or product you offer, i.e. from the market movement in that area.

We created a mailing list and now what?

The first and basic mistake that is made when you have a mailing list is to send subscribers exclusively and only promotions and discounts in unlimited quantities. The site visitor entrusts you with his email address, giving you permission to contact him, thereby accepting that he will occasionally peek into an email you sent him, and you start showering him with promotions and discounts every day. After some time, depending on the tolerance threshold, he either unsubscribes from the list or marks the email address from which the emails you send him receive as spam, i.e. undesirable.

Totally applicable to email marketing

What kind of emails should you send to your subscribers instead of the ones we listed? First you need to understand that with your mailing list, ie. you have to have a special relationship with the people who are signed up for it. You have to nurture her, maintain a constant relationship. The process of communication through the mailing list should take place not only from you to the subscribers but also in the reverse direction. You should encourage communication. It should be clear to the applicants that you really care about their opinion.

When you create a mailing list, you should first imagine the “avatar” for whom you are creating the list (as Jeff Walker puts it nicely).

What is an avatar? Avatar in this case is an imaginary person to whom you want to offer your service or product. You can define it as a male person, over 30 years old, employed in some field, etc. You have defined the type of man, ie. characteristics of the ideal customer for your product or service. At all times, whenever you create content you should think about your avatar and how it will relate to the content you create.

In the emails themselves, give useful and interesting information to the subscribers, so that over time they start following you and start opening the emails you send regularly. Don’t offer promotions and discounts at first, try to build a relationship with your list.

One of the things you need to do when creating a good email is to get rid of the corporate tone. What it means ? Instead of saying:

“Research has shown that 90% of people who used this and that toothpaste had a 70.6% lower chance of developing periodontal disease.” In cooperation with Zubicvil doo, the conditions for importing this paste have been met, so please contact the nearest pharmacy if you are interested in this product.”

You can say:

“Hello, this is Government.” I have an update regarding a new toothpaste that has hit the market. In cooperation with dentists, we let people try the paste here and there for free. I did not expect anything excessive from it, because we have already had similar actions. This time it happened that people were bragging to the dentists about how much whiter their teeth were. I also looked at several studies and saw that the paste contains this and that substance and that even periodontitis occurs much less often. We offer a lot of toothpastes, but this one is really something special, and you can find it in all pharmacies.”

The goal is to remove the corporate tone and give the whole relationship a friendly note. The subscriber should feel like he is talking to a friend. Finally, ask yourself when you most often buy a product. The answer is simple, we buy most often when family and friends recommend it to us, then a few places are empty, then experts through personal contact, and only then do propaganda and advertising messages come. Since the email inbox is a very private thing for each of us and everything that reaches us becomes part of our private world, if we are already sending marketing messages, we should market them through useful and quality content. If we can’t sound like family members, we can still give our content a friendly tone rather than a boring corporate one.

There are special strategies when you want to introduce a new product through a mailing list. These strategies are also based on quality content that is organized in several sequences. There is an exact order in which the different types of content are sent and the time intervals in which the content is sent. Mainly through the content of the email you have to unobtrusively provide people with proof that your product or you are socially accepted, through the content you have to indicate your position of authority as a seller. It’s especially important to sell from a position of authority rather than condescendingly begging people to buy your product.

When you make actions, they must be rare and last for a specific and precisely defined period of time. If you say that the action lasts until a certain moment, it must be so that people would take you seriously and that would make them decide to buy or give up the purchase by that moment.

Through content, you need to show people the transformation they will experience if they buy your product. People are not interested in the form in which they receive the product, but rather in the story of the transformation they will experience by purchasing it. For example, just answer the question, if someone is selling a cure for cancer, does it matter to people whether they received it as a tablet or as an injection, or does it matter to them the transformation from sick to healthy.

cancer girls If you found the text interesting, comment on it. We really care about your opinion.

 

Content marketing ie. content marketing: 100000 ways to destroy the competition!

The content represents the essence, it is you represented by words, recordings, pictures. Sajjaj represents what they will see you as.

What used to be?

Once upon a time, you paid someone to build a website for you and provided content for them to insert. Thus, most sites contained menus: About us, Products, Price list, Contact. You usually had one text for each of the menus. The site served as long as you have it and write its address on the business card. Even today, someone offers this kind of service on the website of a company that sells healthy food.

Hello websites

A section on the website of a company that sells healthy food.

At that time, business in Serbia was conducted exclusively through acquaintances and meetings, advertisements in newspapers, sticking advertising messages on poles, inserting flyers into mailboxes. Some of the ways of advertising have survived to this day, however, it should not be ignored that in Serbia at the moment there are over 2.5 million Internet users and over 3 million open Facebook accounts.

We weren't even good guerrillas.

We weren’t even good guerrillas.

What is searched for on the Internet?

Mainly for cheap entertainment and content. The fact is that domestic websites are not excessively rich in content and that there is an open space for competition in content marketing , because content is something that Internet users always need and that is why they are there. The number of resources available to them in this area of ​​ours is very limited, and new quality content is always welcome.

 

What has changed ?

It is no longer enough to have a website without content. Now, in order to survive in business and to properly present yourself to Internet users, you need to be in the role of a publisher, ie. you should be a source of content and not just any content but quality and useful content. Easier said than done. First you need to define the target group. The way you address someone, as well as the content you will offer, depends on the level of education, socioeconomic status, gender, place of living and other characteristics. Imagine reading the best material in the field of nuclear physics, but you are not a nuclear physicist. Do you believe you would understand anything? That’s the point. You create content for your target group. Write in simple language. You can’t look at visitors solely through their demographic characteristics, but as living and real human beings because that’s what they are. Let the words be drinkable and impressive for the reader. We do not claim that this text is also ideal for you who are reading it, nor that it will represent the ultimate experience and revelation for you, but we believe that you will understand it and that it is useful. What makes it useful is the information it contains. That’s enough for a start.

Adapt the story to the person you are talking to

Adapt the story to its intended audience

 

How can you check the quality of the content?

Every content is an investment. It allows you to present yourself to clients in the right way. Search engines also index the content from your site and thus allow potential clients to find you faster. For example, you want people to find you on Google for the keywords “custom furniture.” You achieve this, among other things, when you often mention that phrase in your texts. Google indexes your texts and since it finds this phrase in several places, it considers that your site is relevant for searches with these keywords and positions you better in its results.

If you have a site rich in content, the chance that someone will find your site also increases. “long tail” keywords, such as “making american bedroom closets”. The more content you have, the greater the chance that someone will find your site and your offer on search engines. Once they land on your site, potential clients need to stay there and take a close look and seriously consider your offer. If the content is not of high quality, they will leave the page very quickly, without reading even half of the article, without looking at the offer.

How can you check if your content is of high quality and if your investment in it has paid off? You can check whether there has been an increase in the sales of those products or services for which quality content has been created compared to those for which this has not been done.

Through Google Analytics, you can monitor the time that users spend on different pages of the site. Based on this, you can determine whether visitors like to read some content or not. What is good, you will keep, what is bad you will change or throw out. In this way, you can permanently monitor the success of the created content and improve it.

Google Analytics

Display of time spent on the site in Google Analytics

What can be the goal of creating quality content?

Maybe you want to increase people’s awareness of your brand, become an authority source of information in your field, increase sales, create a mailing list with active subscribers. An active and involved subscriber is also a potential customer. All this is not at all easy to do. Content creation must be planned. There are even certain techniques that can be used in the process of creation itself. One of the basic techniques is telling stories, ie. “Storytelling”.

Storytelling

We all talk and exchange information, but we are simply programmed to like hearing a good story. Think about whether you liked to listen to the stories and fairy tales of your parents or grandparents when you were little? Do you like to read a good novel or watch a movie today? They are all stories.

grandma

It is known that good speakers are those people who know how to tell a story beautifully. A story breathes life into the driest matter. Therefore, use a storytelling strategy in your content creation because your readers will be enthralled.

Even as a student, I loved doing research. I was very interested in what kind of results I would get when I gave people different types of instruments such as surveys, questionnaires and tests. In short, the whole procedure goes something like this. Come up with a research question, choose a sample, give people e.g. fill in the questionnaires, process the results in a statistical program and finally write a paper in which you answer the research question and present it at a conference.

We’ve been doing some research on dual-tasking. You know how women can do several jobs at the same time, and men can only do one. The presentation of the results at the conference goes something like this: “To compare the mean values ​​of the groups on the Dual Processing Test, we used the T test of independent samples.” We obtained a statistically significant difference between men (AS=13.5) and women (AS=16.8) at the level of p< 0.005″. And so each presenter with his topic until the whole hall falls asleep.

speaker-is-boring1

 

At that time, I was reading something about storytelling and found the strength to try it at that conference. I said:

“Good day. I am glad to be with you here today. Don’t ask anything, my day started terribly, I thought I wouldn’t come. I had a fight with a girl this morning. She came to me and saw that I hadn’t had time to wash the dishes. I told her that I was preparing a presentation for today. Well, at the same time I’m cooking lunch and typing the seminar paper, and you can’t wash the dishes for 3 days. You are very slow, my dear brother.’

At that moment, the whole hall wakes up from the lethargy they fell into a few hours ago due to the enormous amount of dry steam exposure. Everyone is looking at me and I have their full attention. At that moment, many people don’t understand why I’m wasting time describing an argument with a girl. From the description of the dispute, I gently introduce them into the research without excessive presentation of figures and percentages. I conclude that my girlfriend had no right to be angry with me because it’s normal that I can’t do two things at the same time because I’m male and that was confirmed by the results of my research. To this day, people remember my presentation at that conference. They don’t even remember the topic of the research, the title, they remember me and the story of the fight I told them about. The story wasn’t even innovative or overly interesting, but people remember it. This is precisely the transformation that storytelling can make of some content, regardless of its form (text, video, infographic…).

What can happen when you don’t tell your story at all?

P&G logo

Sometime in 2010. In 2010, Procter & Gamble (P&G) wanted to market a new diaper that they internally called the “Baby iPod.” The diapers were 20% thinner and retained much more liquid. People from P&G decided not to change the packaging of the product, but to put a new product in the old packaging and test it on the “test market” without any announcement.

What happened then? The product hit the market and it wasn’t long before news of it spread across the internet. Dozens of groups were created, including a Facebook group, calling for the old product to be returned. An entire network of blogs owned by mothers protested the product. P&G had two options before launching the product. The first was to create their own story related to the product, and the second was exactly what they did. What they didn’t understand is that if they don’t create their own story, their customers will do it for them. That’s exactly what they got. A story without an initiated beginning, without a real conclusion that could have cost them a lot.

Story structure: The writer’s path

It is believed that when creating content that contains storytelling, there is a structure that gives good results. Christopher Vogler , in his book “Writer’s Way” describes this structure, and this book has become indispensable literature in scenography schools around the world and is used in the practice of creating Hollywood films.

When you start your story, you first talk about the ordinary world, in which the main character lives. Then, in the opening part of the story, there is a call for adventure. In marketing terms, you will first describe a current situation or problem, after which you create an invitation to solve it yourself.

Then comes the rejection of the invitation to adventure. This is a very important part where the main character overcomes his fear of going into the unknown. Potential problem and fear of failure are considered. Usually then he meets a mentor or comes across some new knowledge, some new truth that will lead him into the unknown.

When one sets off into the unknown, friends and enemies begin to be recognized and difficulties along the way are resolved.

The protagonist then approaches the center of the unknown. In this part, the hero prepares to meet the center of the unknown. When we talk about storytelling in marketing, it is an approach to problem solving.

Then comes the overcoming of challenges and finally the rewards.

After that comes the return home. This is a crucial moment because the main character returns to the ordinary world which he now sees with different eyes because he has come all the way and finally got the reward. It’s a matter of transformation. Show people through a story how buying your product will transform them.

So, the first thing you need to do is to imagine your “heroes”, ie. ideal users, and then you will structure the content on the site in such a way that you “walk” them through the entire journey. So the invitation to the adventure is giving the basic information that you are there and that you offer some services. Then you have fear of the unknown. In that part, you provide the customer with additional content that aims to educate them. People are afraid of what they don’t know, so introduce them to what you have to offer. Take them in depth, item by item, until they reach the center of the unknown, that is. they don’t try what you offer. However, it does not end there either. We will talk more about this in one of the following posts.

How to get authority?

Achieving authority in an area is a very powerful sales tool. Content marketing is the right choice of strategy. If you get people to trust you, but with good reason, you can always recommend them to buy a quality product or service from a domain for which you are an authority.

Reading Copyblogger we came across an example of what authority can do to the human mind. A survey of clients of a bank was conducted. Namely, on the ATM in front of the bank there was a sign with the text:

“The ATM is not working. Give the deposits to the guard on duty.”

A TV reporter dressed in a guard’s uniform was standing next to him. People approached him and he asked them if they wanted to make a deposit or withdraw money. The whole situation is absurd, but nine out of ten people gave their deposit to the guard.

Why ? Banks never operate in this way, but because of the authority reflected in the sign on the ATM, uniforms and badges, people agree.

Neuroscience has confirmed that people are subject to authority and that it influences their behavior and decisions.

Where does authority come from? Authorities somehow make other people’s lives better. It originates from the audience. The audience consists of those people whom you have helped in some way. You told them how to solve a problem. It doesn’t matter if they contacted you personally or read some of your text in a newspaper or on the Internet or watched a video file. It is important that you helped them to find a solution to a problem. From that day on, you are an authority in that area for them.

Authority also comes from yourself. Take what you know best and share it with others while believing in yourself and being confident. People like it much more when you demonstrate authority than when you claim to have it.

How is authority formed by content marketing on the Internet through content creation? The idea on which Google is based is that not all created pages are worth the same. Some are worth less and some are worth more. The initial idea started from the fact that the more links to your page, the more valuable it is because other pages refer to it and cite it more. Pages that had more value, in this way, Google placed closer to the top of the search, compared to those that had fewer links or no links leading to it. This is the basis. Over time, Google’s algorithms have improved more and more in order to better measure the authority of a page.

Just like in real life, if you have helped many people they will reciprocate by recommending and referring to you.

Observing the initial logic of the Google search engine, some people figured out that if they create a huge amount of content and artificially create links to their pages, a better ranking in Google search is inevitable. Programs have even been developed that automatically create links to a page on other sites. Imagine a program in which you insert a list of web addresses that it should visit. The program is e.g. I am able to create comments on texts on those sites that will contain a link to your site. The result is that within half an hour you have thousands of links leading to a page of your site. After that, Google places your page at the top of the search. In order to prevent this and similar abuses, Google improved its algorithm, and it now evaluates the quality of content to a certain extent. Whenever Google improves the algorithm, the search results also change, so those pages that “cheated” fall in the search results.

In order to build authority with content marketing, you can’t go wrong if you consistently write quality content that is useful to people and shows them how to solve a problem. The quality of the content is more important than the quantity. The difference between quantity and quality of content is the same as between a Dostoyevsky novel and a bunch of old tabloids. Quality content can also have a timeless value.

If you create content marketing content about things that change quickly, refresh it with new information. One of our clients is an accounting agency. In cooperation with them, we published content on how to calculate wages for employees. Whenever the law changes or the calculation method changes, we try to update the article with new information as soon as possible. When the changes are made, the number of organic visits (not through paid promotion, but free) to the site increases over time. The increased number of site visitors who are satisfied with the information they received often become new clients.

Authority is the centerpiece of any content marketing strategy. Content is a key element of authority formation and a key element of sales itself. For this reason, he is the center of our strategy. If you really become an authority in a field through your content, Google will consider you an authority.

Authority is not built by shortcuts and lies. Tweaked titles are currently in effect. Basically there are tons and tons of literature out there on how to change your headline to have a certain effect on the potential visitor and ultimately increase the number of visits through content marketing. What happens in practice? We almost came across a foreign site title that read something like this:

“You can’t miss the delight of little ones in Africa when they drink clean water for the first time”.

I click on the link, play the video. They are talking about a project in Africa in which several millionaires participated who ensured that a certain amount of water arrived every day for children in a certain part of Africa. At no point in the video file do you see children encountering clean water for the first time, nor is a single child seen drinking water. It can only be seen that the water arrived in closed canisters and that’s where the video ends and they explain how the project succeeded and how the daily flow of water is stable.

They lied to me, they made me go to the site, they didn’t give me the promised content. Such an approach does not inspire confidence. You must always give people what you promised, because that’s how you build initial trust. That is the beginning of creating authority. Sometimes it’s good to design headlines with the aim of arousing curiosity or emotions and thus gain sensationalism, but you shouldn’t promise what is impossible to fulfill.

We did not learn this from the article. There was no text, but only two pictures of Karleuša in fur.

We did not learn this from the article. There was no text, but only two pictures of Karleuša in fur.

The whole process of creating content for content marketing needs is a matter of learning, persistence and invested time. We have explained some of the ways and you should try it yourself. If you have any comments on this text, feel free to send them. I always like to hear both negative and positive reviews because it helps us create better quality content. Until you read.

How to get spied on or an introduction to Facebook marketing

In every city there are places where people gather. You have a favorite club, coffee shop. You are in the square with your friends. You have a favorite hairdresser. Most often, you go to your theater, buy newspapers at your shop, walk on your quay. Of course you are in constant contact with people. The environment in which you are and in which you live largely determines the way of life you lead. There are also cultural milieus, religion, education, classical media such as radio and television. Together, they are powerful influences on what you will do and how you will behave.

The world of checkered tablecloths

The world of red checkered tablecloths

On the Internet, a place of local influence, there are centers that spread a powerful influence to every person present. These are, you guessed it, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo.

We will talk more about Facebook and try to explain what kind of influences it is and to what extent they are present.

Facebook Marketing Impact and Strategy

facetable

In this other world, they prefer blue checkered tablecloths

You already know that most of your friends have Facebook accounts. It is created in such a way that it has the function of providing information about what your friends are doing. You can view their statuses and photos and find out about where they are, what they are doing. Many people feel that by joining Facebook, a whole world of long-forgotten people and friends has returned to them. In addition to statuses and photos, you can also see what your friends like and what interests them.

It is possible to access Facebook groups or like Facebook pages that may have a hobby, professional interests, or a company’s product as a topic (eg chocolate banana lovers or groups of doctors or people who like Coca Cola and its products). Whenever your friend likes or comments something on Facebook there is a chance that you and his other friends will see it. You will see “Miloš likes Coca Cola” or “Ana joined a group called Pets”.

spy

Facebook collects this information. Information about your interests is used by Facebook to enable customers to pay for a marketing campaign and to promote a text or page only to people who have certain interests. In this way, they increase the chance of selling their product or service. Pet food manufacturers will select only those people who like groups called “Pets”, “I love cats”, “My vet”. Choosing these people increases the chance that they own a pet, and thus the chance that they become aware of the manufacturer’s brand and eventually decide to buy his product.

Facebook tracks what you do on it. Every action you take, every like can put you under the influence of a paid marketing campaign in which you are selected to display certain content according to your interest. It’s not like on TV. You’re watching a movie on television, and then you’re bombarded with a set of commercials that don’t interest you, what’s more, they interfere with your enjoyment. You usually use this set of ads as a break to go to the toilet or a break to make coffee or prepare a snack. Some of the commercials you only become aware of when they have a catchy tune or a slightly intriguing lyric that grabs your attention. Of course, everyone tries to produce this kind of advertisement, but only some of them succeed.

On the other hand, on Facebook, you only get ads that offer things and services that you’ve already said you like. Therefore, you don’t mind them, you often like them and go to the company’s page to see what it’s all about.

Want to spread influence on Facebook?

If you want to take advantage of Facebook’s huge opportunities for spreading influence, you need to act very carefully so that you don’t get into a situation where you spend a lot of money on advertising without seeing any results.

When you get the desire to spread any influence on Facebook the first logical step is to create a group to which you will invite “like-minded people” or if you have a company the first step would be to open a company Facebook page. At first it is completely empty. After entering basic information about the company such as location, working hours, website address, you need to design it well because it will represent the main channel through which you will exert influence. When you’ve done all that, the most important thing remains, and that’s what you’re going to post on it.

Creating pages on Facebook

Creating pages on Facebook

Of course, in the beginning you will publish posts about the services you provide or the product you make/sell. Since the number of products and services that a company can offer is limited, once you’ve sorted them all out, you’ll be left scratching your head wondering what to post next. Some will start repeating old posts, and some will remember the possibility to promote some action, discount and the like. This is a good line of thinking, however, many people fall into the trap of giving too many promotions, and then it happens that your customers do not buy the product from you, until it is on sale, and they know it will be at some point. This is the do-or-die moment in the revolution in your performance on Facebook. Most companies remain on that plateau of “endless promotions and discounts”.

What to give your website visitors instead of “endless promotions and discounts”? The answer to this question is very simple. They should be given QUALITY, USEFUL, INNOVATIVE AND INFINITELY INTERESTING CONTENT. It sounds simple, but this is actually the moment where the essential knowledge of marketing and marketing as an art and marketing as a science comes into play.

 

The picture shows an example. It's not about our client.

The picture shows an example. It’s not about our client.

How does this look in practice? If you’re in the dental business, one of your Facebook posts could be a tutorial on how people should brush their teeth properly. If you have a gas station, we can create a tutorial called “How does a blonde change a tire?”, in which we will show all those who have never changed a tire on a car how to do it. If you are in an education business, we can create an e-book for the first lesson of your education that you will share online for free. The point is that through the posts on the Facebook page, you always provide your future clients with something interesting, some content that will really be useful to them in their everyday life. When you do this, Facebook users will start sharing your content themselves and thus promote your business.

When promoting some content, it is very important to take care of the appearance and title of the post. Let’s assume that a group of some nice young people, dressed in black and white costumes, took part in a “I’ve Got Talent” type competition and dazzled the judges with their performance and appearance. You can write a headline for such news: “Young people overshadowed the jury in Talent”, or “They wore black and white costumes, and then something happened that no one expected.” This is an example of a headline used by the media today. The first one is boring, already seen. When you read the second lead, it leaves an air of mystery and makes you want to read the story. He is left with a large number of questions such as: “Who are black and white?”, “What happened?”. Another type of title is applicable in special situations. For example. for sensationalist reporting. There are entire studies and books that talk only about designing headlines with a specific goal in mind. There is plenty of it on the internet. If you have time, you can search for titles that would be suitable for your promotion. In addition to the title, there is also a supporting text that must be aligned with the title. You cannot put a title that contains a dose of mystery, and then explain exactly what it is about in the following few sentences. Often a follow-up text is used to call people to action: “Click here to…”. If you offer a service, you will usually mention the name of the service in the title, while in the accompanying text you will additionally explain the service itself, or mention who the service provider is in order to contribute to the authority of the offeror.

Research has shown that Facebook users are more motivated to take action when they come across posts that include both text and images than those that only include text or video. Choosing an image for a post is a very important thing. The image should provide a clear association to the content of the post, and yet it must be interesting enough, sometimes intriguing, to attract attention. If you post an image that has nothing to do with the content, but is very interesting, you can have a similar situation that we had with one image. The client wanted us to insert a specific image into the post. The page for the online educational course is being promoted. The picture fully reflected the content of the course, however, the characters on it were so interesting and tinged with humor, that in practice it attracted the attention of those people who are from the branch of people that is targeted, but at that moment they are not interested in the course offered they already find the picture so interesting that they click on it. What happens in that situation? Facebook charges for clicks and likes. The post leads people who clicked to the course web page. The moment they see that it is not something they are interested in and that they will not find any more interesting pictures there, they immediately leave the page.

What did we do? Since it is a paid campaign, Facebook offers the option of so-called A/B testing. Simply put, you take 5 pictures that you think are appropriate for a given post. In paid drip, Facebook alternately displays a post with different images to a targeted group of users. You look at the statistics, see which image you got the best results with and then use it in the rest of the campaign. You also need to look at the analytics of the site itself to see if these users stay longer on the site or leave immediately. If they leave, either the post is not adapted to the content of the website or the website itself is not well made, in the sense that it does not activate visitors enough with its content. In this process, you have to test, check, change, investigate the effects of the change in order to get optimal results in terms of sales.

What do you get with paid Facebook ads?

Paid advertising is inevitable on Facebook. It’s not because we said so, but simply Facebook is a profitable company and if you want to advertise something good, you have to pay for it. In return Facebook offers you amazing promotion options. You can select people with certain characteristics to whom you want to promote your company’s post, page or website.

What are the characteristics? Gender, age, place of residence, marital status, level of education and, most importantly, interests. How to use all this? A prerequisite is that you know your target population well. We had an example where we had to promote a certain product to pregnant women. Of course, in the options for creating paid promoted posts on Facebook, you don’t have the option to just select all pregnant women from Belgrade. First, we had to investigate at what age of life women from the requested territory most often get pregnant. The situation is not the same in Vojvodina and in the south of Serbia. It occurred to us that in Serbia more and more often couples decide to get married because of pregnancy. We had to verify this information through field research and really empirically confirm our assumption. Only after this process were we able to start creating more expensive promotions for the company that hired us. Only then were we sure about the age range we were targeting and that we were targeting only recently married women.

What’s the point? If we had targeted only women from the requested territory, regardless of age and marital status, we would have wasted our money on all women, and mostly on those who are not in a different state. In that population, only 5-10% would be those women who should make up our target group. We saved the client’s funds from being wasted, and with quality targeting, we increased the chance of selling the product.

If you have time you can do all this yourself. It takes a lot of work and effort to get the desired results, but they are definitely achievable. You can look and read other texts on our site and learn something from them, or at least they will guide you.

A textbook on Twitter marketing

Twitter is used by millions of people. Some privately and others for business purposes. Business users use it to monitor the conversation about their brands, promote offers or share rich and high-quality content in the form of images or videos. Each tweet (post on Twitter) can be only 140 characters long. Research has shown that 64% of users will be more willing to buy a product from a company they follow on Twitter.

twitter

The first thing you need to do when you sign up for Twitter is to choose a username and create your profile. Choosing a username is very important as it becomes an integral part of your profile address. You’ll put that address on all your other marketing materials to direct people to follow your Twitter account. The name should be short and easy to remember. Usually, for business purposes, use your company name or abbreviated name. That means you need to type

“building maintenance company istanovastarigrad”

you will already use in that case

“building maintenance”

etc. In that case, your Twitter profile address will be

www.twitter.com/odrzavanjezgrada.

The name of the profile is important because it will appear high in search when people search for words in its name.

You have the option in Twitter to write a short biography, 160 characters long. As long as the profile is private, you can enter words separated by commas, e.g.

“entrepreneur, wine lover, internet addict”.

If it is a business profile, try not to sound too corporate, but more like a private profile. People prefer to communicate with other people rather than with some kind of corporation. As many places as you have, you can mention other related profiles in your biography. If you sell branded clothing, you can mention the profile of one of the brands by typing

@profilbrenda.

 

Profile design

 

Twitter profile should be well designed. The profile picture must be effective and clear. The company logo is usually inserted here, but care must be taken that its dimensions are 400 x 400 pixels. This is a recommendation from Twitter and using this rule you should get maximum image clarity. Profile header image is also important. It should be 1500 x 500 pixels in size. It’s up to you what you fill this space with. In principle, this space should be used for branding, highlighting promotions, etc. You also have the option to choose a background photo. When you choose these three images, you have created the visual identity of your profile. It is recommended that you entrust this work to an experienced designer who will fit all these elements into a harmonious whole that will appeal to people.

Don’t share tweets on Facebook

 

In your Twitter settings, you have the option that when you tweet, your tweets are instantly shared on Facebook. We do not recommend turning this option on because it is assumed that you will be tweeting much more often than you will be posting on Facebook, so Facebook users may feel as if you are spamming (harassing) them. The methods of communication and the type of audience on Twitter and Facebook are very different, so we recommend that you keep your accounts completely separate.

Answer quickly

People often choose to contact companies via Twitter when they have a specific question or problem related to a product they bought or a service they received. Because Twitter is a place where constant and fast conversation takes place, users expect a quick response from you. According to research, a response is expected within 30 minutes or even faster. Therefore, if you decide to use a Twitter profile, it is important to tell the users who follow you when you are available to give them answers. Whether it’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or just Tuesdays or Wednesdays, it’s up to you. It is only important that you are there for your followers at the agreed time. You can include this information either in your bio or as part of your profile design, within one of your photos.

Content strategy of Twitter marketing

Only 140 characters for the perfect tweet. The first thing you should keep in mind if you have a business profile is to put the initials of the person who is currently communicating with users at the end of each tweet. You can put photos and initials of people from your company who communicate with followers within the image in the profile header. In this way, the follower knows who he is talking to at all times. The most difficult thing is how to conceive that perfect tweet that will provoke a positive reaction from followers.

You should not continue one message through multiple tweets because this form of communication is invisible to the people who follow you. Over time, you’ll gain the experience needed to fit everything you wanted to say into just 140 characters. The basis is to focus on the quality and consistency of tweets as well. This means that in addition to tweeting often, the content of your tweets should be useful and interesting. You don’t need to tweet every minute of the day. It annoys those who follow you and they simply stop following you at one point. People from Twitter did a research and found that those people who tweet 3 times a day for seven days are noticed by the number of people who represent 30% of the total number of people who follow them. Not all tweets are of equal quality. Some go viral and some don’t. In any case, quality always wins over quantity in the long run.

Don’t be afraid to post the same content several times during the day as long as it is of good quality. In theory, Twitter displays the content you post to all the people who follow you. However, in practice it is very dynamic and the movement of content is very fast. Therefore, many people who follow you may miss the content you have posted. That’s why it’s not a bad idea to set the same content to be published a few more times in the span of a few hours. When repeating the same content, experiment with nals, tweet text and hash tags.

What types of content are best for posting on Twitter and other social networks?

 

Ask people a question and start a discussion. The questions can be related directly to your product (Do you prefer white or dark chocolate?) or it can be a kind of mini-quiz (Opened a new store. Guess where?). On social networks, always ask the question at the end of the posts, because there is a 15% higher chance that someone will join the conversation. This is mostly true for Facebook because Twitter is all about short posts.

You can tell your story to people who follow you. It can be something interesting from everyday business or you can talk about what motivates or inspires you. Encourage people to share their story with you. The goal is to get them emotionally invested in your brand and share information about you with their friends.

You can also offer people a solution to a problem or your expertise in a certain area. Use the latest news and try to find a real or imaginary connection with your products.

For example, use the news “Opera singer broke a glass with his voice” to advertise soundproofing for the house. The glass remains whole on the table and next to the singer’s voice.

You can mark all important dates and holidays in the calendar and create content for your Twitter profile according to the theme of the holiday. Your content can also directly promote the content and services you provide.

Users of social networks are most often looking for useful and interesting content. On the other hand, you want to sell your product or service. The ratio of product promotion and quality content should be 20% to 80%. In that case, people who follow you will appreciate that you let them know about your offer.

It is not in the least commendable that most of the content is direct product promotion. Imagine a situation where you come to a store where the salesperson chases you every time you look at a product saying “Buy, buy, buy!!!”. Instead of such a seller, you would prefer the one who answers your questions like “What is the difference between these two cameras?” Why is this one more expensive?”

Visual content types such as images and video files are particularly popular. Posts that contain images are getting a lot of attention on social media. Twitter is primarily text-oriented, which is why you have people on it who are constantly complaining about something and constantly whining, while those social media where you can use the full potential of images do not have this to that extent.

Whenever you use photos on social media it’s best to take and edit them yourself. As this is a time-consuming process, people usually use stock photography (images that someone else has taken and is selling or sharing for free, with the intention of placing them on your website or adding them to a social media post).

Twitter, although text-oriented has an option to add images, so you can use this option, but be careful about the quality of the images you share, as well as copyright. You can also brand each image by adding a logo or a link to a website, social network profile, and the like. This is useful because when people share the content you deliver to them, they are also sharing your brand. Avoid branding only when it comes to holidays and historical events. When it comes to such events, people share more pictures that do not have the company’s brand on them because they feel a higher degree of ownership of them. As a company you cannot own Easter. He belongs to all those people who celebrate him. The content of the image is always important. It should be self-explanatory or explain well the content of the link it leads to. You can use images to highlight a special offer. They can be infographics, they can motivate people (motivational posters), they can be nostalgic or funny, etc.

Tweets

hash

Use #hashtags when creating tweets. Hashtags group tweets not on the same topic. On Twitter, you can see which hashtags are currently popular, i.e. which are popular topics of conversation. It has been shown that people respond to tweets that use hashtags twice as well as those that do not. Do not use more than two hashtags per tweet as it can be confusing for users. Try to use short hashtags because they are more readable. Do not use symbols. You can use capital letters to separate words and make the hashtag more readable.

For example. #DeepSea instead of #deepsea.

What are hashtags actually for? Hashtag highlights your brand. Create a unique hashtag to highlight your brand. Use it often in your tweets so that your followers get used to it. When you organize a promotion or an event that people who follow you will be invited to, they will want to tweet from your event. Encourage them to use your hashtag and you will get quality promotion for your brand.

The hashtag can be used to get feedback or information about the profitability of the investment. You can use services like http://hashtagify.me/ to see what other hashtags are related to yours. For example. at the moment of writing this #cocacola is very strongly associated with #love. This happens because hashtags are very often used by Twitter users today to express emotions. In this way, you can get information about what emotions your brand name evokes in your customers. This information is a very powerful tool for experienced marketing professionals and can be used for further promotion purposes.

The use of hashtags on other social networks and platforms can also be analyzed. If someone else mentions your hashtag in any context, on Twitter you can find information about when it was used, who used it and the content of the message in which it is used. You can engage in conversation with people who have used your hashtag in messages. Be of help to them, solve a problem for them. Don’t be pushy and overpromote the products. In this way, much-needed authority is gained.

There is also an option to pin some of your important tweets to the top of your profile. All other tweets will be below it. You do this if you want to put the tweet in the center of attention of your followers. These can be important notifications, event promotions, etc. You can summarize the mission and vision in that tweet.

When you tweet always leave some room for people’s comments. Many people like to add their own comment to your tweet that they retweet. For example if you tweeted

“New product on www.com”.

Someone retweets it and adds it

“New product on www.com Awesome @vasbrend.”.

Write tweets of up to 120 characters that you want people to retweet this way. In that case, you leave room for them to add their opinion with the help of Tweetdeck. Always strike a good balance of tweets, replies and retweets.

There is nothing worse than exclusively promoting your products and services on social networks. Reply to other people’s tweets. Encourage them to contact you. Later, you can also encourage them to take pictures of the products they bought from you and post them. Then you can retweet those images and thus provide other followers with “social proof”, i.e. to show them the popularity of your product, ie. that many people already use it and are satisfied.

Please note, if you address someone and use @personname at the beginning of the tweet, that tweet only appears on the feeds of people who follow you and the person you are addressing at the same time. If you mention someone in the middle of a tweet then all your followers see it. Retweeting is a good relationship building strategy on Twitter. Find a couple of Tweeters who are influential and post popular tweets in your industry and retweet them. Of course, you won’t retweet competing firms. When you first open an account, try to tweet and retweet equally. By doing so, you build good karma and the basis that when you show yourself as an interesting tweeter, those same people start retweeting your tweets and expanding your audience and influence in the best possible way.

If you have quality content on your site that is worth sharing. There is an option to add a button to follow on Twitter or a button to share content on Twitter. This button allows readers to instantly share a link to the page they are on and the content they are reading with their followers. This way, there is a chance that more people will start following you on Twitter and reading the content of your site. It’s not just a point to place a Twitter share button on all pages of your site. Clicking on the button opens Twitter and automatically creates the text of the tweet to be shared. Most of the readers do not change this predefined tweet, so it is important that you create how the text of the tweet will look like. It should change depending on the page the reader is on. If he is reading the blog post it should read something like this

“Great write-up on this and that on the link.”

As far as the reader is on the product page the tweet should read

“I like the name of the product very much.”

In this way, you not only promote the sharing of content, but also predefine the reader’s attitude about your text or product.

Respond to @mentions and direct messages as quickly as possible. Many large companies do not do this, which threatens their credibility. Respond quickly to mentions in a positive context, and even more quickly to those in a negative context. The longer negative mentions sit in the air, unanswered, the more likely your customers will think you don’t care about them. When you want to thank someone for a tweet or mention, do so by fav (favorite) what they posted. Tweets from other users you’ve liked are displayed on your profile. Therefore, you should not do this too often, so that your faves have a “higher value”, ie. “emphasized” more. When someone just follows you, thank them with

“@korisnik thanks for following me.”

You can start by retweeting an interesting tweet of his and thus start an interaction.

We’ve already talked about pictures, but we’ll give you a few more useful tips. It has been shown that tweets containing an image have a higher chance of being retweeted. It has also been shown that tweets containing images from external sources (eg Instagram) are twice as likely to be retweeted as those containing an image uploaded directly to Twitter. The secret is that the images you upload to Twitter appear in the feed. Be sure to upload images with a 2:1 aspect ratio. If you put a dimension in a different scale, the whole thing will not be visible in the feed, but only a part of it in the mentioned scale. You can take advantage of this by intentionally inserting a “bad” scale image. At the bottom of the image you can write a link to download a voucher or a promotional code. Since there is an option to see the whole image, the tweet can read

“Click on the image to view the link to the voucher.”

for a blog

An example of a full image view

Also Twitter is in April 2014. made it possible to add four images to a tweet instead of one. In the feed, they are automatically displayed next to each other, so companies use this option to make collages, mini-tutorials for their products, and the like. With this option, you have the possibility to tag up to 10 people, winners of a competition, customers, business associates. Everyone you tag gets a notification that they’ve been tagged, and best of all, this all doesn’t fit into the allotted 140 characters for a tweet.

Through Twitter, you can organize mini-competitions, give real-time offers with discount codes. You can also receive orders via Twitter. Many companies also organize live chats for their customers. To create these chats, specific hashtags and external services are used that enrich the moderation of chats. Usually, companies organize them once a week. Such chats give companies a lot of authority.

Twitter cards

Another option that can be used well for marketing is Twitter cards. What are Twitter Cards? Whenever someone writes a tweet that contains a link to your page, your card appears below the tweet. In order for the tab to appear, you need to add a piece of code or one of the plugins for the CMS (Content management system such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) that you use to your site. There are 9 types of cards you can use, and their placement may or may not serve one of the following purposes:

  • Sign up for the mailing list
  • Registration on the site
  • Viewing and using coupons
  • Link to the landing page
  • Application download

All of these features can be useful in interacting with your followers and online marketing activities. It remains to answer the question of which 9 types of cards are available to you.

The feed tab is the default Twitter tab. On it, you can see a part of the text from your page in the extract and a thumbnail that goes with the text. This card contains a link that leads directly to the page where the text is located.

Excerpt

The next card is a statement card but with a larger photo. The extract from the website is maximally shortened and the photo occupies a significantly larger space. The purpose of this card is the same as the previous one, but the visual element is emphasized here.

extract image

A product card is, as the name suggests, intended to present your product. For the product description, it is possible to create a title, create a description of up to 200 words. It is possible to insert a product image, price and availability. This card is a very elegant solution for introducing products on Twitter.

product

There is also a website card designed for site promotion, then a card for application promotion, as well as a card for generating leads through building an email list. There are also three types of cards that promote visuals. These are the player tab in which the video player with the video is displayed. Picture and gallery tabs are used to display pictures individually or as galleries. There are tweeks to create each of these cards, which we will write about in one of the following texts.

We have shown you some of the ways to successfully run a Twitter account with the aim of promoting your products and services. Of course, this is not all. There’s a lot we haven’t covered on this occasion. It is important that managing a business account is part art and part science. The secret is to be likeable but not too pushy. Try some of these strategies yourself, we believe you will succeed.