by Marelise da Silva | Sep 9, 2020 | Social Media Marketing
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on social media marketing as brands adapt to the changes in the way that people are engaging with them online.
The unique pressures that brands face have forced some key changes such as the dramatic drop in sponsored content from 35% to just 4% on Instagram, but this also presents an opportunity to optimise digital marketing efforts.
All about engagement in social media marketing
While the volume of social media posts from brands has decreased by an average of 1,8 per day on Facebook, 1,9 per day on Instagram and 2,3 per day on Twitter, there are 7.3 more engagements per post per day on average across all networks and industries, which shows consumers are spending more time online and craving social interaction.
The adage of never letting a crisis go to waste rings true in the digital marketing space, as brands who have duly adjusted their social media marketing content to focus on digital sales have reaped rewards such as the surge in e-commerce, with consumers preferring to order online rather than visit stores. Given the changes to daily routines, the ideal times for brands to post have shifted, with the hours of engagement starting and ending later.
While the situation surrounding the pandemic for businesses and consumers remains fluid, digital marketing strategies should also be agile and ready to adapt to any opportunities that may arise, by using relevant data and insights into consumer behaviour online.
Similarly, there have been several key changes to the various social media platforms themselves, which have also impacted how they should be used to extract value from a digital marketing campaign. You are now able to send marketing emails on Facebook and the new ‘Shops’ feature on Facebook and Instagram allows businesses to highlight their products and services more effectively.
With the landscape itself constantly changing and evolving, effective social media marketing strategy should be continually evaluated and adjusted to be effective.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 4, 2020 | LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
The ultimate goal of your social media marketing strategy is your bottom line. So who better to take advice from that Warren Buffet: “An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan!” LinkedIn themselves share that marketing with a documented plan results in greater overall content marketing success than working from a verbal plan only or even no strategy at all.
LinkedIn marketing is no different despite 43% of marketers agreeing that they have sourced a client from LinkedIn. Can you imagine how much higher that percentage would be with proper planning?
Let The Planning Begin – 4 Easy Steps
- Set up an editorial calendar. Based on your ideal target audience, create a list of topics, events, product launches that will help them reach their goals or overcome their struggle. Organise your content into categories or themes and start filling in the dates with content.
- Create and adhere to brand guidelines. To maintain a consistent look, voice, and tone, use content guidelines and communicate them to your team.
- Delegate. Assign someone (or a group of people) to be responsible for each of your channels. Using the standards set above, empower them to monitor and respond to engagement from your readers.
- Look further afield to source content.With a dedicated curator of content, you can encourage the regions and verticals in your organisation to submit content.
Consider enlisting the services of a digital marketing agency to add credibility to your profile with powerful content, craft strong headlines and a summary that motivates people to read your entire profile, and include visuals and multimedia to illustrate your expertise.
Award-Winning Solutions
Leveraging LinkedIn for business purposes is easy once you have a compelling and bullet-proof content. For more information on how WSIOMS can help you, contact us today.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 1, 2020 | Digital Media Marketing
People are more likely to be shopping online during lockdown, which means you need to be investing in online advertising in a whole new way. Now is the time to try new things to get your products and services under the eyes of your potential buyers. Here are six simple online advertising tactics that you can follow to sell more in 2020:
Using digital marketing to sell more
- Keep your content fresh and make the most of it by updating old content and reusing it strategically by changing the type of media. Most written content can be repurposed as video, which is a great way to improve engagement and connect with new audiences.
- Get the timing right with your email marketing. Do not underestimate the effect timing can have as consumers are not always likely to open emails. If you send your emails out at the right time, it can translate into more sales.
- Get smarter with your pay per click bidding. The next step in PPC advertising is to use smart bidding to make sure that you get maximum value. Smart bidding uses AI technology to make sure that your budget is being used effectively. This is done using data from past search results.
- Go live on social media. People are now more than comfortable with video calls and are interested in consuming content in real-time. Take advantage of this by live streaming content on your social media to increase engagement. Any interview or video content can be streamed live instead of being shot beforehand.
- Let your audience contribute to your content. By allowing your customers to post their experiences with your brand, you can harness their feedback to improve your offering. Digital marketing and social media reporting platform DashThis scaled their content offering by allowing clients to contribute to their blog and some of these consistently bring in over 200 leads per month.
- Make the most of your video content. More than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands so it is essential to have this as a central part of your digital marketing strategy.
There are always new ways to reach your target audience. Get in touch with WSI OMS now to take your digital marketing strategy to the next level.
by Marelise da Silva | Aug 27, 2020 | Digital Media Marketing
If you want to learn more about SEO for your digital marketing journey, a good place to start is on-page SEO. In this guide, we’ll cover what it is, why it is essential and how you can optimise your content for SEO.
What exactly is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO simply means optimising your website (and each page on your site) for search engines to ensure a higher ranking and drive organic traffic to your website. Optimising your website for SEO makes it easier for a search engine to find out what your content is about. In doing so, a search engine can easily recommend your content to its users, which is exactly what you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy.
The on-page part of SEO refers to the aspects on your website that you can optimise, including the content (text or images), HTML tags (title tag, meta tag and header tag), internal links and addresses or URLs. It does not include external links and other signals that point to your website to drive traffic.
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic (that is unpaid traffic) to your website. As search engines and their algorithms evolve, they look for more specific indicators that will tell them if your content is relevant and valuable to their audience. Because search engines are competitive businesses, they want to outshine their fellow search engines by giving users the best possible experience. If your on-page SEO factors indicate that your content is a good match for a search query, your content will get shared by search engines and more people will find your content.
Ways in which you can optimise your content for SEO
By optimising your content on every page, you’ll have the best chance at ranking highly in search engine results, which is precisely what you want to achieve with your SEO strategy. Here are some ways in which you can use keywords to optimise your content on every page.
Use your target keywords
Once you’ve picked your target keywords, use them at the start of your content (or as close to the beginning as possible) and use them frequently without being unnatural about it. While your keywords are incredibly important to signal what your content is about, you shouldn’t stuff them into every sentence. Overuse of keywords will make your content useless for humans, and that will not improve your ranking. Remember to include your keywords in your headings and sub-headings (at least one of your sub-headings).
Tag headings and subheadings
Use (H1) for your main heading and (H2) to tag subheadings. These tags help search engines to understand the structure of your content, which makes it easier to categorise and recommend it to users. If you leave out these tags, your entire strategy won’t crash and burn, but it can help you to make incremental improvements in your rankings by giving search engines just another factor to signal useful content.
Need help with your on-page SEO strategy? Visit our website to find out about WSI OMS’ digital marketing services.
by Marelise da Silva | Aug 18, 2020 | Digital Media Marketing
Found in 180 countries and boasting over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the messaging market leader in 133 countries. Especially in countries such as India, Brazil, The Netherlands, Spain, and Italy, the most popular messaging app is WhatsApp. South Africans will not be surprised to learn that Africa is so dominated by WhatsApp that it has increased the continent’s internet usage. (WhatsApp is responsible for 50% of data usage in Zimbabwe!)
It is no wonder, then, that businesses have wanted to get in on the action as part of their digital marketing strategy.
WhatsApp for Business
Launched just over two years ago, in 2018, WhatsApp Business is a marketing tool which is:
- Highly targeted. The WhatsApp Filter Tool can filter one million numbers in a just few minutes.
- Accessible. A perfect example of “mobile-first” design. The WhatsApp location service allows you to send a map with your location to people on the go.
- Media rich. The mobile marketing application supports videos, images, GIFs, text documents, and vCards. WhatsApp technology creates customer-centric experiences.
- Free. While the API version has additional features which come at a price, the basic WhatsApp for Business is ideal for small business owners who have a tighter budget. Despite being free, it still offers a verified WhatsApp Account, text modules, product catalogue, opening hours, and tools to automate, sort, and quickly respond to messages.
Latest Features in WhatsApp
In recent months, WhatsApp has yet again upped its game. Some noteworthy new features include:
- Animated stickers. With Facebook’s eye on merging their messaging apps, this quick way of communicating will already be familiar to Messenger and Facebook users.
- Video focus. The advent of COVID-19 bumped WhatsApp’s video call capacity to eight participants. To focus on someone, press and hold to maximise their video to full screen.
- QR codes. Avoid the pressure of fumbling with your keypad, and add new contacts using QR codes instead.
Award-Winning Solutions
For help with your digital marketing efforts, including social media marketing campaigns, and internet marketing strategy, contact WSI for more information.
