Effective social media strategies involve more than just posting content; interaction with followers, addressing customer service queries, and creating shareable content are also crucial. Engaging directly with customers through comments, likes, and shares can build a loyal community around your brand. Brand visibility increases as businesses create engaging content and actively participate in conversations.

According to the marketing team at the CT Group, a London based global consultancy, by strategically planning and implementing social media campaigns, businesses can drive traffic to their websites, generate quality leads, and ultimately increase sales. Each platform offers unique opportunities to connect with potential customers and showcase your products or services. Whether through impactful visuals, compelling stories, or insightful posts, leveraging social media effectively is a vital component of modern business success.

Building a Strong Foundation

A strong social media foundation is essential for business success. This involves developing a clear strategy, choosing the right platforms, understanding your audience, creating engaging content, and tracking performance with analytics.

Developing a Solid Social Media Strategy

Creating a solid social media strategy involves several key steps. The experts at the CT Group recommend businesses define clear objectives. Are they aiming to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to their website, or boost sales? Each goal will shape the strategy differently.

Choosing the Right Platforms

Selecting the right social media platforms is critical. Businesses should identify where their target audience spends most of their time. Facebook and Instagram are great for visual content, while LinkedIn is ideal for B2B marketing. Twitter works well for real-time updates and customer service.

Directing efforts towards platforms that align with the business’s goals and audience can maximize impact. For instance, Pinterest is perfect for lifestyle brands, whereas YouTube and TikTok are excellent for video content. Each platform has unique features tailored to different marketing strategies.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding the target audience is essential, according to the CT Group. This involves researching the demographics, interests, and behaviors of potential customers. Businesses need to know who they are trying to reach.

Creating buyer personas can help in this process. These personas represent segments of the audience and include details like age, location, interests, and challenges. By knowing the audience well, businesses can tailor their content and engagement efforts to meet the specific needs and preferences of their customer base.

Creating High-Quality, Engaging Content

Quality content is the cornerstone of any successful social media presence. Content should be engaging, relevant, and visually appealing. Types of content include blog posts, infographics, videos, and user-generated content (UGC).

Videos and live streams are particularly effective, as they can capture attention and convey messages quickly. Consistent branding and a clear voice across content help in building trust and recognition. Staying relevant by tapping into trending topics and providing value through informative or entertaining posts can keep the audience engaged.

Measuring Success with Analytics

To ensure social media efforts are effective, measuring success with analytics is necessary. Tools like Google Analytics and platform-specific insights on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn provide valuable data. Key metrics include engagement rates, follower growth, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

Return on investment (ROI) from social media activities should be regularly assessed. By analyzing this data, businesses can adjust their strategies to better meet their objectives. Understanding which types of content perform best and on which platforms can inform future marketing decisions.

Advanced Tactics for Growth

To achieve significant business growth through social media, it’s essential to employ advanced tactics. These strategies include using influencers to expand your reach, leveraging advertising to boost engagement, converting followers into customers, and providing exceptional customer experiences.

Leveraging Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves partnering with social media influencers who have a considerable following to promote your products or services. Businesses can reach a wider audience by aligning with influencers whose followers match their target market.

Identify Influencers: Select influencers who align with your brand identity and values.

Build Relationships: Develop genuine partnerships to foster trust.

Track Success: Use metrics to measure the impact of these collaborations on brand growth and engagement.

These partnerships can greatly amplify the brand’s message and increase its visibility.

Maximizing Engagement Through Advertising

Social media advertising can significantly increase engagement and brand awareness. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer robust ads targeting options.

Facebook Ads: Utilize its precise targeting to reach the right audience.

Ad Formats: Experiment with different ad formats such as image, video, and carousel ads.

Performance Metrics: Track metrics like click-through rates and engagement levels to refine campaigns.

Paid advertising campaigns can drive immediate traffic and interaction, making it an effective method to grow your online presence.

Boosting Sales and Conversion

Social media is a powerful tool not just for engagement but also for driving sales. Businesses can turn followers into paying customers through strategic social media marketing.

Product Promotions: Highlight new launches and special offers.

Shoppable Posts: Enable direct purchasing through social media platforms.

Conversion Tracking: Use analytics tools to see how many visitors turn into customers.

Effective sales strategies can increase revenue and contribute to customer loyalty.

Enhancing Customer Experience

Outstanding customer service on social media can build trust and long-term relationships with your audience. It involves prompt responses to inquiries and maintaining a positive brand image.

Communication: Use chatbots for quick responses and human agents for personalized service.

Customer Feedback: Actively seek and respond to customer feedback to improve services.

Consistency: Ensure consistent posting and interactions to maintain a strong online presence.

Providing an exceptional customer experience can enhance loyalty, boost trust, and foster a loyal customer base.

The post Leveraging Social Media for Business Success: Strategies for Growth appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Much of the success of today’s edge offerings is due to advancements made in the cloud computing space. Without access to computing capabilities that are fast, flexible, reliable, and scalable, it would not likely have been possible to build new business models and IT infrastructures designed to deliver the real-time, low latency, and highly available functionalities that edge devices, sensors, systems, and applications provide.

That being said, Tom Keane believes that an exploration of not just cloud but multi-cloud strategies can be of immense benefit to businesses and users. Business leaders should look at the available cloud and multi-cloud offerings and how they may integrate with a given set of edge capabilities to create value and/or solve real-world challenges. Below are points to consider and critical success factors based on Tom Keane’s vast experience as a long-time leader at Azure – Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

Tom Keane Breaks Down Multi-Cloud Strategies

As the name suggests, a multi-cloud strategy involves the use of two or more different cloud computing services. This can refer to the use of multiple SaaS (Software as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings, although it is typically used to mean a combination of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud are relevant examples of this.

Multi-cloud adoption today is primarily being driven by redundancy and vendor lock-in concerns. However, evolving business and technical goals and strategies are also linked to the rise in multi-cloud growth. For example, some cloud offerings are more price-competitive than others, while others may be faster or come with more capacity or features. Others may be better suited for particular environments, industries, or regions.

Furthermore, many organizations pursue multi-cloud strategies due to data privacy and sovereignty concerns. The evolving landscape of data privacy, protection, sovereignty, and localization laws means many types of enterprise data must be physically located in specific locations or borders. Multi-cloud strategies can be used to help organizations meet those mandates by leveraging the availability and expertise and offerings of multiple IaaS providers across different data center regions and/or availability zones. Such a setup also provides businesses with the ability to have cloud data and relevant computing resources residing as close as possible to end users, thereby optimizing performance and minimizing latency.

Pros, Cons, and Adoption Trends of Multi-Cloud Computing

Multi-cloud can prevent data loss and downtime that may arise due to localized component failures in the cloud. With multi-cloud, businesses can also avoid vendor lock-in. Tom Keane says that these have been the key driving factors of multi-cloud adoption in recent years.

However, as alluded to above, there are many other benefits to adopting a multi-cloud strategy. Since users can select the right cloud services and features that they need from the most optimized and cost-effective providers that meet all SLAs, this makes picking, choosing, and then building the perfect multi-cloud infrastructure easy. Where end needs are highly specific, such as the ability to handle a large number of requests per unit of time, process smaller data transfers on average, reduce latency, increase redundancies, add machine learning capabilities to devices, or maximize resource availability, businesses can choose what they need based on a highly specific set of requirements without having to worry about designing and building those systems from scratch.

Agility and choice, therefore, are important reasons to consider a multi-cloud architecture for your IT needs. The ability to use best-of-breed services and modernize and transform your digital infrastructure while having the upper hand in price negotiations are also compelling reasons to consider multi-cloud.

However, there are a few potential drawbacks to using multi-cloud. Many IaaS cloud providers provide their users with volume discounts in which prices fall as the user buys more of a specific service. Tom Keane says that organizations may find it increasingly difficult to qualify for such discounts and enjoy those economies of scale if they spread their IT needs across several providers or platforms. Furthermore, since multi-cloud deployments, by definition, involve multiple cloud services and/or platforms, Tom Keane says that it is important to consider the IT and staffing needs of running and maintaining that infrastructure. Workload and application management in a multi-cloud environment can also be challenging when workloads and data move between clouds, platforms, and applications.

The increased complexity of using multiple clouds as opposed to using a single provider or platform, coupled with a lack of trained personnel and difficulties in provisioning can also stand in the way of effective multi-cloud adoption and utilization.

Tom Keane Outlines How to Develop a Multi-Cloud Strategy for Your Business

Before you embark on a move to multi-cloud services, first assess your application needs and your business and technical requirements to break down the motivators for a move to multi-cloud. For example, is your ultimate goal a lowering of overall costs by migrating workloads to cloud providers that have aggressive and attractive pricing? Do you need to enhance application delivery by provisioning development resources when and where they are needed? Do you want to improve IT efficiency by freeing up resources that were formerly reliant on on-premises systems?

Tom Keane says that, in addition to the above, decision-makers should also consider the unique benefits of different cloud providers, how those benefits map to current and future needs, the strength of current vendor and provider relationships, whether vendor lock-in is or will be a concern, and any strategic or business benefits or risks that may arise in a multi-cloud setting, such as compliance or governance issues that would come about or be solved.

A simple playbook for ensuring multi-cloud success is to:

• Know the “why” of multi-cloud while focusing on key objectives, such as modernization, cost savings, or the elimination of on-premises IT infrastructure.
• Keep costs in check. Cloud platforms are all different. As per Tom Keane, if businesses are not careful, the expansion of operations, security, and governance over multiple costs can quickly spiral out of control.
• Plan for the resources you need to make your multi-cloud strategy a success. Every additional cloud adds complexity to your IT infrastructure, and they may all need dedicated and expert personnel to run and maintain them.
• Always measure progress to know where and how ROI is generated or obstructed.

Multi-Cloud for Edge? Tom Keane Weights In

Edge devices and systems, often by definition, can be countless. Think of the sensors, mobile devices, smart appliances, RFID-equipped supplies and shipments, and more. When connected, these devices, sensors, and systems make up the Internet of Things (IoT), and they all operate at the edge of where data is generated, stored, consumed – and even processed.

With the benefits of multi-cloud in mind, Tom Keane says that it is easy to see why businesses may wish to adopt a multi-cloud strategy. It can lower costs and latency while allowing businesses to choose the optimal providers for specific services and needs.

With so much variety in terms of needs, data types, device types, application requirements, and the geographic spread of large and growing edge networks, edge systems can definitely benefit from adopting a multi-cloud topology. The only consideration would be to ensure that the use case and financials make sense and can deliver the benefits and ROI expected of a multi-cloud edge implementation. If they do, then Tom Keane believes that making the move and adopting a new multi-cloud edge approach is an easy decision to make.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned at the outset, edge computing capabilities and cloud/multi-cloud technologies continue to evolve. Innovation, new offerings, new service models, and new business use cases are all driving an IT and digital transformation revolution, but the smart money is always invested in maximizing output and value creation with a given set of inputs.That being said, businesses should not look at either edge, cloud, or multi-cloud implementations as one-off and independent digital transformation initiatives or opportunities. Tech synergies, economies of scale, application tie-ins, and the incremental growth and deepening of expertise that come with specialization all provide unique and quantifiable benefits to businesses and users. With multi-cloud in an edge setting, businesses can pick and choose the services, features, cost structures, and delivery models that suit them best. With the flexibility, scalability, competitive pricing, and best-in-class offerings of different cloud platforms and services, businesses can truly build the systems that are precisely tailored to their needs and are just perfect for them.

The post Analysis by Tom Keane: Harnessing the Power of Multi-Cloud appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Toll-free phone number, though seems a mere telephony system, has all the powers to leverage your business at every level. However, not many people are aware of its true potential and consider it an easy way to offer a free calling facility to the customers. 

But it does a lot more than this.

You have to find out all of this and start deploying this internet business phone system today to speed-up business growth. 

Toll-free number – Changing the way businesses use to communicate

A toll-free number is different from any usual telephone number in every sense. Unlike common phone numbers, it has a specific three-digit code attached as a prefix. In the usual type of telephony, the caller has to bear the call incurring charges. This may stop some of the customers to reach out to the businesses, especially where calling cost is high.

This limits communication and reaching out. If left unnoticed, this restricted customer-business collaboration can lead to your failure. By using a toll-free number, you can break this barrier as the callers are free from the call incurring burden.

Here, it’s the business that pays for the calls made by the callers. So, more and more customers will reach out to you, more and more customers will place an inquiry, and more and more customers will collaborate with the business.

This increased collaboration increases your market presence, your customer database, and your lead database. You have more customers to pitch, which means you have more sales opportunities.

Better assessment of everything

The very first thing that you should ensure to get the right ROI is doing a right assessment of efforts made. For example, if you have launched a TV commercial or billboard marketing campaign for your business, you must find out its viability in real-time.

Both of these marketing strategies demand high-end costing. So, you just can’t launch them and leave them. You have to find out how they are contributing to your success. 

Well, the toll-free number can be of real help here.

You can create different extensions for different marketing campaigns on the same phone number and monitor their viability. Let’s take 833-toll-free as an example to understand it. You have an 833 code toll-free number that you can attach with your TV commercials and billboard advertisement.

Though the customer will see the same phone number in both the advertisements but, each will have a different extension. So, you can find out which advertisement is fetching how much customer attention. Based on this data, you can easily assess the utility of your marketing campaigns. 

Other than the marketing campaign, it can also help you assess the customers’ feedback and views over your services. When calls are free, customers won’t mind making long duration calls. If they have any issue regarding your service quality, they will explain it in detail.

 They will put forward their grievances in the best possible and comprehensive manner. This way, you can understand what your customers think about your service, what’s their suggestions to you, and what exactly they want from you.

All these insights will help you improve your offerings and cement your feet firmly.

Choosing the right type

There is no second opinion that a toll-free phone number is a growth-driven resource that every business should pick without having a second thought. However, all of this is going to happen only if you have made the right choice.

Many factors decide whether you have made the right choice or not. Buying it from the right service provider, costs that you can afford, and features that support are some of them.

You should make sure that the code you are choosing is the right kind of area code. Take 833 toll-free as an example. This is the latest code that we have these days. So, most of the numbers available with this code must be a new one and have never been used before. 800 is the oldest code type, and most of its combinations are already sold out. So, it’s not an excellent choice to make.

All these factors should be taken into consideration without fail when you decide to buy this revolutionary type of internet business phone system.  

Get in touch with more and more customers

Toll-free numbers are the best resource that you should get to empower your marketing strategy, improve your ROI, have a hold over massive satisfied customer data, and many other business-related things. If you succeed in this, then no one can ever stop you. Success is on your way by all means.

The post Toll-free phone number- The best way to sky-rocket your business success appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

But if it’s not just marketing, then what is it that makes an incredible company?

Here are my thoughts. I’m interested in yours as well.

Product

In order to be truly insatiable for consumers, your product (or service) has to be exceptional. Few consider Kia an incredible car company. They have a fine product, but not an outstanding one. The same can be said for any product in any category that typically ranks 3-4 or worse in the completive set. They have a viable product, but none that makes customers say, “This is awesome!” Product is a key ingredient.

Customer Service

While there have been select moments in time when one company or another with a great product could be dinged for having crappy service, the companies that truly stand out as incredible, have both. Southwest Airlines has an incredible product (for a certain type of traveller) and incredible service. It’s the combination of the two, and perhaps other factors, that make SWA LUV-able. Without one or the other, it would just be another airline most people complain about.

Communications

Certainly, customer service falls into the realm of communications, but separating out the marketing, advertising, customer experience and social connections a company offers is important because it’s the proactive side of the aisle. This is how the company represents itself to the world, how it engages its stakeholders, whether they are prospects, customers or otherwise. By delivering a promise, then delivering on that promise through the product and service lines, truly great companies connect their strengths with customer needs. Companies with outstanding communications are ones that help customers buy (active engagement) or help customers choose (passive engagement.)

Timing

Take the greatest product with outstanding customer service and perfect communications and put it in a marketplace where it’s either too early or too late and you’re sunk. A great example would be the company I currently serve — CafePress. In 1999, we invented the print-on-demand industry, making it possible for one-off printing of personalized or customized shirts, mugs and mouse pads. Start a company that does that today, in a print-on-demand industry with dozens of viable competitors and more accessible technology for every quick print or screen print T-shirt shop to offer one-off printing and that business would die quickly. Timing is everything.

When you think of the incredible companies in the world today, or even yesterday, check them through those four items. Did they have a great product, customer service, communications and timing? If you answered yes to three of the four, I would argue you have yourself an incredible company. If you hit on less than three, they’re missing a little something.

But Wait! There’s More!

That’s not all, however. I believe there to be other factors that go into the DNA of an incredible company. These four can’t be it. But how many are there? That’s where you come in.

Give some thought to the incredible companies you’ve experienced in your time. What is it you think makes them incredible? Does that fit into one of the four categories above? If not, where does it fit and what is it? Please share in the comments. Perhaps we can come up with a blueprint for success in being incredible.

Image: Design by a user at CafePress, available on products here.

The post What Makes A Company Incredible? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Must Do

One of our Must Do Exercises with our companies that we own and operate is to create a new value curve. We spend a lot of time on the following four questions:

A New Value Curve

1. Reduce – Which factors should be reduced well below the industry standard
2. Create – Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered
3. Raise – Which factors should be raised well above the industry standard
4. Eliminate – Which of the factors that the industry take for granted should be eliminated

Create Your Niche

Getting really clear with the above four questions has helped us carve out niche businesses. Many times the things that separate one company or business from another are not large single items, but a series of small, but radically different, things. A great place to start is your policy and procedure manual. It is likely slam full of stuff that no longer applies or never worked well from the get-go.

Have You Answered Why?

This is a tricky one, we tend to race to What we do. That is much easier to identify. We gravitate to How we do it. The question of Why we do it only gets answered by the remarkable brands. If we reverse the order, and start with why we are doing this and keep that at the core center of our culture, we are heads above the rest.

Why People Buy

People buy from companies because of why they do, not what they do. That is one of the explanations as to why great brands exponentially lead the pack. Many times their competitors actually have a better product. Many times the competition is better capitalized. Yet the company who best identifies what motivates them, and why they are doing what they are doing run circles around the pack.

We suggest that you take some time to identify the Why, way before you get to the What and the How. Your result will be diametrically different.

For more inspiration on the same topic, check out Simon Sinek’s awesome TED Talk:

The post People Buy The Why, Not What appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Perhaps the most well-known example of a lean startup was Groupon, who tested the concept by handing out coupons for the pizza restaurant in the building where they worked. The book has become a phenomenon and a part of the vocabulary of legions of young programmers with the dream to create the next billion dollar IPO.

But there are two reasons why every single business needs to understand the concepts and practice the lean start-up methods:

1.  If you don’t innovate in a business environment where everything changes at lightning speed you will become obsolete.

If you have a Facebook business page you know that Facebook isn’t  kidding when they say their motto is “move fast and break things.”  They will deliver changes and you will adapt. That’s life on the web and Facebook is throwing you into the deep end of the pool to learn to swim.  It’s true of all digital marketing.  You have to keep up with technological changes and with consumers who demand increasingly better experiences in mobile and social media.

But, it’s not just about incremental chance, it’s about revolutionary change.  Adapting to technological changes is the practice game.  The industries where most of the businesses did not revolutionize include music, printing, book and magazine publishing, travel—and if it hasn’t happened yet—bricks and mortar retail. The companies that survived and will continue to survive have generally not been the established ones.  Your industry could be next. But there is no reason why you can’t be a start-up if you establish the right mindset and a system that supports innovation.

 2.  If you attempt to make major shifts in the way you do business without a rigorous system for mitigating risk, you can lose your shirt.

The lean start-up model proposes a system that is foreign to many established businesses. You don’t perform expensive research. You don’t hire a team. You don’t rent office space. You don’t create a five year plan. You don’t start coding or buying for the perfect embodiment of your vision.  Because that’s high stakes gambling.

You create the MVP—the minimum viable product.  And you’d be surprised to discover how simple that product can be.  The point of this exercise is to get a model of your business in front of real potential customers and see what happens.  You create a prototype that could be little more than a PDF.  This is critical because it is the only way to test assumptions.  There is no point in asking people what they would do if . . . . because what people really do is quite another thing than either you, or they imagine.  Think small and think “test”.  There are so many aspects of your vision that you won’t know will work until you test, from the price to the experience.  The lean start-up model allows you to find the answers with a small, private group of people. Using the MVP approach, you find out if you are creating value for consumers before you build.  And that is the point of a business—to create value for consumers.

The largest startup in the world right now is Wal Mart Labs, a small, innovative group of people, operating outside the traditional structure of Wal Mart with the idea of finding a way to reinvent the online experience and integrate the online and offline experience of the world’s largest retailer.  Their “Get On The Shelf” program allows any vendor to upload a video of their product and the decision of whether it makes it into Wal Mart is based on crowdsourcing the decision through public voting.  It is an innovative idea for such a large retailer where the longstanding tradition is to put buying power in the hands of a few individuals. But, it seems, that they didn’t test the concept with real users before launching, because while the vision was admirable, as soon as it launched, it became apparent that finding a specific type of product would be nearly impossible, in spite of the availability of general categories.  The videos are not tagged and the site is not searchable.  At  least they tried something new.

Why not experience the promise of an internet-entrepreneur and take advantage of the opportunity that exists in times of massive change to innovate within your own business?  Just because you’re big or well established doesn’t mean that you can’t innovate if you create the right environment.

So, as an established business, what do you need to understand to participate?

• Do not get comfortable. Always be generating ideas.  Not ideas that improve on what you have, but ideas rethink the way things are done. Remember, that the ones that often pay off are usually the simplest, craziest, most counterintuitive ones.
• Create an atmosphere where ideas are treated gently.  It’s typical in established businesses that when an innovative idea is proposed, the first response is to give reasons why it won’t work.  That approach would have killed a lot of successful business models including Twitter, Ikea, Zappos, and Apple.
• Know that committees don’t innovate.  If even one, or a few individuals are willing to work on an idea because they believe in it, allow some time and a shoestring budget to see if they can prove the concept.  Become a VC investor within your own company.
• Be willing to compete with your own current products.  If you don’t, some imaginative, young group of people with The Lean Start-Up in hand, will and they’ll do it in a way you haven’t been thinking of.
• Get comfortable with failure. You may have heard that failure is part of the process of successful entrepreneurial ventures but established businesses tend not to accept failure.  The lean start-up model requires you actually embrace failure.  But don’t worry because a) it’s how you learn and b) it won’t be failure on a grand and public scale.  Just know that you have to put aside your ego and your attachment to your initial strategy.  If what you learn tells you that changes are needed, be willing to “pivot.”

Do you think innovation is risky? Today the riskiest strategy is not to innovate.

The post How The Lean Start-Up Can Save Your Business appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

This one-day conference is free and open to the public. YES … FREE! A full day of tips, tricks, and advice on how to build a successful business from several seasoned entrepreneurs (and me) is completely free.

If you’re in the Miami area (or just want an excuse to be near the beach), register for the Winning Strategies Conference today. In addition to some really useful information, I can promise a few belly laughs and a whole lot of snark from Erika and me. Hope to see you there!

The post Hey Miami! The Winning Strategies Conference Is FREE! appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The experience made me think perhaps we need to treat our businesses the same way.

You want to know how to be successful in social media? You want to know how to produce great content for your online audiences? You want to know how to make social media matter for your company?

Do something that makes your customers go out of their way to say, “Thank you!”

It’ll work. I guarantee it.

IMAGE: From PricelessPhotos on Shutterstock.com

The post A 100-Percent Guarantee For Social Media Success appeared first on Social Media Explorer.