One problem on top of another. If somehow you have managed to hit strikes all on your tries, we don’t don’t know what sort of wizardry you are using for your clients or for your own brand. Congratulations to you! Not because you are succeeding each and every time. It’s for the massive wall you would hit someday in the future regardless of how successful your campaigns are. So brace for the impact, my friend.

Even though we can’t help you with such a crisis with 110% precision, we can definitely help you to get better and maybe even clone some of the examples we would be showcasing below. Take what you love and hate and mould something beautiful. It’s up to you entirely. Also, you will get an overview of the latest design trends, hacks, and innovations which are working for others on the battlefield.

We always try to seek inspirations from some of the big brands out there. Like Picasso quoted  “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Not denying the fact that we copy everything (just kidding).

We will be covering both Instagram and Facebook here with a huge chunk of examples and inspirations. Save it, bookmark it. You might want to keep it in your archive.

As you go through the read,

• You will have a better understanding of what’s working and what is not.
• Inspirations to make use of.
• Willingness to take the risk with new campaigns and ideas.
• Compare yourself with the best about there and just learn and improve.

We will try to explain some of the features of the ad and why it stands out. Rest, you will get the idea.

Try to keep up. Let’s dive in!

Facebook

#1 PayPal

Why?

The use of icons and it’s impression on users. Engagement in return which doubles down the ad cost with its beautiful colour combo and minimal design.

#2 Shopify

Why?

Not everything has to be a sales pitch. Here’s Shopify trying to promote their blog content online instead of promoting their niche. Acute lesson to be learned here.

#3 Google

Why?

Yeah, a video inside a carousel is also possible with Facebook’s Dynamic ad features. Brings the product or service some life into it.

#4 GoPro

Why?

Here, GoPro is giving an option for their existing loyal customers with a trade-up option. Go Custom audience to the core and show them this particular offer to get upgraded. Results will follow. Who doesn’t like an upgrade?

#5 Teabox

Why?

Presale countdown ads for Facebook are a great way to build up some hype chain and get people to save the date to grab your offer. It works well.

#6 Leadpages

Why?

If you’ve got a decent number or stat you could brag out to the public? Why not brag it out through Facebook as a means of promotion? Creates a reputation for yourself and build more trust.

#7 Asana

Why?

Bright colours always get your attention. Asana always manages to come up with really well blend colour combos which would instantly grab your attention. Colour psychology plays a massive part, colour combinations is probably the most important aspect of an ad and how it’s presented for the wide audience. Asana does it well with really bright colours.

#8 Adobe Stock

Why?

Stock Photo and an overlay text image of your logo. Adobe Stock’s logo stands out pretty well, doesn’t it? Make a dark background image, not necessarily a stock image and an overlay, the result? What you just saw above. Adobe know their stuff, we all know that.

#9 Kissmetrics

Why?

Specifically for their current and potential customers by getting hooked with their very first sentence – ‘Get, keep and grow more customers’. Followed by a selection of carousel.

#10 Hubspot

Why?

Highlighting their 20% discount above all. Let your audience know what you are offering, there isn’t a better option out there like Hubspot’s ad here.

#11 Grammarly

Why?

Highlights come from the text. ‘Your life is about to change’ – Grammarly is making a huge statement here and it definitely sparks an interest in our mind.

#12 Google

Why?

Google doesn’t necessarily need an ad to showcase their services. Instead, they want to make it all about you and remind you how much Google is doing for you. Put the customers first instead of prioritizing your company or brand. Results will follow.

#13 The Color Run

Why?

The Color Run focuses the Blue-White palette here which makes the text standout as well as the personalities in the ad. With not so much to explain, but you will get the picture just by taking a look at it and see their objective.

#14 Dropbox

Why?

Letting your potential customers know about the userbase of your product. The probability of x figure impressing you and even making you a step closer to use their service are significantly high compared to a brand you a relatively unknown of. Here Dropbox is letting you know that they are well established and respected by many businesses.

#15 Adidas

Why?

There isn’t much happening here with Adidas’ Pharrell Williams’ sneakers here. Just being creative and elegant. You don’t need to overdo it to show the significance or beauty of a particular apparel or accessories.

#16 Upwork

Why?

Upwork is trying to take an action here. Slowly tilting the slide to their favour by helping users to solve a problem here with a solution, which is a service provided by Upwork.

#17 Marvel

Why?

Temptation. Phrases like ‘Free’, ‘Offer’ and more would land to your eyes without even knowing. Marvel is trying to highlight the biggest CTA strategy here with their membership features.

#18 Nike

Why?

Similar to Adidas. Not overcooking but highlighting their product with visual colours and the Nike branding.

#19 Jungle Scout

#20 Google Cloud

#21 MailChimp

#22 Nike

#23 Hired

#24 Juicero

#25 Xero

#26 Canva

Why?

Simple and minimal with some really gorgeous colors which make it standout when laid on top of a white background. It’s the least we could expect from Canva.

#27 Zendesk

Why?

Going 100% minimal ain’t that bad it seems. Straight to the point, “Yeah, it’s us”. Wrap it up!

#28 Slack

Why?

A hybrid image of unicorns, rainbow, stars and a female model. Always do your best to speak in customer’s language like Slack doing right here with this ad. By highlighting customer’s problem and offering a solution is a genuine way of offering help through your ad.

#29 HelloFresh

Why?

Here, the collage of different dish images adds even more vibrancy and contrast than if there was just one image, and all of the colours go along really well. Also giving an option to your audience to respond through three of the emojis options provided. The colours compliment each other.

Other note to be pointed would be incorporate the brand colour to the image with high quality. Don’t let them question your quality.

Hold these points tight.

Creating a landing page for your Facebook traffic to visit is integral to the success of your Facebook ad campaigns regardless of how much effort you put in and if the landing page sucks, that’s a breaking point for your potential customers. Use common image on both of them – landing page and the ad campaign.

According to Adespresso data, almost 70% of the marketers knew how much it would affect their business.

Here we can see 11% of the marketers are missing out on the potential customers with the lack of customized landing pages. Instead, they are redirecting the customers to their Home Page. So numbers prove to us that whatever you might be offering for, e-book, brochure, webinars, etc., your landing page should match the Facebook ad campaign.

Hopefully, these examples of some of the best Facebook ads we came up with managed to give some insights and inspiration as you take your next step in creating a new campaign. Your past experiences might have helped you learned your lessons as well when it didn’t work out like you hoped it would.

Quality over quantity. Make sure you come up with a bold headline and rich visual content by being short and engaging for your audience. As each day passes, it’s getting harder and harder for you to reach a particular goal with your Digital Marketing campaigns. Because no one is looking to do something new and risk worthy. Instead, they all try to follow the safe path like a leader in their industry. To make a huge leap in the final lap. Set the tone, take a different track from everyone else. The road less travelled leads you to better successful results.

Get in touch with Wishtree to pipe up your Facebook campaigns and bring ROI from your Facebook Dynamic ad campaigns.

Sofia the robot can be a prime example, and general consumers (interacting through AI chatbots and the like), but many still are unaware of what AI really is and what it can do, how it would automate and how it could be used in conjunction with influencer marketing.

What is AI all about?

AI or Artificial Intelligence couldn’t be more burning topic as it is right now. But is the hype and stories surrounding it even real? And what impacts will AI have on Social Media, Internet, Apps and other platforms and how we treat the customers or audience in the coming future?

Its primary purpose is to replace/improve humans when making sophisticated tough decisions by crafting up algorithms, using data inputted into a system and then injecting code to help the computers make more intelligent decisions based on possible outcomes which would simplify the decisions.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

AI or Artificial Intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs based on various algorithms. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.

For example, AI can’t define our human feelings and nature.

When did AI research start?

After WWII, a number of people independently started to work on intelligent machines. The English mathematician Alan Turing may have been the first. He gave a lecture on it in 1947.

He also may have been the first to decide that AI was best researched by programming computers rather than by building machines. By the late 1950s, there were many researchers on AI, and most of them were basing their work on programming computers.

(Those two answers were from studies made by Stanford)

How AI is reshaping Marketing?

To understand it better, let’s focus on how AI could impact Social Media Influencers and how it syncs with businesses.

What do Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Influencers have in common?  And how they both could pair-up for better results and ROI? Artificial Intelligence platforms make it easier for marketers to choose which influencer campaigns are likely to be more successful.

AI uses its so-called “neural networks” to analyze various metrics and pillars such as thousands of images that link and match influencers to respective brands, in the hopes of finding a match that is the best fit for both parties.

The key is the brand and influencers fusing and being on the same page with same drive and goals. And this is where the AI steps in which would analyze how the influencer likely performs the best given their previously posted content, engagement, and the likes.

It’s a no-brainer. Since it helps the companies and brands to foresee the ROI and how likely they are to succeed with your campaigns to drive them more sales or profit.

Recently, one of the AdWeek article titled “AI in Influencer Marketing: Buzz or Real Value?”, “AI platforms move beyond image processing and analyze years of influencer content to determine the brands and topics that influencers talk about, aesthetic style, audience sentiment and, most important, how effective their content is at driving traffic, engagement and product sales.”

What To Make Out of It:

To summarise, Artificial Intelligence and Influencer Marketing act as Matchmaking service like Tinder. i.e., for Influencers to find brands or the brands to find Influencers.

As each day, weeks, months and years go by, customer needs and satisfaction are getting more and more sophisticated and hard to judge and to predict.

Fun Fact: 52% of consumers indicated that they will toss a brand if the received communication is impersonal. At the same time, 51% of marketers admit to recycling the same messages across different channels due to inadequate resources.

Behind the Curtains

According to the Salesforce’s 2017 “State of Marketing” report, AI is the leading tech where marketers expect the most growth in the coming two years. In a survey of 3,500 marketers, respondents predict AI use will grow by 53% – a much higher rate than any other type of technology.

And among marketers who already use AI on their Marketing field, 64% said it has “massively increased their overall marketing efficiency.” Which signifies AI is doing much better good for them in driving sales for their customers and whatnot.

Polishing Work at Office

Alpharooms is one of the leading Travel Agency in Europe. They are based in U.K with nearly two decades of grit in the field. They have a list which is well over 250,000 hotels in 40,000 destinations.

Simon Kennedy is the digital strategist at Alpharooms and he’s in charge of building strategies to drive brand, conversion and revenue growth through testing, configuration, and optimization.

It’s been a few months since he has joined forces with Sentient Technologies, a leading AI firm based in US with more than $174 million in venture investment.

Kennedy has been using the Sentient’s system to test a variety of elements of the alpharoooms.com site, including colours, navigation bars, CTA, and layout.

“We know that for example when you are booking a hotel, reviews are really important to users,” he says.

“On our standard version of the page, we have reviews sitting at the bottom, with facility details and maps and other information sitting above. Now we can test a number of versions of that layout to determine what is most important in the hierarchy. Is what they see first making a difference to how long they stay on the page? And we’ve found yes, it does make a difference and in fact, it makes a difference in how likely they are to make a booking as well.”

Now you know pretty much how AI is getting integrated into Marketing. Social Media is just one of the many stages getting influenced by AI.

While you made your way here, why not stay and read through rest of our findings and research on how AI is reshaping the Digital Marketing.

Recently, EyeEm which is an app you could find in the Play Store and App Store to download for your phone with similar features like that of Instagram started rolling in their new ‘Semantic Tagging’ feature which suggests you tags based on your selections for a particular post. Here’s how:

With the image above, you can see how the tags change as you select various keywords.

– If you tap on “French Fries”,  “Burger” “Ketchup” and “Cheeseburger” show up as new suggestions.

– If you then tap on “Ketchup”,  “Mustard” “hamburger” “pub food” show up as new suggestions.

– Finally, if you tap on “mustard”, “Hot dog” “processed meat” and “paper plate” show up as new suggestions.

This is all part of the AI integration and how it can help you to tag your photos even faster and more accurately – giving your photos an additional boost to be discovered by other users in the platform. You can find the similar feature in various Google and Facebook assets as well.

AI and Digital Marketing

In this day and age, data is one of the most valuable assets of any companies or corporation. And with all the major advancements and progress being made in machine learning and algorithms each week, Data Scientists and Marketers have found numerous ways to make use of technology and drive results for their clients for better conversion rates.

There are many speculations regarding on how AI will take over marketing space entirely. It may or may not be true. But we need to make sure that we are not left behind with the immense progress that is being made every single day goes by.

When Evergage conducted a survey – they were found out that over 60% marketers noticed an improvement in the user experience and in their conversions after they started implementing Artificial Intelligence in their website communications.

There are some very effective tools on the market already for AI integrations.

•  Optimizely – A tool for A/B test multiple variations of the same page, and allows users to experiment with the website’s interface to suit their unique needs and wants.
• Hunch – Also an AI-powered tool, Hunch can automate and optimize your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Adwords to bring out the best in them.
• Sentient Ascend  – AI-powered website experimentation tool for testing out various options and experimentations to figure out the best option for the audience or visitors to drive more results.

The primary concern is, customers nowadays are expecting a very customized understanding from their most loved brands and other services.

With Artificial Intelligence, computerization of personalization has turned out to be conceivable, because of which, every guest is offered content which is more customized for each and every one of them.

Customer Insights via AI

Customer Insights is one of the crucial metrics for a business. And trying to define character/buyer personas are crucial for to determine how products should be tailored, positioning services based on behavioral patterns and lot more. AI can be super good at giving insights.

Above all, it can save you time. When compared to human level calculations, AI can beat the clock with a fraction of what time it would normally take for us to derive a result or to analyze results and identify customer behaviour from it.

• Identify the right buyer personas to include in certain marketing campaigns for a set of the focused group.
• Display relevant products and personalized services recommendations to each visitor.

What to take out of it.

Ultimately, we hold that controller for data collection, data processing, and optimization are the most likely AI applications to gain in the first hand in widespread use in marketing agencies.

Maybe it’s too early, but sooner or later the tools will hit the market for agencies. And it will make significant changes to the process we are custom to.

So be ready to move along with the pace set by big guns in Marketing field.

Last but not least, let’s wind up wordplay with some of the quotes made by entrepreneurs and tech experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.”

“We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.” — Larry Page

“The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast—it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe. 10 years at most.” — Elon Musk wrote in a comment on Edge.org

“I don’t want to really scare you, but it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.”— James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, told the Washington Post

“Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.” — Ginni Rometty

“You have to talk about ‘The Terminator’ if you’re talking about artificial intelligence. I actually think that that’s way off. I don’t think that an artificially intelligent system that has superhuman intelligence will be violent. I do think that it will disrupt our culture.” — Gray Scott

“It’s going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.” — Colin Angle

“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” — Ray Kurzweil

Until next time. 

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Okay, these are still useful measures, the normal is – when half or even the whole planet scrolls through their feeds or timelines in the spare time (which is an awful lot of time), why not just focus and target them directly so that it would reach their doorstep?

The Social Media game has changed over the years. Now, it is on a whole new level and it has made the brands easier to showcase their products and what’s happening to them to their customers and potential audience. And if you have plans to bring your ‘A’ game to your audience with creative partners like Wishtree, to create and showcase your vision to your audiences and target to the right audience from the set and subsets, we can drive results for you.

Why don’t you go through our Few Tips from Experts and from our experiences?

1. One at a Time

Yay! Sign up on Facebook and reach the whole word, ROI easily. Not so fast, on the long-term term, it will become more ineffective.

Jeff Silkov, founder of FitnessTrainer.com,

“One very key part of our business is to drive local service providers to sign up for our service. We have local personal trainers, nutritionists, therapists and others in the health and wellness space. However, when doing Facebook advertising for each of these different providers we only focus on advertising to one group at a time. By doing this we are able to think through our targeting more thoroughly, and ultimately have higher conversion rates.”

Focus and target where it should be intended. If not, you are just trying to dump the whole investment into the sea. And the intended targets and audiences are getting smarter and smarter each and every day which makes it more complicated.

2. Pin-point the Location

Consider you are new to the market and you have a broad audience or strictly focused group of audience to target, but you can focus targeting technique. As someone like Rohit Sharma from Statusbrew have some insights about one particular technique.

“Geofencing is an AdWords based tool that helps you to target a more general area. It can be anything such as a particular area, zip code or particular city. It is slightly broader, but it can be used strategically if there is a general location where your customers will be that you wish to target. This allows you to reach a much larger group of people, and specifically, the right group of people.”

3. Optimize your Social Media Brand Pages 

You have your page and you are successfully running huge campaigns and pipes to reach your customers and grow your customers. But what happens if they happen to drop by your page and see there isn’t anything active or any trustworthy posts or idle page. It would really affect your business claiming that you might not be trustworthy or lacks credentials.

To avoid such blockades, you need to continuously and systematically manage and run your pages actively to get in touch with your audiences. Your posts and interests may change over time or period. But the page should maintain a particular unique theme throughout from the very existence. Because it’s very likely that a potential customer would do their research before buying your product. And Social Media is one of the main source where they could find your brand and how engaging and reliable your brand is.

The Art of FLIGHT is a perfect example of Red Bull’s seamless integration of social media into film marketing. Their social strategy generated nearly 10 million trailer views and 100,000 Facebook fans, who were linked directly to iTunes movie sales.

Red Bull clearly knows its way around social media. It established itself as the premier sports energy drink and maintaining their A-Level game for 30 years now.

4. Don’t Scroll through a Feedback

Your ad did good and managed to land new fans on your page. Decent. But, if you have ever felt like every single one of them are part of the happy family, you are WRONG. They are also here to address their issues and problems they faced with your brand or product. But it is also a window for you to learn and improve from them.

Hence, you should never ignore their feedbacks even if they are negative or positive. Take your time to appreciate them because they took their time to drop by to share their views and thoughts. Build a relationship and make them feel valuable. At the end of the day, it’s them who really values your brand and your products or services.

You should realize when to opt-in or out. As Reid Hoffman says entrepreneurs need to both listen to what users say and selectively ignore them.

5. A/B Testing

From business to business, every field requires testing. Marketing is no exception.

Google alone ran more than 7,000 A/B tests in 2011. They even tested 50 shades of blue on their call-to-action button, to find the highest converting shade. Even the giants are as clueless as every one of you and us.

As per Noah Kagan from Appsumo puts it,

“Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change in conversion rates.”

A/B testing can enable you to make careful, focused changes to improve your conversion rates. Only if you are willing to try.

6. We are LIVE!

Ads are cool, but going LIVE takes engagement to another level. The best attribute of going LIVE is audience getting a chance to get in touch with Brands and the workforce behind it. Another big advantage of going LIVE would be it will stay live on your page for up to 24 hours. From there, you can target a specific audience and whom it matters for you and your brand.

Need actual words? Christina Nicholson, former TV reporter, and anchor:

“After you do it, do all you can to drive traffic for 24 hours so the engagement on the Facebook Live grows. Then, boost it to a targeted audience.  Not only is this unconventional, but it works well because Facebook rewards engagement and Facebook Live gives you the most engagement. Plus, people like to see things off the cuff and not so buttoned up on social media. It will make you more relatable and will be fun to watch for your audience.”

These are just a few tips how you can help your Social Media advertising game. For more information on how Wishtree can help your business, check out our services.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Building and keeping up a gainful online social and advanced stage have turned out to be pivotal in the event that you like to develop your business. This incorporates utilizing the interpersonal organizations, making content, propelling web journals, making online networking profiles, building groups around your image, and the rundown goes on.

In case you’re an entrepreneur, and you don’t know where to start, we are here to enable you to locate the correct way with regards to promoting your item or administration.

Digital Marketing Integration

Coordinated advanced advertising puts the focus on the significance of a steady, consistent, multi-dimensional brand understanding for the purchaser. This implies each marking exertion is displayed in a comparative style that fortifies the brand’s definitive message.

Take Apple as a sample. It’s a genuinely straightforward technique – grandstand a cutting edge item that has outperformed its rivals by a plan, architecture and functionality, all bundled in small, white, minimal designed boxes with their iconic Apple logo.

By marking their items as world class and cutting edge, Apple could charge costs over those of their opposition and command the market. And the rest of them are following in their trends and benchmarks.

Consistency does not mean the absence of innovativeness, however, coordinated advertising doesn’t intend to just utilize a solitary palette for all showcasing endeavors and spam one slogan, again and again, so you have to keep adjusting.

The focal point of coordinated computerized advertising is achieving the biggest number of clients in your intended interest group and streamlining your messages to them overall directs in a way that makes sense for them (through information estimation, research, and investigation).

How Social Media helps the cause?

A web-based social networking promoting plan is the outline of all that you intend to do and want to accomplish for your business utilizing interpersonal organizations.

It ought to be contained from reviews on where you stand today, to your future objectives, and devices or platforms you’ll use to achieve that objective. In the event that you need your web-based social networking promoting endeavors to have the greatest effect, it’s super imperative that they’re lined up with your general organization objectives and qualities.

Objectives and goals control your web-based social networking technique to help you effectively associate with your clients. Take a deep look at your organization’s general needs and choose how you need to utilize online socializing and engagement to reach your potential audiences and customers.

If you seem clueless about your goals and needs and how to make an exposure? Here are few ideas worth thinking about.

• Increasing your Brand Awareness
• Driving more traffic to your website
• Generating new leads
• Boosting brand engagement
• Building a community
• Growing revenue
• Increasing press mentions
• Social listening
• Getting to know your audience

How to combine Digital Marketing and Social Media to your ADVANTAGE

It’s normal learning that implementing an online networking system requires information of your clients.

When you know your intended interest group’s age, occupation, age, interests, issues, hindrances, propensities, and objectives, at that point it’s less demanding and less expensive to target them on social or some other media. The more particular you are, the more changes you will escape each channel you use to advance your business.

The second measure of having a fruitful methodology is to know your opposition. You can do look into without anyone else and become more acquainted with your rivals in the market via hunting down interpersonal organizations they’re utilizing and assembling data about their substance procedure.

The most imperative action to take a gander at is engagement. Despite the fact that page administrators are the main ones who can figure engagement rate on a specific refresh, you can get a smart thought of what they’re seeing.

One of the biggest problems you could make would be making accounts on each prevalent interpersonal organization without understanding which platform will bring the most ROI for your business. You can abstain from squandering your opportunity in the wrong place by utilizing the data from your purchaser personas to figure out which stage is best for you.

With respect to coordinated advanced promoting – you can make ponders for your online presence. Individuals, for the most part, make utilization of online channels to examine about brands, items, and administrations. As indicated by Harvard Business, they would experience a normal of 6 touch scores or channels before they settle on an acquiring choice. That implies that your business needs to have a nearness in different directs keeping in mind the end product to interface and draw in your focused on your userbase.

Buyers or potential customers additionally always search for new and refreshing texture. With an endless measure of data accessible every day, your clients need to find solutions and arrangements that are solid and useful for them. By giving new texture, not exclusively do you give your showcasing effort more possibility of associating with potential clients, you’re additionally constructing a superior rank for your site and brand online.

There are numerous manners by which you can instigate more traffic to your website, however, there’s nothing superior to unique, supportive and enlightening content. Research demonstrated that as much as 80% of online movement originates from common web search tool and other natural means. As per studies conducted by SEO Specialists, that is on the grounds that unique content is esteemed more by Google and other web search tools.

A coordinated advanced promoting effort can enable you to expand the potential outcomes of every single pertinent channel, which implies that better and greater outcomes that you couldn’t experience in any way, shape or form get from a solitary channel will be conveyed.

Marketing your business these days can seem hard and like a daunting task, but if planned and executed correctly, you can hack your small business with immense growth which seemed impossible few years back.

Seems it is time to finish off with some tips that can kick you into gear:

• Align your social media goals with your company goals
• Break each goal into detailed tactics
• Prioritize your plans
• Assign tasks and set a deadline goals
• Be on the lookout the whole way through and adapt

If you are willing to step up your business by integrating Digital Marketing and Social Media, hit us up.

Instagram has a new rival in town, Vero.

The new ad-free Vero – True Social is blowing up the internet. Charting # 1 at the App Store climbing nearly 100 spots to rank number one in the App Store in many countries and globally. But what is Vero and what is the story behind the sudden rise?

Vero was launched back in 2015 by Ayman Hariri, a billionaire businessman and son of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Someone who has a really shady past life. He is the son of the assassinated former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.

Same time last year, Ayman Hariri spoke about his plans for the future of Vero and why he came up with the app,

“When I did join existing social networks, I found the options for privacy were quite limited and difficult to understand, and also when I decided to get on and connect with a few of my friends, I noticed that their behavior online was very different than their behavior in the real world,” he told CNBC.

Hariri came up with this idea and development with a set of Russian developers to build this and pointed it to be the next Facebook. Some Instagram users have complained about adverts on Instagram, which have been introduced in the app since 2013. But the question remains if Hariri will stay with the ad-free format for future if it continues to grow.

If Vero could replicate Instagram by filtering their problems and complaints such as chronological order issue and ad-stuffed, it would really shine in the ever so popular social media platforms.

Vero app is free at the moment but eventually, the users will have to pay a subscription fee, which the makers say will keep it free of advertising.

But the app is in the early stages as of now and bugs and glitches are part of it. To download the app, head over to their official site.

What do you think about the rise of Vero and would it be able to keep up with the popularity and hype in the coming years? Leave your comments below and let us know.

New platforms are being launched every day. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Instagram, Pinterest, Foursquare, Google+ —these are some of the big hitters, for now. But there’s also Vine, Flickr, and YouTube. And have you heard about Shots, Ello, and Hyper? The buzz around new platforms is creating a lot of noise for marketers. And new trends, coupled with rapidly increasing user reach, are adding even more chaos to the mix.

In order to break through the all of the noise pollutions, your business needs to have a solid social media strategy. Here, we’re going to break down the steps to help you get started.

1. Start Big

Before you delve into social media strategizing, it’s important to know your purpose. You first need to consider your company’s main goals. What’s important to you, right now? Once you establish these, you can start to think about how social media can align with those goals and help contribute to the overall betterment and success of your brand.

To better illustrate this, let’s create three example goals for a new business. For starters, one goal might be to establish the brand’s identity. A second goal might be to establish a strong customer base (you may have a specific target number to hit here). And lastly, a new business may aim to launch three new products by the end of the year.

So, how can social media help you establish your brand’s identity? Well, put simply, it can help get your brand’s name out there. With billions of users interacting on social platforms daily, social media has become the new-wave word of mouth. You can also use social media platforms to align yourself with strong influencers in the social scene. Partnering up with these people could help you to establish exactly where your company fits—which niche markets do you best relate to, connect with, and serve?

Partnering up with influencers can also help you to establish and expand your customer base. You can also use organic social media content to build rapport with customers and further establish your identity as a trustworthy company.

Lastly, social media is a great platform for new product launches. You can create campaigns and target specific demographics. Your business can run posts on its own social pages. But you can also see which influencers might be willing to run some paid content for you. Likewise, you can also look into running boosted posts on major platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Now that you’ve established a purpose for social media and can see how it aligns with your business goals, it’s time to focus on your marketing strategy.

2. Get Specific

Ideally, your marketing goals should funnel down and align with your company’s overarching goals. From these goals, you will develop specific marketing strategies.

Let’s build three new marketing goals to align with the business goals we created earlier. One marketing goal might be to increase brand awareness. This aligns with your company’s goal of establishing a brand identity and starting to build a customer base. A second goal might be to boost brand engagement. This is going to help you to attract and retain new customers, while also continuing to build that brand identity. Third, your company is probably going to want to research and learn about your customers. This is going to help you understand what makes your customers tick, what products are best going to serve their needs, and exactly how you can reach them. This will be instrumental in helping you launch those three new products this year.

3. Go Social

Now that your business has aligned its marketing goals with its company goals, it’s time to see how social media can improve your overall marketing strategy.

Start with brand awareness by first doing some research to figure out what platforms your consumers are on. Enlist your marketing team’s help to scour as many platforms as you can and conduct simple searches on each. Thankfully, each platform is now a search engine, in and of itself, making it easy to find threads and discussions for particular products and services. Work with your team to create a list of your top platforms—the ones that have the biggest pool of potential customers for your brand. Build a profile for yourself on these platforms that are engaging and most importantly, aligns with your brand’s identity.

Then start actively engaging with users on the site. Join in on consumer discussions and threads. Consciously contribute, while making sure that you aren’t just pushing ads and marketing gimmicks onto users. This is your chance to build your reputation and rapport with consumers. Now, you can start building brand engagement and establishing your customer base. This can all happen organically, so long as you have the quality content to back up leads, and you’re willing to put in the effort it takes to build relationships.

By increasing your customer engagement on these platforms, you’re going to get more insight into how your customers think and exactly what products and services they want. This, coupled with consistent analytics, is going to help your business with those new product launches.

4. Analyze

Now you have that you’ve built your foundation, it’s time to start analyzing your performance. Analytic software tools, such as Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Buffer, and Crowdbooster, will enable you to assess whether or not your social media strategy is working, and if so, exactly where and exactly how. These tools can also track customer leads, conversion rates, and traffic being generated from your platforms. They will be the same ones that guide your company in terms of utilizing paid versus organic social media, as well as creating product launch campaigns. But most importantly, analytics are what’s going to help your company adjust and adapt its social media strategy as you grow and evolve.

Analytics will tell you if your social strategies are working and most importantly, how to adapt.

Hopping onboard the social media bullet train doesn’t have to be as intimidating as it first may seem. The trick is to make sure you are standing on solid ground before you make the leap. Begin your strategy big, by exploring how social media is going to help your company meet its overall goals. Once you do this, you have a purpose for social media. From there, narrow down the playing field by taking stock of your company’s marketing strategy. This is where you can start to get specific and hone in on which platforms are best going to serve your brand and your marketing goals. Once you nail your platforms, you can start to adjust your delivery and content to fit platform-specific trends and build rapport with your consumers. And finally, remember to analyze and adjust. Social media is never going to stop evolving. Your strategy shouldn’t either.

Competition analysis is increasingly becoming important due to ever competing market. Competitor analysis determines your strength and identifies your shortcomings. It gives your online business a distinctive advantage. Today, every brand wants to capture consumer’s mind and drive them towards their products or services. Therefore it is important for you to keep a close eye on your competitor’s core strategies.

Competitive intelligence can also help you in determining your pricing, sales and on-boarding process for retailers. But before doing a competitor analysis, you must ensure that you answer right questions. For example:

• Who are your competitors?
• What products and services they sell?
• What are their value prepositions?
• What is their marketing strategy?
• What is their strength and weakness?
• How they are approaching consumers?
• What is their customer acquisition strategy?

Below are some critical steps which will help you in determining answers to the above questions:

Identify their Market Position

First step is to identify your competitor and its rank in the segment you are operating. The best way is to categorize them into various levels.

Primary: These are the competitors which directly targets your target audience with same or diversified product.

Secondary: These competitors have either high or low version of your products and are selling to a different target audience.

Tertiary: These competitors are related to your product or services and plays a critical role while expanding your product line-up.

Pick-Out their USPs

Once you have identified your competitors across various categories, take a deep dig on what value prepositions they are incorporating into their consumers. Once you have located their USPs, you will gain a better understanding of  your strengths and weaknesses. This process will help you to evaluate:

• What their business stands for?
• What sets them apart from you?
• Why consumers are interacting with them?
• How they are addressing consumer need?

Analyze their Website

Next crucial step is analyzing your competitor’s website. It helps you better understand their user experience and communication strategy. Every website will be different as per their respective market. Therefore, you need to understand how they are showcasing various key elements of your website. Also consider noting crucial SEO parameters such as:

• Domain authority
• Page Title
• The URL architecture
• H1 Tags
• Content
• Internal links
• Image alt text

Check their Social Media

Interacting with consumers on social media is increasingly dominating marketing strategies across channels. Every company is utilizing social media to target their prospect audience in the best possible way. Determine how your competitors are using social media to market their products and services.

Evaluate what kind of content and campaigns they are publishing on their respective social channels. Also map how people are interacting with their campaigns. Learn from their campaigns and take ideas to formulate your own.

Also identify which social channels they are using the most to reach out consumers. Looking out your competitor’s social media tells how customers feel about their business and what works best for them.

Do they have a Blog?

Locate their blog and determine the quality of content they are driving. Make sure that you note how frequently they are publishing new content, as well as the topic on which they are writing. Once you have evaluated their content effort, you would be in a better position to mobilize your content marketing team.

If your competitors are publishing high quality content, then it will be beneficial for you to identify the value preposition they are incorporating. Don’t just try to increase frequency because you want to publish more content than your competitors. It won’t generate more traffic if your content isn’t valuable.  Instead try to publish content which markets your value prepositions and caters to your customer needs.

Always research about:

• Vision of the blog
• Topics they post
• How researched are they
• How engaging are posts

Always remember, regular monitoring your competitors doesn’t mean that you are copying their campaigns or content. You don’t need to watch them like a hawk, but you should keep a tab on their activities so that you can face any challenges you encounter.

As it happens, hashtags can be confusing for content marketers too. We know we need to use them, but what’s the best approach? How do we determine the right tactical strategy to integrate hashtags into our campaigns that will, in turn, generate results for our brand?

Below are some excellent tips for leveraging hashtags to create more successful campaigns:

1. Categorize Your Brand’s Messaging

Hashtags originated as a way to categorize topics of conversation online so that users could track down posts related to a group or a particular event they were interested in. Currently, they’re still ideal for organizing content, whether posts apply to an upcoming conference your business is hosting, or to the product lines offered by a popular manufacturer. When you upload social media content, use hashtags to further describe the purpose and show a value proposition to your audience. For example, if your content relates to a topic like #beauty, #fashion, #business, or a #sale, say so by including a hashtag. This cohesive breakdown of subjects helps to keep your brand relevant when users search for a certain topic.

Breaking down posts in this manner is extremely critical to promoting your brand content. You most likely are already including hashtags in posts that are related to your products and brand, but have you considered using them to provide additional information about each piece of content?

2. Extend the Reach of Your Social Posts

Hashtags are useful for defining content, but they can also extend the reach of your brand as a whole. Think of them as search marketing keywords, but with one unique feature that sets them apart. Unlike the keywords in your paid search campaign, most of which are built around highly specific, less common terms — most of the hashtags you use should already be popular and known to an audience. By using tags that are frequently searched, you’ll greatly increase the odds that your content will appear in more hashtag searches, and reach more eyes.

You can measure the popularity of trending hashtags by researching right within social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. This is a great place to get started when choosing hashtags for your brand. Think about what speciality areas your company focuses on, and what common hashtag is fitting with that theme but also generates a lot of engagement, and use that as a starting point for identifying the right tags to include in your posts.

3. Start a Topic Trend

While most of the hashtags you include in your posts will already exist and serve the primary purpose of getting your content found, hashtags can also present an opportunity to showcase your brand’s creativity. This presents an opportunity for your brand to really start something with your audience and be associated with a certain term. It’s important that consistency and relevancy be the overarching goal as you develop a hashtag trend.

Alternatively, you can try using a pop culture reference and align it with an aspect of your brand. This technique is an excellent way to demonstrate that your brand is connected to the population and not just out to sell a product.

4. Above All, Use Them Sparingly and Wisely

This may sound like it goes against common sense, but as useful as incorporating hashtags can be, it’s also possible to overdo it (#nofilter #jktheresafilter #really?). Too many of them in a single post and your message will read like spam, which could deter social media content consumers and eventually cause them to unfollow your brand. While there are multiple opinions about the optimal number of tags, you’re generally safe with one to three per post. Think of viewers of your content as dedicated readers. When it all boils down, hashtags are a distraction that detracts from the message you’re trying to relay. Include them by all means, but always do so in moderation.

Too many hashtags may still garner more “likes”, but at the end of the day, those users probably aren’t a fit with your brand, and aren’t going to lead to any further engagement, leads, or growth. Focus on quality over quantity.

Hashtag Marketing

Hashtags have become an incredibly important aspect to nearly all social media campaigns—they put your brand’s efforts into a single categorized subject, and make it easy for your audience to access what you’re posting. Whether you’re looking to extend the reach of your posts, start a new trend or share your overall messaging, always focus on quality over quantity. For this particular social media tactic, and like most marketing methods, relevancy is key!

Since you are here, why not check out our work on how to analyze your Digital Marketing campaigns in 2018.