5 Strategies To Use Customer Testimonials To Gain Leads

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We all look for and act on social proof, otherwise known as reviews or recommendations from any community. These recommendations can come in many forms. Word-of-mouth, third-party reviews, as well as what I’m focusing on in this article – testimonials. Customer testimonials influence us all of the time, even subconsciously, on how we behave and also our purchasing decisions.

It doesn’t really matter anymore who the review or recommendation is coming from. What matters is that we see evidence from our peers about services or products that either worked or didn’t. What matters is that we’re seeing evidence from our peers – in this context, other consumers – that the decision we’re about to make to purchase is the right one.

Design Great Testimonials

A great testimonial should include specific product or service details, but what does it all entail? Vague statements such as “great product” or “loved it” don’t usually persuade a customer.  Instead, your testimonials should describe what is so great about your product or service and how it benefited your customers. Include elements such as a name, date, and photographs of the customer or brand that you worked with. This information all serves to help legitimize the testimonial.

Improving Customer Experience

This goal is relatively straightforward. If you improve customer experience, you’ll satisfy more people and generate more testimonials. Consistent engagement is very important because only 28% of positive customer experiences end with leaving a review. If you’re putting effort in to enhance the customer experience, make sure you are also including feedback collection features. It is important to give your consumers the opportunity to provide a customer testimonial.

Understand Customer Journeys

Customer service teams often focus on negative feedback, but we want to remind you that there is a lot to learn from positive reviews as well. They tell you what your company is doing right and what you shouldn’t change. Understanding your customer journeys will help you replicate customer success and generate future testimonials.

Use Visual Content

What’s even better than a text box talking about your amazing products or services? Video content.

For a few of your most enthusiastic and dedicated customers, invest in video production of their testimonials to bring their stories to life. The video will tell your story across different media — on your website, YouTube, and social media — in a unique and engaging way.

Feature Content Anywhere Possible

If you have any compelling case studies, make sure to feature them anywhere you can on your site. Other creative ways to feature them are putting a link to the case studies on your blog, in your email signature, and in all of your social media profiles. The more places potential customers can see the results of your work across different media, the better.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Audience Context: Why It Matters

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Your content is most likely catered to audience personas, as it should be. All marketers rely on an outlined demographic of the audience you have targeted as potential customers. However, there is no way for a persona to account for your audience context – what is a real person experiencing at the exact moment they see your content?

In a perfect world, 100% of your content would be catered specifically to every potential customer. Thankfully, there are tools we can use to get a better idea of the customer’s headspace to match up with the audience context.

Keyword Planners

Often times keyword planners are used as a crutch to plug in a few key topics and phrases, and overload on content to increase your organic traffic. We advise to rather think of keyword planners as tools to help understand the specific language your readers are using. Focus on the phrases that pose as questions, and answer those questions in your content to give immediate value to your readers.

Google Trends

Once you have your group of keywords and key phrases, enter them into Google Trends to see what else you can learn about people using those search terms. This step will help you to match up your content to fit your audience context. Look into geographic locations, and the time of day, month, or year people access information and searches increase.

Popular Content

Try googling the question you are trying to answer in your content, and see what else is currently out there. Use this to see if you can do a better job explaining the question at hand or fill in missing gaps of information.

 

Now step one is complete. You know what challenges your potential customers are facing. Now for step 2, which is understanding how your customers feel about their challenges and utilize effective emotional writing to strike a chord with this audience.

Show Audience Context, Don’t Tell

The most simple mistake to make when writing emotional content to engage your audience is telling them that you’re doing it. Don’t tell the reader how they feel. Instead, imagine how they would prefer to feel and give them that. Audience context is all about resonating with the reader without exposing your intention.

Resonate, Don’t Exploit

When it comes to audience context, you should evoke, not exploit, emotion in people. It’s quite simple to exploit intense emotions of fear, anger, agitation in our audiences in order to sell. We advise against this strategy and encourage you to instead show the reader you understand their emotions and maybe even share them.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Tips to Grow your Small Business Through Social Media

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The value of social media for businesses continues to grow, especially in light of COVID-19 pandemic. Social media allows for businesses to maintain connections with existing customers and extend their reach to new audiences. With over 2 billion worldwide users, everyone knows social media has now become a crucial part of an overall business strategy. But as a small business, joining social media effectively can be easier said than done. Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can start using social media to grow your small business. 

1. If you can’t create, curate. 

Posting consistent content is one of the most important factors that goes into increasing engagement. If you can’t create new content on your own, curate other’s content. Tools such as Pocket, Flipboard and Feedly allow you to curate useful, relevant content from other sources and share due credits. We recommend posting a minimum of twice per week and a maximum of 5, depending on your content type and industry. 

2. Use video to keep your audience engaged and growing. 

Nowadays, visual content is key. Algorithms have changed and evolved to actually preferring video content over all other forms. Going even further, 72% of consumers prefer videos over manuals to decide on a buy. There are numerous types of video content you can create to keep your audience engaged and growing. Consider sharing behind-the-scenes looks at your business, product launches, how-to’s, service examples, etc. 

3. Involve your followers. 

Finding ways to directly involve your followers in your content is another way to maximize engagement. Consider making quizzes, polls, giveaways and contests.  Many brands will create giveaways and contests and require those that enter to like, comment or share their posts with their friends. This is a simple and effective way to drastically increase your awareness among your followers and a larger audience. 

4. Utilize hashtags. 

Hashtags are one of the best ways to improve your searchability,  gain more awareness and expand the reach of your content. This goes beyond just creating your own hashtags. Find trending hashtags that are pertinent for your business: 

  • For your subject matter: #HowTo’s, #Hacks, #DIYS 
  • For your industry: #Food, #Fashion, #Auto 
  • For your audience: #StartUp, #WannaBeChef, #FitnessFreaks 

Research what’s trending among your audience and find a relevant way to involve yourself into the conversation. 

5. Reach out to influencers. 

Influencer marketing is a great way for new and small businesses to gain traction amongst a large audience. Influencers are now seen as more trusted, relatable and popular than celebrities. Consumers turn to them more for advice on what products to buy, services to use, brands to trust, etc. There are a number of tools that can help you research who the best influencers are in your industry and make it easier for you to reach out and connect with them. 

Final Thoughts

To be successful on social media it’s ultimately about giving value to your audience, whether that be through educating or entertaining. Users are constantly being bombarded with massive amounts of content and ads everyday. Meaning you have to find ways to bring value to them and differentiate yourself from the competition. Strategies will differ based on your industry and audience, but these 5 tactics are a great way for anyone to get started. If you need further assistance in social media marketing, or any other area of digital marketing, contact us today! 

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here.

How To Design Facebook & Instagram Ads That Convert

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There are over 7 million active advertisers on Facebook, according to Statista. With this impressive number, you may be thinking that increasing your Facebook and Instagram ads budget is the only way to outperform your competition. The experts at Onimod Global are here to tell you that is not always true. It is possible to achieve a great ROI when advertising on a budget.

Are you considering Facebook and Instagram as advertising platforms, but you’re not sure where to start? Our Onimod Global team is sharing our best practices for creating Facebook and Instagram ads that convert.

Facebook Desktop

Use square format. On the Facebook and Instagram platforms, square videos fill the screen more and will be more engaging for viewers on both desktop and mobile devices.

Create a visual hook. The more you can get your ad to look like it blends into your customer’s feed, the better. However, you also want to make sure that your content stands out. Use bright, cool colors.

Don’t overuse branding. Advertising is typically a major turnoff for all customers. The less they feel someone is trying to sell them something, the more likely they are to interact with your ad.

Facebook App

Avoid too much detail in images. In this case, less is definitely more. Make your graphics straight and to the point. Too much detail will either confuse or bore your audience.

Write short copy to fill the space. Do your best to avoid the “read more” button on any of your ads. The ad copy should also be very straightforward, with just enough detail to entice your customer but not information overload.

Choose graphics to blend in with news feeds. Similar to how you would choose an image for an ad optimized for Facebook desktop, you want to ensure your ad doesn’t stand out as an advertisement. The more it blends in, the better interaction you will have.

Instagram App

Don’t use landscape images. A bothersome feature about Instagram is their vertical layout of the app. Always use portrait style images and videos for the best look on your audience’s feed.

Describe how people can use your product. For example, let’s say you’re selling LED signs that can be used for all types of home decor. Show the product in action by taking a video showing the light in different areas of the house. Low production costs and the video will blend perfectly into the audience feed, which translates into better interaction on your ad.

Avoid using too many words on your visual. Instagram gives you so many ways to be artsy and creative in your ad. Make sure you’re not overdoing it on the text and emojis, and really let the media visual that you chose speak for itself.

More From Onimod Global

Following these best practices for Facebook and Instagram ads will help you reach success on a budget. Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

The 3 Pillars Of Link Building

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High quality content is the one of the keys to success when it comes to internet presence. Creating high-quality content can strengthen your business’ branding and spark conversions, but not if your audience is never exposed to that content. Link building is your solution to help your content be visible via other websites and in the search results.

Check out this list created by Michael Johnson, sales manager at Page One Power. He explains how to identify relevant linking opportunities, create and leverage linkable assets, and communicate with site owners in a way that compels them to link to your content.

Create audience-focused, linkable assets

Your links will be as good as your content. If you link to a site or an asset of your company that is worthless to the audience you’re selling to, it makes no sense to include in your content. For example, pointing directly to a product page or other pages that provide low-value to your audience of the sites that you target, you will have a tough time converting into paying customers.

Great linkable assets are audience focused and provide informational educational value. Your linkable assets should not be promotional. Johnson specifically cautions against requesting links to lower-value promotional content or product pages because they may come across as paid links, which may also discourage users from clicking through.

Identify relevant, valued and trusted sites for links

Use the following criteria to evaluate which sites are worth including in a link building campaign.

Value for users. The page that you’re interested in getting a link from should provide value to your customers. And of course, be sure the anchor text in the link helps set user expectations when they click through.

Relevance. Your link building should be relevant to the context of which the link is appearing and also match the audience that you want to attract.

Vet every site. Make a thorough investigation on every site. It’s very important that your sources are credible, and that you can be counted on as a trusted source for your audience.  “Always ask yourself the question, ‘In a world without Google, would I still want this link?’” Johnson said, adding, “If the answer is no, then you have to question whether or not that’s an organic link.”

Trust and authority. Always look at the backlinks to the site you’re thinking of incorporating into your content. “If you see that they are linking out to a lot of spam or are posting low quality content on their website, those are red flags that mean you should probably avoid that website.”

Keep the momentum after the link

After acquiring a link, link builders should send a followup communication thanking the site owner. To keep in contact with these brands puts you in a good position of goodwill between brands. Working together to make sure your audience has accurate and reliable information will translate into paying customers for you both.

Johnson also recommends paying attention to the internal linking of the page that earned the backlink. Since product or promotional pages aren’t likely to attract many of their own backlinks, internally linking those conversion-based pages to other pages with a stronger backlink profile will help you to build link equity.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Choosing Content Topics

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When choosing content topics, most digital marketers try to write about things they believe is relevant to their audience. While relevance is important, alone it’s not enough. Furthermore, some seemingly relevant content topics may not be a good fit for your brand. 

So, how do you determine which topics are a good fit for your brand and engaging for your audience? Here are 4 questions to ask yourself when choosing the right content topics for you.

1. Is there a need? 

A topic should address an audience’s pain points and provide a solution. One way to identify your audience’s needs are through creating a buyer persona, or your ideal customer. This may require some research, but you want to identify the following: 

Source: https://buffer.com/resources/discover-content-ideas/

Your buyer persona will give you a better sense of challenges and goals your audience has. Knowing your audience’s problems will allow you to come up with content topics that solve those problems. 

You can also use search engines and social platforms for discovering users’ needs. Utilize Google trends to gauge if a topic is growing or on the decline. You can use social the same way. Most platforms have analytical tools to show you how popular a certain keyword or set of keywords are. If you have a social listening tool, this would be the perfect way to incorporate that as well. Once you have a good grasp on what your audience is talking about, you can insert yourself in the conversation where appropriate. 

2. Do you have the credibility? 

If you publish content you don’t have the authority to speak on, you risk ruining the credibility of your brand. You want to use content marketing to strengthen your trust and credibility, not weaken it. So, how can you determine if you’re equipped to speak on a matter? There are generally two main criteria for credibility. Ask yourself: 

  • Am I an expert? Can you or someone else from your company confidently create and cite original sources? Or is the information based strictly on opinion? 
  • Is there data to back it up? If there is data, is it outdated? If there isn’t any recent data, you further risk losing your credibility. 

Find topics where you have genuine interest, as well as a good knowledge base. Content is about taking data and incorporating your own voice into it. But if you’re writing about something you aren’t very knowledgeable on, you won’t have the expertise to go deeper and differentiate your own opinions. 

3. What is the goal of the piece of content?  

You want each piece of content you create to have an end goal for your audience, but you also want it to align with your overall organizational goals. Content marketing is really about producing an action from a potential customer. Do your topic ideas connect with that overall marketing objective? Do they move your reader further along the customer journey? For each content topic you decide on, evaluate it and see how it aligns with your organizational goals.

Doing this will also help you when selecting KPIs (key performance indicators). If your current goal is to generate leads, your content should be focused on moving customers further through the sales funnel. If your current goal is to produce more sales, your content should be aimed at moving the sales needle. This means content isn’t just informative, it also builds trust.

It can be easy to rely on viral topics and expect that to carry your content to success. But if those topics don’t align with your overall business strategy, it’s a waste.

4. Can the message be shared across multiple mediums?  

Content should communicate how and why your perspectives, products and services stand apart from others in your industry. Content marketing takes a good balance of storytelling, educating, convincing and should include a call-to-action. Once you’ve landed on a strong topic, it’s equally important to ensure you’re able to create multi-purpose content out of it. You want to choose topics that you’re an expert on, but you don’t want it to be too niche. This may cause a shortage of material and of those actually interested in reading it. Not only that, but it might also be difficult to share that content across multiple mediums and platforms. 

You want to find the sweet spot between broad and niche. Ideally, you will find content pieces that can be featured in a number of ways. For example how-to content could be created as: 

  • A YouTube video 
  • An infographic 
  • A blog post

You want to be able to then share these pieces of content across social platforms. Having flexible content ensures that all members of your audience will be able to find something they best relate to and be able to find it in multiple places. This also creates less work for you, as you can successfully reuse and share topics. 

Final Thoughts 

Mapping out and choosing the right topics for content marketing takes strategic planning. Learning what content performs best among your audience takes time and experimenting. Continually measure and track your strategy and make changes when necessary. Choosing the right topics is essential to developing and driving an effective coverall content marketing strategy. 

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. If you’re looking for assistance with your content marketing or any other areas of digital marketing, contact us today! 

5 Google Ads Tips That Will Make You More Money

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Google Ads: one of the top marketing tools which assists you in displaying ads to promote your products or services online. If you are using Google Ads to advertise your goods or services, then you are making a conscious effort to improve your market share and increase your business. When your ads are set up properly, Google Ads can help to increase online traffic, in-store traffic, brand recognition and generate sales while reducing marketing costs. Through the process of helping digital marketing teams assess their campaigns with our expertise, we’ve constructed a list of five essential tips to help optimize your Google Ads campaigns and get the most from your ad dollars.

 

Keywords: Choose Carefully

This has relatively large and powerful effects on not only how much you spend on your campaign, but also how well your Google Ads convert. One of the most common and costly mistakes is focusing all your attention on positive keywords that bring you traffic. Don’t forget to construct a list of negative keywords (words you don’t want people associating with your company) as well. When building your Google Ads campaign, one of the most important things that you will have to do is set a match type for your keyword bidding strategy.  Consider starting with broad match. You can then add the negative match keywords to exclude those searches on Google that aren’t related to your business.

Alter Keyword Match Type Over Time

When launching a brand new Google Ads campaign, start out with several ad groups that have strong themes of similar keywords. Over time, the focus tends to become more a blend of Modified Broad, Phrase and Exact Match words as the data starts to show what actually converts.

keyword match

This graphic from Search Engine Journal showcases how keyword match can modify over time. Each match type is a trade-off between impressions, relevancy, and cost. For most impressions, Broad Match will be a success. However, it can also mean you are matching to a bunch of irrelevant searches and wasting your money.

Relevant Landing Pages

This is one of the most overlooked topics when it comes to paid search. It’s easy to get lost in the paid search platforms, tweaking bids, testing ad copy, and funneling all your energy into the platform itself. A successful PPC ad drives qualified potential leads to a landing page, but that’s only the first half of winning. The second part is getting them to convert into a paying customer. Maintaining consistency between your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages should improve both your click-through and conversion rates while lowering your CPC.

Optimize Google Ads Performance

Perhaps the most critical part of running a Google Ads campaign is making sure that it is optimized for your target audience. Optimizing a campaign consists of establishing profitable keywords and ad campaigns and terminating those without success. This can be difficult to determine when you need to make adjustment or eliminate a campaign entirely.

Onimod Global, a trusted Google Partner, specializes in all AdWords product areas. We can help you create and optimize ads that show up on Google Search. We can also advise on keyword strategy and budget planning. Contact us here to learn more about how we can optimize your Google Ads campaigns to their fullest potential.

Look For Opportunity To Drive Mobile

Many of your future customers use mobile devices, and more and more, users convert on them. Especially after the huge push in digital business during 2020, mobile-focused campaigns can potentially give you the best chance to engage your mobile customers in the right format on their preferred device.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

7 Marketing Metrics to Focus on for the Rest of 2020

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Tracking key metrics is crucial for any successful marketing campaign. There are countless KPI’s you could be tracking, but not all are essential. While it does vary from campaign to campaign, we’ve narrowed it down to 7 critical metrics that must be tracked to get a solid understanding of your campaign, to better identify where you should be spending your ad dollar. 

1. Qualified Leads 

Generating leads is one of the first and most difficult steps of a marketing campaign, but getting qualified leads is even more important. Qualified leads are leads that you’ve seen some level of engagement from, and have a high chance of making a purchase decision. You can calculate the rate of your qualified leads by using this formula: (Qualified leads / Total leads) x 100 = Qualified lead rate. That will help you get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. A few tips for gaining qualified leads include: 

  • Creating more personalized messages. Giving leads personal attention makes them feel more important and much more likely to continue down the sales funnel. 
  • Putting greater effort into finding them. Instead of cold-calling or sending out bulk email blasts, go through your lists to identify those that have a higher chance of converting. 

2. Customer Acquisition Costs 

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) looks at how much, on average, it takes to convert a lead into a customer. You can find it by calculating: Amount spent on lead generation / Number of new customers as a result of lead generation = Cost of customer acquisition. It’s a metric that can help you avoid wasting resources on programs and campaigns that aren’t delivering. It should not be relied on alone, though, as there are number caveats. A company’s CAC can be poor if they’re expanding into a new area, are in early stages of SEO work, the company is undergoing reorganization, etc. CAC should be viewed in comparison with the company’s overall strategy. 

3. Referrals 

Referrals are something that often get overlooked by companies, but this is an important metric, especially in digital marketing. There are a lot of ways to track referrals. Traditionally, they can be tracked using referral or coupon cards. However, they’re often run and tracked online. The most commonly used program involves a customer signing up online, then inviting their friends via a unique code/link. To track this an excel or spreadsheet is easiest to use. You can calculate your rate of referrals with: Total number of customers / Number of referrals = Referral rate.

4. Customer Lifetime Value 

Customer lifetime value refers to how much revenue the typical customer will bring into your business over the course of their lifetime. The simplest formula to measure CLV is the following: Customer revenue per year x Duration of the relationship in years – Total costs of acquiring and serving the customer = SLV. This shows how many customers you need to break even and make a profit. 

5. Time Spent on Site and Bounce Rate 

Time spent on site is a good indicator of whether or not people are interested in what you have to offer. If they’re spending a significant time on your site, as well as browsing to other pages, it’s likely they’ve found a good amount of value in your brand. Bounce rate is related to time spent on page, but refers to someone who made it to your homepage, but immediately leaves. If you have a high bounce rate, this is a big indication that either your home page is poorly designed or you are focusing your digital marketing on the wrong people and need a shift in strategy. Both of these metrics can be tracked with tools like Google Analytics or Clicky. 

6. ROI 

Return on investment is one of the most important metrics to track for a business overall. It allows you to identify which tactics are generating revenue and which are poorly performing. You can then adjust budgets and strategies as necessary. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t immediately quit a marketing strategy if it has a poor ROI right off the bat. You should take some time to think if there’s anything you can do to adjust to make it more successful. 

7. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate tracks the percentage of people that make it to your landing page and turn into a real customer. A low conversion rate is bad for obvious reasons; your landing page isn’t working and you’re not making a profit. It’s important to A/B test multiple landing pages, because you never know what people are going to like best. Sometimes it can just be a small tweak to turn a poor performing landing page into a high performing one. Try different colors, fonts, images, etc. Other things that may cause a low conversion rate is if your ask is too large. It’s best to start with something small, such as a subscription or sign up, then move those customers to bigger purchase asks. 

Final Thoughts

Like previously mentioned, all strategies and campaigns are different. But one thing all marketing programs have in common is their metrics need to be tracked and adjusted based on the data that’s found. If you need assistance in any area of digital marketing, our team at Onimod Global is here to help. We’re experts in SEM, SEO, analytics, social media marketing, and more. Learn more about what we do and contact us today. 

Tips to Increase Your Brand’s Engagement on Social Media

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Promoting your brand through social media has become vital for overall business success. But just being on social channels isn’t enough anymore. The key to real success is through user engagement. This can help increase your brand awareness, customer relationships, and conversions, ultimately improving profits. 

Something that often gets lost to marketers is this: engagement is much more than just likes. Engagement is also comments, shares, follows, re-tweets, clicks, private messages, etc. And these types of engagements are often more valuable than likes. That sounds great, but how can brands accomplish all this? We’re here to help. Here are 5 tips for boosting your brand’s engagement across all social platforms.  

1. Talk about interesting topics, not just your brand. 

It’s common for businesses to frequently or exclusively post about their products or services. That’s not really not what social media is for, or what users want to see. The best content is exciting and informative. Ask yourself if it’s something you’d want to see or would share. It’s also important to ask yourself how it makes you feel. What getting people to engage, click, and convert comes down to is emotion. You should constantly be evaluating if your content is making you feel something and if that is worth sharing. If it’s not, editing and reevaluating may be needed. Most importantly, the content you’re creating and putting out to your audience should have value. The value is either making your audience happy, gives steps on how to get there, or anything else that’s beneficial. 

2. Join and hold Q&A’s and surveys. 

Joining Q&A sessions is a great way to provide your audience with value and get more brand awareness. You can spark discussions with prospective customers, all before competitors, you can become the go-to seller. Consumers are more impatient than ever and don’t want to wait for answers. That’s why, if it’s possible, you should have a dedicated response management person/team. While answering questions quickly is important, it’s also important to answer them accurately and clearly. We advise you to complete ongoing research for the most commonly asked questions and develop sample answers that can be customized for each question/situation. 

3. Share other people’s content. 

Constantly creating interesting, high quality, and engaging content is not easy. If there’s someone else providing quality answers to a query or other relevant content, make use of it. Your audience will see that you are there to give them what they need, no matter where it comes from. If your feed provides relevant and valuable information, whether it’s yours or not, people will be more attracted to your brand and be more encouraged to follow you. Keeping your feed diverse and from different contributors keeps audiences interested.

4. Make your customers feel engaged. 

To boost engagement, you need to be social. This means directly responding to all messages, comments, etc. Whether it be negative or positive, responding is essential. Show appreciation for the positive comments and suggest solutions for negative ones. It’s also important to respond to posts that aren’t addressing you directly, but indirectly or through hashtags. When responding you should present yourself as personable and approachable, ultimately humanizing your brand. Addressing comments with the person’s name is a great way to do this. It shows that the comment wasn’t computer generated and that someone really is listening to them. You should also try to match the person’s tone/emotion. If their comment was lighthearted and included emojis, feel free to use them back. This is a great way to generate a longer conversation and may even get other audience members involved. 

When it comes to negative comments, it’s smart to have a plan on how you’re going to deal with them. You want to be able to respond quickly to stop the issue from growing. You want to respond to show others that you’re not just ignoring the problem, but it’s also best to take the conversation offline and solve the problem privately. 

5. Post frequently and at optimal times. 

Posting frequently across all channels is vital for overall social media success. This shows your audience you’re relevant and up-to-date on the latest trends. This also helps your audience members stay up-to-date with you. Loyal customers want to know what’s happening with your brand the moment it occurs. Whether it’s a promotion, a new product/service, expansion, etc. This helps your audience stay connected and strengthens your relationship with them. 

A large part of engagement is posting at optimal times (when your audience is online and active). Most people are online during lunch hours or later at night, but it’s important to do research on your audience specifically. A/B testing may be necessary. Experiment with posting times to see which performs best and generates the most engagement amongst your audience. 

Social media moves quickly. If users think your page is inactive, they will unfollow you. Which is why it’s important to be posting as frequently as you can. Everyday isn’t necessary, but a few times a week is best practice. 

Final Thoughts

No matter what industry you’re in, social media is beneficial. It only continues to grow in value as times change in 2020. Brands that are focusing on growing their social media engagement are benefiting from better marketing reach, ROI and higher brand awareness. All which makes it easier to reach prospects and customers. Boosting and sustaining engagement is difficult and does take time, but it’s not impossible. It takes knowing your audience, a strong strategy and ongoing effort. In the end, it will be worth it. 

More from Onimod Global

As experts in social media marketing, our team knows where and when your customers need you most. We help create visibility for brands where their customers are searching, interacting and engaging. If you’re struggling in social media or any area of digital marketing, contact us today.