Simply put, lead generation is the process of attracting, engaging, and converting website visitors into leads.

A lead, on the other hand, is basically anyone that has shown any signs of voluntary interest in your products and/or services. Since here we are mainly discussing B2B lead generation, then your leads—and target customers— are businesses and organizations that are in need of your product or service.

Another important factor that is unique for the B2B environment is that there can be several different stakeholders in a single target company.

For example, if your product is a B2B software, then the target company’s IT officer, IT manager, finance manager, and CEO might be involved in the purchase decision. Meaning, each of these individual stakeholders with different roles can be considered a unique lead, with each of them requiring different lead generation approach and targeting with SEO for SaaS and Software companies.

How B2B Lead Generation Works

How do we ‘convert’ a random website visitor into a lead?

The answer is to capture the visitor’s contact information (mainly email address) via an opt-in form so we can then send email content as a lead nurturing process. The typical steps would be similar to this:

• We attract
• We place CTA (Click-To-Action) buttons like “buy now” at optimized places on our web page, this will be closely related to the lead magnet, which will be discussed below.
• Visitors that clicked on the CTA button will be given a lead capture opt-in form so we can collect the necessary information from the consumer (their name, email address, physical location, etc.)
• Once the form is submitted, the visitor is effectively converted as your lead/prospect
• Now we can effectively connect with the said prospect and enter the lead nurturing stage as discussed above.

As we can see, the key here is the CTA button, its placement, and the offer we placed behind the CTA—the lead magnet—, which we will discuss above.

The Idea of Lead Magnet

A lead magnet, in essence, is something valuable we offer the website’s visitor for FREE, in exchange for their contact information.

It’s that simple. So, the key to offering an effective lead magnet is to understand our audience’s needs, pain points, problems, and what can interest them.

In general, there are three things that construct an effective lead magnet:

1. Instant Solution: the lead magnet can immediately—or almost immediately— provide a solution for the web visitor’s problem.
2. Perceived Value: the website visitor can perceive that the offer can provide value. Remember that the key here is the audience’s perception—and not yours—. Sometimes, something that is actually valuable is not perceived as such by the target audience.
3. Communicate Unique Selling Proposition: the lead magnet can communicate and convince your website visitor about your brand’s unique value proposition. This way, when the consumer signs up voluntarily to the email opt-in, they have a higher chance to convert as actual customers because they understood what your brand offers.

Effective Lead Generation Best Practices

Here, we will discuss some of the most effective tactics in implementing B2B lead generation.

1. Inbound Marketing: Blog Post+Gated Content as Lead Magnet

This is one of the most commonly practiced lead generation tactics today both in the B2C and B2B environments.

Gated content is, simply put, a downloadable content that is ‘gated’ behind a lead capture form. When the user provides their contact information in the opt-in form, they can now download the content.

The main idea is fairly simple:

• Publish valuable content to attract website visitors, promoted mainly through B2B SEO.
• Engage users through the content, and offer a related, more valuable (at least, perceived as more valuable) content in exchange for their contact information.
• The visitors are attracted to download the gated content and effectively converts as a lead/prospect

For example, let’s say the company is selling an SEO keyword research tool in a SaaS business model, so the ‘main’ content discusses something like “enterprise SEO strategy”. Then, the gated content can be something like “Step-by-Step SEO Strategy” in a 10,000-word long ebook.

2. Social Media Lead Generation

Social media is an effective lead generation channel due to one obvious reason: it is where the audience is nowadays, even in the B2B environment. In fact, influencer marketing—as an aspect of social media marketing is currently— very popular in B2B marketing.

There are over 3 billion social media active users all over the world. Nowadays, even B2B stakeholders consider social media as a valuable source of information.

There are three main approaches to using social media for lead generation:

• Organic: that is, growing your own social media followers and attract them organically with your content.
• Paid: using advertising and other paid promotional options offered by various social media platforms to generate leads. For B2B businesses, for example, LinkedIn offers a specific lead generation ad campaign.
• Influencers: working with influencers to promote your brand, product, and/or service. In essence, a mix of organic and paid approaches.

In practice, you can use social media to direct your audience to a content (which will offer a lead magnet, as discussed above), or straight to a landing page with an opt-in form, among other methods.

Social media is among the quickest, easiest to implement, and most cost-efficient B2B lead generation channels available, and it’s also highly versatile.

3. Effective CTAs

The design of the CTA and how we place it will significantly affect the conversion rate. However, creating a highly effective CTA can be easier said than done: on the one hand, it has to be simple and clear enough for our audience. On the other hand, it has to effectively attract and engage.

So, how can we develop highly effective CTAs? Here are a few pointers:

1. The offer: a CTA can only be as powerful as the offer behind it (see point one above), the other
2. Text/Copywriting: this is about how you communicate the offer. This guide by Hubspot on CTA copywriting might help you in this aspect.
3. Visuals: a CTa can come in the form of a visual button (or even a banner) or a text-based hyperlink. In general, however, well-designed buttons tend to catch more attention.
4. Contrast: the CTA has to stand out from its surrounding ‘environment’. Use different colors than the rest of the page, use typography that sticks out, and so on.
5. Size: fairly obvious—the bigger, generally the better. Yet, it’s important to maintain the balance of the overall context.

Make sure the CTA is clear and communicate the right message about the role of the user. For example, if the user is going to download something after they click on the button, then say “download”. Similarly, if the CTA is about free-trial sign-up, say “sign-up for a free trial here” or something similar. Keep it specific and don’t mislead the user.

4. Slide-In Scroll CTA

The idea here is fairly simple, and also one of the most effective ways to generate leads.

Here, we ‘slide-in’ a scroll box—technically a contact capture form as a CTA— after the user scrolls through a certain percentage of the entire content, for example, we can slide in the opt-in box after the user scrolls through 70% of the entire page.

You can use tools like OptinMonster to create this type of CTA.

5. Effective Use of Pop-Up Forms

A pop-up box is also effective in collecting direct leads.

Simply adding a pop-up box at the end of your content can significantly improve lead conversion rate. Why at the end? Because placement is very important, and most users decide whether they’d want to commit with your brand—or not— when they reach the end of your content. So, placing your CTA here will translate to asking them to make the decision right away.

In short, timing is important.

Also, this might convert visitors that are originally unwilling to at the start of the content.

6. Create a Quiz

An interesting and interactive quiz can be an effective method to generate more leads, and you can use tools like Interact Quiz Maker or Bucket.io to create this lead-generation quizzes.

The idea is quite similar to ‘traditional’ CTA and lead magnet: provide value with your quiz, and communicate this value as best as possible.

For example, tell them that this quiz will provide insights into how they can grow their website traffic, and don’t forget to deliver on this promise.

Keep in simple: ask around 6 to 12 question, and only include three or four options for each question.

End Words

Lead generation is—in its purest essence—, an art of understanding your target audience, provide value according to their needs and/or problems, and find out opportunities to capture their contact information.

Don’t annoy your site visitors, and always aim to provide value to your audience. Also, timing is key.

The post 6 B2B Lead Generation Ideas To Implement appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Online marketing, in particular, is fluid and constantly changing, and you need to constantly update and adjust your strategy.

It’s important to read blogs, news updates, articles, and newsletters that focus on marketing trends so that you aren’t left behind. To start you off, here a few big ways marketing will be different in 2026.

Content Comes In Many Forms

Content marketing is mostly driven by having a successful blog and rolling out email newsletters but there are other forms of content which are becoming increasingly popular with consumers, especially the younger crowd.

Video and live video content are just two examples of how you can use different forms of content to reach consumers.

However, it goes a lot deeper than that. Take memes and GIFs as examples.

They are extremely popular with millennials. If used correctly, they can be an effective tool for creating a connection with your target audience, especially on social media.

Quick surveys and quizzes, how-to guides, whitepapers, ebooks, cartoons, and webinars are some additional ideas of types of content you may want to use.

Vlogs can be used to create a personal connection with your audience, and podcasts are useful for reaching those who love to consume new information on-the-go.

Of course, not all of the above forms of content will be applicable to your business. Everything will depend on your industry and target demographic; for example, if you are targeting professionals, whitepapers would be a better choice than memes and GIFs.

Voice Search and Voice SEO

Google users are using voice commands to conduct online searches. By 2026, it is estimated that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches.

This will affect, among other things, how marketing professionals will need to approach SEO.

Instead of simply targeting keywords, you will need to target search terms that are likely to be used by people conducting voice searches. Not only it has the capacity to generate quick traffic but also signifies a strong on-page designing of the website.

As such, try incorporating questions and “natural language” keyword phrases in your content.

In addition, if you operate an ecommerce site, you should allow users to search for products through a voice search. Make sure that your search engine can detect and interpret natural language and is optimized for bringing up the best-match products.

The Rise of the Chatbots

Chatbots, that are AI driven application, offer consumers many benefits, such as 24/7 customer service, quick answers and solutions, ease of approach, and convenience.

Having a chatbot option on your website can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Many businesses are starting to incorporate a small chatbot popup in the bottom right corners of their site. Ecommerce businesses especially are already leveraging on AI potential. Customers can interact with the bots and get answers to questions; if needed, they can be connected with a live representative

Chatbots are more for just customer service. In an age when getting a good opening rate on your emails can seem like a difficult task, Facebook messenger chatbots may offer a solution.

The average email open rate is around 24 percent. For ecommerce businesses, it’s around 78 percent. Facebook Messenger chatbots, on the other hand, can get you an open rate of 88 percent.

Keeping Up With the Platforms

Facebook is still King of the Social Media. However, that doesn’t mean it will always stay that way.

According to Pew Research, many young Americans are changing the nature of their relationships with Facebook.

As many as 44 percent of millennials have deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the past year, while 42 percent of all adult users said that they had taken a break from checking Facebook for several weeks or more.

Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Kik, and Vimeo are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to alternative social networks. It’s important to continually pay attention to new and emerging social apps.

Remarketing and Customer Lifecycles

Remarketing and retargeting are becoming increasingly popular among marketing professionals. The click-through-rate of a retargeted ad is 10x more, on average, than regular ads.

Remarketing is available on many platforms, including Facebook and Google Adwords. You can target people who have already visited your site, signed up to your list, or clicked on one of your previous ads.

It’s also important to put more focus on customer retention. The acquisition cost of new customers is five times that of retaining existing customers.

More Social Contact

It’s time to up your social game.

Social media should be personal. Your profile shouldn’t just be a brand pushing its products and website links, but rather it should have a personal tone to it.

You can connect with your customers by adapting a fun tone, posting interesting and/or humorous content such as memes or GIFs, giving followers behind-the-scene peeks into your business, and using live video.

Having the management or even the CEO active on social media will also help increase trust.

Of course, make sure to actively reply to customers who reach out to you or tweet to you with problems or complaints. Many millennials prefer to use social media as their preferred customer service channel.

You should also try to encourage engagement by posting questions and asking for opinions.

Secure Data and Privacy

With more and more large companies and platforms facing scrutiny over their privacy policies and what they do with users’ data, it’s important that you take steps to protect your customer data.

This ties into a previous point, where we mentioned that many Facebook users have deleted the app from their phones or taken a break from using it.

One of the things that may have led to this was the news of the massive data breach that affected nearly 50 million Facebook users in September.

Wrapping It Up

Marketing professionals need to constantly be on top of the game and be ready to go with the flow.

By adjusting your marketing strategy in 2026 to take into account the above-mentioned trends, you will stay one step ahead of your competition.

The post Will 2026 Be Any Different For Marketing Professionals? Know What to Expect appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, in this guide, we will cover all aspects of the content marketing strategy for technology, startup and software companies: from figuring out your audience to planning your topics to creating conversion devices for your content pieces. Yet, let us first discuss the main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing tactics.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Content marketing, in a nutshell, is how you use content to attract new audience, converting the audience into prospects, and ultimately, into paying customers.

With a proper content marketing, you can establish credibility, a very expensive asset in this saturated digital age. Why? Because simply, people only buy from brands they can trust. If you publish valuable, relevant content regularly, you can establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your industry, which is the principle of inbound marketing.

The main difference between B2C and B2B content marketing planning, obviously, is the audience. With B2C content marketing, you are dealing with personal customers, while with B2B content, you are dealing with businesses, or professionals within the businesses. This main difference will further gives fruit into several important differences, namely:

• B2C audiences are mainly influenced by emotion, while B2B audiences are mainly influenced by logical information, although this is not absolute
• The purchase process of B2B businesses tend to be longer than B2C consumers, meaning, generally you will need more content pieces to nurture a B2B audience
• There can be several different decision-makers in your target companies, and each of them can have different roles with different needs. Your content pieces should address each of these roles, and so B2B content marketing must be more diversified.
• B2C content marketing is more effective for brand awareness purposes, while B2B content marketing plan is more focused towards results (conversion)

Obviously, there are other differences, but these four we have discussed above are the most crucial ones. So, based on those differences, B2B content pieces are required to be more engaging, valuable, relevant, and developed with professional-quality.

Planning and Executing Content Marketing Strategy for Your Technology, Software and Startup Company

Now that we’ve understood the main principles of B2B content marketing, and the differences to B2C content marketing, let us further discuss how to develop a content marketing strategy for technology and software companies.

1. Finding and Understanding Your Audience

It’s impossible to please everyone: our time is limited, our resources are limited, and our manpower is limited. This is why it’s very important to focus on an ideal audience.

Here are some key considerations before we delve further into this subject:

1. Your core value proposition

Remember that people aren’t essentially buying your product or software, but rather the benefits tied to it. Identify the single, most important value about your product or service. If you can define the extra features and benefits, that’s fine, but don’t let these extra features dilute your judgment about the most important benefit.

2. Who would benefit most from that value?

Now that you’ve defined your core value, you will need to find out who, or at least, which companies will benefit the most from this value. For example, if your product is aimed at improving productivity, you might want to target startups with fast-paced growth.

3. Your unique value

What makes your business unique compared to your competitors? What should be the reason your audience will purchase from you and not from your competition? This can be a lower price tag, but remember that your competitor can always lower their price as well. Identify your unique value, and build your business (and content marketing) around it.

Based on those three considerations, here are some targeting approaches you can implement:

• Start by defining your target companies

If you are a B2B technology, startup and software company, your customers will be companies and organizations. List all possible target companies and pick 3 or 5 biggest/most relevant ones. Research these companies thoroughly, especially their key decision-makers.

Each company can have more than one decision-maker, and by studying these key companies, you can have a clearer picture of ideal roles you should target. If possible, segment this audience according to the various stages of the marketing funnel.

• Using analytics and available data

If your brand (and especially site) is not totally new, you should be able to use analytics data to analyze your current visitors. You can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics to do this.

Then, you can take notes of the important metrics. You might want to check out this guide by Tech Funnel listing all the important metrics in tracking qualified audiences.

With this data, you can learn a lot about your site visitors, from basic demographics like gender and age, and more in-depth behavior and interest data from the topics they are interested in, what time they are active on your site, what device are they using (mobile/desktop/tablet), and so on.

Understanding this data will be useful not only for your startup content marketing strategy, but for your overall marketing and business strategies you can apply for your tech or software business. Here are some key metrics to observe:

• Demographics: fairly obvious, for example, if your main target audience is millennial women working in California between the age of 25-34, you can figure out how to develop content for this group.

• Behavior: there have been arguments that behavioral targeting is now more important than demographics targeting. The better you can understand your audience’s behavior, the better you can tailor your content. Check out this guide by Google on how to use Analytics to analyze behavior.

• Keywords: analyzing keywords that bring these visitors to your blog/site will be extremely beneficial for your startup digital marketing planning. You can plan out topics to target keywords that have brought results.

• Interest: you can use Google Analytics data to track the social channels that bring visitors to your site. Then you can use the analytics feature on each social media channel to find their interests. You might want to check this guide to learn more about this aspect.

In short, with this approach, we analyze various data of our current visitors and readers to develop better content. Obviously we can’t use this approach if your site is brand new, but you can analyze your closest competitors’ data for a similar effect.

• Developing reader persona

Reader persona, similar to buyer persona, is a fictional model of your ideal reader. So, as opposed to the previous approach where you use the available data to understand your current audience, here you analyze possibilities to create your most ideal future audience.

One way to do this is by analyzing your business and marketing goals, and finding the audience with the highest possibilities in helping you to achieve those goals.

Another approach is to analyze various data, similar to the previous discussion, and use this data to shape your ideal reader. Developing a reader persona can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on developing a data-driven reader persona.

2. Planning Your Topics

One of the biggest challenges in developing a content marketing strategy for tech and startup businesses is consistency. A proper content marketing is not about just one or two high-quality content pages, but you will need to publish a lot of content blogs, articles and pages in various forms, while maintaining consistency in quality.

The best way to tackle this issue is to plan your topics ahead, or better, develop a 6 to 12 months editorial calendar. At the very least, you should aim for two to three content pieces per month. The more the merrier, as long as you can maintain quality.

Here are key steps to consider when planning your topics:

• Keyword research

In this saturated digital marketing world, thousands of content pieces are being published every single day. No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any value from it unless it’s visible to your audience.

One of the best ways to achieve content visibility for software companies is through SEO, and this is why targeting the right keywords is important. In general, you should target keywords that are:

1. Valuable for your business and relevant to what you are offering.
2. Have enough search volume (people are actually searching these keywords).
3. Ranking for these keywords is possible (manageable competition/keyword difficulty).

Then, you can develop topics to target these keywords. You might want to check out our previous guide on keyword research here.

• Social Monitoring

Another indicator you can use in planning your topics is to see the current trends in social media channels: what topics are currently talked about, what’s being shared the most, what’s the popular hashtags, and so on.

There are various marketing tools that can do this, but the most popular one is BuzzSumo. With BuzzSumo, for example, you can collect real-time data from all major social networks according to your industry/niche, and you will be given a list of popular topics with the most traction in your niche.

Using this data, you can either aim to make better content on the topic or use a different approach to cover the topic. Obviously, since you are measuring trends, this approach will be limited to a time frame.

To tackle this, you can first develop a content calendar using the keyword research approach, and use social monitoring to fine-tune it. For example, if you see a topic that was planned for December is trending today in June, you can move it forward. You can also stick to your initial content calendar while developing another content to cover the trend.

• User Intent Prediction

Every activity on the internet from searching to browsing to making a transaction has an intention behind it. This is the concept of user intent, and there are three basic user intent types:

1. Navigational: when you are aiming to get to a specific website
2. Informational: when you are searching for information
3. Transactional: when you are looking to make a purchase

In a B2B sales cycle, it is important to understand that user intent can move progressively according to their position in the sales cycle or marketing funnel. Let’s use an example to illustrate this:

Let’s say you are a marketing manager in a company, and you are currently searching for information on improving your team’s productivity. Your intent here is informational but you are not yet looking for a specific product. Here, a marketing automation tool company can target you with content like “how marketing automation tools can improve productivity”, covering the benefits and main features of marketing automation tools.

Then, after reading the content, you are now interested in buying a marketing automation tool and decided to research your options. Notice your intent has shifted here, and in this stage, content like “best marketing automation tools comparison” can appeal to you.

As you can see, the better you understand the various user intent, the better you can plan your topics. Here are several principles to consider when using this approach:

• The more expensive your product is, the longer your sales cycle will be, and thus generally more people will be involved in the purchase decision
• Understand your sales process, how a typical user usually stumble upon your product and their key considerations until they finally make a the purchase
• Understand the unique values of your product compared to your competitors
• Develop content pieces according to the possible user intents.

3. Validating Your Content

Now that you’ve planned your topics and probably developed a content calendar, it’s time to validate your topics. We all know creating content can be a painful, arduous process. So, we have to make sure our efforts, time, and resources are going to the right ones.

Thankfully, with social media as well as other channels, we can validate our content by using simple social experiments. For example:

• You can create a simple infographic covering a topic, and post in on social media to see number of shares, etc.
• Develop simple, short, but valuable content and post in on social media or over email marketing.
• Use A/B testing to test various aspects of your content from headlines to forms to images and videos.
• Surveys and one-on-one interviews are always effective.

The idea is, don’t blindly produce any content and let your precious time and/or money go to waste. Make sure to focus on topics that actually matter.

4. Planning Content Promotion

Planning and actually developing the content is actually only half the job done. As we have mentioned, excellent content won’t bring value unless people (and ideally, a lot of people) are consuming it.

This is why it is very important to plan how you are going to distribute and promote the content.

As we have discussed briefly above, optimizing your content for B2B SEO with the aim of increasing your organic reach is very effective. However, that’s not the only effective way to promote your content, and here are some tactics you might want to consider:

• Social media marketing

Social media is how many people finding out news, new products, new places, and especially, contents. So, it’s fairly obvious that social media will be a very effective channel for your content promotion.

Take notes, however, that organic social media reach has been in decline for some time now, and you will most likely need to invest on paid social advertising.

• Influencer marketing

The key here is finding the right influencers of the B2B industry you are in, that will align well with your content. Influencer marketing on the B2B environment is still less common than the B2C counterpart, but it can still be very effective when done right.

• Email marketing

You can use email marketing to promote your content, while on the other hand a valuable content can help improve the performance of your email marketing.

The idea here is to deliver the right content, to the right people, at exactly the right time, and we can do it by implementing drip marketing.

5. Planning Conversion Device

Now that your audience is consuming your content, what then? Obviously, for your content pieces to be effective, they must be able to convert your readers, either from readers to prospects or from prospects into actual, paying customers.

There are several different approaches to do this, and here are some of the most effective ones:

• Offering free but valuable, in-depth content in exchange of the user’s contact information (mainly email address), a pretty common but effective tactic
• Offering free-trial of your product, free sample, or discount within the content, using a sense of urgency.
• Using a comprehensive, in-depth content about your product and its unique values to encourage them to purchase. This can be effective, but you will need to find the right balance between being informative and hard-selling.
• Use social proof like testimonies, user reviews, etc. within your content. A common approach is to develop a video highlighting these social proofs.

End Words

The most important aspect of any B2B content marketing plan is finding and understanding your ideal audience: always aim to provide value by offering solutions to their problems or presenting new information to improve their businesses. If you are looking for professional content marketing and SEO check my SEO services for startups.

Remember that the key here is consistency: regularly publish your content pieces, yet maintain the quality. Monitor your progress, evaluate your results, and use the data to develop even better content in the future.

The post Content Marketing Strategy for Technology, Software and Startup Companies to Grow Traffic and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Here, we will discuss 8 of the best social media marketing tools available, as well as how you can implement them in your digital marketing strategy.

Let us begin.

1. Animoto

Site: https://animoto.com/

Pricing: $9/month or $5/month if you subscribe for 1 year. (14-day free trial)

Promo code: 20% off all plans with the promo code YAAAAAS

What it does:

Videos are an integral part of social media marketing nowadays, not only for image and video-centric platforms like Pinterest or Instagram, but for all major social media platforms. Video is currently the most engaging and the most shared content medium, so it only makes sense to focus on it. 

On the other hand, video production is a thing a lot of social media marketers struggle with: first, it requires a pretty steep learning curve, and second, producing a video can be very expensive.

This is why Animoto comes in as one of the most affordable and easy to use video making tools. At just $5 monthly, you get a lot of layouts and templates to work on, licensed music and sound, stock photos and animations, fonts, and so much more. With the more expensive packages, you can also consult with an expert for 30-minutes, which can be useful for those needing advice. 

2. Audiense Insights

Site: https://audiense.com

Pricing: starting from $696/month

What it does:

A key aspect of any marketing is about understanding your audience. If you can understand what your customers actually need, the problems they are facing, and their behaviors, you can market any product to them. 

In this regard, Audiense is a very powerful tool that can provide very detailed reports about any audience according to your criteria, no matter how niche the audience group is. The A.I.-based tool will apply machine learning to instantly understand the population of your target audience, the connections between people within the group, and their behaviors. 

Audiense will also provide insights about key demographics info, interests (in brands, influencers/celebrities, hobbies), and can also compare the audience with your competitors.

Although it’s fairly priced, Audiense is a very advanced tool which justifies its value. Will turn your social media marketing game to another level.

3. HubSpot

Site: https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/social-inbox

Pricing: $20/mo or $15 if you commit for a year, but you pay monthly.

What it does:

Take care of your customers by connecting with them on platforms where they spend most of their time. You can set up keyword monitoring and email alerts so that the right team can get details about your customers at the right time. Create and manage your marketing campaigns, CRM and social media content all from one place. HubSpot’s Social Media Marketing Software can take care of creating, optimizing and scheduling content for Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

With AI-powered content creation for social media, you can stop worrying about content ideas and focus on engaging with your audience. For Instagram and Facebook, AI suggests hashtags that your audience is interested in. This saves time and eliminates guesswork. All you have to do is share raw ideas with the AI assistant, and it will create the rest of the content for you. You can also access reporting from within the dashboard. These reports are designed to help you grow with your audience.

3. Canva

Site: https://www.canva.com/

Pricing: Freemium (starts at $12.95/month, 30-day free trial)

What it does:

Good visual designs are also an important aspect for any successful social media marketing: good photos,well-designed images, and value-packed infographics are highly engaging and shareable. However,sometimes a social media marketer doesn’t have access to a graphic designer, and this is where Canva comes in.

Canva is, in its core, a cloud-based Photoshop where you can create images from scratch easily. This is because you can find many professionally-made templates from business cards to posters to infographic maker.

The infographic maker is a very useful feature where you get a huge library of various graphic elements, and you can easily create a beautiful infographic with just a drag-and-drop approach. 

4. BuzzSumo

Site: https://buzzsumo.com/

Pricing: starts at $79/month ($948 annually) 

What it does:

There’s a reason you’ll probably find BuzzSumo not only on the top of many social media marketing tools lists, but also on many digital marketing lists in general:because it’s so useful.

BuzzSumo’s core functions is to analyze the internet and especially social media platforms for trending topics and keywords, as well as finding key influencers for these topics. In a nutshell, we can use BuzzSumo to find out what kind of content (or post) that will perform for a certain topic. 

So, how will BuzzSumo plays in the world of social media marketing? For instance, you can use BuzzSumo to analyze your performance and impact on various social media platforms, as well as analyzing your competitors’ social media presences.

BuzzSumo, however, is technically a content marketing tool, and since nowadays we can’t separate social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing (another area where BuzzSumo shines), this is an especially powerful, all-purpose digital marketing tool. 

5. Built-in Analytics on Social Media Platforms

Most major social media platforms offer their own analytics, which are especially useful to analyze your performance and make the necessary adjustments. The best thing is, they are all totally free.

Instagram Insights 

Instagram’s analytics, dubbed Insights, allow you to check various important metrics like the performance of your posts (and your growth over time), how users interact with your posts (number of likes, shares, etc.), and check important demographics data of your audience (their location, gender, age range, etc.)

By analyzing this data, you can evaluate your performance on Instagram and develop a better approach.

Twitter Analytics

Similar to Instagram insights, Twitter analytics will provide useful data about your performance on the platform. For example, Twitter will show you your top performing posts, demographics data of your audience, and the performance of your engagement with your followers (which is an especially important aspect with Twitter). 

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook’s analytics tool is very detailed and powerful, as basically you can get any information related to your posts and followers: number of engagement, likes, followers growth, posts performances, ads performance (if you invest on Facebook Ads), and there’s also a feature to compare your Page with similar other Pages (called Pages to Watch), which is very useful in analyzing your competitors’ performance.

6. Hootsuite

Site: https://hootsuite.com/

Pricing: Freemium (premium starts at $19/month)

What it does:

In this age of automation and personalization, having a social media management app is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. 

There are numerous social media scheduling and management tools available on the market: Buffer, SproutSocial, and Hootsuite, among others. Most of them offer similar core functionalities with just a few unique features.

So, why do we pick Hootsuite over all the other similar tools? Hootsuite is a more well-rounded option over its competitors offering scheduling, analytics, and monitoring tools all in just one dashboard. 

As a scheduling tool, Hootsuite offers pretty complete features from the ability to queue post according to a timed-schedule, AutoSchedule feature to automatically queue your post according to optimal times, and so on.

However, Hootsuite is especially strong in its analytics features. Above, we have discussed how native analytics of the social media platforms are already powerful, but Hootsuite offers so much more. For instance, you can monitor all the different platforms in one single dashboard, making it easier to compare the performance between each platform. You can create custom social streams by including or excluding specific keywords, assigning locations, filtering by languages, and so on. This can be useful to get insights according to your specific needs.

The free plan includes control over three social profiles and 30 scheduled posts, while the most affordable plan ($29/month) offers unlimited scheduling and 10 different social profiles.

7. Statusbrew

Site: https://statusbrew.com/

Pricing: 14-day free trial (lite starts at $69/month)

What it does:

Statusbrew has 1:1 feature parity with industry leaders like Sprout and Hootsuite. The tool provides a unified experience for managing social media from a single hub.

The scheduler allows you to curate various content types, including carousels, threads, polls, and stories, for multiple networks, with bulk scheduling options available. The internal tagging feature makes it easy to organize and categorize content by campaign, streamlining the entire process.

Their Inbox is similar to other tools that sync engagement from connected networks in real-time, but it stands out with its intuitive interface and automation features. You can set up automated actions, like automatically hiding or deleting negative or spam comments on brand profiles. Queries that require attention, such as pricing requests, can be routed to specific team members with active alerts. Plus, engagements can be organized into different views for better visibility and management.

The analytics dashboards are easy to navigate and give a clear view of the combined impact of your social media efforts. With over 230 metrics in the widget library, you can create custom dashboards for the specific metrics your brand or clients care about. These dashboards can be shared via live links or downloaded as PDF or CSV files for further analysis.

8. Mention

Site: https://mention.com/en/

Price: Freemium (starts at $29/month, 7-day free trial)

What it does:

Mention is a marketing analytics platform focusing on—-as the name suggests—- brand mentions. Mention will monitor not only the major social media platforms, but also millions of blogs, forums, and sites (based on Mention’s claim, they monitor over 1 billion sources daily) for any mention of your brand (or your competitor’s) name.

You can also use Mention to check the popularity of certain keywords and topic, and also to get more insights about your competitors. You can customize Mention using Boolean approach to track queries and brand mentions according to your preferences and needs.

A very simple tool, function-wise, but really is the best at what it does.

9. Affable Discovery  

Site: https://www.affable.ai/

Pricing: credit-based pricing, starts from $90 for 30 credits (1 credit for 1 monthly influencer analytics)

What it does:

Affable is an A.I.-driven analytics tool that can identify and analyze ideal influencers and audiences for your business. You can submit your preferences and needs for influencers (i.e., X number of followers located in a specific city, have used a specific product, 80% of female followers, etc.), and Affable will deliver a list containing 10 influencers who matched your criteria, along with reports for key metrics like engagement rates, follower demographics, etc. 

Influencer marketing is now also an integral part of social media marketing, and Affable can save your time and resources in finding the right influencers for your business. Since you also get a detailed report for these influencers’ followers, you also get a new source to get more audience.

10. Narrato

Site: https://narrato.io/

Pricing: Three plans, starting from $36 per month (4 user seats included)

What it does:

Automatically generated social media content by an AI Content Genie. That’s probably one of the most unique social media marketing tools offered by Narrato. This unique AI tool creates social media posts (and also blog content), complete with relevant emojis, hashtags, and images. Simply share your website URL and content themes, and watch as the AI Content Genie delivers a new batch of content every week. If there’s something that needs changing, you can easily edit and add your own touch right on the platform before publishing.

Narrato offers a variety of AI tools to streamline social media content creation. You can create content using notes, themes, or URLs, and generate posts for holidays or quotes. The platform tailors content specifically for LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. It also features an AI Twitter thread generator, AI meme generator, and AI image generator, alongside a comprehensive library of CC images and GIFs. For any other social media marketing needs, there are custom AI templates.

End Words

There are certainly many more social media marketing tools used by marketing consultants with various pricing packages, various functions, and various sets of features. The 8 tools we have discussed above covered various important areas of social media marketing from audience analytics, content creation, performance analytics, and influencer marketing purposes. All of them can act as a benchmark when you are considering other tools for their respective purposes. 

The post Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The solution? Personalization, automation, and scheduling management, and these are where a social media management tool like Hootsuite can shine.

However, Hootsuite certainly is not a perfect tool with its own pros and cons. There are other alternatives with better pricing and unique features. In this guide, we will discuss some of the best HootSuite alternatives in the market.

Before we begin, let us briefly discuss Hootsuite as the benchmark for the alternatives.

A Brief Overview of Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the pioneers of social media management platform, and arguably the most well-known. Hootsuite remains competitive among its competitors due to its well-rounded set of features: it can manage your social media profiles, provide a reliable automation scheduling, and one of its key strengths is its superb analytics features where you can analyze your performance on various social media platforms in one dashboard.

Pros of Hootsuite:

1. Complete set of social media tools from analytics to scheduling
2. All major social media platforms are supported (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, WordPress alternatives, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.). No extra installations necessary
3. Intuitive user interface, very easy to manage all your social media profiles in different tabs.
4. Easy auto-scheduling
5. Powerful analytics reports in one single dashboard
6. Extra applications you can install to enrich your experience

Cons of Hootsuite:

1. The free plan is fairly limited with just control over 3 social media profiles, basic scheduling an analytic features.
2. The premium plan starts at $29/month, and to use extra apps and features you will need to pay more, the cost can get quite expensive with all the extras
3. The analytic tool, although very powerful, will have a significant learning curve.
4. Training is not mandatory but will cost another $21/month at the very least. It is, however, worth noting that Hootsuite Academy’s certifications are very valuable and well-respected

Pricing:

1. A free plan is available, with control over 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages
2. Premium pricing starts from $29/month with 10 social profiles and unlimited scheduling for 1 user. Pricing changes with more social profiles and more users.

As you can see, the main issue of Hootsuite is about cost. So, are there any Hootsuite alternatives that are more affordable with similar or even better features?

Best Hootsuite Alternatives

1. Sendible

Another strong contender as one of the best Hootsuite alternatives is Sendible, another all-in-one social media management tool that can handle scheduling, content curation, and analytics. Priced roughly the same as Hootsuite, and Sendible’s dashboard is somewhat of a cross between that of Sprout Social (a single dashboard approach) and Hootsuite (multi-column approach), where you have one priority inbox but you can also add customizable streams for different profiles.

Pros of Sendible:

1. Integration with all major social media profiles, especially powerful for Instagram
2. Easy and versatile scheduling features like the ability to upload a CSV file for scheduling a lot of posts at once
3. Unique content curation feature, integration with Canva
4. In-depth analytics and reporting feature
5. Great social listening feature with a dedicated Monitor tab

Cons of Sendible:

1. No free plan offered, 14-day trial is available
2. Steep learning curve, the analytics feature is not as user-friendly as Hootsuite

Pricing:

1. No free-plan, but there’s a 14-day free trial
2. Starts at $29/month for 12 social profiles and 8 scheduling queues.

2. Socialoomph

Previously called TweetLater, Socialoomph was originally a Twitter management and automation tool, but has since expanded to other social media platforms. Due to that history, Socialoomph is especially powerful in Twitter management with various advanced features like the ability to tweet via mail and a keyword search tool.

It is also an affordable social media management tool for other platforms with easy-to-use scheduling management.

Main features of free account

Pros:

1. Relatively affordable at just $15/month for the cheapest plan.
2. A good choice if you focus on Twitter marketing, although it can also integrate with other platforms from Facebook to Linkedin, among others
3. Unlimited scheduled posts even for the free plan

Cons:

1. Limited analytics and reporting features
2. A lot of its advanced features are focused for Twitter

Pricing:

1. Free plan available (1 social profile only)
2. Pricing starts at $15/month (also for 1 social profile but extra features), the “professional” plan starts from $25/month for 10 social profiles

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social and Hootsuite are very similar to each other in so many levels. Both are excellent at both scheduling and analytics, but their approaches are quite different. For instance, with Hootsuite we can customize different tabs and columns, each corresponding to a social media profile. On the other hand, with Social Sprout all posts from all platforms are integrated to just one “stream” or feed.

In the analytics department, Hootsuite is a little bit more versatile with the ability to customize various aspects of your reports. On the other hand, Sprout Social’s reporting is more simple and practical.

In short, Sprout Social is probably one of the best Hootsuite alternatives if you prefer simplicity and minimalist approach.

Pros of Sprout Social:

1. Can integrate with all major social media platforms
2. Simple, easy to use interface with minimalist design approach
3. Included social CRM features, some are very useful like the ability to view and share customer records.
4. Advanced scheduling tools that are unique to Sprout Social
5. Integrated messages/inbox collecting all messages from your social media profiles in just one place. Useful feature to easily engage with your followers.

Cons of Sprout Social:

1. A little lacking in LinkedIn integration
2. Relatively expensive with the cheapest plan priced at $99/month

Pricing:

1. No free plan, but there’s a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) for all the premium plans
2. Starts at $99/month including 5 social profiles. To unlock full features including content library and in-depth competitive reporting, you will need to pay $249/month

4. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse’s tagline is “managing social media has never been easier”, showing its focus on simplicity. The inbox interface is very simple and resembling your standard email inbox, so you can easily see which posts you have read, and which still demands attention. There are also analytics, reporting, and automation scheduling features, all designed with simplicity in mind.

Pros of AgoraPulse:

1. Integration with major social media platforms
2. Powerful analytics features that are easy to use at the same time, arguably the best among its competitors
3. Feature to categorize your audience based on different variables (most engagements, most mentions, etc.). AgoraPulse can do this automatically through a badge system, but you can also do it manually.
4. Powerful social listening and engagement features, you can easily keep track of your conversations 24/7

Cons of AgoraPulse:

1. Very expensive with the cheapest plan costs $89/month. However, for big agencies,arguably Agorapulse’s premium plans deliver better overall value
2. Not very powerful in the CRM department

Pricing:

1. No free plan, but free-trial available
2. Starts at $99/month or $89/month when paid annually for 10 social profiles, extra costs for add-on profiles and users

5. Buffer

Buffer is also a well-known social media management tool and probably the closest competitor to Hootsuite.

Buffer’s strength lies in its smart scheduling feature, with an intuitive user interface where you can easily add your posts in various forms (videos, photos, articles, etc.) and scheduled with a virtual queue. Buffer can then figure out the best possible time to post your content according to your target audience.

Pros of Buffer:

1. Integration with various social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more).
2. With the smart scheduling feature, you don’t have to individually schedule each post, as Buffer will determine the optimal time
3. Integration with Pablo, a useful image editor that will automatically resize and format your images for the respective social media platform
4. RSS feed integration with all the available plans
5. More affordable than Hootsuite with the cheapest plan costs

Cons of Buffer:

1. Analytics features are sub-par compared to Hootsuite only $15/month and billed monthly
2. Limited scheduled posts for the premium plan (the cheapest plan limits 100 scheduled posts).

Pricing:

1. Basic free plan for 3 social media profiles and 10 scheduled posts
2. Premium plan starts from $15/month for 100 scheduled posts, 8 social media profiles and 1 user. The most expensive plan is $99 per month for 25 profiles and 2000 scheduled posts, 6 users.
3. Free trial for all the premium plans

6. Plann

Plann is a comprehensive platform for managing your Instagram presence, offering scheduling, analytics, and strategic tools focused on
a visually appealing interface similar to Instagram. With a user-friendly drag-and-drop workspace,
users can create a custom-branded feed that reflects their unique style and helps them succeed on social media.

Pros of Plann:

1. User-friendly interface: Plann is designed to be simple and easy to use, making it accessible to people with little to no social media experience.
2. Content planning and scheduling: With Plann, users can plan and schedule their content ahead of time, saving time and ensuring a consistent presence on their social media platforms.
3. Performance analytics: Plann provides performance analytics that helps users track the success of their social media campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t.
4. Multi-platform support: Plann supports multiple social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook, allowing users to manage all their social media accounts in one place.

Cons of Plann:

Limited features compared to other platforms: While Plann offers a range of features, it may not have all the features that more comprehensive social media management platforms offer.
Limited analytics: While Plann provides performance analytics, they may be limited compared to what is available on more comprehensive analytics platforms.

Pricing:
Plann offers a range of pricing plans, starting with a free plan that includes basic features, and going up to a premium plan that includes all features for $15/month. The Build plan is great for small team members, making it ideal for businesses and teams managing multiple social media accounts.

7. Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a social media management platform that’s a one-to-one replacement for Hootsuite. It lets you manage large amounts of real-time social media engagement in an organized way, all from a single, unified inbox. What sets Statusbrew apart is its advanced features in setting up custom automation for social interactions, scheduling, and publishing tasks. This means you can focus on creating great content while Statusbrew handles the rest, ensuring your brand stands out on social media. This tool is recognized as one of the best Hootsuite alternatives in the market due to its latest industry-standard features. 

Pros of Statusbrew:

1. Easily manage tons of conversations on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, and GMB.
2. AI sentiment analysis to understand the audience behavior and preferences
3. Unified Inbox to provide a bird’s eye view of each conversation across different channels
4. Bulk scheduling to plan out the content up to a year in advance
5. Team approval workflows to avoid any kind of internal errors
6. Social listening & brand keyword monitoring
7. 190+ reporting metrics, custom widget creation with sharable live links
8. Integrations: Zendesk, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more

Cons of Statusbrew:

TikTok & Email Intergration is missing.

Pricing:

• Plans start from just $69 per month 
• There’s a 14-day free trial available
  

8. Planable

Planable is a visual social media management platform that stands out with its collaboration-first approach. While Hootsuite focuses on analytics and scheduling, Planable’s strength lies in its approval workflows and team collaboration features. The platform displays your content exactly as it will appear on each social media platform, making it incredibly easy for clients and team members to review and approve posts without any confusion.  This makes it an excellent Hootsuite alternative for agencies and teams managing multiple clients.

Pros of Planable:

1. Integration with all major social media platforms 
2. Exceptional collaboration features with multi-level approval workflows, perfect for agencies managing multiple clients
3. Visual content calendar with drag-and-drop functionality and live mockups showing exactly how posts will appear
4. Intuitive interface that’s extremely easy for clients and non-technical team members to navigate
5. Client-facing views that can be shared without exposing internal comments and workflow
6. Customizable reports that can be tailored to highlight the metrics that matter most to your clients

Cons of Planable:

1. Analytics features are more basic compared to Hootsuite and available only in higher-tier plans
2. Advanced features like in-depth competitive analysis and social listening are not as powerful as dedicated enterprise tools
   

Planable’s public pricing (USD) is workspace-based (you pay per workspace, per month):

• Free plan: $0 (includes all features, but limited to 50 total posts to create/schedule).

• Basic: $33 / workspace / month (includes 60 posts/workspace/month, unlimited users).

• Pro: $49 / workspace / month (includes 150 posts/workspace/month, unlimited users).

• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

Add-ons (per workspace/month):

• Analytics: $14 / workspace / month

• Social inbox: $9 / workspace / month

Conclusion

There are many excellent Hootsuite alternatives available on the market: some are more affordable, some others provide better overall value in features. Hootsuite, however, remains a strong social media management tool used by many digital marketing consultants with its well-rounded set of features and relatively affordable plans.

The post Best Hootsuite Alternatives for Your Business Success appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Social media often refers to social networking platforms which organize the sharing of ideas and communication. These platforms focus on building Internet-based social communities.

Users sometimes access social media via desktop computers, though most activity today happens on mobile devices (e.g., smart phones and tablets). As more users interact with a social media network, the platform grows and becomes more powerful. Using social media users and brands create, share, and participate in highly relevant discussions.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing can be an effective strategy for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and existing customers. Your customers are likely already in touch with brands through social media. If you are not interacting to your audience through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, there is a lot you are missing out on! Great marketing tactics on social media can bring additional benefits to your business, including building loyal followers and generating more revenue.

One definition for Social Media Marketing is:

Social Media Marketing is the method of creating content that you tailor for each individual social media platform to drive user engagement.

Important Social Media Terms

1. Content: Content refers to anything that you post. It can be a Facebook status update, a picture on Instagram, a tweet, or a pin on Pinterest.

Content usually relates to information that connects with an audience. It is usually in text or visual form, with the goal of conveying an idea to your audience. Content can be delivered through different media such as internet, cinema, television, radio, Smartphone’s, audio CDs, books, e-books, magazines, and live events, live speeches, conferences, and stage performances.

2. Hashtags: By now, there are many ways users can classify posts on most social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to describe the subject of your content or associate it with current trends.

They make it easy for users to discover and share your content.

A hashtag can describe information on social networks like Twitter and different social services. They allow users to use dynamic, user-generated tags that make it easy for others to find information on a selected topic. Users create hashtags by inserting the hash (#) symbol before a word or phrase.

For example, on Instagram, the hashtag #bluesky permits users to find all posts that are labeled using that hashtag.

3. Shares: Shares are the currency of the social media world. To many companies, they are all that matters on social media.

You can keep improving your reach, impressions, and click-through rates. However, these metrics do not tell you whether individuals are spreading your information to others.

When individuals engage and interact with your content, that’s great. But, if they share it with others, that’s even better.

A great tool to track shares and the overall impact of content is BuzzSumo.

4. Engagement: Engagement is general term that relates to how effective your content is. An engagement can be a like, suggestion, comment, or share.

All of these are relevant metrics. However as mentioned before, shares are the most important.

Engagement on social media implies that customers and stakeholders are active participants instead of just passive viewers.

How Social Media Marketing Can Help you Achieve Your Marketing Goals

Social Media Marketing can assist with achieving a range of goals, including:

• Increasing website traffic
• Generating conversions
• Raising brand awareness
• Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
• Improving communication and interaction with key audiences

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media, the easier it will be for you to achieve each marketing goal on your list!

Social Media Marketing Checklist

• Social Media Content Planning —Getting started with social media marketing is the first step. Consider keyword and competitive analysis to assist in brainstorming content ideas that excite your audience. What are competitors in your industry doing to drive engagement on social media?

• Share Great Social Content —Content reigns supreme. Ensure you post often and offer valuable information that your potential customers find useful and attention-grabbing. The content that you share on social media can include pictures, videos, infographics, how-to guides and other relevant information.

• Use A Consistent Brand Image —Social media marketing permits your business to project your brand across a variety of various social media platforms. Whereas every platform has its distinctive community, your business’s core identity, whether it’s a friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should be consistent.

• Social Media for Content Promotion — Social media marketing is an excellent channel for sharing your best website and blog content with readers. Once you build a loyal following, you will be able to post all your new content to keep your audience up to date. Plus, relevant blog content can assist you in gaining additional followers. It isn’t surprising that content marketing and social media marketing benefit one another.

• Sharing Curated Links — Using social media for marketing may be a way to leverage your own content to achieve followers, fans, and customers. It also offers a chance to link to outside articles. Your audience may enjoy engaging with different sources of relevant information. Curating and linking to outside sources builds trust, and you may even get more likes and shares in return.

• Tracking Competitors — It’s necessary to key an eye on your competitors. They may offer valuable information for keyword analysis as well as social media insights. If your competitors are using a certain social channel or technique that appears to be working for them, considering trying similar tactics. Just do them even better!
• Measuring Success with Analytics — You can’t verify the success of your social media marketing without proper data. Google Analytics is a good social media marketing metrics tool that may assist you in measuring the effectiveness of your marketing techniques. Creating UTM tags for your social campaigns can help you to properly monitor their performance. And be certain to use the analytics tools offered in every social media platform for even more additional insights (e.g. Facebook Analytics). This can help you to determine which content is performs best for your audience.

• Social Media Crisis Management — Things may not always go smoothly on social media. It is best to create a playbook in place, so your team knows how to handle a potential tricky situation.

Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

1. Failing to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy!

Every social media marketing strategy needs:

• Goals
• A target audience
• Tactics
• Time investment
• A Committed Team

2. Your Target Audience:

Your target audience must be relevant so that they can one day become your customers. If you target everyone, then you will be focusing your time and energy engaging with the wrong people.

3. Dealing with Negative Feedback

Types of Negative Feedback:

• Criticism is feedback based on individuals ‘opinions regarding your products and services. Criticism might escalate if neglected or not addressed quickly. Examine the problem and let individuals understand that you just are looking into it. A way to deal with criticism is to create a feedback channel to collect users’ opinions.

• Crisis hits once somebody is irritated and decides to take things to the next level. It’s typically a result of your earlier neglect. First, make certain that there is an issue and it’s not somebody attempting to personally harm you or your business. If you made a mistake, show regret and apologize for what happened. Next, let individuals understand what you are aiming to do improve things. Provides a timeline and specify goals you’re aiming to work towards.

4. Promoting yourself too much:

Don’t promote yourself a lot as users are quick to differentiate between any two products.Let your products speak for themselves.

5. Spamming:

Over promotion can lead to the spamming of your website. Avoid spamming and promote your content in genuine way.

6. Too Little Interaction:

Stay in touch with your customers or target audience. Otherwise, they may leave to other companies in the absence of proper interaction.

7. No Real Followers:

There are many ways to increase the followers of your account. However, fake followers don’t contribute business revenue. Moreover, building fake followers can be waste of money and time. So, avoid buying fake followers as a best practice.

Best Social Media Platforms for Marketing in 2019

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Youtube
• Reddit

Conclusion

It is necessary to learn from your content promotion mistakes. Many of today’s social media platforms value quality content and a positive user experience. Continue learning to stay top of your marketing game and get a marketing consultant to help you out. Eventually, you will build out your name and brand in the social media world.

The post Quick Social Media Marketing Checklist: A Comprehensive Guide to Key Terms, Goals, and Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will discuss four of the most effective marketing tactics for the e-commerce environment. These tactics can be very effective to increase the revenue of your business, encouraging growth, and maximizing profitability.

Without further ado, let us begin.

Have an Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing—even amidst all the newer platforms and technologies today— is still one of, if not the most most effective tactics available, especially for nurturing your prospects until they are ready for the purchase.

Since in an e-commerce business, we lack of any physical engagements with our customers, your email marketing campaign will be your main, and most effective way to maintain engagement.

When implementing email marketing for e-commerce, here are some key considerations:

• Proper audience segmentation and personalization are very important factors to success nowadays. You will need to understand the needs of each specific audience, and deliver the right message properly. (link drip marketing)
• An engaging subject line will be the key to optimizing open rate. Make sure it’s to-the point and can communicate the benefit of opening the message. You will also need to optimize preview texts with a similar approach.
• Have an optimized landing page for each email sent. This is the key to maximizing conversion rate.
• The quality of your content, as well as visual design will be the most important factor in determining click-through rate (CTR).

To learn further about email marketing for e-commerce, you might want to check this guide by BigCommerce.

Implementing Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the popular term now used to describe the activity of regularly publishing relevant, valuable audience to attract prospects. This can be an active blog, podcast, or even a YouTube channel.

The main idea of inbound marketing—as the name suggests— is to pull our audience “inward”, and it is particularly effective for e-commerce because:

• Your business is mainly online-based where you don’t have physical engagement. By regularly publishing content, you can maintain and optimize engagement with prospects and customers.
• A proper inbound marketing will improve your site’s ranking in search results. Remember that people mainly find e-commerce sites through a Google search, and this can be a very effective strategy to improve visibility.

When implementing inbound marketing in an e-commerce setting, here are some key considerations:

• Your inbound marketing efforts should not focus solely on promoting your products or services, but rather to provide relevant information about your niche.
• The key is a proper understanding of your audience: their needs, problems, and behaviors in general. If you can answer a specific issue with your content that is relevant for your ideal audience, you can drive a lot of traffic.
• Although we shouldn’t mainly focus on selling products, you should aim to convert readers into prospects—or even better—customers. You can include CTAs to capture your audience’s email address to follow them up with email marketing. This is mainly done by offering a downloadable content (ebook, white paper, etc.), free-trial, or even free stuffs.
• Developing the content is just half the job done. No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless there’s an audience. Promote your content through various marketing tactics, and aim to get as many backlinks during the process. Working with SEO experts will also improve your SEO results.

Make an Easier Checkout Process

While there are many different factors that can determine conversion rate, it is actually a common occurrence that the cause for a low conversion rate is simply because the checkout process is not optimized.

In the specific case of the e-commerce niche, we can avoid cart abandonment with an easy, optimized checkout process:

• The whole checkout process should be seamless, easy enough for anyone, and trustworthy. Include as little number of steps as possible.
• Make sure the whole checkout page is mobile-responsive and optimized. More and more people are purchasing from their phones, and you shouldn’t neglect this opportunity. Make sure all your buttons are easily clickable from a mobile device.
• Capture their contact information (email address) as early as you can in the checkout process. You can actually do this before showing any checkout forms. This way, if they abandon the cart, you can follow up with email marketing.
• You should provide a reliable real-time support that is easy to access during the whole checkout process. You can either provide a live chat feature here, or even implement chatbots. You might also add a live chat function in your app using an in-app chat API solution for Android or iOS.
• Don’t offer false promises, inform clear delivery times, stock levels, shipping costs, and other necessary information. You might also want to offer free shipping.
• Offer incentives and communicate them clearly within the review page(s). This is done to avoid cart abandonment.

Optimizing your checkout page is a pretty deep subject on its own, and there are still various ways to further enhance your checkout process. You might want to check out this guide to learn further.

Leveraging Social Proofs Effectively

People are now avoiding advertising all the time, and studies have suggested that people are more likely to purchase a product or service after reading a positive review, or after a recommendation from their peers.

This is often referred to as “social proof”, a psychological phenomenon when we follow the action of others, assuming this specific action is the correct one.

There are at least six main types of social proof in the marketing environment:

• From existing customers: positive reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.
• From big masses: using large crowds as social proof, for example, “100,000 customers have bought our product, are you ready to join?”
• From experts: reviews from experts and thought leaders of the industry, including the specific content discussing your product
• From influencers: celebrities that have bought your product/used your service, influencer mentions, etc.
• From colleagues: recommendation from your friends or using social media data (i.e. “100 of your friends have used our product”)
• Awards/certifications: credible awards and certifications can be a huge social proof

So, how can we leverage these social proofs to improve conversion rate? Here are some key principles:

• 63% of customers are more likely to purchase something online when the site displays reviews and ratings.
• You can use real-time stats as powerful social proofs. For example, showing how many people are currently on your site, how many people are currently making a purchase, and so on.
• If you are a B2B ecommerce site, displaying client logos can be very effective. Make sure, however, that it is well designed.
• Encourage existing customer to leave positive reviews and/or ratings. You can offer incentives from discounts to freebies to other special offers.

The main idea here is winning the trust of your audience, so avoid using exaggerated social proofs.

End Words

The key to marketing success for e-commerce is understanding your customer base: their behaviors, their needs, and the problems you/your product can address.

You should also talk to a digital marketing consultant and adapt marketing tactics according to the length of your sales cycle. If your sales cycle is long, for example, you should focus more on the lead nurturing process.

The post 4 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Tactics appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide to inbound marketing strategy, we will divide our discussion into three big parts. By the end, you can develop a sound inbound marketing strategy and start implementing it.

Let us begin with the first one.

Targeting The Right Audience

Knowing who to target and understanding their needs are very important factors for the success of your inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is ultimately about delivering valuable content to your target audience. Without knowing their needs, you simply can’t deliver value.

The market is also rapidly changing, as do the behaviors and needs of your audience. Focusing on the target audience that matters will also help you in dealing with this changes. So, how can we effectively determine the right audience? Below, we will share some of our methods:

1. Social media insights

If your business already have performing social media profiles with several hundreds followers for each, you can analyze their demographic data to figure out your existing customer base.

Most major social media platforms offer features to analyze the demographic data of your followers, especially their gender, age, and location. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, there’s the “Insights” tab on the top of the page for this purpose.

This is also why social media should be one of your main ways of publishing and promoting content.The more followers and fans you have, the more data you’ll have, and the better you can understand your audience.

2. Conducting Online Surveys

Conducting surveys can be very effective to know your target prospects, and you can easily do this if you already have a growing email database. Also, there are many different tools that can assist you in this process.

The main goal here is to find out your target audience’s needs and problems, so you can ask a question like “what is your current biggest issue related to X (your niche/industry)”. By figuring out their problems, you can then develop content pieces providing solutions to these issues.

3. Conducting Interviews

While broadcasting surveys can be an effective way to figure out the general picture of your target market, it is fairly difficult to capture an in-depth data with it. This is where phone or even in-person interviews can fill in the gap.

Select a few of your existing customers (it’s better to conduct interviews with existing customers compared to prospects, since generally they are more willing), and ask them if it’s okay to conduct short phone calls or video chats (a maximum of 10 minutes). Again, your main goal here is to find out their current problems: ask their current struggles, the solutions they’ve tried in the past, and what are they looking in a solution.

You can then use this data to develop your content.

4. Content Development

Content quality is obviously the core of any inbound marketing strategy. In fact, in theory, if your content quality is excellent, you won’t need any strategy at all.

On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content pieces. Even when a low-quality content somehow rank on the top of search engine results, it won’t bring any business, period.

The value of your content is directly tied to your audience’s needs: a good inbound marketer should always adapt their content according to the current needs of their audience. Yet, it’s not the only thing you should consider when developing your content.

Here are a few areas you should focus on:

Content types

First, understand that textual content, especially blog posts, is still the most effective content form in generating new leads.

However, more and more businesses are shifting towards podcasts and videos, and not without its reasons:you can’t consume textual content while driving or while working out in the gym. Podcasts and videos tackled that issue.

Yet, when researching for services and products, people trust textual content more, especially due to its ability to cover in-depth information.

So, a majority of your content should be textual, while podcasts, videos, and webinars can assist these textual content pieces. For example, you can create a podcast covering an outline for a topic, and offer a link to a more in-depth blog posts covering the same topic. If necessary, you can offer e-books or white papers for even more in-depth information.

Content length

This is the main principle you should understand: the longer is always the better, as long as you can maintain engagement throughout the whole content. Yet, we all know that maintaining quality will be more difficult with longer content pieces. The key is finding that balance.

For textual content pieces, the average word count to maintain this balance looks like to be 1,890 words. For videos? This research by Minimatters might help.

Optimizing titles

Titles, or headlines, if you will, are the first thing people read when they stumbled upon your content, and so they are the ones determining your click-through rate (CTR).

Optimized titles are also important for SEO purposes. You should include your target keyword in the title while making sure the title is also appealing to human readers. Putting the target keyword at the front of the title will also help. For example, if your focus keyword is “Local SEO”, you can make a title like “Local SEO: Top 10 Tactics for Higher Google Maps Results”.

You might want to check this guide by QuickSprout on optimizing headlines.

Optimizing snippet

Similar to titles, your snippet (META description) is very important not only to improve CTR, but for SEO purposes. Include your target keywords, but make sure the description is comprehensive and engaging for human readers.

You might want to check this guide by Neil Patel on how to optimize META description.

Diversify your media

Even if you should focus on primarily textual content pieces, you should utilize other media like images, infographics, audio, and even videos to enrich your content.

Remember that these additional media should support your core content, do not use them just for the sake of it. You can also optimize these images and videos for SEO benefits.

Tell a compelling story

Every human being is attracted to great story: we either spend our lives consuming exciting stories (through books, movies and so on) or writing our own (literally, or by living a successful life).

So, even if your content is technical and data-driven, doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and fun. Use storytelling techniques to enhance your content, use a conversational approach to engage your audience, and aim to create an interactive story.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value if no one consumes it. This is why content development is just half of the process, and you shouldn’t neglect content promotion as the core part of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are various ways to promote your content, and below, we will list some of the most popular (and effective) ones:

1. Social Media Marketing

Quite obvious, with so many people using social media nowadays, it is one of the most effective platforms to promote anything.

The thing is, organic reach on major social media platforms have declined rapidly in recent years. So, you will need to consider paid promotional options. Your main goal here is to have more people sharing your content, which can bring exponential benefits both for short-term and long-term basis.

2. Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting can be very effective inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because you get many different benefits with one action: you get backlinks (probably not immediately, but very possible), you get awareness and authority, and you develop relationships with influencers and high-quality sites.

There are several key principles to a proper guest posting campaign:

• Consistency is key, find as many sites accepting guest posting,and approach all of them
• Take notes on sites with high engagement rates, these are your priorities
• Build relationships before you pitch them with your blog post: engage in their conversations, comment on their previous posts, and so on
• Don’t focus on getting backlinks at first, aim to get authority

3. Influencer Marketing

Utilizing influencers not only can effectively promote your content pieces, but you will also get the benefit of getting backlinks from their authority sites.

Again, here are some key principles for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

• The most important step is finding the right influencers for you. There are many tools that can assist you in this process, for example, Buzzsumo.
• Gradually build a relationship with these influencers. Engage them on their social media profiles, join their conversations, and only after gaining their trust, you can propose them for a content promotion opportunity
• Don’t solely focus on major influencers and celebrities, micro-influencers can also provide values

4. Host a Webinar

You can utilize webinars to promote your brand or your personality, while also indirectly promote your content. Host a free webinar session in exchange for their email address, which can be an effective lead generation device.

If you can provide value, people who attended your webinar might also be interested in future content, as you establish your position as the thought leader of your niche.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective tactic not only to promote your content, but also to encourage those who have consumed your content to convert.

Here are some important principles for a successful email marketing campaign:

• Be consistent and think long-term, regularly provide excellent content through email marketing. Don’t focus on hard-selling your products, but focus on providing value
• Understand the behavior and needs of your email subscribers (back to section I). You simply need to provide them with proper values, a reason to stay subscribed
• Personalize your email marketing by using first names. Many email marketing tools can help with this
• Use an interesting, engaging subject line.
• Keep your email messages to-the-point and engaging, you can use animated gifs, images, and even videos, but make sure they have decent loading speed
• Make sure all email messages are mobile-responsive

6. SEO

SEO is obviously an inseparable aspect of inbound marketing, and the primary way you can increase your content’s visibility.

To maximize your SEO results, there are four main areas to focus on:

• Make sure your content is targeting a proper keyword with enough search volume. Check the top-ranking content pieces of this keyword, and aim to develop a better content
• Optimize these keywords on your content, but don’t overstuff the keywords. Include keyword variants and make sure they occur naturally
• Use various content promotion techniques discussed above to generate more backlinks
• Work with SEO expert and consultant to streamline your traffic improvements and avoid search engine penalties

Remember, however, that SEO is a long-term game. Be consistent with your SEO optimizations, and expect at least 6 to 12 months before you see your content on the first page of search results.

Utilizing Your Content to Achieve Results

Inbound marketing won’t bring any value on its own, unless it can generate traffic (leads), educate customers (lead nurturing) or encourage conversions.

Below, we will discuss how to optimize inbound marketing in those three different areas.

1. Lead Generation

The most common practice in this aspect is to offer free but valuable content to acquire leads. You can offer well-researched reports, white papers, e-books, or even in-depth videos and webinar sessions in exchange of their email address.

The key here is obviously the value of your content: the more valuable it is, the more leads you can capture. Check out some of the best examples of this practice, as compiled by Contently.

There are other tactics you can try, for example, offering your readers to subscribe to your email newsletter within your blog post.

2. Lead Nurturing

This is the stage where most inbound marketing practices shine the brightest. Your content will be a powerful weapon to nurture your prospects until they are finally ready to purchase. There are two main goals here:

• Establish trust and credibility. The thing is, people only want to purchase from brands they can trust. This is the most important purpose of inbound marketing.
• Educating your audience about your product or service, especially your unique value proposition. Only when people realize your unique values, they will purchase your product and not your competitor’s.

In this stage, inbound marketing will be even more effective when combined with other lead nurturing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing among others.

The key here is to refer to the two main goals discussed above when planning and developing your content pieces.

3. Conversion

There are two different conversions to discuss here: converting visitors to prospects/leads, and converting leads into actual customers.

Inbound marketing is very effective in driving blog visitors into leads, as we have discussed on the lead generation section above. However, inbound marketing is less effective at converting leads into actual customers, although it’s not impossible.

Here are some key tactics you can implement to optimize conversions:

• Optimize your site and landing pages

Make sure all your pages, including your email content is mobile-responsive and have fast loading speeds.

If you include links, make sure it is easy enough to click on mobile device.Similarly, make sure all forms are easy to fill on phone screens, and don’t use too many fields (4-5 is the maximum).

• Optimize CTA placements

You can include CTA buttons within your content. Yet, make sure the placement doesn’t disrupt the user in consuming the content. You might want to check this guide by Crazy Egg (written by Neil Patel) on optimizing CTA buttons.

• Monitor and Refine

Monitor the performance of your content, and aim to refine future content pieces according to this data. You can also re-optimize or even leverage existing content pieces.

End Words

As you can see, although inbound marketing seemed like a simple strategy at first, there are many different tactics and optimizations you can implement to maximize your results.

Inbound marketing is a very effective way especially to generate and nurture leads. The key here is to understand your audience, especially their needs and behaviors, and provide values and solutions according to their needs and problems.

If you work with a professional digital marketing consultant to implement inbound marketing properly, you will see sustainable growth in your business.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

As if they have sniffed a business opportunity where you thought none existed.

If you are not on Instagram Stories, perhaps this is exactly what has happened.

Launched in 2016, smart businesses have created a strong presence on this platform, leveraging its huge popularity among internet users to widen their audience and improve customer engagement.

Maybe your competitors are using this 400-million-daily-user feature as a promising marketing platform to grow their business and gain a sizeable lead over you.

That said, not all is lost for you. Join this platform today and kick start your campaign.

If you follow a carefully planned marketing strategy instead of flying by the seat of your pants, you might well be able to make up for the lost time fairly quickly.

Here are a few tips to give voice and personality to your brand and impress consumers through your business Stories.

Offer Something To Your Consumers

Did you know that more than 50% of businesses on Instagram use Stories to market their brand? It follows that competition here is stiff. To catch users’ attention, you might have to give them a good reason to follow your campaign, like including a special offer ad in your business Stories.

Show Video Ads

If you want to raise awareness of your brand, consider showing video ads in your Stories. Still, it’s important to create a good ad that will be 100% self-explanatory.

Create Stories to Encourage App Installs

Make interesting Stories to drive app installs among young people who are more likely to shop via their phones than older people.

Want to know more Instagram Stories hacks?

Check out the following infographic which shows how other businesses have used Stories to boost their brand image and sales.

URL: https://99firms.com/blog/how-businesses-use-instagram-stories/

The post How To Design A Successful Instagram Stories Campaign appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.