Influencer marketing has become a hot topic trend among marketers because it is extremely effective. In fact, 94% of marketers who use influencer marketing says that it has helped boost their business, which is a pretty amazing statistic.


The basic idea is that you find people on social media who fit your sales demographic and who have an influence over their group of followers. You then work out an arrangement to have them promote your product in some way. A machine learning company can set you up to get all the information you need about who your audience is and what influencers will work the best for your business. The people you choose should be influencers who would naturally be using your product or service in their everyday life, so it doesn’t seem as much of an ad as a real part of their lives. In turn, their followers become interested in your product. You can expect the following 4 things to happen when you engage in influencer marketing.


1. Exposure

The more a customer is exposed to your brand and product, the more likely they are to try it. When doing influence marketing, it is important that the person you pick fits your brand and is something they might actually use. The influencer should then promote that product multiple times as a part of their regular posting. The more a customer sees the product being used by a person they like, the more likely they are to use that product themselves.


It’s also important to consider that customers are more likely to buy stuff advertised through an influencer if they are getting a special discount at the time of purchase. An influencer who offers a special discount for being a follower will make people more interested and will increase brand exposure.


2. Engagement

Engaging your customers is a really great way to get them involved and get your product stuck in their brains. Using influencer marketing can really up engagement. People are much more likely to engage with people they follow on social media platforms than a business. Businesses often feel cold and like they are always just trying to sell you something. Influencers, on the other hand, feel like your friend and someone you might hang out with. That’s why it is much easier for influencers to engage customers and get them involved in a post. An influencer is already engaging with their followers on a regular basis asking them questions and getting them involved in everyday life. It makes sense that they’d be able to easily engage with your product as well.


3. #ad controversy

One of the biggest debates in the marketing world is whether or not influencers should tag their ads with the #ad. It is legally required for an influencer to disclose a relationship per the FTC guidelines, but they can do that in any way they like. They can simply mention they’ve partnered with your business or they can do something like tag with #ad. Many influencers choose to tag #ad their posts to keep the level of trust they have going with their followers. Instead of letting followers feel deceived with advertising, they want to make it clear that it is a partnership with a business.


The real question is what customers will prefer. Honestly, most customers prefer to know it’s an ad as well. That’s why one time worth of advertising doesn’t work super well. An influencer who is using your product in their everyday life, even if they tag it as an ad when they post for your business, will still get you new customers. The real key is that influencers need to show how the product or service works and why it would be beneficial to their followers. For example, they might do a hair tutorial showing exactly how to use a curling wand instead of just saying they use it and telling followers to try it.


4. Word of mouth advertising

The best advertising you have is through word of mouth. The more people you have talking about your product, the more likely you are to sell it. And if you can get influencers advertising a product, their followers may start advertising for you too. It’s an interesting trickle effect that we’ve seen with influencers where many of their followers are trying to become influencers on social media as well, so they promote products to their followers that they find and try, even if they aren’t actually in a relationship with the business or being asked to promote the product.


All of these things will happen when influencer marketing is working properly. Just remember to let your influencers advertise your company however they see fit, and make sure to focus more on their story instead of how great your product is. If they are trying to sell fitness clothes, have them share their story of how the clothes are working great for them instead of focusing on how the clothes are great for everyone in general. Remember influencers are successful because they are followed by people who like them and who are similar to them. What they are willing to advertise, followers are willing to give a try.


Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com


Source: forbes.com/sites/davidschwab/2017/11/30/influencer-marketing-redefined/#58152a5a124d

Social media has forced marketers to begin embracing new metrics but most are still having trouble correlating those new metrics with sales.

Email marketing may not be your top marketing priority, but it should definitely be one that you focus on. Recent data suggests that email marketing is starting to be more effective and rise in popularity once again. Smartphones have made it easier than ever to check your email, and it is almost as easy as texting these days. Most people have notifications that let them know every time they even receive an email. Here are some email marketing stats:

•     2.6 billion people are on an email platform compared to 1.7 billion on Facebook and 313 million on Twitter
•     91% of users said they use email daily compared to 57% on Facebook and 14% on Twitter
•     66% of users said they will make a purchase because of email advertising, as opposed to 20% on Facebook and 6% on Twitter
•     58% of users said they checked email first every day compared to 11% at Facebook and 2% on Twitter

With email getting a much better rep, it’s important to focus on it more heavily. Here are a few ways you can revitalize your email marketing campaign.


1. Machine Learning Technology

Machine learning (MI) gives your computer the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. It can help provide your business with the stats to determine what is and is not working and can communicate with your customers. This type of programming can read and respond to emails from customers as well as be setup to send specific emails to specific customers based on their personal information. It gives you a higher success rate because customers are only seeing what applies to their personal situation and things they are interested in seeing. You can talk to a machine learning company to get set up.


2. Send valuable information


Customers do not want to get emails that feel like spam. If a business is going to send emails to customers, make sure they have value. Don’t just send an email to remind them you are there. Make sure you have something in it they want to see. Here are a few types of valuable emails you can send to customers.

    a. Coupons or sales: Of all email users, 44% said they were most likely to check their email first for promotional savings. Sometimes, a promotion can be the difference between a customer choosing whether or not to make the purchase. An email with monetary value is going to be very valuable to your customer.

    b. Informational: Is your business changing regular store hours? Are you going through a Chapter 11 and need to let customers know you are just restructuring, not closing? Are you donating proceeds to a charity during a specific day of sales? Do you have new product that needs to be highlighted? These type of informational emails are still valuable to customers, and they like having this information given to them.

    c.Reminders: Another type of valuable email customers like to get is reminders. Remind them of an event they have coming up and remind them of an appointment they have scheduled. Some people are great at putting stuff on their calendar, so they don’t need a reminder. Others, however, need regular reminders and appreciate the email a lot.


3. Timing of emails


Since over half of all users check their email first during the day, it is important that most promotional emails get sent during the early morning hours. You want your email to be there when they first get up and check it. Since some people only check their promotional email box once a day, your sale might be missed if the email isn’t sent early enough.



Another strategy is to send emails in the middle of the day when the customer may get a notification for the email and open it right away. Still, if your goal is to get the customer to open your message immediately, you’d be better off with text than email since many people will dismiss emails to read later while most people open their text within the first few minutes.


Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com


Source: yourstory.com/2017/10/top-email-marketing-tools-in-2018/

Twenty years ago, words like hashtag, trending, tweeting, or even chatting meant totally different things. But now, social media is an extremely powerful form of marketing.

Follow these five steps to create a social media marketing strategy that will take your social campaign to the next level.

The following tips can help you differentiate your brand from others and really succeed with social media marketing.

Social Media is ever changing and the strategies that businesses use to market with these platforms are always changing as well. Businesses that stay on top of social media trends and are early adopters of new features and strategies stand out in the already very crowded marketplace that is social media. Here are four social media trends you need to know in order to stay ahead of your competition.

Chatbots

Customers are increasingly likely to turn to social media when they need to interact with your business whether that’s to seek out customer support, complain about something relating to one of your products, or just to find out information about your business. Businesses that can afford it pay someone (or teams of people) to monitor social media profiles around the clock to participate in these interactions. This is where chatbots come in. The majority of the social media platforms today support the deploying of chatbots across their messaging platform. Chatbots are essentially computer programs that you can create to simulate the experience of chatting with a live person. They won’t completely replace your need for humans monitoring your social media profiles (they’ll still need to respond to comments on posts) and handle the more difficult questions and problems, but a chatbot can be there 24/7 and can chat with dozens of customers at once. When a person clicks onto one of your social media pages, a chatbot can initiate a chat session offering to answer any questions. From there your chatbot can answer some of the most frequently asked questions and resolve simple issues completely unaided.

Mobile-focused

Many social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat are designed to be used exclusively for mobile devices and even social media sites like Facebook that were created before smartphones and tablets have adapted to be primarily mobile-based platforms. With this in mind, your social media marketing strategy needs to adopt a mobile-first approach. Assume that your audience is using a mobile device to visit your page, read, comment on, and share your posts. Some good strategies to keep in mind for a mobile approach to social media marketing is to keep sentences concise and to emphasize visual elements over textual ones. Mobile users are less likely to delve into a long blog article on their mobile device but may click through several images with short captions. A direct call to action (such as asking people to “like” and share are especially effective for mobile users.

Multiple platforms

Facebook tends to be the one social media platform that every marketing expert agrees on. You need a business page on Facebook. But don’t stop there. Different types of audiences use different platforms. Not all of them will be right for your brand, but several different ones might be. Don’t shy away from using multiple platforms that have a lot in common. Instagram may have copied a lot off of Snapchat but each platform will have plenty of users that don’t use the other so you can cast a wider net by using all of the platforms that your audience is using.

Video content

Many social media platforms are now trying to prioritize video content. That means when you post videos, they’re more likely to be seen, commented on, and shared with friends. Another great thing about video is that many of your competitors aren’t using it. If you’re apprehensive about creating your own video content, don’t be. Videos need not be professionally produced and edited and you don’t have to spend a fortune. Something as simple as using a smartphone to livestream a tutorial or product announcement is sufficient and will really help you to stand out.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: entrepreneur.com/article/299729

Unless you’ve completely avoided the internet for the past few weeks (unlikely), you’ve probably heard a rather alarming story going around lately regarding chatbots that Facebook’s AI team were working on that went rogue and started planning the overthrow of humanity. You may also have heard since the story blew up across various social media platforms and online newspapers and magazines that the story may have been just a little bit overblown. Rather than get into what the story got wrong--since so many others have already done that, let’s look at what this entire episode can teach us about content marketing instead.

The headline is very important

It quickly became apparent with this story that the people sharing the various iterations of it and predicting the robot apocalypse hadn’t even read much beyond the headlines. That isn’t just unique to this particular story. Research backs this up. Approximately 60% of people who share links to articles on social media do so without ever clicking on the link themselves. In other words, they’re basing their decision solely on the catchy headline. That’s not to say that good content isn’t also important for the 40% who do actually read the article but a good headline may have a bigger impact on its success than anything else.

Timing is less important than we think

We often think of content marketing as being tied to current events; reporting on things that have just happened are going to be more successful than covering old stories. Well that isn’t always true. A new take on an older story can earn you huge success. The Facebook chatbot story is a great example because it first happened and was reported in early June but it wasn’t until about two months later when the vast number of doomsday articles were published in response to it. It’s still a good idea to give preference to the latest news but an older story can still work for your content marketing strategy if you can say something new about it.

Original reporting will make you stand out

While all the later coverage of the Facebook chatbot story was saying that it was a sign that a robot overthrow was imminent, a few who were willing to do the work to get to the bottom of the story eventually came to the original reporting on the story. These were more detailed and accurate. While taking somebody else’s original reporting and exaggerating the facts can get you some initial success, it’s more important that your brand be seen as a source for reliable (and preferably original) reporting.

Fact-checking is an essential part of a content marketer’s job

When the first stories claiming that the failure of Facebook’s negotiation chatbots was a sign that robots were planning a takeover, many content marketers were happy to take the sensationalized story and run with it. If a few people early on were willing to do a little research, talk to people within Facebook’s AI team or even just find some of the original reporting on the story, they would have seen that the sensationalized version was dishonest.

You can’t focus solely on appeals to pathos at the expense of logos

Good marketing always should include an emotional component. But when emotion is emphasized so much so that the facts (and reason) take a back seat entirely, you’ve gone too far. The sensationalized versions of the Facebook chatbot story played on people’s fear of an AI takeover and while that earned them some initial success, when the true (and less exciting) version of the story came out, it was those who had done the more accurate reporting in the first place that established trust with their readership.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/08/17/how-the-facebook-chatbots-story-got-overblown-5-key-lessons-for-marketers/#7642dd2fbf66

Marketing has changed a lot over the last few decades. A major reason is that customers are a lot more savvy and aren’t as trusting as they used to be. People are inherently less trusting of advertisements put out by the brands who stand to profit from them. After all, they’re obviously biased and they can’t be objective. This is where the value of influencers come in. Influencers are people who customers view as peers. They aren’t sponsored by any company so they can be trusted to share accurate and objective information about various products. People considering a purchase often turn to influencers to see what they think. When influencers give their approval, customers are more likely to buy. If you have yet to look into influencer marketing, here are a few signs that can tell you it’s time to.

Five signs

       1. Your audience has stagnated. If your audience has dwindled to just a small loyal customer base who keep coming back for more, your business isn’t going to thrive. You need to be constantly adding to your customer base and influencers are a great way to help you accomplish this since they can generate interest among people who’ve maybe never even heard of your brand before.

       2. Sales are down. This one’s pretty self explanatory. If you’re not moving merchandise off of shelves or out of warehouses, your business won’t be around much longer. A good review by the right influencer can reignite sales. And once you’re moving merchandise again, you can keep investing in improving your product or adding to the products you offer.

         3. Your social media presence is lacking. If you’re not on social media channels, you aren’t operating anywhere near your potential. The younger generations spend so much time on social media that it’s pretty much essential that your brand be visible there. Whis is where influencers excel since influencers, by definition, already have a strong following on various social media platforms. Finding influencers can be a great way to jumpstart a new social media marketing campaign or revive one that is pretty much dead.

       4. You’re relying too much on paid content. If all of your advertising is in the form of paid content, you need influencers. You don’t pay influencers to review your products or share your content with their audience the same way you have to pay Facebook or Google to sponsor your post or website. Influencers in your niche are already interested in what you’re selling, they want a to get their hands on your products and they’ll most likely be happy to offer a free review of anything you send them.

      5. Digital offers aren’t being redeemed. If you’re using email, SMS, or other channels to send special offers to customers but they’re not redeeming these offers at the rate you’d like to see, an influencer can help you by sharing that same offer, or an exclusive one, to their already considerable audience.

Finding the right influencers

The right influencer probably isn’t a world-famous actor, athlete, or singer. Only the national brands can afford to hire them anyways. The right influencers are people that your target audience look up too. Often they’re bloggers or YouTube video creators or minor social media celebrities who are passionate about a subject relating to your business. By simply searching out content relating to your industry, you’ll start to get a sense of which people have influence. Don’t start by asking for favors. Comment on their blog posts or videos. Share their posts on your social media pages. Once you’ve established a relationship, you can reach out to offer a product in exchange for their honest opinion. Finally, make sure you’re sharing their write-up of your product with all your available channels whether it’s a company blog, an email newsletter, or SMS. A relationship with the right influencers will be mutually beneficial as you drive traffic their way, and they influence their audience to become your customers.

Mobile Technology News brought to you by biztexter.com

Source: forbes. com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/08/14/seven-signs-you-should-invest-in-influencer-marketing/#5f668093176f