Month: December 2020

Websites with user-generated content like Quora and Reddit can be a golden goose for producing quality traffic to your website, boosting brand authority, and reaching new prospects for your business.

But you better know what is and is not allowed on these social channels in terms of content distribution and engagement. These online communities (Reddit and Quora) have their own written and unwritten rules of etiquette and marketers attempting to trick the system are quickly red-flagged and ostracised.

Reddit a.k.a. “the front page of the internet,” attracts almost six crores, unique monthly visitors, from the United States alone to its eclectic mix of unique content. Similarly, Quora has excelled in search engine rankings for a wide variety of topics because the website does an amazing job of satisfying user intent through answering genuine questions. It’s a user-generated and driven platform which is highly regarded for its content.

If you’re looking for the next step via Reddit & Quora to boost your product or service online, this is the blog for you. Here we are answering some of the popular questions- How to use Reddit effectively? How to use Reddit for traffic? How to get traffic from Quora? How to market on quora? And the basics of both platforms for better understanding. So read on to know all.

Banner Image Source: Writeabout Website

 

How Does Reddit Work?

Reddit primarily focuses on social news aggregation by its users. These users have formed communities, and they submit content on various topics and subjects. Then other users and communities upvote or downvote that content- The most popular feed rises to the top.

As of today, Reddit is carved into thousands of individual communities organised around topics or interests. For example, r/politics focuses on political news, and r/dogberg focuses only on dog footages haphazardly knocking over people or things.

Because of this ‘up and down’ voting system, opening the Reddit homepage is like getting a snapshot of the Internet’s most popular content. Now imagine, sponsoring your content or showing your product or service on this page. That’s the power of Reddit.

How To Engage And Market On Reddit?

Redditors are quite protective of the communities they’ve built and loathe individuals or brands that attempt to hijack a subreddit for personal gain. But marketers can get into this system genuinely in two ways:

1. Produce and publish genuine good content
2. Sponsor your content via the paid medium

What you need to remember is that the people in Reddit communities have come on the website or app for specific reasons—hobbies, social causes, or just plain fun—and you have to genuinely respect that, so shape your content in a way which is useful to the users and has a great shareability quotient.

Even before you start publishing, analyse what is working in your domain. Be a genuine participant and start engaging with comment threads and inside jokes.

Most Reddit communities ask that you contribute 80% of the time and only self-promote 20% of the time (the ratio can go up or down, depending on your content and your target community)

Post original content and engage genuinely. You are unlikely to find success if you just repurpose your daily Facebook post and dump it into a reddit. Only specific and curated content works as the audience is quite smart on Reddit and keeps an eye on the contribution you make or do not make on the platform.

Fake accounts, undisclosed paid sponsors, employee upvoting requirements – Redditors have seen it all, and it makes them very angry when marketers try to pull one over on them. So keep yourself away from these things or get ready to find yourself at loses on the platform.

What Is Quora And Why Should Marketers Consider It?

Quora is driven by the mission to share and grow the world’s knowledge online. It uses advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to connect people who know answers to people who have unanswered questions. Knowledge exists in a lot of places – books, magazines, videos, whitepapers, podcasts, and all over the places, but bringing that knowledge to one internet user in a form which makes sense, is where Quora comes into play.

The platform works to get the right question and the right answer to the right person at the right time. You can even ask a question about your neighbourhood, and someone from your community might be able to satiate your curiosity.

Once you create an account and start using the platform, Quora learns more about your expertise and experience and directly routes questions to you that you might be able to answer. Later, it surfaces the conversation to other domain experts who can upvote and support your answer to generate a highly personalised and refined. And the more you use the site, the better it becomes.

For marketers, Quora provides the opportunity to reach and influence prospects at the moment they are intentionally researching and evaluating products. Hence striking at the right time and influencing at the time of their purchase.

How To Leverage Quora? & How To Get Traffic From Quora?

Quora is available as a website and a mobile app, which can be accessed by anyone on the Internet. The queries on Quora additionally index well with Bing and Google, so a lot of people discover questions and answers through organic search.

Questions are typically answered within 24 hours, especially if you request answers from specific communities or use the “Ask to Answer” option.

Here marketers and advertisers can leverage the platform by answering the questions genuinely and creating a fan base. Subtly inserting your brand, product, or service is also one of the ways to introduce yourself to the questioner.

At The Bottom

Quora and Reddit offer content on just about every category you could imagine. They then allow you to follow specific subjects so that you’ll be able to see thread/conversations about interests. Nothing beats these platforms in terms of genuine content and responsiveness; not even Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Whatever industry you market or are interested in learning more about, Quora & Reddit can get you in front of that audience easily.

In case you face any problems then do reach out to one of the best marketing companies in Pune – Seagull Advertising. Our experts will help you out with all your queries regarding digital marketing.

If you’re new to social media marketing, 2020 is an interesting time to get started. The whole COVID situation has altered the games of many advertisers. And even the tech giants have lowered the overall bid cost. Brands have reported less income, and vice versa less spend on advertising. Similarly, for organic social media, some innovations have won the traditional feed page, which was mainly counted out of the books for many years.

So where does that leave your brand’s social media marketing strategy? Well, it depends on your brand, audience and marketing strategy. In this blog, you will know all about organic and paid social media. Read on to learn more.

What is Paid Social Media Marketing?

Paid social has become an essential component of advertising, over the last couple of years, on social media platforms. It is mainly due to the different algorithms the tech giants are now using. Back in good old days, organic content used to reach thousands of users on its own. But now with increased competition and altered algorithms, the organic reach is as minimum as the 100-metre sprint.

In simple words, a campaign is considered “paid” when there is money behind to promote the posts on digital media platforms. This is done by using specific funds/marketing budgets to boost social posts for further reach, or by designing and running optimized digital ads to connect with a specific audience to generate leads, clicks or traffic.

The main social media channels which run paid social are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Apart from these Google, Youtube, and other similar channels also accept paid promotion.

Each digital media platform uses its own unique strategy in order to reach followers / targeted audience and garner interaction, and paid advertising is a large part of those strategies.

The days of using organic posts exclusively to reach a target audience have now vanished from marketing steps, so utilizing paid social in your marketing plan is invaluable.

Paid ads take you beyond the reach of traditional organic posts and allow you to attract leads outside your existing customer base. Here, you will be able to determine specific demographics, geographics, lifestyle traits and other details to reach and target select locations, interests and more. Which further helps in generating quality leads.

What is Organic Social Media Marketing?

On the other hand, the organic social strategy relies completely on audience interaction and posts to engage with followers. All posts on social pages with no financial backing are considered organic posts and will only reach customers through the platform’s ever-changing and often veiled algorithm.

The reach depends on audience’s engagement with the post. Liking or disliking the post, commenting on the post, sharing it with others are the actions considered by the algorithm to either show it more people or shred it in the vast ocean of other similar posts.

More interaction garners further reach, encourage more participation from the audience and ultimately establish the brand as legitimate; that’s why consistent interaction on all social channels is extremely important in organic social media strategy.

Although this method is time-consuming, it is important to establish relationships with your followers and clients on a regular basis. This will not only foster strong relations and loyalty, but you will also learn about the current and potential customers’ expectations from your brand.

Related Post – Tips & Tricks In Organic And Paid Facebook Advertising

 

Advantages of organic social media

1. It’s completely free
2. Organic social media works well if you’ve amassed a large following
3. The organic posts create better loyalty and generate more trust It helps to build a community
4. You can boost organic posts as well (if needed)
5. Organic posts have better chances to go viral on the internet

Advantages of paid social media

1. Paid promotion can amplify your reach
2. Paid posts can target more of your desired audience specifically
3. You can utilize any budget to reach as many people as you want
4. It helps to increase metrics like click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-lead (CPL), and return on ad spend (ROAS).
5. Paid social complements your search marketing efforts and act as a better alternative if any of the channels are underperforming
6. It provides a lot of flexibility in the ads you run

 

Merge Organic and Paid Social for a More Holistic Approach

Image Source: Digital Marketing Philippines Website

There is no answer to the question- paid vs organic social media traffic, which one is better? Because both work well at their respective places. And for the holistic approach, it is recommended to run both kinds of ads.

While organic social media posts help you build trust with customers, and delight them with quality content, paid social media content helps you put your brand in front of the right audience and attract new leads.

At The Bottom

In short, paid and organic social media marketing shouldn’t omit each other out. Instead, they should be used as complementary methods to reach business objectives.

Try to come up with a strategy that uses paid social media marketing content and organic social media marketing in the best efficient manner. In that way, when someone arrives at your page from an advertisement, they can also learn more about who you are and what you do. A mixed organic and paid social media marketing strategy can increase the potential success rates of any advertising campaigns.

Before you jump right into creating a hybrid social media strategy for your brand, consider the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve on social media?
• What my brand is offering?
• What is my digital marketing budget?
• Who is my target audience?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you shape your strategy and find the right balance between paid and organic.

In case you face any problems then do reach out to one of the top marketing agencies in Pune – Seagull advertising. Our experts will help you out with all your queries regarding digital marketing.

In today’s world, traditional marketing has become far less persuasive than it once was. Traditional methods have been outdated, and especially after quarantine, digital consumption has boomed drastically, decreasing the face for out of home and print ads.

4 Minutes Read

Here enters content marketing: a way to provide your audience engaging content while increasing conversions, raising brand awareness, boosting revenue and more at the cost of zero expenses.

But what is content marketing exactly? And where do you even start implementing? Let’s take a deep dive into the knowledge ocean of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

To understand content marketing, first, you need to know about the traditional marketing approach. TV, Print, Radio, Out of Home are advertising mediums and have dominated the market for centuries. But with the advancement of digital consumption, the average customer has moved to digital mediums like smartphone and computer screens. Traditional shopping has been partially replaced by online shopping, and even the services and consultation have come to virtual platforms. That’s where content marketing comes into play.

According to the definition of content marketing, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

So instead of selling your products or services through bombarding media, you’re providing useful and relevant content to your prospect customers to help them out and solve their issues. It can also be said that it is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a relationship with your prospects.

Why Invest in Content Marketing? Or What is the ROI of Content Marketing?

If executed in a good way, content creates brand equity. A brand becomes more valuable over time as you continue to create valuable content. The audience appreciates your content and follows your brand as a leader in the respective field; this creates a flywheel effect where you start to generate more and more momentum until suddenly, you’re dominating your field.

The content provides value to your business through organic traffic. People start discovering you on search platforms like Google and Youtube and look forward to your opinions on respective matters.

It’s literally different from other kinds of traffic on digital medium for one important reason — you are creating a loyal audience base. These people are actively searching for information related to subjects business and when in need of opinions, they come to your content.

It is a great way to create followers and spread awareness about your core product. Even this piece of content (this blog) is a part of the content marketing paradigm. This blog is teaching you something for free. Plus, on the website, you can find different blogs about advertising and marketing technology, and everything is free.

 

Related Post – Content Strategy: Your Company needs it, Surely!

 

Best Practices for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you know content marketing is a good method of advertising and promotion, you need to create a strategy to implement the best practices in content marketing. Here they go:

A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers. In simple words, you are building relationships and solving problems by providing helpful content.

Slice the content into three parts: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. In other words, content should be staged to provide awareness about your brand- what is it about? How does it work? Then comes the consideration stage- how the brand will benefit? What are its uses? Why should someone consider the brand? And lastly, there is the decision stage: how is it better than the competitor? Why should someone only choose you?

But before you start pumping out content like a machine-based on the stages mentioned above, you need to do three things:

1. Determine who your customer is (Demographics, Geographics, etc.)
2. Figure out what information they need (Their problems)
3. Choose how to say it (Style of writing or elocution)

What are the Types of Content Marketing?

The most common type of content marketing is blog posting. Blogs can contain a wide variety of content on their own, with plenty of ways to draw more traffic to your site. A blog is where most of your evergreen content will be. E.g. The blog you are reading right now is a content marketing type. You are reading it because it interests you and the subject intrigues you. Plus, it is free on the internet.

Other content types include videos, infographics, white papers, articles, social media posts, e-books, etc. Based on these types, you can decide your plan of action to execute various types of content marketing strategies.

 

Related Post – 9 Reasons Why Content Marketing Should Be Part of Your Marketing Plan

 

Content Marketing Strategies For 2021

There’s a reason Seth Godin calls content marketing “the only marketing left” – it’s authentic, useful, and perfectly suited for the internet generation. But which strategies to choose in 2020. Here is a list to help you out:

1. Results-focused content
2. Video and live-stream take centre stage
3. User and search intent drives content creation
4. Conversational marketing continues to evolve
5. Content gets tailored to voice search and smart devices
6. Personalized content gets a shot of steroids
7. Podcasts keep catching on
8. Topic-focused content to build authority
9. The battle for the snippet
10. Data-driven content creation

At The Bottom

We hope that by now, you feel a bit better with the decisions you need to make on a content marketing level. This blog is a brief overview of what content marketing is all about. There is a lot of fish to explore in this ocean, and only hands-on experience will teach you that.

So let us know in the comment section below- What has worked for you in terms of content marketing so far? What hasn’t worked and why?

In case you face any problems then do reach out to our experts at Seagull Advertising one of the best advertising agencies in India. We will help you out with all your queries regarding digital marketing.

Machine Learning for advertising is the newest buzzword. After the internet and targeted ads, it is the newest development that will catapult advertising into a new realm. So what is machine learning and how can advertising benefit from it?

In this new blog, we take a look at artificial intelligence and machine learning in digital advertising and how business, agencies, and advertisers can capitalize on the same. We also take a look at some of the examples of how advertisers are using machine learning in its nascent stages.

What Is Machine Learning in Advertising?

Image Source: Educba Website

Machine learning in advertising is the name of the process by which advertising tech looks at data, analyzes it, and comes up with conclusions to improve a task. In simpler terms: it’s how advertising technology learns, improves and grows.

The technology can learn anything- mapping customer journeys, yearly buying cycle, the effectiveness of ad copy, audience targeting and segmentation. The applications are endless.

The catch with machine learning is that it gets better the more it gets used. Machine learning has self-learning capabilities, means with every iteration it becomes better at applying its knowledge as it efficiently learns from previous mistakes. It is like AB testing but taking it to another level.

Let us Take a Look at Some Real-life Examples:

1. Audience Testing Through Machine Learning:

Image Source: Industryweek Website

Let’s say you are a shoe company that sells sports shoes. Now you may assume that you can target men, who are preferably young, go to the gym, or play a sport and then you target those audiences. But your assumptions and knowledge about the world limits who you choose to target.

Whereas, in machine learning, the system operates on a HUGE dataset and analyses audience patterns. Which means the machine is able to pick up on audiences you may have missed out on, or drop audiences that you may have chosen, but won’t get you any conversions.

So the machine may target young boys and girls, young women, and young and old men- based on how likely they are to convert and make a purchase, how much they are interested in your product, how quickly will they buy it after seeing the ad etc.

 

2. Improving Ad Copy / Creative

Image Source: Adweek Website
You may write an ad copy for the same shoe brand in the earlier example for a New Year offer. It can say “Run Faster, Towards A Better You,” with a bold creative.

Now, the problem with humans writing copy and designing creatives is that you cannot measure the effectiveness of the creative when it comes to direct translation towards sales. Yes, you may like it, your audience will appreciate it too, but maybe it could have been better? Maybe a little colour tweaking or change of a comma would have made the creative infinitely better.

Here is where machine learning has the advantage. Machine learning can track audience viewing patterns, how long they look at an ad, how often viewers click on an ad, run A/B testing for creative and copy etc. Machine learning used for advertising can track, analyse, and improve every part of an ad creative.

 

Related Post – Things You Should Know About AI in Advertising

 

3. Personalization

Image Source: Martechtoday Website

The more personal a digital ad seems the more likely a person is to click on it. Which is why when an ad or an email has your name in it, you feel more enticed to read it. But what if it is not just your name, but your entire personality that can relate to the ad?

The colour, the language, the design, them knowing your name, capitalising on your interests- the more personal the ad gets the better. Which is exactly what machine learning does. It takes personalization to the next level. So the same product can be advertised to millions of users but using machine learning models for advertising means that the ad has a different version for each individual.

And that is it. These are just some of the examples taken from the vast majority of capabilities that MI and AI have in advertising. We are currently truly at the cusp of an AI revolution and soon the world of digital advertising is going to be much more dynamic, customized, and improved.

Want more insights into marketing and advertising? Keep following the blogs at Seagull!