With a PR strategy’s conversion-boosting properties in mind, the information you release to the public to be concise and impactful. To avoid PR disasters and keep your new business afloat, keep these common PR mistakes in mind as you head out into the entrepreneurial arena.

How can lousy PR affect your brand?

PR disasters are like wildfires—they spread quickly and set your credibility up in flames. Companies and brands are likely to face criticism and backlash from time to time. However, a business owner’s ability to handle tumultuous situations and perform damage control successfully will depend on their ability to bounce back. Too much bad publicity can result in the loss of loyal customers, advertising opportunities, and sponsors, creating the perfect storm for a business’s downfall. 

How to harness the power of social media in your PR strategy

Having your social media and publicity team on the same wavelength is crucial for brand management. It establishes consistency across the board and creates the perfect opportunity to reach a broader audience. While your PR approach will likely differ from your social media strategy, the two work hand-in-hand in creating the picture-perfect brand story that encapsulates your vision and represents your business’s core values. 

Utilize hashtags and online social media campaigns to merge public relations and social media into an unstoppable surge of positive publicity and outreach. 

Six common PR mistakes

Should you take a sharp turn down bad-publicity lane, you’ll need to respond, not react. If you’re wondering how you can insulate your business from PR disasters, consider following the steps below. 

Underestimating the power of public relations

One of the most devastating and most avoidable PR mistakes startup companies make is neglecting to develop a PR strategy. There’s a common misconception that new companies should worry less about PR and more about brand building. What that notion fails to recognize is that PR and branding go hand in hand—acting as a foundation for your startup. 

Jumping the gun

Another common mistake small companies make is coming out, guns-a-blazing, only to burn out quickly by wasting time and resources on unattainable agendas. Understanding how and who to approach is crucial in brand building. 

Should you set your sights too high, you may find your company being rejected by the biggest names in the industry over and over again. Manage your expectations and research more local, lesser-known journalists who can grow along with your newfound success. 

Irresponsible spending

Along with strategic collaborations and expectations comes strategic spending. While some companies make the mistake of under-utilizing PR teams, others spend too much too soon on shaky market strategies, only to end up drowning in a sea of unnecessary debt. 

That said, you’ll need to toe this fine line with caution. Remember, PR is crucial and spending is unavoidable, but having a firm grasp on what is and isn’t dispensable for your startup is key in running a successful business. 

Losing your story

PR mavens reiterate the importance of storytelling for a reason. It connects clients and creates an interpersonal relationship that is crucial for brand building. Often brands try to push out as much content as possible when it’s much more effective to prioritize quality over quantity. 

Sometimes a story just isn’t newsworthy, meaning it may be time to accept the harsh reality that one attention-grabbing article is better than five mediocre ones. With the right time and resources funneled into an article, social media post, or blog post, you can pique your target market’s interest and incentivize consumers. Manufacturing content on an assembly line run by disinterested writers will only congest your site with less-than-stellar content.  

Wrap up

While it may seem like startup companies need not worry about PR, the opposite is true. New businesses that manage and maintain PR teams effectively have much better growth opportunities. So forget what you’ve been told and round up the team. Quality PR is the foundation to any successful business venture. 

The post 6 Common PR Mistakes Budding Entrepreneurs Make (And How to Avoid Them) appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Brand Awareness

One of the primary ways that social media can be used to leverage your business would be to create brand awareness. There are a few ways to help you achieve this, but the first would be to find your target audience where they are. It will require that you do research and figure out what platform they’re likely to be on. You can then create content that they’re most likely to engage with. In doing so, you have a better chance of creating awareness about your brand, and hopefully building your business.

For Sales

Another way that social media can be used to leverage your business is by using it as a platform for selling. Not all brands do this, but if you choose to, it’s crucial that you have an effective strategy in place. Below are a few things that you may decide to sell on social platforms.

• Property: Real estate has always been lucrative and continues to be because in most cases, property doesn’t decrease in value. In light of this, if you wanted to sell properties, social media would be a good place to advertise. Platforms like Instagram especially are visual, so you could show images of the properties that you want to sell. For example, if you were selling Calabasas real estate you could utilize Instagram stories and do a swipe-up linking to the properties website.

• Retail: If you haven’t already noticed, retail brands tend to do well on social media. They typically are able to showcase their products and give consumers the opportunity to buy through their website or via direct message. However, when selling products on social media, it’s crucial that you don’t forget to curate and share custom content.

• Selling a Business: If you happen to be in the process of selling one or more of your businesses, social media can also be a great platform for this. If, for instance, you were selling an accounting practice, you could get the word out on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook depending on where your audience is.

Engagement

Another way to use social media to leverage your business would be to increase engagement and build an online community. Aside from selling, social media is a great platform to help you show your customers your human side. Do so by responding to their comments, asking them questions and reminding them how your brand fits into their daily life.

The post Using Social Media to Leverage Your Business appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

By having in-depth market data and information about your competitors, your brand has the edge. Markets continuously change and without up-to-date market research, it is impossible to keep your customers happy while being one step ahead of your competitors. There are various ways that your company can do market research, and many of the necessary tools are free and easy to access. Below we list 15 of the must-have market research tools that you need to start using.

Doing Market Research

Market research is a general term that involves the collection of any data. There are many ways that you can go about collecting market research for various verticals of your business.

For example, customer surveys are one of the most popular forms of market research. This is one of the most effective ways to get insights into your customers’ experience and how satisfied they are with your company. Customer surveys are a great way to find out where to focus your company’s efforts and to establish what changes need to be made.

Market research is also a great way to gather data and keywords to help develop an SEO strategy. The best way to implement SEO strategies is by using key search words that are certain to be linked to your brand/company.

Tools Every Great Market Research Analyst Must Have

There are various market research tools that are available to digital marketing research analysts. Some of these are paid for tools, but most are free. Combine these tools tools to get insights into various aspects of market research, depending on what information you are trying to find out.

Due to the availability of the different tools, it is easier than ever before to conduct free or low-cost market research. Here are a few of the different tools every market research analyst must have, no matter what their budget.

1. Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is a multi-platform utility that uncovers various technologies that are being used on websites. It can be added as an extension to your internet browser and provides valuable insights into software that is used by competitors. To make this add-on even more appealing, it is free!

• BuiltWith

This tool is useful for any competitive analyses you may undertake as it identifies key market aspects that your brand may be missing. It will track online data for your market industry and will find usage trends, such as if a technology is losing or gaining market share. This tool acts as your business intelligence and can help you make informed decisions on where to go next with your brand.

• Octoparse

Octoparse is a free web scraper tool which extracts nearly all different forms of data that you may require from a website. This tool allows you collect all the text from a website and download all the content to a more structured format for you to save, such as Excel or HTML. It also has a built-in tool that allows for data collection on websites with tough data blocks.

• Tableau

This tool is often described as the leading data visualization software which is reflected in its customer base of 57,000+. It is simple and easy to use, and its unique qualities allows you to create graphics and visualizations which are the most effective way to review and gain insights from any data collected.

• Hotjar

This is an innovative tool that reveals online behavior as it visually represents clicks, taps and scrolling behavior by creating heat maps. Heatmaps are an important market research tool as they inform you how to improve the overall performance and experience of a website by understanding what visitors want.

• CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is another tool that tracks and analyzes user behavior on websites and tracks which aspects of a page users are interacting with. It creates heat map visualization of this behavior and can reveal at what point in your website’s scroll a visitor loses interest.

• SimilarWeb

This competitive analysis tool is a great way for you to monitor your surrounding industry and what your competitors are doing, and helps reveal what online strategies competitors are using. SimilarWeb helps analyze competitors as it collects data and organizes it by using machine learning algorithms and provides you with statistics that are easy to understand.

• Ahrefs

This SEO tool allows you to get data that you need such as keywords used, and brand management implemented by competitors. This tool can help your SEO strategies as the data collected shows why your competitors are ranking high and what you need to do to list higher than them. This is a great way to find out how to target your SEO strategies based on what content you are missing.

• Moz

Moz can be a helpful guide when trying to assess other websites (such as competitors). It has developed an open site explorer that allows you to assess the quality of the site when you enter a URL. It helps you to master some of the best SEO tactics and boosts your inbound marketing strategy.

• SemRush

This all-in-one digital marketing suite covers SEO, keyword research, social media content, PPC and competitive analysis, to name but a few of the areas it can collect information for. You can tailor your use of SemRush by building your own toolkit for a specific project.

• Google Webmaster Tools

This service provided by Google allows webmasters to improve the visibility of websites. It is great tool to use for keyword research as you can search for the most common words using the Google search console. This is a free service, which can help you get an idea of the kind of keywords competitors are using to improve their SEO strategy.

• BuzzSumo

It is essential that some market research is concentrated on social media, and by using BuzzSumo, you can find out what’s peaking the interest of audiences and develop it. A lot of our time spent on the internet is spent on social media, so it is essential to know what is currently on trend.

• Simplymeasured

This is another social media analytics tool that simplifies the social network of users. It assesses whether activities are paid, owned or earned and gains insights on which influencers exist within your audience and people who help to attract extra traffic.  

• SurveyMonkey

Surveymonkey is a great tool that allows you to create in-depth surveys that will help you understand your market and consumer preferences. Customer surveys are a traditional feature of market research but can help you to perform analyses by outright asking your customers direct questions.

• Typeform

This tool is an innovative way to gather market research through online forms. However, it presents them in an interesting and conversational technique that helps to boost completion rates.

As you can see, there are various market research tools that are all useful in different ways. Be sure to use a mixture of these tools to get the most out of any market research you do.

The post 15 Must-Have Market Research Tools appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

While in context this may seem intimidating to website owners, there are many ways in which you can handle your content more effectively. The savvy site owner knows that content creation is only one part of the job – reaching out and increasing traffic is the other half of the challenge.

Whether you are a blogger or an online business, using the right marketing tactics is one of the strongest ways of getting more web traffic. Here I would like to share with you some tips on exactly how to do that – from some of the most obvious ideas to the more obscure.

1. Leverage on Social Media

Social Media channels are an interesting phenomenon because they have the potential to increase reach at an exponential rate. Here’s how it usually works;

You promote content on social media and those who follow your channel will likely see it. Those who find it interesting may share the content with their friends. This act of sharing is what extends the reach of your content beyond your immediate audience.

The key to successful social media marketing is to know the right way to present your content. Use it well and you may see an explosion in traffic from social media sources.

2. Focus on your SEO

One of the biggest avenues of promotion is via search engines like Google – it processes on average around 40,000 search queries every second. By focusing on your SEO, you will be able to make use of those huge number of searches and gain traffic organically from search engines.

Even if you’re not an SEO specialist or website developer, you can make use of tools to help boost your website SEO. For example, if you’ve used something like Wix to build your own website it can help you leverage on SEO.

Since it is a site builder you won’t even need to know any coding to not just build a beautiful website but also get it SEO-optimized for Google. If you’re not convinced, here’s how to use Wix for your website SEO.

3. Advertise!

This may be a ‘duh’ moment but the most obvious and easy way to market your content is by advertising. There are so many platforms you can do this on, and you basically pay for results. The downside is that advertising costs quickly add up, so if you are looking to head in this direction, make sure that you have a solid campaign plan before throwing your money around.

Advertising online is good though since you are guaranteed X results for X amount of money put in. The only question is whether the traffic you are paying for is actually converting to income for you.

4. Create Great Content

Great content usually markets itself. If you aren’t in a rush for anything, spend time crafting content that is useful and evergreen. Newsy headlines may catch large amounts of traffic quickly, but evergreen content assures you of a slow and steady traffic rate for a long time to come.

I have seen some people sell very heavily on catchy headlines, but I am not a fan of this. In fact, this borders onto the zone of being clickbait sometimes and that is something that will ultimately affect both your site SEO standings as well as increase bounce rates.

5. Make Use of Email Marketing

Building traffic organically through SEO is one thing, but with the amount of competition for eyeballs on the web today, you must reach out to visitors and not just wait for them to come. Try to build an email database from existing visitors so that you can reach out to them later.

There are many great email marketing tools which can help you to do this. Take for example MailChimp. This awesome application lets you create stunning newsletters and send it out to any database of emails which you’ve collected.

From there you can also track how many of those emails are still valid, how many have opened your email and how many visit your site after an email blast.

6. Use News Listing Sites

If the nature of your website is truly in the domain of current news, try to get your site listed on aggregators such as Google News. It can be incredibly easy and once on you’ll stay there if you don’t violate their terms of use.

Sites like Google News get an incredible amount of traffic daily and there you will be grouped with sites offering similar topics. This is where you pay attention to your headlines and extracts to entice people to click through to your site. Remember though, crafting clickbaity headlines isn’t a viable long-term solution.

7. Create Infographics

Infographics are fantastic for many reasons, although they will take a little time to put together. Once you know the content that goes on to the infographics you can use a tool like Canva to help create an attractive visual design.

This serves many purposes. Because of their highly visual nature, infographics are ideal to share on social media platforms. They are also attractive enough to entice other sites to want to use them – which usually results in at least an attribution link back to your site.

The result: More visitors and better SEO rankings!

Conclusion

This list is by no means exhaustive, but I am sure by now that you realise how much work can potentially go into marketing your content. Unfortunately, this is a necessary evil since if you do nothing you will likely fall behind other sites who may have weaker content but are willing to put time, money and effort into their marketing.

The good news is that as you can see, marketing your content doesn’t have to be all about the money. There are free channels you can rely on to bring more visitors in as well.

The post How to Market your Website Content Effectively appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Increased traffic

Having the right content brings more people to view your website. When you publish something individuals in your base are very interested in, they will view your article. And if it is captivating enough, you’ll have massive interaction where you can further discuss your brand and share your views. This is a very effective way of getting more customers from the internet which is accessed by billions of people.

Increase in conversion rate

The conversion rate of a website is simply the ratio of the number of visitors on your website to the number of those who purchase your products and become your customers. When you publish good content, it tells a lot about your product. People who enjoyed great content will show interest in what the owner has to offer. When you succeed in getting a few customers to your product, it will be easier for them to convince others to get from you if the product is genuine.

Better user experience

Google has the ability to tell if a website is giving the content the people are looking for. Incorporating SEO words into poor content cannot fool google when ranking the sites. When SEO is done properly and with informative and useful content, Google takes that page up the rank. When your website appears on Google’s first pages, you can be sure that it is due to user preference. Your site at the top also means that would be the most-visited when people need answers. In the long run, this helps you generate more traffic, positive reviews, and a bigger customer base.

Credibility and Trust

This is one of the best effects of search engine optimization on your website. Generating credibility is not something that happens in a day or a month. By providing good content regularly and keeping up to the ever-changing SEO standards, Google takes your website into consideration. 

Just a minor slip can drop you down in the ranks, but proper SEO management over time can guarantee you of Google’s recognition. After some time, you begin to rank very high for all the proper keywords. This means you have gained your credibility on Google. Ultimately, this would be converted to more traffic, more customers and more profit.

The benefits of carrying out search engine optimization on your website are innumerable. In the end, you would experience bigger sales and a larger customer base to interact with.

The post How Can SEO Impact Your Business Promotion appeared first on Social Media Explorer.