 Posted by Sharon Nicholas Be Innovative with Your Marketing and Stand Out The way companies are learning to engage with their potential clients and customers is certainly interesting! Fun and fresh are the two key words to take away from this post. I recently heard about a front-yard lawn fountain filled with a soft drink. This was placed in a lady's yard, she won it in a contest run by the soda company. Then the media picked up the story and ran it. It was just another one of the wild ways companies are now having fun with their customers online. They're really taking engagement very seriously for the most part and being highly creative in their interactions with the public which is refreshing to watch. There are exceptions with some - who are still old school, but most companies have teams to engage the public now. Everything is completely changing and so very fast we're seeing these changes. The way companies engage with clients, even how customers are found today is totally different than it was even about 7 years ago. There is less focus on the traditional advertising and more focus on the creative and innovative campaigns which engage large audiences in a fun way. Many more companies are willing to hire brand spokespeople to rep their brands on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter etc. We're also seeing many more of these fun contests, active live engagement campaigns, fun hashtags and exciting videos being presented by traditional companies looking to interact with their fan-base. The way businesses are located today is highly online {even if they do still have brick and mortar locations} The marketing for just about every product is digital now. Even the way customers decide on which products they'll try is based on online reviews and Google searches. Of utmost importance are the customer comments online for almost all decisions are based online. As a business, you need to take time and study your reviews. The best thing you can do is to engage with your customers directly and take the feedback seriously. Use this shift to our newer review based culture to your advantage. In order to take advantage of online reviews, actively seek out happy customer comments to offset any negative ones. We're Drowning in Ads There is so much noise on the Internet between as many sites and social media sites all competing for our time and attention. Now with the constant ads showing up everywhere we look in places they'd never been we have a tendency to be blocking out what we read more. Between the ads in social media and apps and we just naturally just ignore it. We must ignore all the nonstop blasts of ads on apps that have taken over every aspect of our lives. Who would of even thought 10 years ago while you'd be pumping gas, ads would be playing selling us products? That would of seemed really foreign even 10 years ago. Many of us are learning we must take breaks from the social ad bombardment rest between working and social media. So much bombardment can lead to negative health consequences. We need rest too, besides read social posts and ads. Many people today regularly take large breaks from being online with announced social vacations. We are learning to focus on what is most important to us family and friends, our healthy, our pets and our need for sleep, our need for downtime over being online 24/7. As a business you need to study this change to take advantage of it and learn new ways of engagement in a fresh new ways to keep the level of interest up. Knowledge is Power For brands, blasting more ads actually makes the public have less interest. The need to tune it all out is very high, so this creates a new marketing challenge. How to get the audience who has seen all the ads interested again? Today marketing is all about communication and engagement with your ideal customers. Getting to know what they like, where they are online and what most interests them are keys to keeping customers. Engaging and learning what they want your brand to produce for products in the future {for example} is a great takeway. What changes they'd like to see in your existing products. Learning that knowing your ideal customers likes and needs will only set you above your competition. Knowing what to have in spoken and written communications is key. Knowing what your content writers should include and not include in your website, marketing materials and social media posts all will lead the right clients to you. Finding just the right content which is engaging, entertaining, meaningful, helpful - the type of content they'd share in social themselves with their family and friends. The mother of all is the "The did you see this?" with a share. The word of mouth advertising that no one can deny is the best advertising of all! Celebrity Endorsements Brands which are on top of their game have noticed this change in the way advertising is done today. We've moved to the "who also likes it business model" more than ever. The rise of the social media shout outs. One shout out either positive or negative by a celebrity makes or breaks a brand in an instant. The connection for a brand with a celebrity can make a brand go from unknown to an overnight success in about a second on social media. The "new media stamp of approval" all the brands are banking on it to make their brands stand out. Brands spend hours studying online individuals and media personalities on how they speak to others. The brands make their decisions as to who they will offer brand ambassadorship positions to based on online interactions, all these decisions are based on engagement with audiences and follower counts. The brands themselves study their own audiences extensively, they watch and listen intensely to their social conversations, and develop plans to use that content in their social profiles. There are no mistakes made by the top pros in marketing when it comes to who's comment they share. They know their ideal customers inside and out. They are well aware of the social and emotional connection to celebrities with their customers. They know their ideal audiences to the point they even know which celebrities match well with their demographics. The celebrity ambassadors are actively encouraging conversations about the products they use and are able to engage audiences like no other. The sharing of just one post placed well can bring in millions of dollars and receives comments unlike the brand could ever bring in on their own. The celebrities make megabrands out of small to medium businesses overnight with their visibility. Moving Forward This is a new way of doing content marketing. The content may come in different forms from contests, shout outs, carefully timed and designed mentions. The sharing is more natural and the conversation is often organic and the emotionial connection is based around celebrities. Start thinking of ads as conversation pieces, as a conversation starter over just an ad. Helpful questions and conversations gives the engagement your brand needs while it also creates a level of expertise in the online marketplace we call the web. Start So start thinking like a customer. The more helpful and education based your brand is the more loyal your customers will be. Your goals is to drive engagement in a softer more caring way to hit home the point you care and like your customers. The new rules to content writing and marketing are simply "Relationship based Consumerism", not blasting 'em the cows come home. No one cares to listen or cares to buy products with those tactics anymore. IF YOU TAKE AWAY NOTHING ELSE REMEMBER THESE TIPS: Content. Care. Engage. Educate. Emotion. Connection. Help. If you any need help with developing a marketing mindset or developing a marketing startegy for your businesss, or any other marketing challenge, subscribe to my email newsletter. http://www.sharonnicholas.com/free-resources.html It’s filled with helpful advice, hints, tips, and lessons and case studies I'll include too.' About MeSharon Nicholas is a Marketing Strategist and Coach. Sharon is a Business Consultant, Writer, Corporate American Marketing Strategist & Best-selling Author of four books. You can connect with Sharon on Facebook www.facebook.com/AuthorSharonNicholas/ Original post https://steemit.com/marketing/@sharonnicholas/please-engage-and-entertain-us-over-selling-to-us 
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Posted by Sharon Nicholas
What is a Marketing Mindset? Marketing Mindset is: Having a marketing mindset means that building relationships with customers and business partners is at the heart of everything you do. From everyone you meet, to the way you engage with others, it's a skill which can be taught. A skill can be developed to build your relationships into solid contacts from friends and acquaintances to trusted contacts which become your own personal referral system because of your expertise in your field. Relationships are built on trust. To earn the trust of potential customers, you must focus on building your audience and your brand into a reliable and creditable business. Creditability in your customer’s eyes may be that they believe in your expertise, your talent and your knowledge of your subject matter, you personally represent your reputable brand and stand behind your products and services, and that you have demonstrated your capability when it comes to your industry. When you operate with a marketing mindset, you continually market your knowledge, your interest in your field. You naturally express your talent and communicate on how your expertise will benefit your customer and their business. If you effectively do this, the customer will be willing to take a risk and engage with you to learn how your product or services will help them solve their problems, needs and goals. The Marketing Mindset in practice is one to be mindful of when you're speaking with others to gauge your own comfort as you learn to put your own talents on display. I'm my blog I will use case studies from past clients to demonstrate how I've helped people overcome some of their issues on marketing and learning to market themselves. I've taught many celebrities, musicians, entertainers, businessmen and women to market themselves in a more engaging way . Some to the ways you can teach others about what you do is to state facts and statistics in your marketing messages that are relevant to your target audience. Create your own unique taglines, mission statements and selling statements that separate you from other service providers in your industry. Identify an under-served niche within your field and focus your marketing efforts towards that market. Write books, posts and articles demonstrating your expertise. Write whitepapers and articles and submit them to publications. Start giving talks, seminars, speeches, presentations and workshops to educate your market on the importance of your services. Work on developing deeper relationship with potential referral partners in related fields. Word of mouth advertising is very powerful. The Marketing Mindset in Action
Sharon Nicholas, Marketing Strategist and Coach, is a Business Consultant, Writer, Corporate American Marketing Strategist and Author. You can connect with Sharon on Facebook www.facebook.com/AuthorSharonNicholas/  Posted by Sharon Nicholas Would you love to know how to grow your community of followers? With follower count building, some are naturally good at building and others struggle with it. Would you like to build a bigger blog audience with an engaged, loyal community of followers? Would you like to build your profile as a trusted authority in your field? Are you interested in community building for your brand, blog or business? As a Best Selling Author, Artist, Art Promoter, Blogger and Community Builder - I've achieved this organically by applying simple social media strategies that are based around content creation and community strategies. I often consult today with brands, media personalities and companies on how to engage audiences. I've done this {for the most part}as a single individual without a huge staff of assistants. For some larger projects the brands or companies I've worked with have supplied some of their own staff to execute the plan I've designed. I'd like to share some of my strategies for building my communities and audience over the past 10 years with thousands of unique visitors per month (and hundreds of thousands of page views per month) I run many social media communities, the topics range from faith to art I'm a very complex person with a variety of interests. The communities I manage range been 5,000 to 16,000 members per community and there are nearly a dozen of them. This number doesn't not include my own personal social media profiles which I manage myself either, which have grown tremendously themselves which near 50,000 members. How did I get here you may ask? My backstory is that I started my career in marketing in Corporate America for Fortune 500 companies working in sales / marketing, advertising and PR with various types of companies. I started as a traditional marketer with American household brand names. I later transitioned into writing as a stay at home mother of two small children working part time. I went from 100 to zero professional pressure as a mom and enjoyed being home with my children. As my children played in the pool during the Summers I'd write and that's how my career as a writer began really. I then began blogging in 2005. After about 5 years of blogging next came contributing to magazines, later writing books and interviewing others. After some time I started marketing and doing PR for those who asked how I had gone about building a following. With the rise of social media happening around the same time, a community of like-minded people was naturally taking shape. Time is everything in life and I was in the right place at the right time. Magic happens when the stars align. Initially I was creating my blog geared to women and mothers, I now regard this choice was an integral part of my success. Having a built in audience was established for later projects without and the foresight at the time for what was to come later. Many of those relationships have lasted a decade or more. I recently have started a few new blogs. I'm not as much of an daily poster as I once once, but I still blog some. Over the years, I've been asked many times to speak on topics such as social media and community building with the growth of our groups - art promotion, meditation, spirituality and women's communities. I've been asked to speak on particularly the use of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, blogging and how these all grow and engage a community by topics and interests. My advice for anyone wanting to build a community on their blog, while establishing themselves as a trusted authority or expert in their field:
Numbers mean nothing unless you have great content on your blog, so start with building content first. Too many people want to start, but do not want to put enough time in. They expect to get there tomorrow (never going to happen) with regards to building a large, dedicated following it's about time and effort. It takes lots of time and patience. One of the most important tips on community building is engagement, not broadcasting – I recommend that you use your content to engage, later after you have built some content study the numbers as to which posts were viewed the most. Engage and not just broadcast it seems simple but there is a huge difference in perception. In between posting on your own blog, and promoting those blog posts on social media channels, you should be engaging with your readers, responding to their comments, and be willing to guest write for other blogs and attend events.
Have a schedule on when you want to discuss topics. Keep yourself on a task schedule too. For example, Monday - organizing your site and writing, Tuesday - promotions , Wednesday - social media scheduling posts. This is just a thought on how to plan your social media during the week, and then blog about food on Sunday. This consistency of topics and tasks are a driving force behind success of bloggers with readers tuning in to engage on particular days for favorite content topics.
Keep your content fresh – As much as I favor regular posts, I also recommend that you bring fresh ideas to the table too this will encourage your readers to engage and take notice of new writing. Vary your content, ask intriguing questions of your readers, and posting at times about topics that are not typical of regular posts, including charity events or causes. Or just lending your space to good works of others is great.
Therefore I recommend you visit, then also read other bloggers work and comment on other blogs within your own blog, as well as outside of your niche, and talk to other bloggers. When a reader comes to your blog and sees other comments they're looking to engage with not only you but the others who are commenting too. Encourage posts with allow engaging with other visitors to your blog. Not all of your readers will be other bloggers, but engaging with bloggers is a good way to start community building. A visible active blog can create a visible active engaged community.
I recommend meeting up with other bloggers and businesses in your niche so that you can engage and connect with them both online and offline. Blog conferences are also great for making connections and building your following. When you come together with other bloggers, you always learn something new, because everyone has something different to share form their experiences, bloggers are naturally GREAT at sharing information and teaching one another the ropes.
On your blog posts, ensure that you have options to share to ALL of the major social media platforms. Take the time to share your blog post urls across your social media platforms, so your readers can see your latest posts and engage with you.
To stay really active on social media posting once to Facebook and then a few posts throughout the day on Twitter at key times when you know your audience is interested and online. Lunch time works well for professional blogs or after work hours. For many bloggers the evening hours are key. You know your audience is online. Parents are hanging out online after they put their kids to bed. The times at which your target market is online may vary depending on your niche, but as a general rule, I recommend that you consider posting early in the morning, mid-morning, lunchtime, afternoon (for commuters) and in the evening. For new social media platforms - you have a new opportunities to get in on the ground floor and build a big community on your topic. Since new social media platforms are being developed it pays to pay attention to what's upcoming and new on the horizon. You should try and test new Social Media platforms, especially if your followers are using them and make sure you secure your usernames on all platforms even you are not super active on all of them. I have found visual platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest to be beneficial, as they are image based and provide graphic interest to readers and also a mental image stamped in their mind of your brand. The graphics or pictures also easily link back to your blog. For many topic bloggers like food bloggers, parenting bloggers, etc, the visual social media channels like Instagram are really good and they are effectively like mini blogs within each post. Leaving a few paragraphs about the image, which encourages people to follow you, share and comment and connect back to your website or blog.
What works well for blogs, people love free products and giveaways. In the case of my niche, giving away promotion when I have a campaign gets others excited online and my followers excited too. Promotions can also work very well for other types of businesses, give lots of thought about the type of promotion and what you'll give away. This attracts new clients and customers like nothing else does. Mini size products, small samples, tasting or sampling events announced on social media bring out the customers. Announcing on social media to stop by our booth or we'll be taking part in a community event, etc brings out the people. Even adding coupons for products to your site creates customers. The key is to know your readership and what makes them excited about the possibility of winning something or trying new products. What does work are raffles for building email list and contact building are raffles. Bundling together 5 or 15 prizes, readers have more chance of winning and this gets more response than for a single prize. Listing your promotion on a competition site can be a good lead generator for emails too. It brings readers that wouldn’t have found you otherwise. Gaining email subscribers to your newsletters and mailings only creates more of an engaged readership. With each new competition and these posts are viewed even more! It is, however, also important to know the regulations for competitions, sweepstakes and promotions in your Country, State or Territory and to follow these guidelines.
Often you'll see a fun hashtag like the one we use with our Art Promotion group - Share Your Art Sundayhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/1499031763700734/ Our community runs a Sunday promotion on social media called ShareYourArtSunday and what my role is I the share the content but the whole community is the content creator. Take a look at my Instagram page to get an idea of how a sub group is created within an existing community. The community is the content creator. Take a look at my Instagram page to get an idea of how a sub group is created within an existing community. http://instagram.com/sharonnicholas1 Tips - In growing a loyal, dedicated readership on your blog, the goal is to establish yourself as an "Leading Authority or Expert” on your topic. The more engaged your audience is the more others will notice you. This generates recognition and the attention of major brands and sponsors. It has also resulted in numerous paid jobs in the future. This leads to more visibility and credibility. I can attest to the benefits of creating quality content or quantity, and investing the time to get to know your readers, engage with them, and therefore build your community organically. Not enough is said today about organic community building. It's key to be authentic and genuine with your audience. I can say I've known people who have purchased followers or hired social media people to build their following, it's not always good. The issue with this is, yes you may be able to fool some of the people to believe you're popular, yes. The problem is when a sponsor asked to see your numbers and you have to produce your metrics and stats, faking it until you make it doesn't work. I can not stress the importance of building an organic following enough. Do you have a blog as an integral part of your business? If not why not? What strategies have worked for you to grow your community? How have you increased exposure for your brand and build your personal profile through blogging? What tips can you share that you've used to help others? Click Reply to those questions. Let's discuss. { On a side note - The very first image at the top of the page is going to going to be the one I'm using on Steemit for my posts. I just love the aspect of Steemit being a global community. The communities I manage are global, my agent is on the other side of the world and many of the members of our communities are elsewhere in the world. Truly being a good global citizen I embrace.} Warmest wishes, Sharon http://sharonnicholas.com https://twitter.com/SharonNicholas https://www.instagram.com/SHARONNICHOLAS1/ Our Art Promotion group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/1499031763700734/ P.S. - Thank you for any upvotes, resteems, shares on social media and comments. Feel free to leave a comment so I can follow you back and do the same. Please connect with me as I plan to build some very large next which I'd love to include you in. Blessings...... Originally posted on - https://steemit.com/communitybuilding/@sharonnicholas/community-building-and-building-your-following-natually |
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