Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

YouTube and Cloud Lead the Way for Alphabet – Morningstar.com

Alphabet (GOOGL) easily beat all fourth-quarter expectations, driven by a continuing resurgence in ad spending, growing demand for cloud, the overall digital transformation by many businesses, and the cost control that it initiated when the pandemic hit. Management expects tougher comps in the second half of this year but remains confident in further strong growth in its cloud segment. The firm will also return to more-aggressive hiring and overall spending on research and development and sales and marketing, as well as significantly higher capital expenditure. We remain confident that accelerating growth in brand ad spending along with the return of ad spending in the travel vertical in the second half will more than offset a possible slowdown in direct-response ad revenue growth, especially at YouTube. In cloud, while we expect Alphabet to generate operating losses as it continues to scale that business, we anticipate profitability by 2024 as we think 32% average annual growth during the next five years will create operating leverage.

After adjusting our model to reflect higher ad spending and continuing robust growth in cloud, and taking into account the time value of money, our fair value estimate is now 32% higher, at $2,605 per share. Alphabet remains one of our favorite names in the Internet and social media space.

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YouTube and Cloud Lead the Way for Alphabet - Morningstar.com

Developing A Social Media Marketing Strategy – Seekers Time

Whether you are operating a big or small business, social media marketing is one of the most powerful ways of expanding your brands reach. Numerous brands are interacting with their customers through various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; if you have not ventured into this, you are missing out! A great marketing strategy on social media can bring remarkable success; however, there is a need to create a good marketing strategy to obtain extraordinary success.

A social media strategy is basically everything you plan to do and hope to achieve. It guides your ways and lets you know your progress on whether youre doing good or not. The more discrete your plan is, the more efficient it will be. Keep your plan concise, and do not make it unattainable or impossible to check how far you are. There are simple ways to create a marketing strategy:

Understand Your Audience

It is vital to understand the audience you are targeting since they play a significant role in identifying the best social media approach. Knowing your audience is about the content you will post and prompt them to like, share, comment, and subscribe.

Learning about your audience is vital in turning your social media followers into your business customers. Whats the age or gender of your target audience? When it comes to age, the majority of Instagrams are millennials or young people. Women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest, which means that women are likely to shop and get more ideas from that platform than men.

Social media analysis can also provide a variety of valuable data about who your followers are and what they think about your brand on social media. Through these ways, it allows you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.

Set Meaningful Social Marketing Goals

Your goals should be specific, relevant, and timely; otherwise, you will end with the frustrations associated with failing to reach your goals. You must also know what you want to gain from social media to ensure that you meet what you had planned for and what you had in mind when you first created the social platform. It is imperative to set meaningful social marketing goals since these goals hold you accountable for your brand, guide your budget, and encourage marketers to pay attention to your data.

Your goals need a time frame that can either be months, weeks, or years, and you ought to have achieved and attained what is possible within your resources at the end of that period. It is crucial to learn how to increase your brand awareness by making a lasting impression on your target audience. To achieve this, establish and focus on the content that promotes your values and personality as a business.

For instance, if you are a social media influencer or a brand ambassador for a particular product, one of your social marketing goals can be done through giveaways on your Instagram and Facebook pages. Social media goals should be on par with your overall marketing objectives. It makes it easier to show the value of your work and secure buy-in from your employer.

Establish Significant Metrics

Establishing metrics means that you focus on the social media platform metrics that do matter to your business. It is essential to establish metrics since they enable your brand to reach its overall objectives for digital engagements. Customer service is one of the most important metrics to consider.

Establishing metrics also provides a look behind the scenes at how you interact with your customers. Customer service on Instagram can be done through direct messages by your brand by answering questions on time about your product or brand. Vanity metrics like the number of followers, comments, and likes are easy to check, but its hard to prove their real value.

It is best to focus on things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates. Although likes and the many other metrics are influential, they are not the be-all and end-all to social media progress. You need to prove to your audience that you are not just a robot. Intertwine personality through humor and emotions into your posts so that your audience can relate to whatever you are marketing.

Social media is about putting yourself out there, and if your customers see the same types of posts every time, they may lose interest. Make your communications involving by asking your audience questions and gathering their views on some issues. Sharing news incorporated information rather than just information about your brand, liking and commenting on some of their posts rather than just the vice versa, and asking them to interact directly with your posts through likes and shares.

Analyze Your Competition

Social media marketing is a highly competitive venture, and so it is vital to know and understand who your audience is. Once you identify your competitors, you will learn what works for them and implement them to your favor. You will also learn their strategic mistakes and avoid them.

You will also get a sense of what to expect in your spectrum, which will help you set social media targets on your basis. It also enables you to identify available opportunities. It might turn out that one of your competitors is dominant on Instagram, some may even have the help from places like Instalikes for Instagram, for example, but has put little effort into Twitter or Facebook. You might want to focus on the networks where your audience is not deserved rather than trying to win over fans away from a dominant party. Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors.

Do searches of the competitions company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what theyre sharing and what other people are saying about them.

Set Up Your Profile with Diverse Content

People always react to good imagery, fun videos, and some exciting podcasts once in a while; fill up your content using this type of media often. Your social media pages will look monotonous if all you post and share is text, so be sure to use various forms of media to catch your audiences attention. It is also a great way to add a level of personality to your brand.

You can also use a brand ambassador for your profile. Your best promotional weapon is the people who love your product; instead of putting all your efforts into finding new customers, why not leverage your current customers? In addition to your current ones, you could also use your employees. To use your employees as brand advocates, create social media rules that are specific to your brand. Inform your advocates about social media acceptable practices. Add a team leader to each part of your social media plan. Check the correct data to pinpoint areas for improvement and those that are doing well.

Optimize your content with your targeted keywords. Armed with a factual keyword research report with the following categories, you should get some good ideas for relevant content that will be reasonable to your audience.

Timeliness is Key

Map out your means of delivering content to your audience. Will you reach out and leverage Influence? Will you provide free material or samples? How will the materials be delivered? You may have environmentally friendly products. Will you supervise and lead a conversation about environmental issues, for instance, organic products? There are many creative ways to reach your audience. Be creative.

Next, develop a timeline, preferably a few months in advance, to identify events, promotions, or product launches that you know and where these events are. Now figure out the content ideas you want to deliver that can supplement those events. If you are dealing with alcoholic drinks, you can sell them at a Rugby game such as Tusker sevens. It is like creating a media plan where you are timing your efforts to be consistent and relevant to your business or customers other events. You will find that it will be easier to regulate content creation efforts and allow you to plan.

Conclusion

Establishing a social media marketing strategy and presence is probably one of the hardest things to do because it needs you to step back and think outside the box. You have to move your mindset away from your daily tasks like scheduling, replying to your direct messages, and responding to higher-level thinking comments.

But its advantageous to have a social media marketing strategy so that you arent just posting content just for the sake of posting. Itll help you fulfill your social media and marketing goals for your brand.

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Developing A Social Media Marketing Strategy - Seekers Time

10 Social Media Trends That Every Marketer Should Know in 2021 [Infographic] – Social Media Today

The last twelve months have been transformative in many ways, with one of the key changes being the increased reliance on digital connectivity for work, play, socializing, connection, etc.

Indeed, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the various mitigation efforts, have underlined the critical role that the internet now plays in our everyday lives. And within that, they've also exacerbated our reliance on social media apps, which are increasingly serving a range of different purposes in our day-to-day routines.

That could be a bad thing - as we've seen just recently, the impacts of misinformation and division via social media can have significant consequences. But it also provides more ways to share and connect. And also, to shop, to research, and much more.

That's what makes this listing from the team at Oberlo particularly relevant. The below infographic outlines some of the key social media trends of notes for 2021, which puts a spotlight on the importance of social media for business.

And while you likely know many of these trends, it is worth considering their impacts on your marketing approach.

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10 Social Media Trends That Every Marketer Should Know in 2021 [Infographic] - Social Media Today

Development, Digital Marketing or Social media, What are the most in-demand tech skills? – Digital Information World

Sifting through hundreds of job posts can be tiring and confusing, especially with posts filled with industry-specific jargon and information.

The new year typically brings in new resolutions, opportunities and new beginnings, so why not bring about a career or job change? Its been suggested that by applying for new roles in the new year, therell be less competition as people will be lying low after the festive period, and wont necessarily think about a career change. The first two months of the year also mean that companies will have had time to think about their resourcing over the break, due to updated yearly budgets - meaning that your dream job may just be an application away.

If youre on the lookout for a new job, or plan to be now its the new year, research into the most in-demand skills can reveal which roles companies are looking to fill the most.

According to Microsoft, the pandemic will lead to the creation of a staggering 145 million jobs by 2025, with software developers accounting for 65% of those jobs. Heading in the right direction, 800,000 computer programming jobs have been created since March 2020, spanning across the US, UK, Australia, Japan and the EU.

So, what are the most in-demand tech skills in job posts? PostBeyond reveals the top skills across three sectors: digital marketing, social media and development. You can view the full piece here.

The third most in-demand skill is Agile, the software development and project management tool, with 35 percent of the 1,000 posts analyzed mentioning it. Agile helps teams deliver value to customers quicker with less stumbling blocks.

The second most skilled sector is digital marketing, with over a quarter (29%) of the posts analyzed mentioning a skill within this industry. Social media is the third most skilled sector, with over a quarter (26%) of job posts requiring a skill in the industry. Some examples of the types of roles available within the three industries include social media and content manager, digital marketing officer, campaign analyst, Java developer, digital content developer and junior systems software developer.

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Development, Digital Marketing or Social media, What are the most in-demand tech skills? - Digital Information World

A sigh of relief: Beauty brands message hope on Inauguration Day – Glossy

Beauty brands on social media space were quietly hopeful on Wednesday, as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn into office.

The last three weeks, if not four years, provoked consumer brands across all categories to commemorate, condemn, pledge or otherwise acknowledge political and cultural events. And in response to the new presidential administration, many beauty brands took the opportunity to change their tune. Instead of posts that condemned acts of violence or spoke of brand values, indie brands like Herbivore Botanicals, Winky Lux, Prima and Saint Jane opted to use the inauguration as a moment to tease hopefulness and relief.

Additionally, Haus Labs, the brand founded by Lady Gaga, who performed at the inauguration ceremony, posted a photo of her at the event and a quote in the text box explaining her decision to perform. JLO Beauty, whose founder Jennifer Lopez also performed at the inauguration, did not acknowledge the event via social posts. Brands may find it easier over the next four years to avoid commenting on cultural and political issues. Or they may opt to instead focus on political prime time figures like Harris, who has already received considerable attention from the beauty industry for breaking the color and gender barrier for the vice presidency.

We decided to post about the Inauguration and curate powerful quotes because Herbivore is a brand invested in social justice and diverse representation, said Claudia Allwood, Herbivore svp of brand marketing. Previously, we updated our community with transparency about our commitment to social justice inour statement againstthe riots at the Capitol. We [posted] both [a quote from] Alexandria Ocasio Cortezs and Bidens speeches [because they] represent a powerful, positive direction for our country, elevating diversity and representation as central pillars to reunify our country.

The role of social media, and the people who manage brand accounts, has dramatically shifted over the last four years as online environments have become more hostile. As Digiday reported in January, many social media managers are experiencing burnout and are departing from their jobs, in part because of toxic online environments. While online environments remain hostile given the polarized nature of American politics, the Biden administration has sought to project a politically centered policy platform. It has even been remarked, in enthusiastic terms, that a Biden administration could and should be boring.

There will be a collective sigh of relief across brands and social media managers, Bilal Kaiser, principal lead at social media and marketing agency Agency Guacamole said. There is a hopefulness as we turn this page and go into this new chapter together as a country that the daily dose of chaos we became accustomed to is reduced, and we can focus back on the stuff that we got into this world to begin with, which is beauty and skin care and hair care.

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A sigh of relief: Beauty brands message hope on Inauguration Day - Glossy