Major changes have erupted in the past two years, right from lifestyles to education to entertainment. Over-the-top platforms have become mainstream entertainment channels, as evident by the surge in their viewership. As people are rapidly inclining towards online streaming services than traditional TV, brands are swaying towards OTT advertising. It is because your ads must be where your consumers are, and hence more than 57% of marketers are preferring OTT for advertising along with social media advertising and Google advertising. Are you still wondering whether you should consider advertising on OTT platforms or not? Here are the benefits of OTT advertising and the key tips for advertising on these digital streaming platforms.  

 

1.AUDIENCE’S INCLINATION TOWARDS OTT SERVICES 

 

OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar and Prime Video have existed over years, but the surge of viewership these platforms got in 2020 and 2021 is incredible. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdown, the entertainment hubs like cinema theatres remained closed that made OTT, a major entertainment source, accounting for record-high OTT viewership.  

 

Before the pandemic, there were hardly a couple of OTT platforms, and they were also striving hard to thrive under the shadow of cineplexes. The general public was not willing to shift to these digital screens, and hence the movie makers also kept away from these platforms. Only limited content was available on OTT media which was also outdated.  

 

However, when cinema theatres were closed, people started seeking new media of entertainment and OTT was quick enough to grab viewer’s attention. The number of OTT platforms grew enormously from two to more than 40 OTT services available as of today in India. The movie producers, entertainment series makers have all started making a transition to these direct-to-digital platforms to keep the revenue flowing.  

 

When the audience started inclining more and more towards the OTT platforms, brands also started making the transition to these services. Whether it’s YouTube or Netflix or Prime Video, all these platforms started getting loaded with advertisements.  

 

2.ADVERTISING ON OTT REDUCES WASTE OF MONEY 

 

Anything that is done digitally has advantages over its non-digital counterpart, so is with advertising. When advertising on cable TV, you advertise your product to the masses rather than targeting the ideal target audience. For instance, if you are doing a local business, you would air your advertisement on a local TV channel, and it would be shown to every person watching that channel. Out of 100 people who watch your TV advertisement, assume only five people are the ones who might be interested in your product. So you are wasting your ad budget by targeting 95% of people who do not fall in your buyer persona.  

 

On the other hand, you get to target your advertisement to specific people on the OTT platform based on their interests, the shows they watch and other demographics. These days the marketing demographics are something more than the basic information like age, gender, location. When you target your ad to your buyer personas, the rate of conversion increases, and you get a better return on your advertising spends.  

 

3.ACCESS TO CONSUMER ANALYTICS 

 

With the conventional TV commercials, advertisers and brands used to target their ad to the TV channel and TV show that garnered higher TRPs or were popular among the audience. However, you could only guess the number of people who watched your ad based on the viewership of the TV show, and there were no real-time audience data. The lack of sufficient audience analytics failed to give an exact report of the number of people who viewed the advertisement.   

 

OTT advertising combines the analytics features of digital advertising and gives you detailed audience analytics of what shows people watch, what time they watch, how long they watch, etc. With the help of these data, you can target your advertisement only to the audience who might be interested in your product. After advertising, you also get to view the analytics and reframe your marketing campaigns based on the analytics to reach a more niche-targeted audience.  

 

4.OTT ADS ARE MORE ENGAGING 

 

If you remember, traditional TV shows would have a 5-6 minutes commercial break loaded with tens of advertisements. A viewer resented the long gap between the immersive viewing experience and would either switch to other TV channels or engage in other activities to only return after the ad break gets over.   

 

OTT shows do not run lengthy ad breaks in between. Either the ads are a few seconds long, or sometimes people get a premium subscription to skip watching ads. However, it is also true that people love to watch ads from brands they love, ads of products they wish to buy. With geo-targeting and niche-targeting, when you advertise your product to your buyer persona, they watch the ad and engage with it. And again, analytics serve a great purpose to target your ad to the ideal consumers.  

 

Another factor that makes OTT ads interesting is the engagement factor. These ads are short of only a few seconds or a minute and have stunning visuals that capture the audience’s attention, being highly engaging with clear messaging. This clearly explains how visual designing is crucial for branding. 

 

With the great advantages comes greater responsibility, and it’s the responsibility of brands to create high-quality content that people love to watch rather than look for options to skip or report an ad. With the rise of automation and extensive analytics, programmatic OTT advertising is also evolving and could be a game-changer in near future. When impressive visuals can escalate your ad performance, for it may be on OTT advertising or digital advertising, connect with Entitledarts to create highly interactive advertisements and market to the right audience via efficient marketing strategies. 

Social media has become a gold mine for businesses and content creators. The lifestyle and the decisions of Millennials and Gen Z consumers these days get highly inspired by the social media trends and the popular content creators on these platforms who are known as influencers. Influencers have the skill and the power to drive awareness and interest among the audience for a particular product/service.  

 

If you consider business networking, the best platform would be LinkedIn that accounts for 80% of B2B leads. Thus becoming an influencer on LinkedIn could be highly lucrative for your brand and your business. But becoming an influencer on LinkedIn is not as easy as said. It takes time, effort and brilliant strategy to become an influencer. Here is a detailed guide to become a thought leader in your industry and establish yourself as a LinkedIn influencer. 

 

These days you will find influencers on all social media platforms like Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers, etc., as influencer marketing has become mainstream. Earlier, the LinkedIn platform had selected a few industry leaders as the influencers, including them in the influencer program. However, a few of these profiles were not quite active on the platform, and the LinkedIn audience started following new influencers who created brilliant content consistently. So here are the steps that will help you propel your LinkedIn profile as an influencer. 

 

1.LAUNCH A RIGHT PROFILE 

As you know, LinkedIn is primarily a business social network, hence your profile must align with business goals. Keep your profile updated with your profession, expertise, career hierarchy, achievements and contact details. In the ‘About’ section, include a crisp overview of your services and expertise while removing the unnecessary fluff.  

 

Include a professional-looking profile picture and your services or your business card in the banner. Your profile should be such that whoever visits it gets a quick overview of who you are, what you do and how you can help them. Do not forget to attach the links to your website or portfolio. 

 

2.BUILD A PERSONAL BRAND 

Branding is not only associated with a business; a personal brand is something that works wonders on the LinkedIn platform. Whether you are a CEO of a reputed company, startup founder, employee or freelancer, it is necessary to build a personal brand for yourself to excel on this business network.  

 

A personal brand is building a unique identity of oneself that makes you stand apart from the crowd. Your brand must speak of your excellence, your personality, and it must be something that people look up to and love to interact with.  

 

While building your brand, the foremost requirement is to identify your niche. Initially, explore diverse fields and settle on one that you find the most interesting and aligning with your passion. Once you find your niche, create valuable content and establish thought leadership in that particular niche. The work you do, the results you put out speak about your brand.   

 

3.ADD VALUE TO THE AUDIENCE  

After you find your niche, it is time to create content. The content you create should be something that imparts value to the audience. Do not create salesy or promotional content in the initial stage. Share value-driven content like how-to, the challenges you encountered, the mistake you made, the lessons you learnt, etc.  

 

Your content must reflect genuinity and appeal to the audience’s emotions and personal experiences, striking the right chord. When people relate to your experiences, they will further take decisions as per your advice.   

 

4.INCORPORATE STORYTELLING 

Stories have fascinated the human race for ages. Stories build a connection with the audience by leveraging nostalgia, emotions and shared experiences. Even when you try to market your product, blend it into an engaging story that entertains the audience.  

 

Content that shocks, surprises, entertains and educates the audience is always known to succeed. Share stories of how your career evolved and how you tackled the challenges on your way. This type of content is relatable and also seen to drive more engagement on LinkedIn.   

 

5.DRIVE ENGAGEMENT VIA CONTENT 

Did you know your content on LinkedIn can act as a lucrative lead magnet? Yeah, it’s not clickbait but a proven reality. There are several real-life examples of how people became influencers and popular freelancers by posting highly engaging and value-driven content on LinkedIn. Engagement is a priority on LinkedIn because when someone likes or comments on your post, the reach of your post expands to their connections and followers, as well. Thus your post reach can become twofold or threefold with every engagement.  

 

Once someone interacts with your content, they will visit your profile, and there are chances for them to become your prospects or make informed conversions. A tested trick to drive increased engagement is to post value-added content and then leave a question for the audience that is easy and relatable to the maximum of the audience. Occasionally conduct surveys in terms of polls or post entertaining memes that relate to your brand and add some light humor to bring engagement.  

 

6.BUILD RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE AUDIENCE & FELLOW INFLUENCERS IN YOUR NICHE 

When you receive engagement in terms of comments on your posts, reply to those comments and take the conversations ahead. When you interact with the audience, provide them with solutions via comments, a bond of trust gets established, as you end up building a community.  

 

Conduct polls and try to find out what type of content your audience would like to see. Interact more and more with your audience to comprehend their pain points and address them. Once you build a trusted relationship on LinkedIn, you can then drive your community outside the platform, increasing the sales. Hence we had earlier marked that LinkedIn acts as a lead magnet. 

 

Along with responding to audience comments on your post, interact with the posts of other influencers in your niche. Interaction does not mean leaving a like on their LinkedIn post or posting a single-word comment for mere formality. Add more valuable points to their posts or share your perspective of the shared scenario in the comments. When you add value in the comments section of other influencers’ posts, their audience will navigate to your profile as you prove your expertise in the niche.  

 

7.BE CONSISTENT 

After trying out all the above steps, the highly essential thing to follow is being consistent. You cannot become a LinkedIn influencer overnight. It takes days of hard work, consistent content creation, audience interaction and networking skills to become an influencer. Having said that, your content creation journey does not end when you become an influencer. All the above-mentioned steps are recurring events, hence keep following them to keep up with the coveted position of being an influencer. Once you establish yourself in the social business network, you can drive leads and sales conveniently unless you take it for granted.  

 

If you do not find results after a few days of effort, do not lose confidence and give up in the mid-way. It may take few months to a couple of years to gain the status of an influencer, and your patience and consistency would be the key ingredients of the recipe. Keep experimenting with content styles, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes, rectify your mistakes, network with people and one day, you could be someone who drives the decisions of thousands of people. 

 

Becoming an influencer on LinkedIn could be lucrative, but the process might be demanding. It is not a place where one viral post would be enough to establish your identity; it is a place where your consistent efforts and consistent value-added, excellent performing posts will drive your success. If you wish to build your brand on LinkedIn or boost your business via LinkedIn marketing, connect with Entitledarts. We have helped people double their revenue by leveraging the LinkedIn platform.   

Graphic design and UI design has become an indispensable part of the Internet and social media. As businesses are rapidly making a transition to digital, the field of designing is growing exponentially. With it, the demand for UI designers and digital designers has been on the rise, too. While trying to mark their space in the overly saturated digital designing world, graphic designers leverage their creativity, along with basic design principles to bring out design masterpieces.  

 

In the process, it is natural for a designer to overdo the design with too much content as the marketing world today emphasize content being the king. Contrastingly, including a good deal of white spaces in the design makes it more appealing. Being overwhelmed about designing, they fail to realize using negative spaces is one of the basic design principles that make the design more breathable, accentuating key elements, text and CTAs in the design. If you are still sceptical about including sufficient breathing space in your design, here are a few reasons how negative spaces could benefit your graphic design in a positive way. 

 

WHAT IS WHITESPACE? 

White space, also known as negative space, is a space that is left unmarked in a design. It doesn’t necessarily have to be white in color or negative, but it is the space around your design elements, layouts, text, etc. Though called white space, it can have different color, background images and textures.  

 

As a designer, you might include enough white space in the design to make it look clutter-free, and for enhanced user experience, however, the client or the manager might ask you to fill up the gaps and house more information on the design. For them, gaps could be a waste of space, and it is then that you have to make them realize the importance of whitespace in designing. 

 

1.IMPROVES LEGIBILITY 

Would you like to be bombarded with too much information that has no breathing space? It would be more like getting choked of over-design. It is natural for humans to quit a page or design that has content without spacing and is difficult to read. The content must be such that it is easily scannable with enough space between the lines and paragraphs. The sufficient spacing between the text and the design elements makes the content more legible instead of burdening the eyes and brain.  

 

Two types of whitespaces are used to improve the legibility of the content – micro and macro whitespace. Micro whitespace is the space between the words, lines, paragraphs and smaller design elements. Macro whitespaces are the bigger spaces between two big graphics or the space used to differentiate two different groups of design elements such as the tables, pictures, etc. If you consider a web UI design, the bigger volume of space on the right and left sides of the webpage is known as the macro whitespace.  

 

2.ACCENTUATES FOCAL POINTS 

When you include enough information on the page, build a focal point towards the most crucial elements, such as the CTAs. For example, consider you design a poster about an upcoming contest that includes contest details, sponsor details, winning criteria, etc. The prime focal point of this design should be the CTA, such as ‘participate now’ or ‘register now’. Even if you highlight this CTA with different colors, fonts or other design tools, it might get submerged among the other details on the banner. However, if you leave enough white space around the CTA, it would get accentuated and act as a focal point, driving more conversions.   

 

3.ENHANCED USER EXPERIENCE 

When your design gets highly saturated with content or designs and animation, people might leave if they do not quickly find what they want. A simple, clutter-free design is what grabs the user’s attention and is not overdesigning. Let’s consider the homepage of Google, how easy it is to access the search bar and get answers to queries! It is because there is enough whitespace on the page that make the search bar easily accessible. Now consider if Google had overloaded their homepage with too much content, would it be as convenient to use? That’s the reason Google’s homepage stands as an exemplary clutter-free and user-friendly design. 

 

4.INCREASED USER INTERACTION 

The attention span of humans is too short, and if you can interest the audience in a few seconds, you win the game. As already stated above, white space builds focus on the key elements of the design. The human brain shifts focus to the portion that has enough white space around it and is free from the chaos. When you segregate your key messages from the remaining design with enough negative space around, it helps you deliver key messages instantly and more accurately. When your message is clear, it makes it easier for the audience to make the informed decisions, thereby increasing your leads and conversions.  

 

You know that social media has become a gold mine to generate brand awareness, leads and conversions for the business of all types. As social media is saturated with content, if you wish to drive awareness to your brand or business, keep your social media design simple and the message clear. If you go by the recent trends of social media, minimalism drives more engagement.  

 

5.INVOKES LUXURY 

Consider the top luxury brands or the businesses with premium quality branding, one thing common among them is the simple, minimalistic and clutter-free designs. They do not bombard your digital screens with heavy designs or multiple CTAs but keep the prime focus on their product by having enough white space around. Right from the brand logo to the webpage to the product page, every design places its product at the focal point. Minimalism is associated with modern-day luxury designs, and using white spaces is a key to it.    

 

As graphic design can boost your business and sales, it is equally important to leverage the best design tools and practices. Whether it is your web design, social media post design, digital ads, print ads, business cards, newsletters or packaging designs, white space works wonders in every field of graphic design. A good designer strikes the right balance between the content and the whitespace. If you are looking to enhancing branding with exceptional graphic designing or motion designing, connect with Entitledarts, one of the best design and marketing agencies in Hyderabad, India.   

  

Businesses across the globe have boarded the digital space during the recent pandemic. Whether B2B or B2C, these days, every business is actively using digital channels to reach prospects during these pandemic times because of safety concerns and social distancing norms. Email marketing is one of the prominent and conventional digital marketing channels to reach out to the audience. Emails are a great medium to drive brand awareness, leads generation, lead nurturing, customer acquisition and customer retention. Email marketing will not be regarded as outdated if you follow the latest trends of email marketing. Here are a few email marketing trends of 2021 that can boost your marketing ROI. 

 

HOW HAS COVID-19 PROMOTED EMAIL MARKETING?  

Over time, social media simplified communication with the audience and has become a mainstream marketing channel, making people assume that traditional email marketing channels are outdated and less profitable. However, change is the law of the universe, and things are quite uncertain in the business and marketing world.  

 

To everyone’s surprise, email marketing recharged in the pandemic hit times. Covid-19 not only changed the lifestyle but also made people more mindful about their choices. In this pretext, emails served a great purpose to make the audience aware of a brand, nurture the leads, acquire and retain the leads, thus making email one of the highly reliable and converting consumer touchpoints.  

 

Thus to revive the regular business, brands will have to revamp their marketing strategy and bring email marketing campaigns to the forefront of their strategy. For this, it is necessary to build a long mailing list; your mail list also helps generate increased traffic and boost your search ranking. While doing so, it is essential to keep up with the latest trends of email marketing to leverage more of its potential.  

 

1.PERSONALIZED EMAILS 

Consumers these days have millions of alternate options for every business or product, making it a strenuous task for marketers to hold the prospects. One of the best ways to this is by sending highly personalized emails that cater specifically to every individual reading the mail rather than a common text forwarded to the bulky mailing list.  

 

Consumers are aware that their interests and information are being collected by companies these days, and in return for these, they expect personalized deals and offers. The initial personalization begins with the name of the receiver and goes to the higher-end of customizing the mail content to align with the interests of the receiver.  

 

It has been surveyed that people either delete the mail, opt-out of a mailing list or report it spam when the content of the mail does not align with their behaviour. A higher degree of personalization could not be met when you use basic automation to send mail to millions of people with a single click. However, this is not impossible in this age of AI and high-end technology if you adopt the latest marketing trends.  

 

Leverage Artificial Intelligence in your email marketing campaigns to access the enormous amount of user data available on the Internet, segment the audience based on their interest, and finally serve them highly personalized emails that align with their behaviour and interest. Use robotic process automation and AI to convey the message to every individual rather than to your mailing list in general. If a person feels his/her importance, they will show interest otherwise they have millions of options on the Internet.   

 

2.INTERACTIVE EMAILS 

Consumers do not want you to throw some random content, they want you to be interactive with them though it is a promotional mail. Marketers need to understand that people do not hate promotions rather they hate the way the promotion is done. Most of the consumers revealed in a survey by Statista that they love to receive promotional emails from brands that they love. Thus you must send emails that are highly interactive to engage the receivers instead of annoying them. 

 

Interactive emails have a higher engagement, open rate and clickthrough rate. You can include short videos, product animations, gifs, photo carousels, polls, etc., in your mail to make it highly interactive. If consumers abandon their cart before making a purchase, re-target them with a personalized email that has a clear call to action reminding them about their abandoned cart and motivating them to complete the purchase. By motivating, we mean give them a special offer or a giveaway to seal the deal. 

 

Clear CTAs are one of the most interactive elements that if rightly used can boost your conversion rates. Along with CTAs, you can also directly sell your products from the mail using an interactive product page and a shopping cart. This removes the need for a prospect to move out of the email to make a transaction, making the process highly convenient that undoubtedly boosts your conversion rate.   

 

3.STORYTELLING 

Humans love stories and so do your prospects. With the aid of interactive content, tell an engaging story via your mail. Have a relevant and fascinating subject line that boosts the open rate. Do not go for those clichéd click baits that people just ignore clicking through. You can also take a step ahead and build a personalized story for the mail receivers that aligns with their behaviour and uses their names. This will fascinate the people, and they will end up clicking the CTA at the end.  

 

4.RECOGNIZING & REWARDING CUSTOMERS 

As already stated above that people love brands that give consumers due respect and importance. Taking personalization a step ahead, you can retain customers by sending personalized messages thanking them for their support. Brands these days are more into these thanksgiving and customer appreciation emails as it generates a better response from the prospects. Send them birthday wishes along with personalized discounts, give them exclusive early access to a sale for being a valued customer and reward them for promoting your brand to their friends. These are age-old marketing techniques for customer retention that has to be updated and incorporated into your email marketing campaigns.  

 

5.OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE DEVICES 

Most of the online activities happen on mobile devices by the consumers giving you ample reason to optimize your emails for the mobile layouts. If your mail content is not optimized for mobile devices, people will not even think twice before deleting the mail. Even the interactive content that you use must be highly optimized for mobile view for maximum output.  

 

6.MINIMALISM 

The digital audience today prefers an uncluttered and simple form of communication. That straightly indicates you must go for a minimalistic mail without much ado. Keep your message simple with straightforward CTAs, and do not confuse or bore the readers with irrelevant details. The design, the font, the message and the subject must be simple yet engaging. 

 

E-mail marketing is a gold mine for businesses to generate leads and then convert those leads. To populate a converting mailing list, you must analyze whom to target by defining a target audience. Have a clear understanding of your target audience and buyer persona to personalize the emails and follow the latest email marketing trends to leverage the highly converting digital marketing channel. If you are also looking to boost your marketing ROI with highly converting email marketing strategies, connect with Entitledarts, the leading digital marketing agency in Hyderabad, India. We help clients across the globe to bring a 360-degree digital transformation and build a brand out of their business.  

As most businesses are making their presence online these days, marketing and advertising costs are growing exponentially. With such high digital advertising costs, you would not want to waste your hard-earned money in advertising to people who are not interested in your product or to whom your product/offer does not relate.  

The best way to save your pockets while getting optimum leads and conversions would be by marketing your product/services to a target audience rather than random people on the Internet. We will guide you on how to find your target audience and leverage the best digital marketing practices. 

 

WHAT IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE? 

If you run a business, you will have a product or service to offer, and this product/service will be catering to a particular group of people. This group of people who might be interested in your product/service and potentially convert from a visitor to a customer is known as the target audience. These people are grouped according to the demographics and a few personal details.  

 

When we say target audience, chances are that you might get it confused with a buyer persona. There is a thin-line difference between the target audience and buyer persona, such that your buyer persona is the fictional representation of your ideal customer and his/her journey, whereas the target audience is a group of people who might be interested in your product/service. For your business, both the buyer persona and target audience are crucial and cannot be compromised for each other. 

 

WHY SHOULD YOU DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE? 

If we go by the stats, Proxima estimated that nearly 37 billion dollars of ad spend are being wasted every year in advertising to the wrong audience resulting in poor digital advertising performance. So much ad spend gets wasted in advertising to the wrong audience. This wastage of ad spend can be saved if the ads are directed to the target audience as there is a higher probability for conversion and sales.  

 

When you define your target audience, you can address their pain points and customize your messages and ad copies that align with their interest. Having a clear understanding of your target market and serving them with a relatable piece of content, boosts your marketing ROI.  

For example, consider you sell expensive luxury handbags for women. There would be no use in advertising your product to a random audience comprising both men and women whose budgets fall out of your pricing. Instead, consider a few demographics like gender, consumption habits, income, etc., to find the ideal group of people who fall into the target audience group.  

 

When you have a clear idea of who your audience is and their demographics, you can target the most appropriate keywords such that your PPC campaigns bring better results and boost your search rankings. Having a good understanding of your consumer persona, also helps you incorporate negative keywords in PPC campaigns to drive relevant leads and lower your CPC. 

 

HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT TARGET AUDIENCE? 

Target audiences are usually segregated from the random crowd using a few demographics like age, gender, location, educational background, interests, etc. Filling out these spaces gives you an idea of who can be your customers. You can determine your ideal target audience by following these below-mentioned steps. 

 

1.Know Your Existing Customer Base 

Prior to find out who could be your target audience, you must analyze your existing customer base. If a person has previously bought or made a purchase with your business, you must consider his/her demographics and find how he/she landed your business and what interested them to buy from you. When you find the answers to these questions, you can find out your target audience. A person who has once purchased from you will have a probability of returning in future too.  

 

2.Research About The Industry 

Perform comprehensive research about the industry that you deal in and its consumers. Every industry will have a dedicated consumer base, for example, if you manufacture cake tins, bakers and women interested in baking could be your target audience.  

  

3.Address Their Pain Points & Interests 

After finding the ideal demographics of your target audience, try to find their pain points and interests. For example, if we consider the previous example of manufacturing cake tins, there might be the latest trend of baking different unique shapes of cake. But it might be difficult for a consumer to purchase separate cake tins of every shape that will cost them too much.  

You must try to leverage consumer interest, along with addressing their pain point of overspending for buying separate tins for every shape. Your product must solve consumer’s problems by manufacturing a customizable silicon-based cake tin that can customize the cake to any shape as required.     

 

4.Analyse Your Competitor’s Target Audience 

Competitors are good for every business as when there is competition in the market, the best services get rendered to the consumers at affordable prices. Analyze to whom your competitor is selling its services and find if you have leveraged the similar demographics as used by them. Also, try to fill the gaps in your competitor’s business strategy and drive increased leads and sales. 

  

5.Where Does Your Target Audience Have A Greater Presence? 

In the world of digital advertising and social media advertising, it is not a big thing to find insights about your consumers, where do the maximum traffic and leads come from and other analytics. Using the tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can track user behavior and what type of content is driving traffic so that you make better data-driven decisions for your marketing campaigns. 

 

Use these insights and strengthen your presence in the places where your target audience is highly active to accentuate your brand awareness and generate increased leads. Having a presence where your audience is already present doubles the chances for conversions.  

To drive customers to your brand, you have to show up initially. It is essential to show up to the right audience that minimizes advertising costs and saves your marketing budget. Defining the target audience and advertising your product only to them boosts the sales, and also your marketing ROI.  

 

Along with determining the ideal target audience and consumer persona, leverage the latest marketing trends for better results. If you are looking to expand your business and boost your sales with top-notch Marketing strategies, connect with Entitledarts, the best digital marketing agency in Hyderabad, India. We have been helping clients across the globe with their digital transformation via designing, branding and marketing services. 

It would not be wrong if we tell social media has become an inseparable part of our routine. What began as a networking medium has over time evolved into a prime touchpoint for marketers and businesses to reach out to the target customers. Social media gives an extended insight into consumer choices. Additionally, social media advertising helps display ads to a niche-specific audience bringing higher leads and conversion rates. However, you might be aware that there are billions of social media users and highlighting your page and content among them might be a cumbersome task. If you follow the latest trends on social media, both the social media algorithm and the audience get impressed; boosting the reach, impressions and engagement. Here are a few latest trends of 2021 to be leveraged for better engagement on social media.

 

1.Create High-Quality Relatable Content

People come on social media for content, and hence if you wish to drive their attention to your page, regularly upload high-quality content. High-quality content includes high-quality images, well-written pieces of textual content, stunning designs and captivating audios/videos. Whatever content you upload, make sure it is relatable to your audience as relatable content gets shared and saved highly.

 

• Initially, keep experimenting with various forms of content related to your niche.
• Find out which post performs the best among the audience.
• Understand what your audience is interested in by running story polls, asking them questions using questions sticker on stories to better comprehend their choices.
• After finding what your audience is looking for, create content that adds value to your audience.
• Your content must either entertain them or educate them only then they will stop, look and engage.
• Post content that will be highly engaged with and shared with others.

 

2.Live Streaming Steals the Show

Posting high-quality content is an initial step for hooking the audience, however, to retain them and build trust, you must be more transparent to your audience, give them a sneak-peek into behind-the-scenes, your workplace, your routine, etc.

 

Most people try to increase their followers to just show off the big numbers on their page. But the genuine social media marketing aims to grow a community rather than just the number of followers. When you build trust within your community, they will stay by your side and invest their time and money in you.

 

The best way to build a personal connection with your social media audience is by going live. People love to watch than to read and this accounts for the integration of live streaming feature on most social media platforms.

 

When you collaborate with fellow creators on a social media live session, you boost your brand awareness as their followers or their community starts knowing you. This is the reason that over the past two years, we have seen people hosting frequent Instagram live sessions with other creators to grow their reach and follower base. Give up your hesitance to the camera and show up to your audience.

 

3.Leverage the Latest Features of Social Media

Every social media platform keeps upgrading its space with the latest features to keep the audience entertained. And are you aware of the fact that whenever a new feature gets released on any social media platform, the algorithm of the platform keeps promoting that to everyone?

 

For example, if you consider the advent of Instagram Reels, soon after Reels got introduced, Instagram has been ardently promoting this feature and motivating the audience to try it. It is also seen that the reach on Instagram is better for Reels than the normal posts. Hence it is vital to try your hands on the latest features of every social media application.

 

4.Ace-up the Game With Audio Content

One thing that has been common with most social media apps in recent months is the introduction of audio spaces on their platform. It all began with the success of the Clubhouse app – a social audio platform. Witnessing its quick success, other companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram have all started to launch their own audio spaces.

 

It’s not only you but most people who hesitate to face the camera and are more comfortable with the audio content. Additionally, audio content has been fascinating people over the years, as seen with the popularity of podcasts. Voice content renders a more seamless experience and engages the audience without any disturbance. Engage regularly with your audience via these audio rooms to know them better and create more relatable content.

 

5.Social Commerce will become a Mainstream Shopping Channel

Have you seen the shopping icon on most of the top social media applications these days? Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat – one by one, everyone is getting on the bandwagon to integrate social commerce on its platform. These social media apps do not want their users to move out of the platform and hence integrating shopping channel into their space. It is a great opportunity for brands and businesses to grow their sales.

 

Normally, when you promote your product on social media and if the audience is interested in buying it, they must navigate to your store link in the bio. But people usually don’t prefer to navigate outside the platform. With a direct shopping feature on social media applications, you can not only market but sell your products directly from the app, thereby boosting your sales. Thus on-board your products on these social media platforms for direct sale.

 

Every social media platform has a different algorithm, but the underlying motive of all is to increase their user base while also boosting their active user count. Hence if you can interest and engage a social media audience, you can boost your branding and business growth. If you are looking to ace up your social media marketing strategy, connect with Entitledarts. We have been helping businesses and brands with Designing, Branding and Marketing solutions to boost their business revenue.

Voice search is one of the fastest-growing trends in the current times. With the advent of digital voice assistants, a new era of voice technology has evolved. What seemed to be a sci-fi movie fantasy has transfigured into a reality, making our daily tasks easier. Imagine while driving a car and you want to search for a location. How difficult it would be to open your phone, type in the location and perform the search! Contrastingly, how easy is it to open the voice search, say it aloud whatever you wish to search and get the results? At least 20% of searches on Google are voice-oriented, and that shows how lucrative it could be if you’re able to rank your content on voice search. Have you incorporated voice search optimization in your SEO strategy? You cannot afford to miss out on this lucrative opportunity that can bring you tons of traffic and leads. Let’s find out the benefits of voice search optimization and how it boosts your visibility online. 

 

WHAT IS VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION? 

When you write a blog or a piece of the website content, you perform SEO to rank it higher on SERP to boost your online visibility and drive increased traffic. Conventionally you optimize your content to rank higher on text searches. But when you optimize your content to rank it higher for voice queries made using digital assistants, it is known as voice search optimization. It’s the same procedure of incorporating specific keywords and use of other SEO tactics with a slightly different approach.  

 

WHY IS VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION NECESSARY? 

1.RISE OF VOICE ASSISTANTS & VOICE SEARCH 

Siri, Alexa, Google voice assistant are no strangers now; they have indeed become a family. Right from playing music to handling the connected appliances of your house to answer your voice queries, these digital assistants make mundane tasks easier and time-saving. In 2020, though pandemic had impacted every industry, the global sales of smart speakers reached an all-time high. Nearly 4.20 billion voice assistant devices were in use in 2020 worldwide, and the number is expected to rise to 8.40 by 2040. To make your content compatible with voice queries, you must perform voice search optimization. When the number of voice searches is rapidly increasing, it is necessary to perform voice SEO. 

 

2.ACQUIRE DOMINANCE IN SEARCH RESULTS   

People these days have become so busy that they wish to find answers to their queries instantly without having to waste the time. Multitasking is something common with people these days, and hence voice searches are making things easier. While driving or cooking, it’s a little difficult to unlock the phone, open the search engine and type the query and keep checking the search results one after the other to find the exact answer for the query. But with voice search, people get to listen to the accurate answer without toggling between the various search results. However, there’s a tricky challenge to it as voice search presents only one result, and hence you cannot afford to rank second or further. The content must be optimized properly to acquire the top spot and be read aloud by the search engine. 

Apart from the voice search results, for the conventional text searches also Google displays featured snippets that are regarded as #0 search result as it is well segregated from others and stand at a top driving maximum of the traffic. The featured snippet is also read aloud by Google, and hence if your content is voice-search optimized, it can potentially rank on #0. 

 

3.BOOSTS YOUR LOCAL TRAFFIC 

Most of the voice searches are done for local listings, such as to find a particular store nearby or café or anything present in the geographical radius. Hence if you’re looking to expand your customer base, start with voice search optimization for your content, such as ranking your business for local voice search results. This will bring in more local traffic to your business as well as increase your sales and help you stand out from the competition. 

 

4.BOOST YOUR E-COMMERCE SALES 

It is seen that people perform a maximum of voice searches when they are in the buying or consideration stage of the sales funnel. Hence if you own an e-commerce store, it could bring lucrative sales opportunities if your business appears in voice search results. 

 

5.STAND OUT OF THE COMPETITION 

Voice search optimization is comparatively new and probably unused by most of your competitors. While you try to outperform your competitor’s traffic, include voice SEO in your strategy to drive increased traffic.  

 

STEPS TO PERFORM VOICE SEO

Optimizing your content to rank in voice search results could bring you several benefits but require your efforts to make the content voice-friendly. The following steps can guide you to perform voice SEO. 

 

1.Streamline a Conversational Tone in Your Content 

When people search for something in their voice, they use a conventional tone rather than the language used while doing a text search. Hence make sure your content is in the simple daily use language that people normally speak instead of including those fancy words and phrases. Voice commands and voice technology works around Natural Language Processing, and hence it is better to use natural language rather than dressing up your content with fancy words. 

 

2.Target Long-tail Keywords 

While typing a query, the main focus of people is one on the specific word, but in a voice search, they ask for something in a complete question. For example, assume someone wishes to buy homemade chocolates, they would type in homemade chocolates for a text search query, but for voice search, they’ll speak out, “Where can I buy an assorted collection of homemade chocolates nearby”. If you target long-tail keyword like ‘assorted collection of homemade chocolates, you can probably make up the search results. Thus targeting long-tail keywords from your niche brings you increased relevant traffic with a higher rate of conversion. 

 

3.Optimize for local search 

As already mentioned above, most of the voice searches happen for local search results and shopping, thus optimize your content to rank for the local search results. Leverage the benefits of Google My Business listing for tapping on local search results. 

  

4.Include Interrogatory Words & FAQs 

Most of the voice searches include interrogative sentences and words, for example, someone searching for homemade chocolates using the text, “homemade chocolates” will get results like homemade chocolates recipes, homemade chocolates store, homemade chocolates to buy nearby, etc. But when using a voice command, they search “Where can I buy homemade chocolates from?” Thus users are very much specific while performing voice search as they wish to receive only relevant answers. Along with long-tail keywords, include a few interrogatory words in your content. 

 

Have an FAQ section on your site that brings direct answers to the common questions. It not only makes it easy for Google to find answers on your webpage for user’s queries but increases the probability for you to rank on featured snippets too, thus driving increased traffic.  

 

5.Schema Markup 

It is seen that the maximum of the voice search results includes the web pages that have a schema markup and structured data. Schema markup includes the details about your webpage that helps search engines like Google to understand what your page is about. Only when the search crawlers understand the content on your webpage, the page gets ranked for relevant search queries. Hence do not miss out on the schema markup for your web pages. 

 

6.Reduce the Website Loading Speed 

The loading speed of the website is one major factor for it to rank higher on SERP. No one wishes to wait long for results, and on average, a person waits only for 2-3 seconds for a website to load and leave if loading time extends. Hence Google looks for a relevant result with the least loading time to be present in voice search results. Optimize and compress the images on your web pages to reduce the loading time. 

    

Voice technology is the present and the future, and hence it is profitable to leverage the voice search ranking by performing voice search optimization. If you wish to outperform your competitor’s and boost your marketing strategies, make voice SEO an indispensable part of your marketing plan. If you’re looking to leverage the benefits of voice search SEO and amp up your marketing plan, connect with Entitledarts at https://entitledarts.com We help businesses to boost their sales and bring a 360-degree digital transformation with cutting edge marketing and branding strategies. 

 

 

If you’re into business, before you begin marketing your product and selling it, you have to figure out whom to sell them. You cannot market/advertise your product to anyone randomly, after all, marketing and advertising costs a big sum. To save your budget and bring good ROI, you need to figure out who could be your audience and who is most likely to buy your product. While drawing out the ideal target audience, you might be confused between the two terms ‘target audience’ and ‘buyer persona’. Though these two terms sound similar, there is a clear thin-line difference between the two that brings a significant impact to your business. A detailed guide on how buyer persona is different from your target audience and how to amp up your marketing strategy with these two is shared below.

 
 
What Are Target Audiences?

You would indeed try to reach a maximum of people, but at the same time, you cannot afford to waste your hard-earned money in marketing to people who are not interested in your product/service. Every businessperson would want a good return on every penny they spend, and for that, marketing to your target audiences can be beneficial.

 

Target audiences or your target market comprises a broad group of people whom you showcase your product, assuming they are interested in your business and would potentially increase your conversion rate. Creating target markets is preferred for B2C business where the interaction is directly with the consumers. Target audiences are drafted based on demographic and psychographic data as follows.
Demographic data includes details like age, gender, nationality, physical location, etc.
Psychographic details include personality, values, interests, etc.

 

With the help of the above details, you can target your marketing and sales campaigns only to people who fall in the bracket of your desired target market. For example, assume you take yoga classes for adolescent women in your city. You would like to target only women living in your city, say Mumbai and in the age group of 25-40 and interested in yoga and fitness. So, by niching down to these demographic details, you can market your classes only to the people who fall in these demographics. This attempt will cost you less in running ads on digital media and bring better leads and conversions, thus saving your money and time.

 
 
What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. While crafting the buyer persona, you must position yourself in the boots of your customer and think how he/she will react and decide. You must carefully map every step of a buyer’s journey and understand consumer psychology. You must try to comprehend your ideal customer’s daily routine, the challenges they face and how they make decisions. You must try to solve their challenges with your product/service. If we consider the same yoga classes example, to craft your buyer persona, you must zoom in on a few more details apart from the ones included in the target market analysis like

 

• What is the regular schedule of the person?

• What are their fitness goals?

• What other activities interest them?

• What challenges are they facing to attend yoga classes?

• Do they prefer online/offline classes?

• How much money can they spend on yoga?

When you answer these questions, you will be able to customize your business/classes catering to the needs of your ideal customer. And when you cater to customer’s interest, they will come to you and stay with you.

 
 
Differences Between Target Audience Vs Buyer Persona

• Defining the target market and drafting buyer persona are intended towards increasing sales and generating increased ROI for your marketing efforts. However, both the techniques differ from each other as the target audience cater mostly to B2C businesses while buyer persona can be useful for B2B sales as well.

• While your target market is a wider group of audience who can be interested in your product/service, buyer persona requires you to zoom in on the fictional representation of your deal customer itself.

• The target market is selecting and grouping people based on demographic and psychographic characteristics. To draft a buyer persona, you must empathize with your ideal customer, track the buyer journey and their thought process to cater them with the most favourable experiences.

• For your target market, you can draft several different buyer personas and customize your marketing messages accordingly to suit the interests of the corresponding buyer.

• Target market or target audience is sorted based on demographic details and analyzing your competitor’s consumer base. For drafting your buyer persona, you do not have to depend on your competitors. Instead, use your previous customer experiences and reviews to think about how to grow your customer base.

• For instance, assume you sell local handmade crafts, your target market will include people of the location you ship your crafts and the people who are interested in handmade crafts or who have searched for handmade crafts or made one such purchase in the past. Your buyer persona will deep dive into more details like which social media platform/online marketplace will handmade craft buyers explore the most; how much will the person spend on buying handmade crafts so that you adjust your pricing; what products are they most interested in, etc.

 
 
Significance Of Buyer Personas in Business

• Once you have drafted your buyer persona, how are you going to use it for your business? It’s not only a random ritual for any business, but you must apply it in every stage of your business to facilitate a smooth transition of visitors to customers.

• Buyer personas must be applied right from your website’s UI/UX to your email subjects and messages, your social media content, social media promotions, search engine marketing campaigns and your content calendar.

• With the drafted persona, you can customize the experiences at every touchpoint of your consumer, like initially market/promote your product on the platforms your ideal customer would be present on for the awareness stage. In the consideration stage, display the products they might be more interested in, and in the decision stage, adjust product prices to their budget. This will render smooth conversions of your funnel.

• While people might think that drafting a buyer persona is a difficult task; they fail to realize that a properly constructed buyer persona can provide content ideas and guide you with devising marketing plans.

• With A/B testing of different buyer personas, you can also pinpoint the content gap and other faults in your marketing efforts while also rectifying them at the earliest.

• Consumers feel their importance and establish a strong connection with your business, having served with what they prefer rather than being bombarded with random ads, products and experiences.

 
 
Can Target Audiences Be Replaced with Buyer Personas?

When you read that buyer personas give you a better idea of your consumer and bring lucrative benefits to your business, you might argue that why should we plan a target market when we can draft a buyer persona. If you’re thinking the same, let’s clarify that target audience and buyer persona are neither interchangeable nor can be compromised for each other.
Your target audience gives you a bigger picture of your market and makes it easy to niche down to your ideal buyer/consumer. Just relate it to the fact that searching for someone among a group of 100 is easier than searching for the same person among the group of 1000.

 

The baseline of the argument is that the target audience and buyer persona are both equally important and relevant for your business. These are the primitive steps that guide you on how to expand and grow your consumer base. Application of these two strategies not only get you a better return on paid ads, but also improve your organic traffic. If you wish to create a target audience and buyer persona for your business/brand, connect with Entitledarts We help our clients with the 360-degree digital transformation of their business and amp up their marketing strategies.

 
 
Getting to the top of the search rankings is not a piece of cake, you have to strive every day to get there. Also, it’s not a one-time task but a marathon where you have to be consistent with your optimization, content creation and marketing techniques to retain your top spot. While you focus on the core competency of your business, you can outsource SEO and marketing to a marketing agency for a better return. If you’re looking to gain a top spot on Google or revamp your marketing and branding, connect with us. Entitledarts(https://entitledarts.com) is a leading digital marketing agency based out of Hyderabad, India helping businesses with their 360-degree digital transformation with branding, designing, web/app development and marketing services.

However innovative your product may be, as effective your branding techniques maybe unless you rank on SERPs, your business and your products remain unknown to the world. These days every business has its online presence, however, one that ranks on the top of SERP gets the maximum lucrative results. It is because the maximum of the traffic gets driven by the top organic results and the featured snippets. When you rank higher, you get more traffic, brand awareness and higher chances of conversions. Here we share a few tips using which your website can rank higher on SERP.

 
 
Why is it necessary to rank higher on SERP?

When people search for a query on Google or an alternate search engine, they find their answers on the first page of the SERP among the top three results. More than three fourth of the searchers never goes beyond the first page of results. And it is said that nearly 35% of traffic and clicks get driven by featured snippets which is the 0th position on search results. However, 46% of traffic goes to the search results on the first page. It indicates how beneficial it could be if your website can rank on featured snippets or at least on the first page of SERP.

 
 
TIPS FOR BOOSTING SEARCH RANKINGS
 

1. 1. Populate Your Website with High-Quality Content

   Whenever you search any query on Google, you get your answer immediately within the first or second result. So imagine how efficiently Google ranks the websites such that the user’s intent is clearly understood, providing accurate results. You must also try to comprehend the user’s intent and create high-quality, detailed content. Populate every page on your website with at least 300-400 words and avoid duplicate content on different pages. Also, avoid copying content from other sites as Google does not encourage duplicate content. Your content should engage the users so that it gets shared. You know that backlinks are a crucial ranking factor, and only when you put out highly engaging content, people will link to your content/website.

 

2. 2. Write User-friendly & not Google-friendly Content

   Whatever content is available on your website or blog is ultimately for the end-users and not for the search engines like Google, hence frame the content accordingly. Keywords are essential to help you rank higher on search results and hence, choose the appropriate keywords that you wish your content to rank for. After jotting down the keywords, do not scatter them here and there in your content or do not stuff them unnecessarily. Frame your website content such that the keywords are incorporated naturally and blend well with the content. Meaningless stuffing of keywords sends bad signals to search crawlers about your content. Write your content based on search intent rather than just focusing on keywords and include long-tail keywords as well.

 

3. 3. Perform On-page SEO

   On-page SEO is the optimization technique you apply to your website content. It is equally necessary to optimize and hence make a list of the keywords relevant to your content and for which you want to rank on Google. Out of the keyword list, have one primary keyword included in the title tag, H1 tag and meta description. Include bulleted lists or numbered lists on your content so that it gets ranked for featured snippets.

 

4. 4. Image Optimization

   Most of the searches on Google are image searches. Imagine if your images could rank on Google image search, how much traffic it could bring? Because every time you click on an image to view it, you get directed to the parent website where the image is available, driving traffic to the website. Also, images and infographics convey information in a nutshell and hence are highly shareable ones. But make sure you optimize your images and compress the size of the images such that the page loads faster. Images that occupy much space increase the page loading time. You know it well that people do not stay on pages that load slowly or take longer than 2 seconds to load. Though you compress the images, ensure that image quality does not get distorted.
   Include alt tags for your images. Google or search crawlers do not understand images, but they understand the alt tags and the title tags. Hence do not miss the opportunity and include your keyword in the alt and title tag. Image filename and its storage path are also considered when search crawlers comprehend the context of an image. Hence, give appropriate image file names.

 

5. 5. Link-Building

   You would have heard about the importance of links in SEO. Link building means gaining hyperlinks for your content. When an external website links to your website by placing your website/content link on their website, it is known as a backlink. To gain backlinks for boosting domain authority and search ranking, people try to get backlinks from irrelevant and toxic websites. This is a black hat technique, and search engines do not promote such techniques. Driving links from trusted and relevant places is important as driving backlinks. And you will get links from trusted websites only when your content is impressive and engaging enough. You can get the backlink profile of your competitors from thorough competitor analysis and try approaching the websites that link to your competitor’s website for a similar piece of content.
   Link building not only focuses on generating backlinks, but internal linking is also a crucial component and a deciding factor for your search rankings. Internal linking is inter-linking the various pages of your website. When the pages are interlinked, crawlers index and crawl every page, understanding how the navigation has to be done. The bounce rate gets reduced when people navigate through the other pages of your site.

 

6. 6. Keep Updating your Website

   Google’s algorithm loves the websites that are fresh or regularly updated as it supports new content. Blogging is one of the best ways to keep your website updated now and then. You would have seen that most of the business and brands have a blog on their website. Blogs provide extra information about the brand and its services and also finds a place in the organic searches. Even though you don’t write new blog often, keep updating your older blogs with new points and updates. Businesses and websites that run blogs have more indexed pages and better indexing when compared to the ones that don’t have a blog. Only when the web pages are indexed by search engines, they become visible to the world and also rank higher. Blogs also allow you to incorporate more keywords into your site, and if your blog performs well, your audience will subscribe to your blogs, and you can generate a list of emails for email marketing.

 

7. 7. Mobile Optimization

   Maximum of the searches happen on mobile phones these days. If your site is not optimized for mobile devices, you’re missing out on a bigger opportunity. Make your site mobile-friendly as it is one of the crucial signals for website ranking. Google indexes and crawls your site for its mobile version as you can check on Google search console thus the site needs to be mobile-friendly. Also, reduce the page load speed by keeping things simple and avoid clutter for the mobile version of your site and enable AMP. You can implement caching on your website to keep track of the analytics.

 

8. 8. Social Share

   Social media is not a separate island when you consider search engine optimization. As you know, social media has become mainstream for marketing, advertising and branding, it has also become a crucial factor for your search rankings. Post the link to your website or blog on social media channels to drive traffic from social media. Post engaging content on social media to drive user’s attention and bring them to your site. Platforms like Pinterest and Instagram are mainstream ones to drive increased traffic to your website.

 
 
Getting to the top of the search rankings is not a piece of cake, you have to strive every day to get there. Also, it’s not a one-time task but a marathon where you have to be consistent with your optimization, content creation and marketing techniques to retain your top spot. While you focus on the core competency of your business, you can outsource SEO and marketing to a marketing agency for a better return. If you’re looking to gain a top spot on Google or revamp your marketing and branding, connect with us. Entitledarts(https://entitledarts.com) is a leading digital marketing agency based out of Hyderabad, India helping businesses with their 360-degree digital transformation with branding, designing, web/app development and marketing services.

In recent times, we have witnessed the enormous growth of startups and microbrands. We have seen in recent years the sales of small businesses grow exponentially with the successful utilization of niche marketing and effectively targeted social media campaigns. Nowadays, you cannot always say that the bigger the company, the greater its sales. You can claim that smallest of the businesses with efficient marketing and branding are generating higher sales because consumers trust the brands making direct-to-consumer sales. So, what are these microbrands, and how did they generate so much buzz in recent years? Continue reading the blog to find your answers on micro branding.

 
 

Every business these days wishes to build a brand. You cannot just keep manufacturing products without understanding the needs of the consumer. You cannot set your business goals without analyzing the ideal consumer persona and consumer requirements. And when you implement these customer-centric objectives in your business, you become a brand. In short, a brand is a perspective you build about your company among the audience. Branding is the emotional connect and a bond of trust that you establish with the consumers.

 
 

The recent era is known as the Startup era, as we have seen so many innovative ideas executed into reality in the form of business. Every big company goes through the startup phase in its initial times. During this phase, the organization is confined to a particular geographical location entertaining the local consumers in that location. Now, how do these small organizations become microbrand?

 
 
WHAT IS MICROBRAND?

Microbrands are the direct-to-consumer businesses that eliminate the need for a middleman. They manufacture and ship the products directly to the consumers. These direct-to-consumer businesses tap on the potential of branding and social media marketing to target the niche-specific audience with strategic, efficiently targeted, heavy marketing campaigns. As they are in direct contact with the consumers, a bond of trust is established between the consumers and the organization. This bond of trust builds a positive perspective of the organization for the consumers, thus forming a brand. Because of the limited target market of the organization, they get referred to as microbrands.

 
 
WHY ARE MICROBRANDS GAINING SO MUCH IMPORTANCE?
 

1. 1. Microbrands are focused on Selective Group of Audience

   Trying to influence 1000 people, in the beginning, is a bit daunting and a dicey approach rather than trying to attract 100 people. Microbrands do not randomly market to anyone and everyone in the world. Their marketing campaigns are well structured to grab the interest of only a smaller group of audience who are most likely to be the consumers. Now they repeatedly target them with hyped-marketing campaigns that keep showing ads to these people on social media, music directories, search engines and probably everywhere on the Internet.

 

2. 2. Microbrands bring better ROI

   You know how expensive PPC ad campaigns have become in recent times. Targeting a wider group audience via any marketing technique proves costly, and when the leads-to-conversion ratio is poor, your expenses go in vain. In contrastingly, microbrands target a smaller audience via efficiently targeted niche-specific keywords that result in increased conversion ratio and increased ROI.

 

3. 3. Microbrands Connect well with the Consumers

   When dealing with direct-to-consumers, microbrands understand their consumer pain points well and strive hard to bring them solutions. Every feedback of every consumer is crucial for them, and consumers also develop trust when they buy directly from the organization instead of a middleman. This trust evolves a brand out of the business.

 

4. 4. Microbrands Have a Strong Digital Presence & Higher Engagement Rate

   Microbrands are not the ones with huge buildings, infrastructure, thousands of employees and enormous market value. These are the ones who have just initiated, and their equity is their image on digital media. They majorly depend on Google ratings and reviews to influence more consumers. Their social media pages may not have millions of followers, but the engagement is high compared to other big pages.

 
 
WHY IS THE ENGAGEMENT RATE HIGHER ON MICROBRANDS INSTAGRAM PAGES?

Instagram shows your post to a certain percentage of the audience based on the algorithm. It is shown to the followers who usually interact with your post. Now consider a page that has thousands of followers, but if the engagement rate is low on their posts, their reach decreases. A lower engagement rate hinders the reach of content to a bigger audience, thus limiting their chances of appearing on explore page. Hence the number of followers does not matter much as the engagement rate on your posts.
Can you interact with everyone who engages with your content when you have, say, some hundred thousand followers? That’s probably not possible unless you have a great team who is 101% dedicated to your page. Now, if you consider there are some thousand followers on your page, you can conveniently interact with everyone who engages with your content and keep your engagement rate higher. This is the reason why even the big brands are actively hiring micro-influencers on Instagram.

 
 
STRATEGIES FOR INSTAGRAM MARKETING OF MICROBRANDS

Instagram is one of the prime social media space to build a brand and attract leads. It’s no more an entertainment-only app rather it has become a major marketing channel for businesses. Now that you know Instagram is a great platform for microbrands, here are a few strategies for how microbrands can make the most out of Instagram.

 

1. 1. Optimize Your Profile

   Your profile gives the first impression of your brand. You cannot afford to leave a dull first impression on the audience. Choose a username that best describes your work and have a relatable profile picture. Mention the services & products you deal with in your bio. Do not forget to include a few keywords in the bio along with the website link where you want to lead the visitors.

 

2. 2. Make Optimum Use of Highlights

   When random visitors visit your page, they will not scroll down on all n number of posts you have on your profile. You only have a few seconds to influence a visitor, or he/she will leave. So the first step is to write a good bio for your page. Secondly, display the best of your works in the highlights segment of your profile which influences the visitors in one go.

 

3. 3. Design Posts that Bring Interaction

   Instagram is a visual platform, and you must deploy good designs to leverage the audience’s interest. Write captions for the posts that initiate interaction with the audience. It will increase your reach to other people on Instagram.

 

4. 4. Keep Your Engagement Rate Higher

   Do not fail to engage with every single person who has interacted with your content. It makes them feel their importance, and they would return in future.

 

5. 5. Use Hashtags that Boost Your Reach

   Like keywords on search engines, hashtags are the magnets that pull the audience on Instagram. But just like keywords do not bring god results without an efficient SEO strategy, the mere usage of random hashtags won’t bring you traction. Analyze and use a specific set of hashtags that brings people to your post.

 

6. 6. Utilize Every Segment of Instagram Effectively

   Whether it’s feed posts, IGTV, stories, Reels or Guides, utilize every segment of Instagram to make your page discoverable on the explore page. Explore page could be regarded as the SERP results of Instagram. Finding a place on this page boosts your reach.

 

7. 7. Strategically leverage Instagram Ads

   Instagram ads play a vital role in social media marketing. As people of all ages are using this platform in huge numbers, posting ads on this platform can boost your brand visibility. Design ads with stunning visuals and display them to the right people.
    
   Use the Platform as a Medium to Connect with your Consumers
   Utilize this platform to build a friendly bond with your consumers and try to understand their requirements and pain points. Conduct timely giveaways, contests, offer discounts to keep them entertained. Direct Messaging is one other potential way to boost your conversion rates.

 
 
Instagram can be a game-changer for every microbrand. If you utilize the platform constructively and exploit the benefits it offers, your brand value increases exponentially. If you wish to tap on the potential of social media marketing or Instagram Marketing specific for your microbrand, connect with us on https://entitledarts.com We also help organizations evolve a brand out of their business.