2 Most Important Steps to Grow Your Instagram Page

April 24, 2017 by Nicholas Bosch

Many businesses find Instagram confusing or a waste of time. However, with 600 million monthly users it remains an extremely popular, visually centered social platform that is fun, fast and easy to use. If your business isn’t using the platform or is having a hard time building a following, this post is for you. Here are the 2 most important steps your company needs to take to grow an engaged audience ready to buy your product or service.

Effectively Use Hashtags

This is the most important element of a successful Instagram page, especially in the beginning when your company page may not have many followers. Hashtags are simply keywords that relate to the picture being posted or your company, industry, etc. When using hashtags, it is important to include ones that are active and have many people using and viewing them. For example, using your company’s name as a hashtag will not be very effective in getting your brand in front of user’s eyes unless you’re a behemoth like Coca-Cola or Walmart. Instead, substitute it with a popular hashtag within your industry like #searchengineoptimization or #interiordesign. A simple search within the Instagram app will show you the best hashtags people are using and viewing within your industry. Try searching “Web Development” in the search bar and going over to “tags”. Instagram will show you how many times that hashtag has been used, and other hashtags similar to the one being searched. Another very important tactic is to use the maximum of 30 hashtags Instagram allows you to post with a photo. The more hashtags you use, the more channels there will be for people to find your brand on the app. A good way of not seeming “spammy” when posting 30 hashtags is to type them in the comment section of the picture or video once posted. By putting the hashtags in the comments section they are essentially hidden from view on your followers’ feeds but still actively pushing your posts to more channels through Instagram. Experiment with different hashtags to find out which ones fit best with your company!

Visual Consistency

Instagram is a very visually focused platform, obviously. The most successful pages have a visual consistency when you look through them. They use the same font, same quality photographs, and same color palettes to add a sense of unity to the page. If your company isn’t doing this, you’re not setting yourself up to gain followers. For example, let’s pretend Greg is browsing Instagram and sees a great looking photograph; he is naturally going to be inclined to check out the page that posted the photo. If he goes to the page and it looks like a cluttered mess with many different colors and different quality photos, Greg is less likely to then follow the page. If he lands on the page and sees a sense of unity with a consistent theme throughout, it will display professionalism and most likely lead to a follow. Focus on coming up with a color palette that fits your company and always post high-quality photos to keep customers coming back for more!

Take a look at our Instagram page to see what we’re talking about in action @brewcitymarketing. Interested in one on one help? Give us a call at 414-208-0700 or fill out our contact form at brewcitymarketing.com.

4 Reasons People Are Unfollowing Your Brand

April 19, 2017 by Nicholas Bosch

When it comes to social media, every business wants to have an engaged audience and extensive reach. You work hard to get your brand in front of potential customers so likes, comments, and shares feel great. Contrastingly, a lack of likes, comments, and shares makes you feel like you’re doing everything wrong. If people are unfollowing your brand on social media, there’s a good reason why. Check out our top four reasons why users may be unfollowing your brand.

#4 Your Content is Too Boring

Buzzfeed and Factl conducted a survey with 900 social media users to help better understand what companies should avoid. 21% of respondents stated they would unfollow a brand if the content was repetitive and boring. Are you keeping up with the latest marketing trends and taking advantage of new social media platform features? If not, reconsider your content strategy.

#3 You’re Not Engaging Your Followers

It’s never been easier for brands to interact with consumers and vice versa. Social media is a two-way street, so engage your following by asking questions, liking posts, offering help, or leaving a meaningful comment or tip. Portraying yourself as an entity rather than a business could exponentially boost your social success.

#2 Your Brand Image and Social Media Image Don’t Align

Law firms don’t post memes and photographers don’t post financial reports. Although those might be extreme examples–you probably get the point. Focus on posting content that engages the type of people you want following your pages and buying your product or service. If you’re fun, then keep it fun. If you want to be serious, then focus on a serious tone and serious topics. In short? Don’t try to branch into social segments that differ from the image you want to portray.

#1 You’re Promoting Yourself Too much

It’s easy to blast out promotions all the time on your social feeds but don’t forget that social media is just that, social. No one likes the boastful person and the same goes for business. Try posting some fun content that still focuses on your brand identity but makes people want to follow and engage with you. While it’s essential to highlight achievements and what you do as a company, make a point to balance those posts with more fun or personal posts.

Need more social media advice? We’d love to help out. Call us anytime at 414-208-0700 or fill out our contact form. We offer a full suite of social media management services to help your business succeed today.

How To Know If Your Social Media Strategy Is Working

November 16, 2016 by April Bautista

So – you’ve crafted a social media strategy, created quality content people will love, and optimized your content for social platforms. You’ve implemented your strategy with high hopes. But how can you be sure if it’s working?

While determining social media “success” is not an exact science, there are a few indicators that may help you determine if your strategy is indeed succeeding. Here are just a few of them.

Website Traffic

Website traffic is a quick and easy indicator of social media success. If your analytics tells you that your social media accounts are bringing visitors to your website, then it’s a clear and obvious sign that what you’re doing is working. However, keep in mind that not all web traffic is equal. Check to see where your visitors are coming from, and more importantly, what they are doing as a result of their visit.

Conversions

Conversions refers to turning your website’s visitors into action takers. In other words, how many people purchased something, downloaded a file, signed up for a webinar, or took some other action after visiting your site? Getting conversions should be the main goal of your social media strategy. If your strategy is not bringing traffic to your website and converting visitors into those ever-elusive action takers, then it may be time to recalibrate your strategy.

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics include amount of likes, shares, retweets or favorites your posts receive on social media. Though vanity metrics are often criticized for giving a false picture of success, they can be quite useful. For example, vanity metrics allow you to quickly and easily see which posts are working and which aren’t. Additionally, if a new social campaign sees a big boost in likes or retweets, it’s a clear sign you’re doing something right and helping to grow your audience.

Engagement

Take a quick look through your posts. Are people commenting? Are people tagging their friends and family in the comments? Are they sharing your content? In other words, is your audience engaging with your posts? If so, then it’s a good sign that you’re not simply throwing content in the void with the hope that someone takes notice and listens. Engagement is important to building trust and increasing awareness of your brand and can be a reliable indicator of whether or not your social media strategy is working.

Of course, social media “success” is a broad subject and almost impossible to base on any one indicator. We recommend looking at these indicators as a whole to determine if your strategy is working for you. Let us know in the comments if you have other useful ways to measure social media success!

How to Optimize Your Content for Social Media

September 21, 2016 by April Bautista

We often hear about website and search engine optimization, but social media optimization (SMO) has not quite reached the same level of importance or urgency. But make no mistake: optimizing your website’s content for social media is an important step in building brand authority and increasing awareness of your business or products.

Steps for Optimizing Your Content

Follow these steps for optimizing your site’s content for social media.

Prepare your site for sharing on social media channels – The first step to optimizing your content for social media is making sure your site itself is shareable. One way to accomplish this is by setting up a blog on your site which would allow users to link back to you. Once your blog is set up, take it to the next level by making tagging and bookmarking easy for users. Connect to bookmarking sites, social news sites, and social event sites.
Add social networking features to your site or blog – Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn offer free widgets that you can deploy on your site to connect users back to those same social networks. These widgets allow users to take polls, share media, and otherwise interact with the social network without ever having to leave your site.
Create content that people will want to share – While there are certainly no guarantees online, it’s important to create content people will want not only want to read but share. You can create shareable content by sticking closely to these three general guidelines: keep your topics simple and focused, keep your sense of humor, and only publish content that’s credible, not obvious click bait.
Discover what content is popular with your audience – Seems simple enough, but the pages that get the most likes, shares and comments are the pages your audience is most interested in. Spend time analyzing the types of content that attract readers and emulate their formula. Knowing your audience will allow you to increase those likes and shares and build brand awareness organically.

Curious to learn more about social media optimization and how a sound strategy can help increase traffic to your site? We can help. Call us today at 414-208-0700.

Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Policy

March 2, 2016 by Brew City Marketing

If you’re actively trying to build your business’ social media presence (which you should be!), it can be tempting to encourage your employees to champion your business and just let them loose online. Unfortunately, much like other highly traveled highways, the road to social media mishaps is paved with plenty of good intentions.

Before one of your well-intentioned employees posts something online that could damage your profit margins, consider putting a social media policy in place. Doing so can protect your business in multiple ways, and it can prevent unnecessary misunderstandings between yourself and your staff as to how your business should be presented via social media.

Three of the biggest reasons to consider implementing a social media policy for your business include:

Protecting Your Reputation

It’s tempting to think that one little embarrassing tweet or Facebook post won’t be noticed, but all it takes is for one particularly mortifying post or image to go viral and be seen by thousands (if not tens of thousands) of people. Protecting your business reputation online is about more than just dealing with bad reviews. Not only can you bet that your competitors would love to share your most embarrassing moments with their own followers, there are plenty of websites devoted to exposing embarrassing moments with as many people as they can. (Don’t believe us? Google “dumbest tweets ever” and marvel at the returns!)

Avoiding False Statements

Do you sometimes feel like you’re playing Telephone at work? You know, where you communicate something to a co-worker but when you hear what you thought you communicated five people later, the message is something completely different? Things get miscommunicated constantly in business environments, but you can control how many worms get out of that can by making sure your staff knows what they should and shouldn’t say online. Having a good social media policy can help protect you and your employees from inadvertently making false statements about your business’ policies, offers, and stances.

Building Your Brand

A social media policy that helps your staff adhere to your brand values will help build your brand value, which is a far-too-often overlooked benefit. Studies have shown again and again that having good brand value increases how reliable and trustworthy the public sees your business, which is always a good thing.

Have the policy but not a plan? Give us a call at 414-208-0700 or fill out our contact form today to see how our Milwaukee internet marketing team can help you build a strong social media strategy.

What To Do About Negative Reviews

November 17, 2015 by Brew City Marketing

When you’re building a business, every online review counts. And, the smaller your business, the more painful each negative review feels (and looks). So, how should you cope with bad online reviews and negative social messaging? Here are a few tips:

Have a plan in place to catch issues early.
If you get a bad review, you should address it as soon as possible. That means having a plan in place to detect bad reviews quickly. Whether that’s using a reputation monitoring service or taking the time to inventory all of your social media accounts on a weekly basis, reputation monitoring should be part of your social media checklist.
Respond promptly and politely.
The last thing that you want to do is get into a “shouting” match with a disgruntled customer online. While it may be hard not to take an insulting review or social media message personally, it’s exactly what you need to do. Instead, remember to empathize, apologize, and try to find a solution. For instance, phrases like, “I can understand why that would frustrate you” and “I’m sorry” may feel like eating a little crow, but they can go a long way to defusing a potentially ugly exchange.
Control the conversation.
As any good politician can tell you, you can’t control what questions are asked of you but you can control how you answer. When it comes to responding to a bad online review, it’s essentially the same thing. Sure, you can’t control the complaint, but you can control the trajectory of your response. (Or, as Forbes calls it, you can “flip the script.”)

For instance, if you got a bad review for a delayed gift shipment, instead of just saying “So sorry, but you should have expected delays around the holidays,” you could instead respond with something like, “I’m sorry to hear that it took so long for your purchase to get to you. I’m proud to say that 99% of the time, our shipments arrive on time, but sometimes there are circumstances beyond our control that delay shipment.”
Take the conversation offline.
If the nature of the review lends itself to a more personal intervention, ask if you can contact the reviewer privately via email or phone to get more information and to more adequately address his or her situation. This can sometimes help keep potential escalations defused and out of the public eye. Plus, if necessary, it can allow you the opportunity to offer a small gift to appease a complainer without having to make the exchange public knowledge.
Get the complaint removed.
Although this is not typically an option, in rare circumstances review sites may allow you to have untrue or particularly egregious complaints removed. For instance, Yelp’s content guidelines call out threats, harassment, lewd language and hate speech as being content violations. So, if any of those are in a review that you feel unfairly targets your business, you can ask to have it removed for ToS (terms of service) and/or content violations. In any event, it can’t hurt to try, right?
Get positive.
If you have a system in place to maximize the number of positive reviews you get, the less visible the occasional bad review will look. Not sure how to get more good reviews? Ask! And ask often! Sending a thank you email after work is complete or asking for a review via your sales receipt are two easy ways to ask for reviews when customers are most likely to give them.

Need some other ideas on ways to get more good reviews? Call 414-208-0700 or fill out our contact form today to see how our Milwaukee internet marketing team can help. We offer a full suite of reputation monitoring and social media management services.

Do You Need a Social Media Marketing Plan?

August 15, 2015 by Brew City Marketing

When you’re allocating your media dollars, deciding whether or not you should include a social media marketing plan can be tough. On the one hand, according to a 2013 Gallup survey, 35% of American consumers’ purchasing decisions are influenced to some degree by social media. But then again, that same survey revealed that 62% of Americans don’t think that their purchasing decisions are influenced at all by social media. So, what’s a smart marketer to do?

Although there are no firm answers, the best way to decide whether or not you should have a social media strategy in place may be to think about your customers and your business. Surveys show that the top three reasons that folks use social media is to connect with friends and family (94%), to share things they know with others (53%), and to find information about a company or organization (40%). Other reasons that people use social media: To find user reviews or product information (29%), to write product reviews (20%), and to build their own reputations or brands (17%). So, can you see your customer base’s social media habits intersecting with that of your business?

Obviously, regardless of what business you’re in, having a strong, positive social media presence is likely to help you when it comes to those people who are scouring social media for company information. But, what about the things you sell online? According to a 2013 study, 43% of users claimed to have purchased a product after sharing it or liking it on social media platforms Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. So, if you sell a product or service that is likely to be shared via social media, setting aside part of your annual marketing budget for social media could be a really smart way to grow your business and improve your online presence at the same time.

Finally, another important point of consideration is how likely your customer base is to use Facebook to connect with you or share information about your company. A surprising new Facebook study has found that FB now drives 25% of all web traffic. Yes, all. So, if you’re in a product or service niche that is well-suited to Facebook sharing, you should seriously consider having some sort of FB marketing plan in place, even if you don’t put much time into other social media platforms.

Thinking about firming up your social media presence? For more information about our Milwaukee social media and online marketing services, call 414-208-0700 or fill out our contact form today.

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Good SEO Means Having a Solid Social Strategy

August 4, 2015 by Brew City Marketing

Oddly enough, both small and large companies often have problems getting their digital marketing strategies to effectively integrate SEO, social media and content marketing. More often than not, this is because key stakeholders don’t understand how these three pillars of effective online marketing work together. Have one or two but not all three, and an online strategy that could sizzle will fizzle.

Don’t believe me? Consider this:

Company A invests in killer content that positions their business as industry experts who have unique insights that they know their competitors can’t match. Awesome! But then they don’t invest in an equally killer social campaign to promote their content, so instead of getting hundreds of leads, they get a handful.

Company B puts together an SEO attack plan that targets critical keywords and phrases that should crush their competition. Yes! But then they don’t back up their plan with a sound social strategy that gets SERP-boosting backlinks from social media must-haves like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Company C creates a smart, fun social media campaign that rates a 10 on the click-bait scale. It’s so effective, in fact, that 50% of people exposed to it click through to their site. Boom! But the campaign ultimately fails because they didn’t invest in equally rockin’ content for their website, so none of the clickthroughs turns into leads.

What do these companies all have in common? They all had digital marketing strategies that failed to pay off because although they each had great parts, they didn’t consider how each part impacts the whole.

The Online Marketing Circle of Life

There are three steps that nearly every successful digital marketing campaign follows:

Create ► Optimize ► Promote

Create high-quality content that is relevant and will resonate with your target audience.
Optimize your content using sound SEO strategy. (No black-hat tactics!)
Promote your content using social media.

What do you do after that? The same thing. Do these three things repeatedly and consistently, and your digital marketing can do great things. If you’ve got great, optimized content, social media can help you both get the exposure it deserves and build up a solid backlink portfolio. Plus, great content paired with the exposure that social media offers can position you or your company as an industry expert and thought leader.

Why You Can’t Forget the Social

For a long time, just having the right keywords at the right ratios was pretty much enough to give websites the SERP results needed for success, but that’s no longer the case. And for those who are knee-deep in SEO and the technical aspects of search engine optimization, it can be easy to forget how important social is in the equation. Before you dismiss social as irrelevant to SEO, remember:

Social media creates backlinks, which is good news for SEO.
Google factors in social media influence, which is based on social signals like Facebook posts, shares and Tweets.
If you’ve got great content, social media can help you do the “heavy lifting” of promoting it and getting it out there long after you’ve stopped actively promoting it.

Ready to add social media to your digital marketing mix? Call us at 414-208-0700 or fill out our contact form today for a free consultation!

Are You Struggling to Get Customer Reviews?

August 26, 2014 by Brew City Marketing

If you’re struggling to find ways to get customer reviews online, you’re not alone. There are plenty of good businesses that offer excellent service but still lack product and customer reviews. Unfortunately for them, this lack of online customer feedback could be hurting their search rankings, making it even less likely that potential customers will find their services on the web.

5 Ways to Get Reviews Online

Here are five tried-and-true ways to get more reviews from your customers:

Ask! The single most effective way to get more reviews from customers is to ask for them. And, while the best time to ask for a review is right after your customer has had a positive experience, it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask whenever you have contact with a customer.

Businesses that know how to get reviews know that the best thing to do is to set up a customer feedback system that involves following up each customer contact with the opportunity to leave feedback. For instance, if a customer buys your product or service there’s an opportunity to include a note that says, “Did your experience with us meet your expectations? We hope so, and we’d love to hear about it. Please visit Yelp or Google+ to leave a review and let us know how we did.” Then, make it easy for folks to follow through by including links to your online review web pages and profiles.
Tell your customers how to leave reviews for you. Just because you know how to leave an online review for a business doesn’t necessarily mean that your customers do. In fact, depending on your demographic, your customers may not even know that leaving feedback online is an option!

If you want to get more reviews online, tell your customers what they need to do and give them direct links to the review websites. If you make leaving feedback easy and they’ve had a great experience with your service, they’re more likely to leave feedback online (which will encourage other people to do the same).
Respond to feedback. Responding to customer reviews is critical to getting more customer reviews online. Everyone wants to feel heard, and responding to online reviews lets your customers know that you’re taking the time to listen and hear what they have to say. And, if you get a negative review, respond publicly and privately. This shows the world that you care and want to “make it right,” and it shows the individual that you really mean it.
Consider using a 3rd-party customer feedback tool or service to get more reviews from customers. There are a number of 3rd-party customer feedback tools and services available that can help make it easier to request testimonials, get customers to leave reviews online, encourage customers to share their positive experiences, and monitor public review websites. In fact, just as important as getting those reviews is having some system for monitoring them so that you can take timely action should you get a bad one.
Have a complete online business profile listed with as many directories as possible. By having your small business listed online with all of the relevant business directories, you’ll give customers the ability to find you—both for buying your goods or services, and for leaving feedback once they’ve done business with you. The big online review sites (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yelp) are great places to start, and don’t forget professional social media sites like LinkedIn (especially if you provide B2B or professional consulting services).

If you’re eager to find new ways to get more reviews online from customers, or if you need a customer feedback service that will help you get reviews, respond to customer feedback, and monitor your online customer reviews, contact us or visit our website. We can help you build a Milwaukee internet marketing strategy that will help.

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