Both new and established brands use social media for a variety of reasons - to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and boost sales. Given the number of social media platforms available these days, building a brand on social media may seem like a daunting task. However, that is hardly the case. Using social media to connect with your audience and grow your brand is not as difficult as it might seem at first.

Whether you have just begun or have been active on social media platforms for quite some time now, you can always follow some social media marketing tips to grow your audience and move ahead of your competitors. These tips also help you in times when coming up with A+ social media content can become a challenge on an everyday basis.

Social Media Marketing Tips For Every Brand

The constantly evolving social media compels marketers to shift their strategies in order to keep up with the trends and updates. However, these tips will prove useful if you are looking to beef up your social media accounts at any given point of time:

1. Focus on Visual Content

If you decide to invest in visual content, it will indeed be a step in the right direction. On average, retweets featuring pictures are more likely to gain higher views and clicks as compared to text-only posts. 49% of marketers use visual content on websites and blogs, followed by Facebook and Instagram. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you focus on visual content.

Now you may wonder how to use visual content on social media. Let us give you some examples:

You can post infographics that shed light on your industry on LinkedIn or post a high-speed video featuring a tour of your office on Facebook.

2. Consider Influencers To Promote Your Service Or Product

First, let’s look at some of the latest statistics for a clearer picture on the subject:

1. Social media influencers influence Gen Z the most.
2. 40% of Twitter users purchased something because an influencer recommended it.

Need we say more?

Investing in influencers is an excellent route you can take to generate sales. In this day and age, young audiences listen to their most-loved influencers. In case you have a younger audience, hunt for influencers in your industry and consider partnering with them.

3. Create Engagement With Interactive Content

Interactive content is a great means to easily connect with your audience or inform them more about your product. For instance, you can conduct Instagram Q&A or Twitter polls to engage with your audience. Essentially, interactive content is any content a user can click through, click on, play with, or answer. This type of content delights your audience and gets them involved. Some interactive content ideas include quizzes, contests, and interactive videos.

Tip: For more ideas on how to engage with your audience, you can always check what your competitors are doing.

4. Provide a Behind-The-Scenes Experience With Stories

Stories offer an amazing opportunity to market to Instagram and Facebook users with unique, snappy content. It may come as a surprise to you, but one-third of the most-viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses. Keeping this data in mind, we highly recommend that you use Stories to share some behind-the-scenes content of your business.

Remember, consumers use social media to engage with their favorite brands. Therefore, when you give your loyal following an exclusive sneak-peek inside the working of your business, you make them feel a part of your group.

5. Blend Your Brand Into Your Social Media Marketing

Once you establish your brand, think about incorporating it into your social strategy. Do the following to blend your brand in your social media marketing:

• Add your logo to posts
• Include a company hashtag
• Highlight your employees

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Check out this branding from a company named Metter Media. When you scroll through the company's homepage on Instagram, you can easily spot the company colors, know who they represent, and get an idea about their team as well.

6. Invest in Video Content

With the speedy growth of YouTube, IGTV, and Facebook Live, users are consuming more and more video content. 49% of marketers say that video helps in engaging their audiences. 52% of marketers state that video helps them create trust among their potential customers. Keeping these stats in mind, investing in video content is a social media marketing tip that we highly recommend.

Tip: Read these stats before you begin to produce video content:

• 81% of marketers state their videos perform better with music.
• 68% of individuals will watch a complete video if it is a minute in length or even smaller.
• 84% of customers make a purchase after seeing an explainer video.

7. Join Communities

It is important to switch your focus to smaller communities within social networks. LinkedIn Groups, Twitter Chats, and Facebook Groups provide excellent opportunities to connect with like-minded people and companies within your niche. When you participate in these communities, you get to interact with your most passionate audiences and establish your business as an authority. Pretty cool, isn't it?

As a first step, search for communities linked with your industry on social media platforms you stay active on. Next, become an active member of these communities. You can even create your very own group around your brand as well!

8. Establish A Two-way Line of Communication on Social Media

Apart from posting relevant and supreme quality content, ensure you keep an eye on all the social media platforms you are using to engage with your audience. We recommend that you do the following for your social media presence to represent a two-way line of communication:

• Provide answers to questions that come up on your handles or posts.
• If you see users talking about your product or brand, don’t hesitate to chime in and add value.
• Give a prompt reply to individuals who mention you.
• Thank individuals who have shared your content.

Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Must Avoid

If the latest social media statistics are to be believed, there are 4.59 billion social media users around the world in 2022. These figures prove that social media marketing is a powerful tool to expose your business to a massive audience. Although most businesses are aware of this fact, only a few succeed in correctly using social media marketing.

For your social media campaign to show excellent results, there are some mistakes you need to avoid. Take a look:

1. Not Having a Social Media Marketing Plan

Even today, many companies fail to create a prompt social media marketing plan. They just keep posting things on social media without having a real plan in place.

Social media marketing is something that should be taken seriously. And for that, we recommend that you make a list of specific objectives you wish to achieve, make a budget, and create a plan of action that you can easily follow.

2. Choosing The Wrong Tone

Brands should definitely know this one important thing - the way a brand behaves on Instagram or Twitter is subject to strict scrutiny. For instance, if you choose a brand voice that is too official, you may sound boring to social media users. Or, if you try to appeal to the users by being offensive, it will be considered a much greater social media sin!

So before you start posting on Instagram or begin tweeting, dedicate some time to figure out the tone you are going to set. It should be consistent across all your social media posts, a reflection of your brand, and should easily connect with your audience.

3. Choosing to Remain Silent in The Comment Section

The Instagram algorithm likes you when you have a lot of comments on your posts. The same holds true about Facebook as well. So, ensure you don't stay silent in the comment section.

Leaving comments also gives you another benefit- it helps you create a connection with your followers. When they notice that you care enough to reply to their comments, they will develop an even deeper liking for your brand.

4. Promoting Yourself A lot

On social media, you should be sociable. If all you do is promote your content on social media, a lot of users will start disliking your business, decreasing your following. Promoting your brand is crucial, but we recommend that you be subtle about it.

5. Deleting Negative Comments

You may have come across a situation where a brand got a negative comment, then engaged in an ugly and lengthy conversation, and then deleted the entire thread. This is a route that a brand should never take.

If you receive a negative comment, we suggest you be objective and show your audience that you have nothing to hide. If the person who wrote the negative comment has highlighted your wrongdoing, thank them and make it a point to improve. If they are toxic in their comment, we recommend you just ignore them.

Image Source: Starbucks Instagram Page

6. Not Creating Content People Would Want to Engage With

The time you invest in creating content for your social media channels will be a complete waste if no one shares or comments on them. Therefore, take out some time to develop content that individuals would relate to and want to engage with.

In case your updates are not getting any reactions, dedicate some time to re-evaluate the social media marketing approach you have taken.

7. Treating Every Social Media Account As Same

Every social media platform differs from the other. That’s why you must only speak the language the users speak on a particular social networking site ‌you wish to grow on. Learn the language of the platforms you have chosen for your brand and speak to the users in a language they will understand.

For this, we recommend ‌you learn how different social media platforms work to leverage the opportunities they have on offer. Each platform offers its own set of unique opportunities that you can use for increasing exposure and growing your business.

The Bottom Line

To sum up, the above-mentioned tips provide you with relevant ways to upgrade your content, organize your page, and help grow your target audience. Also, the mistakes we discussed are the ones you need to avoid to succeed with social media marketing.

In the end, remember that social media, when properly optimized, offers the greatest path to brands to reach more customers and increase their sales. As your followership increases and validates your services or products, your social proof increases, and more individuals get drawn to your business, boosting your sales.

Now that you are armed with some of the best social media marketing tips, are you ready to optimize your marketing strategy with them? Which one of the tips are you definitely going to implement?

Listen Up: DashClicks' white label social media posting service helps agencies save up on the cost involved in paying for the workforce that manages the social needs of their clients. The white label unified solution (platform + dashboard) simplifies things by automating client onboarding, fulfillment, and reporting.

Online marketers have access to a full range of website data and analytics, which come from various resources such as Google Analytics, SEO tools, and other platforms.

The analytics data will greatly help if you use the appropriate metrics to get the correct insights. You should drive your primary data from different marketing channels.

For example, you should find the following information.

• Your best-performing posts on social media and how people land on your website.
• The top landing pages that are converting the most customers.
• The areas of improvement and where to put in more efforts to optimize your campaigns.

In this article, we will define data-driven marketing, its scope, and its benefits. Additionally, we will provide some tips and how to use data-driven marketing to the fullest to improve your digital marketing and overall profits.

Case Study of a Winter Apparel Store

A winter apparel store selling clothes worldwide was struggling with the most suitable type of advertising medium and timing. As the product was used during a specific time of the year, they realized they were wasting a lot of money advertising all year round. Finding the best time to start advertising campaigns in different areas of the world was essential.

Off-season sales happen only in certain products that are considered expensive, and these purchases are carefully planned. Most people don't buy FMCG products far ahead of time.

Unplanned and heavy online advertising resulted in reduced profit margins. They needed to identify the best time to run their advertisements in different locations worldwide.

For this, the company created two datasets. In the first dataset, they created a custom dashboard that included information about the purchase time and the buyer's location.

They created another dashboard to provide the information related to the weather data for those specific locations where their customers were mainly based.

Analyzing these data sets quickly led to information about the ideal time of the year when people started planning to buy their winter outfits.

When they started using this information to plan their online advertising, it significantly reduced their advertising cost. Apart from the advertising cost, the store could better manage its stock levels and drive a higher ROI for the company.

It means less warehouse inventory, less maintenance, and better delivery control.

It is impossible to achieve without conducting a data-driven analysis. A data-driven approach is also effective in analyzing consumer habits and purchase patterns. It helps you plan and implement effective strategies to boost sales and decrease expenditure.

What Is Data-Driven Marketing?

Businesses use data-driven marketing, leveraging the power of data and analytics to make better marketing decisions to improve overall profits. It also helps you to enhance your branding, customer experience, and online visibility. The key to successful online marketing is personalized communication for different customer segments.

Data-driven marketing also helps you measure results, optimize campaigns, and quickly take corrective measures.

What are the Benefits of Data-Driven Marketing?

Data-driven marketing can improve your ROI and overall business performance. But apart from it, it has multiple benefits. It helps you to segment your customers, target their messaging and personalize your campaign.

When you make informed decisions, your marketing becomes laser-sharp, achieving much better results.

The other benefits are as follows.

• It helps you better utilize your time and resources, which is crucial to your success in any business.
• Data-driven marketing helps you to understand your customers better. It is the key to improving marketing campaigns with better targeting and effective strategies.
• It also helps you to identify new markets and growth opportunities. By analyzing the purchasing habits and current trends, you can quickly identify new markets and the need for new products to bridge the gap in the market.

What Is a Data-Driven Marketing Agency?

A data-driven marketing agency uses data to make its critical marketing decisions, including the selection of the most effective marketing channels and messaging to use for your target audience.

When you hire a data-driven marketing agency, you are confident that your hard-earned money is not wasted on experimentation. Your campaigns are fully optimized, and your marketing strategies are incredibly effective. It also ensures you hit the right audience with your messages instead of doing guesswork and praying for your campaigns to work.

A data-driven marketing agency ensures your clients receive value for their marketing spending.

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How to Do Data-Driven Marketing?

In a data-driven marketing environment, data is analyzed before making any decision.

To effectively implement a data-driven marketing campaign, you need the following things.

1. A Robust Reporting Tool

To use customer data, you need to have a proper collection and storage strategy. It would help if you had a robust reporting tool for that.

Pro Tip: You can use the DashClicks InstaReports tool to get the best insights and tips to improve your campaign. InstaReports is an automated tool that can gather information from numerous third-party tools and platforms and generate a report in seconds.

2. Data Analysis Skills

Raw data is of no use. You need valuable insights and discover trends; for this, you must have advanced analytical skills.

3. Ability to Take Action Based on the Insights

You need the necessary skills and experience to take the required action based on these insights. So, you can create new marketing campaigns and tweak your existing campaigns and approach.

4. Willingness to Take Risks and Experiment

Data-driven marketing is inspired by innovation and a willingness to learn and take risks. If you're not ready to experiment with new things and explore unchartered territories, it will not work. There are endless possibilities, and you should be willing to take calculated risks.

How to Analyze Digital Marketing Data?

When you analyze data, you know what works and what doesn't. So, phase out the wasteful or weak strategies and replace them with the most effective ones.

Data-driven marketing provides you with the right kind of information that you can use to make your campaigns more effective. There are many ways you can use your data to get valuable insights.

Here are a few such tips:

1. Optimize Your Website for Bounce Rate and New Keywords

The success of your website largely depends on how you optimize it for new keywords and the bounce rate. Google does not like web pages with a high bounce rate as it indicates that the visitor didn't find the information interesting and relevant. Your keyword choice can also be a sign of poor targeting and substandard content.

That's why you should continuously experiment with new keywords and trends to create the content your audience is looking for. You can use Google Analytics to find out your bounce rate.

A high bounce rate often indicates that users' search intent is not fulfilled, so avoid using wrong keywords at any cost. Using relevant keywords is the key to success.

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2. Improve Your Content Quality

If you are not getting enough traffic on your web pages, your content quality is not up to the mark. Make sure your content offers value and addresses the pain points of your customers.

You can effectively use marketing data to check whether your content is providing value to your audience or not. There are several metrics that you can use to check the engagement levels.

3. Use Audience Analytics to Target the Right Audience

A data-driven organization is always interested in audience analytics because this is the only way to attract the right people and spend your money on the proper channels.

You can use social media analytics i.e., Facebook and Twitter analytics, because many people engage with you on social media. Social media analytics also gives you ample information about your audience, including the demographics and habits of your customers.

It also includes the information related to the products and the content your audience is interested in.

Pro Tip: You can use DashClicks' social media dashboards to get the desired information.

4. Take a Local Approach if NeededĀ

Switch to location analytics if location-based marketing is essential for you. Location-based advertising and marketing also provide you with an edge over your rivals.

If a large portion of your audience lives in a specific location, you can use these insights to create localized content and targeted messaging to drive the best results.

5. Use Customer Journey Insights to Optimize Your Touchpoints

A customer goes through various stages and uses different touchpoints when interacting with your brand during his journey. Knowing these touchpoints and customer journey stages is crucial so you can use them in your marketing strategy.

Ā You can use social media analytics and search engine analytics to get to know the devices they use and the content they like to consume. It will also give you a fair idea of the returning customers.

Such insights will make your marketing more effective. It will also help you to clear the roadblocks your customers come across and the concerns they might have before they decide to purchase from you.

These data points will also provide helpful information about the issues in your website, the main areas of friction, and the pages customers are bouncing from.

Final Words

You can use the vast data available through various sources to optimize and improve your digital marketing strategy. You can use DashClicks’ dashboard to get the wealth of information at your fingertips. It’s possible because of the numerous third-party integrations the platform allows and its robust automated reporting tools that can create digital marketing reports within seconds.

Today, video content forms an indispensable part of a powerful digital marketing strategy. It helps boost your brand’s credibility and increases user engagement.

Owing to the extensive benefits of using video as a marketing tool, businesses all around the world are leveraging it to increase brand visibility and growth.

And why not?

As per Social Media Week, 55% of people view online videos daily and 78% people watch online videos weekly.

In this day and age, not having a dedicated video marketing strategy means losing a good chunk of customers.

You, as a business, may also want to leverage the benefits of video content and share engaging and informative videos on the web.

But for this, you need to undertake measures that help rank your videos on Google.

Now, do you know how you can rank your videos on Google and make your brand visible online? Do you know what video rich snippets are and the importance they hold?

In this post, we’ll talk about how to strategically optimize your videos for Google search with video rich snippets. In short, we’ll know the secrets of video snippets success!

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What Are Rich Snippets?

Before we dive into video rich snippets, it’s important to know what rich snippets are.

We all know what a SERP (search engine results page) result comprises of:

• A URL
• A meta description
• A title

This is called a “snippet.”

Rich snippets, also known as rich results, are the Google search results consisting of some additional details such as events, reviews, recipes, etc. It helps a searcher better understand a website and make a decision about whether or not they should visit it.

Here’s what rich snippets look like:

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As you can see, these search results are visually more appealing with add-on information shown alongside the URL, title, and description.

Note: Do not get rich snippets confused with featured snippets.

Featured snippets, or as they're also called, answer boxes, place content extracted from a web page in a box. This box takes the zero position on the SERP and answers your query in a way that's bound to grab your attention. The CTR (click-through rate) of featured snippets is significantly high as they are the first things you see on a SERP.

Now, on the other hand, when you talk of rich snippets, they rely on structured data pulled from the HTML of a web page.

What Is a Video Rich Snippet?

Now, it's time we come to the main subject of our post ā video rich snippet.

A video rich snippet is the information appearing on Google with a small video showing up along with the result.

Now, you may wonder what's the purpose of this snippet?

A video rich snippet helps a user learn about a certain search query in a more comprehensive manner with a related video. It works as a brilliant way for businesses looking to boost the CTR (click-through rate) of their search results.

Here's an example of a video rich snippet:

As you can see, video snippets consist of a title, description, and URL like any other snippet. But they also include extra information such as the upload date and duration of the video. They even have a thumbnail.

Now that you know what video rich snippets mean, you must also know one other thing.

Search engines can’t watch your videos, even though they know that your content is out there.

They need to put in a lot of effort to learn what your content is about. Hence, to assist them in this process, you need to incorporate structured data into your content. More on this in the next sections.

What Do You Mean by Structured Data?

According to Google, “structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.”

Let’s understand structured data with the help of an example.

Suppose you write an article on “how to make a pancake.” A post without structured data won’t share information such as the ingredients used, the time taken to prepare it, and the number of calories.

However, with structured data, you can assist search engines in crawling with relevant information, such as:

“It takes a total of 30 minutes to cook this recipe.”

“It contains 186 calories.”

“This is how it looks.”

And so on.

To help you understand this better, here’s an example of a video rich snippet that appears on entering the search query “how to cook a chicken stew.”

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To add structured data, the majority of websites use Google-recommended schema.org.

The reason for this is that most leading search engines easily understand this markup. You can also call schema markup the language of search engines.

How Can I Add Video Rich Snippets?

Although there are other options to add video rich snippets, we'll discuss the simple option of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper to implement schema.

Adding schema markup to your website is easy, all thanks to the help you get from this helper. Here's what you need to do.

Step 1: Visit the Structured Data Markup Helper Page

Go to the Structured Data Markup Helper page and sign in.

Step 2: Choose the Website Tab

From the two tabs, Website and Email, click on the website option.

Step 3: Choose a Data Type

Google will prompt you to choose a data type to learn how to categorize your data. The options you get here include:

• Job Postings
• Datasets
• Book Reviews
• Events
• Articles
• Local Businesses
• Question & Answer Page
• Products
• Restaurants
• Software Applications
• Movies
• TV Episodes

Step 4: Enter Page HTML or URL

If your page isn't ready and published, you can paste its HTML in the bar present at the bottom. However, if your web page is published, you can paste your URL.

Step 5: Tag the Elements You Wish to Markup

Next, you need to highlight page elements and assign tags to them, which will help you optimize the video for SEO. Ensure you create a comprehensive markup.

Choose the ‘Add missing tags’ button in case you can’t find a tag on the list.

Step 6: Create the HTML

Next, click the ‘Create HTML’ tab that you will find on the top right.

You will see a drop-down menu. We recommend ‌you choose JSON-LD because Google prefers this structured data type. It’s easy to use too.

Copy the code and insert it into your web page. Submit the web page to search engines after you create the HTML.

Test Your Video Rich Snippets

Before you publish your page, it’s crucial that you thoroughly review the inserted schema markup. This step ensures that you fully utilize the potential of video SEO.

Use Google Rich Results Test to quickly gauge the performance of your schema markup.

Note: Even if you have correctly implemented your rich snippets, there’s no guarantee they will be shown in the SERPs immediately afterward. Google talks about the same in its guidelines.

Google can take weeks to crawl and index your page in the proper manner.

So, all you need to do is implement the markup and leave the rest to the search engines. If all goes well you may see results in a few months, if not weeks. And certain changes may be required too.

Tip: You should learn how to fix schema validation errors.

Final Words

As the wheel of content creation and consumption keeps on moving, businesses find it harder to grab the attention of their audience. This makes it even more important to adopt the practice of adding video-rich snippets for video content. If you put in your best work with the tips and tricks we have discussed so far, you will most likely get to boost click-through rates for your pages and drive more traffic to your site.

Now, what are you waiting for? Take steps to stand out on SERPs with a beautiful and intriguing video attached.

A robust digital marketing strategy requires several components - from social media to email to search engines and much more. While each competent is equally important to advertise your business online, content is unarguably the most important part of these efforts.

Are you a small business owner wishing to increase your audience and boost your brand recognition? If yes, then you must try content marketing.

Content marketing involves the creation and dissemination of online materials such as blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and social media posts with the purpose of stimulating interest in the services or products of a business. It helps grow traffic to your website.

In this blog, we will discuss why small business owners should build a powerful content marketing strategy and how to craft one.

The Importance of Content Marketing For Small Business

Content marketing enables you to create and share timely and useful content. It allows you to build loyalty and respect among consumers and become a thought leader in your industry.

You may wonder how. Content marketing offers your audience something that has value, developing trust among your prospects and customers.

Another way content marketing aids you is by recognizing the pain points of your customers. It also helps build a customer base you can engage with for the purpose of driving sales.

Additionally, another benefit of content marketing includes the evergreen content you produce. For instance, a blog post that talks about the history of your industry. Such an asset will not become outdated.

Businesses today have recognized the importance of content marketing. As per the latest marketing stats for 2022, 70% of marketers are active investors in content marketing.

All in all, with the help of content marketing, you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content marketing. You also get a chance to grow your brand awareness and establish and maintain a successful brand identity.

Content Marketing For A Small Business: 7 Tips For Success

Let's discuss the tips every business owner should follow to build a successful content marketing strategy for their small business.

1) Start a Blog

Companies that consistently write blogs get 67% more leads per month on average.

Blogging is a free way of marketing your capabilities and services. So, if you want to know how to market a small business, blogging is a route that you can opt for. It also helps you become an industry expert.

Blogs help in different ways, such as:

• Boost your SEO rankings
• Drive traffic to your website
• Provide increased value to your consumers
• Add to your brand’s exposure
• Get leads and increase the likelihood of conversion

2) Stay Active on Social Platforms Your Audience Uses

You may have a social media presence if you are actively involved in selling a service or a product. However, simply being present on social channels is not enough. You are required to stay active on all the social media channels your audience spends their time on.

Now you may wonder how to select the right social media channels for your business. For this, you are required to identify your target audience. On social media platforms, you are speaking to a set of consumers who have specific interests and not everyone. After you learn about the individuals you are speaking to, figure out how to reach them.

Tip: To check where your audience is active, you can do the following:

• Use existing consumer data to determine where your audience hangs out online.
• Check out the social profiles of your competitors to know where their most active users are.

3) Deliver Content as per the Stage of Your Customer Within the Marketing Funnel

To reach the conversion phase, individuals go through a process called the marketing funnel. From learning about your business to conversion, this funnel includes everything. These are the four steps most marketing funnels have:

• Attention: Consumer views your social media post, ads, or learns about you via word-of-mouth
• Interest: Consumer is interested and wants to learn more
• Desire: Consumer is at a stage where they want to convert
• Action: Consumer takes action (for e.g.- subscribing to your email newsletter or purchasing your product)

To align this process with your creation, ensure you provide relevant content to the target customers present at the different stages of the funnel. For instance, an in-depth asset can overburden a potential customer who is currently at the attention stage of the funnel.

4) Conduct Keyword Research to Find Great Topics

An important step is to optimize your blog for SEO. You must conduct keyword research as a part of SEO. Keyword research is a crucial part of content marketing because:

• It helps identify trending topics individuals are interested to know more about.
• It helps improve your search engine rankings.

Watch this video to know how to do SEO keyword research -

Note: The keyword strategy for your business is the most critical part that determines your ranking on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). However, you must also know that SEO-friendly websites rank higher on the SERPs, too. If you do not have an SEO-friendly website, it is time to build one for your business.

If you need an SEO-friendly, professional, niche-based website, you should know that it takes many days to build one. We recommend that you use DashClicks' Sites tool that helps you make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

5) Create a Content Calendar

Monthly content calendars include blog posts, emails, social posts, and any other content you wish to produce in that particular month. It helps you stay organized. Also, with the help of a content schedule, your readers get comfortable as it increases familiarity and trust for your business.

A content calendar is important because:

• It ensures that every content-related task is actually taking place
• It makes it convenient to collaborate with outside partners as well as your team
• It provides you a big picture of the upcoming stuff

Let’s discuss the steps that help you create your own content calendar:

• Decide the types of content you wish to publish, such as case studies, landing pages, e-books, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc.
• Discuss with your customer service and sales team to know the most asked questions by your potential customers. Then sit and brainstorm with your marketing team to determine different content strategies and more topics that you need to cover.
• Use the SEMRush Content Audit tool to analyze the current pages on your website and check what you should update, remove, or rewrite. Use this tool to analyze your competitors as well.
• Choose social media channels by checking the platforms your target audience uses. For instance, Facebook typically works great for B2C audiences.
• Before a type of content reaches production, define every step of the content process. Then, decide on a publishing schedule as per your content auditing and analytics data.
• Schedule evergreen content and publish them at a time when there are content delays.
• Don’t forget to add guest content to your content calendar.

6) Bring Your Reviews to Life

You may be surprised to know that 91% of people in the age group of 18-34 trust reviews published online as much as personal recommendations.

Also, a majority of consumers (58%) would pay more or travel farther to support a business that has positive reviews.

What's even more important is that 83% of consumers only trust relevant and recent reviews.

With these stats, you can definitely see the power of reviews. They help in driving a business, especially one that is both local and small.

Keeping this information in mind, we recommend you bring your reviews to life via social posts and testimonials that you can post on your website and blog.

Testimonials are considered one of the most effective content marketing tactics. Let's discuss how you can convert your blog post readers into buyers with the help of customer testimonials:

• Use screenshots of your client’s statements and place them within your blog posts.
• Use these statements as quotes in your blog posts.

Tip: To know how to get reviews and leverage them in your content marketing, read this blog.

7) Find a Unique Angle

Your competitors can indeed provide you with a lot of topic ideas, but avoid producing content that is too similar to the content created by others. The goal of content marketing is to provide information that is useful and adds value to your customers, not something that is already available to them on the web.

If you find a great idea, do not replicate it with tiny alterations. What you can do instead is to see it as a starting point and search for ways to incorporate your own unique angle. Doing so will only help you provide interesting content to your readers.

Bonus Tips:

• Start an email newsletter to let your readers know about an upcoming event, a new product, industry-related news, and much more.
• See what is resonating with your audience and create a variety of content types. Think about content repurposing as well.

How to Craft a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Let's discuss what you need to do to craft a marketing strategy for your small business:

1. Build Your Buyer Personas and Fine - Tune Them

Create buyer personas to better understand your audience and their respective pain points. When you determine who is buying your products, you get to know the kind of content they need and when.

2. Solve a Problem

Consumers look for information that provides a solution to their problems. Identify the content assets that can fulfill the unique needs of your buyers. Do this after you have identified buyer personas.

3. Set Business Goals

Set business goals that align with the strategy. The principle of SMART goals makes your benchmarks attainable and reasonable, so do use the principle during this time.

4. Determine Distribution Channels

When it is time to share your content, determine which content piece is right for which channel. This is because not every content piece does well on every channel. Hence, to achieve success and reach, this step is important.

Check the image below to see how the three distribution channels - owned media channels, paid media channels, and earned media channels - overlap and the way in which you can combine them:

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Also, take a note of how you can distribute different content types:

• Distribute your interview content or podcasts through Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
• Distribute your infographic content through your blog and Pinterest.
• Distribute success stories and case studies through a dedicated website page.
• You can distribute your video content through YouTube.

Conclusion

Even though you run a small business, there is a high chance that you have huge competition. To grow your audience and help your business stand out, you require a content marketing strategy that will help you showcase your value to your current and future consumers.

When you build your buyer personas, you take a step forward towards building a winning content marketing strategy. After you do so, ensure you create content centered around your buyers' pain points and the stage they are at within the marketing funnel. Stay active on social platforms your audience uses and bring your reviews to life through testimonials and social posts.

Bottom line: Try implementing most of the above-mentioned tips for your business.

Now, it is our turn to ask you a question. Which of the above-mentioned tips do you think will be the most beneficial for your business?

Do you know the two major pain points for small-scale agencies? These are data retrieval and client reporting processes. So, congratulations that you have decided to automate your data retrieval and client reporting processes using a white-label platform and software.

To seamlessly execute your daily tasks and manage the workflow, you need to work on different platforms, access data from other sources, and access the login credentials of numerous third-party apps and software.

The smart step is to focus on your agency's growth, so you should invest your precious time in marketing and other essential activities that will help you grow and expand your market.

If you are busy taking screenshots and retrieving data all day long from multiple channels to prepare reports, you're wasting your productive hours. It's not smart work; instead, it is imprudent!

This article will help you share your client reports in no time using the power of automation.

About DashClicks' White-Label Platform

DashClicks' white-label platform helps you scale your agency by not just automating the workflow but also through the fulfillment services. The fulfillment services include all digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media advertising, email marketing, content marketing, website development, etc.

Still, DashClicks' platform is available free of cost for limited use. However, if you want to serve multiple clients and campaigns, you can opt for a premium account.

So, you can be an agency owner, even without hiring expensive full-time professionals. DashClicks will assist you throughout your journey.

Watch this video to learn what DashClicks is and what services it offers.

How to Use the Free Trial?

Before moving on, kindly watch this video to learn how to build a successful digital marketing agency from scratch.

DashClicks' free trial doesn't refrain you from using any of its major premium features. However, it's for limited use. You can always upgrade it if you are using it to manage your campaigns. This way, you can drastically save your time and money spent on time-consuming & repetitive tasks that are a part of the daily grind in an agency.

Here's how DashClicks' free trial offer works.

Go to the DashClicks website and sign up for its white-label platform.

Signing up for an account is free, and DashClicks will never charge you for a base account. You will only be charged if you upgrade to the Pro plan or above.

Once the signup process is complete, you'll be directed to the dashboard.

DashClicks Starter Kit

If you are new to DashClicks, this video will give you a sneak peek at the platform and how it works.

From the top right corner of the dashboard screen, go to settings.

YouTube Video: New User Dashboard Crash Course: 4:10

On the settings page, you will find many options to add your custom domain, fill up your business profile, upload your branding, logo, etc., and change your business settings.

Apart from that, you can manage various third-party account integrations here, so you can import data directly into the DashClicks dashboard to generate automatic reports, etc.

On the settings screen, you can set up a payment and access all the useful apps such as:

• Contacts App
• Deals App
• InstaSites App
• InstaReports App
• Sites App
• Templates App
• Projects App
• Analytics App
• Forms App
• Inbound App

You can also visit White-Labeled Fulfillment Store here and order quality white-label SEO and digital marketing services. It helps you remain lean and thin while staying profitable.

Through the fulfillment store, you can order all digital marketing services such as SEO, PPC, social media advertising, email marketing, content marketing, website development, etc. We have a comprehensive team of full-time digital marketing professionals, so you get the best value from our services.

With DashClicks' forever free account, you get free unlimited features such as:

For more details about pricing and features, please visit our pricing page.

How to Use the Dashboard Application?

You can treat the Dashboard application as the home page for your entire platform experience. It gives you a bird's eye view of your campaigns and performance.

You can fully personalize your dashboard page to adjust the page view as per your needs. It means you will quickly get the most important updates as you open your account.

Accessing the Dashboard App

The Dashboard acts as your default homepage for the platform. So, even if you change the settings, you can navigate back to the dashboard using the app drawer in the top right corner. Here is what the app drawer looks like.

The dashboard provides you with the summaries of your campaign, so it's the easiest to navigate. Each widget is separated by easily visible boxes.

When you click the Deals app widget button, you get the option to customize the data displayed on the widget according to the specified period.

You can edit your Dashboard by clicking the Edit button in the top right corner. This way, you can customize your dashboard view.

You can also drag and drop any widget above, below, left, or right of other widgets to customize your view per your preference. After that, click on Save in the top-right corner.

You can create custom client dashboards and reports on the DashClicks platform. The data updates in real-time. Creating a dashboard is the prerequisite for using a white-label platform as it's the central location where you can manage the entire platform.

Here is the complete DashClicks software tour for your reference -

Final Words

DashClicks is a one-stop solution for every need of a digital marketing agency. You can use the DashClicks dashboard for everything from performance evaluation of your campaign to sending reports and fulfillment of digital marketing solutions such as SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, reputation management, local directory listings, and content marketing. So, sign up for a free account today and benefit from this incredible white-label platform.

This is no news that content is the most fruitful way of gaining organic traffic by providing customers solutions to their search queries. However, designing an SEO strategy that caters to both the search bots and the consumers' needs is equally important. SEO content strategy is essential for every business, even though most marketers believe if they have well-written and helpful content, they do not require an SEO content strategy.

Most companies focus on either extremely keyword-forward SEO or entirely ignore SEO to provide useful information to their consumers in the name of content marketing. However, this is precisely where most content strategies fail to impress search algorithms/bots and viewers. Creating content that brings humans and search bots together is an extremely crucial task that marketers should successfully carry out to generate expected results.

All this is achievable with thorough audience research and quantitative search data. Striking the right balance between SEO and content strategy is one way you can connect every piece of content to your consumers.

Why Do You Need to Bring SEO and Content Strategy Together?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is necessary for your website and brand visibility because, at the end of the day, what you need from beautifully put-out content is results in the form of conversions and traffic. And without SEO, all these efforts will go in vain because no one can find you when they search for products similar to yours on a search engine. Hence, the ultimate goals of needing SEO for your website content are relevancy and a higher rank in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

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If you don’t want to believe the words, here is data showing how SEO is essential for digital marketing to satisfy search bots-

• Organic searches are the primary source of business for B2B businesses, and Google alone counts over 2 trillion searches per year.
• According to a study conducted by SEMRush, 78% of marketers who believe they have a well-developed content strategy were highly successful in 2021.
• According to a study, 89% of marketers investing in SEO and content marketing rely on SEO as their most-effective content distribution channel.
• Another study also revealed that most internet users only click on the results available on the first page of searches and don’t even navigate to the second page. Moreover, the first page linked in the searches takes the trophy home with over 25% more clicks.

What we can conclude from the data above is that SEO and content strategy work the best when they go hand in hand to produce results that give investors ROIs. Other conclusions made from the above studies are-

#1- Organic searches are the primary means to grow businesses, especially B2B.

#2- More and more companies are showing interest in SEO and content strategy since a high percentage are investing in it.

#3- Companies investing in content marketing need to analyze their results to see the efficacy of their approach.

What Is an SEO Content Strategy and Why Do You Need It?

First and foremost, you need to understand what an SEO content strategy is. It is planning for your valuable content that addresses a few key questions, including –

• Who is searching for you or services similar to yours?
• What are their pain points?
• How can you provide solutions to their pain points?
• How will you conduct the required analysis of your progress?

Understanding the Basic Elements of an SEO Content Strategy

An excellent and implementable SEO content strategy is one that includes all the bases that can provide customers with solutions to their pain points and businesses with good results. To better understand the process, here are the basic elements of an SEO content strategy that you should design for your business.

Element #1 – Understanding Your Target Audience

While it may seem too much on the face, the targeted viewers are often overlooked when preparing an SEO strategy. This is because SEO primarily wants to impress the search bots to get your website a better ranking in the SERPs. However, the entire process can be quickly streamlined if you focus on your customers by understanding them better. It makes the task of SEO easier since search bots look for valuable information, something your target audience will also be looking for. Some ways you can get to know your target audience better are –

A. Designing a Customer Persona: If you already have a customer persona, great! But if you do not have one, you definitely need it. Customer personas are basically the essential character descriptions of your targeted audience. You can follow any format for creating these but remember to include crucial details like name, age, gender, location, job title, interests, personal preferences, and other information related to your products and services that can affect sales.

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B. Using Google Analytics: Google has multiple tools you can employ to help in your SEO and content strategy. One such tool is Google Analytics which can help you efficiently reach your goals. You can better understand your viewer by using the demographic and interest data in Google Analytics. Under the demographics section, you will find crucial information about your viewers' age, gender, and traffic and conversion data categorized according to the other information. At the same time, the interests tab will provide details regarding the various interests and preferences your prospective clients lean towards.

‍C. Analyzing the Sites Your Customers Are Interested In: The best way to make an impact on your clients is by getting their attention. And the most straightforward way to do that is by finding something they are interested in. You can find similarities in your audience niches by visiting the websites that are most popular amongst them. Creating the base of your advertising and promotional strategies with these interests in mind will perfectly mesmerize them into learning more about your business.

D. Using Surveys: Another method you can use to understand your customers better is by taking their surveys and knowing why they are interested in your products and services. You can accomplish this with multiple online tools that are becoming pretty popular today to analyze your viewer responses and feedback in real-time, like Google Forms and SurveyMonkey.

Element #2 – Needs of Your Prospects

Knowing the interests of your users is critical to providing them with better products and services. But how do you know what they exactly need from you? You can get this information by discussing such details with your customer service and internal subject matters team. The marketing team usually does not know much about the reviews of the customers, and this is where your customer service and internal subject matters teams come in. These are the best departments to provide you with information about your existing and potential customers as they frequently interact with them. They know how your customers feel about your products and services and can give you a better insight into this information.

Understanding why your customers like or dislike your products and services is essential to improve on them. Think of it like this – if you remove the existing pain points of your consumers that they may have with your products or that of your competitors, you will gain an upper hand by finding a solution. You can begin with the following questions-

• Who are your target customers?
• Why are your customers using your products and services, and how are you solving their concerns?
• Why do your customers face that problem in the first place?
• How are your customers using your products to solve their pain points?
• Why do your customers think your product can solve their problems?
• When do your customers purchase your products and services?

Element #3 – Aligning the Keywords, Topics, and Content With Your Sales Funnel

Users don’t directly search for the entire problem at once on a search engine. They use keywords that can target their pain point and provide them with quick solutions. Once you understand your prospect, you will also understand which keywords work the best for them and how you can direct them toward your website. When you have your keywords, you can develop topics and content similar to the interests of your consumers.

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With that done, you can then write content that aligns with your sales funnel to get the desired results. You can complete this by –

A. Understanding the Search Intent of Your Customers: As mentioned before, customers use the search engine to find solutions to their queries. The query may be finding a site they already know, getting information, or purchasing items. These goals are called search intent and are of three types; navigational, informational, and transactional.

B. Conducting Smart Keyword Research: Generally, organizations conduct their keyword research by finding keywords mostly searched by people related to the products or services they sell and sticking with the ones with the highest search volume. However, an effective and more straightforward way to do this would be to use tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, which will find relevant keywords for you according to the primary and secondary keywords related to your business.

C. Prioritizing Topics: Prioritizing keywords and aligning them with your sales funnel is essential since most viewers do not exactly follow the expected sales funnel flow. You can do this by using keywords most relevant to your products or services, solving the pain points of your consumers, and adding keywords that are most searched by your targeted customers.

Element #4 – Your Goals and Measurement Processes

Every business has a set of goals they want to achieve no matter which industry they belong to. These goals may be higher rankings, more traffic, better conversions, etc. Once you establish your goals, you can then evaluate the success of your SEO content strategy. You can use tools like Google Search Console to check your rankings in the SERPs and Google Analytics to check your overall progress using the strategies employed.

In Conclusion

SEO and content strategies are dynamic and develop all the time as customer expectations from a business keep changing. However, the above blog should give you the evergreen basics of SEO content strategies that will keep the search bots and your consumers happy with your brand.