Rank tracking for us is an important metric for measuring the success of our (technical) SEO changes/implementations. With the day-by-day / week-by-week comparisons we can discover the impact of several changes made on our websites and how this contributes in increasing organic rankings. In times where search engines are changing their algorithms every day, it’s important to understand how and when this affects our rankings, so we can react on it.

Floris Gouw, SEO Coordinator Thomas Cook BE

Established in 1841 with the dream of one man, Thomas Cook has grown into one of the world’s most successful agencies for international travel. The in-house SEO team has been working for more than 4 years with AWR as the main partner for keyword monitoring in Belgium, tracking rankings for different search engines on multiple devices and languages.

Raising a red flag

It all started when Floris’ team noticed inaccurate ranking positions for their neckermann.be domain.

They contacted our customer care team and sent us a report which showed the domain had ranked in the top 5 positions for several days in a row, but suddenly dropped out of top 50 on the next day. Just one day later, it went back up in top 5. The shifts in positions were too sudden and too extreme. It was uncanny, considering that they’d made no changes for those keywords.

One of AWR’s core values lies in the accuracy of the data we provide, so we immediately set out to make an in-depth analysis on the support case that Floris reported. Together with our Search Engine engineers, we started looking at the SERP files that had been retrieved for the neckermann.be project.

24 hours later, the results from the SERP analysis were ready. All the data had been gathered with the correct search definition, which meant that the cause for this behavior was external to AWR.

Yet, we felt like an “it’s not us” approach would not be too helpful for Floris and the team. We continued the investigation at a granular level, trying to look at some of the problematic SERPs from an SEO perspective.

This is how we noticed that on the specific dates when neckermann.be dropped from top 50 rankings, Google was listing URLs from thomascook.be. These pages had almost similar content with their competitor pages from neckermann.be.

Understanding the problem

Once we reported these findings to the Thomas Cook team, they confirmed that the two sites belong to the BE Business Unit, and the offer for Belgium differs slightly between them. It was becoming clear that the major ranking fluctuations were the result of duplicate content on two separate domains.

Neckermann is part of Thomas Cook, and in Belgium both websites have the same offer (but Thomas Cook has extras). The content on some pages is exactly the same, and we’re struggling with this. The thing we see now is that Google is showing one week the neckermann URL, and the next week the thomascook URL.

Floris Gouw, SEO Coordinator Thomas Cook BE

At that point, Floris and his team started to investigate how many hotel pages were cases of duplicate content so they could decide how to approach the issue.

They needed to pinpoint the actual ranking URLs that had duplicate content and causing Google to be unsure of which ones to rank. The team used AWR’s exports to CSV and sorted the data by ranking URL.

Choosing the solution

Now that the stretch of the problem was clear, it was time to think about the fix.

One of the solutions they had was to develop unique content for all hotel pages on both websites, which was more demanding from a human resources point of view.

The second was to make sure the hotel offer pages on one of the websites were not indexed, thus de-indexing the pages in question.

Though full implementation required some time, they set out to work, thus building a strategy with long-term goals in mind. The results would be immediate and solved the duplication issue in line with Google’s best practices.

Measuring the impact

After the change was rolled out on the domains, Floris turned to AWR for monitoring the effects.

Again, the CSV exports proved their utility, showing the actual ranking URLs for each keyword together with the current ranking position, and the change in comparison with the previous ranking data updates.

In a few weeks, the high fluctuations on the problematic keywords stopped. The individual pages from each domain started to rank independently, and the search visibility trends returned to normal.

Some final words

While AWR isn’t an auditing tool, the ranking data it provides can offer a lot of clues about the health of an SEO strategy. In this case, having multiple projects for different domains on the same AWR account led to the discovery of duplicate content which influenced rankings for both domains.

It’s just like Floris said:

Ranking Tools like AWR aren’t just for ranking, but also for showing us the technical SEO issues we’re dealing with :).

What about you?

Have you ever dealt with duplicate content problems cross domains? It’d be interesting to learn how you discovered and resolved them!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section

Search engine optimization for voice search is not radically different to traditional SEO best practices, but because of the nature of voice queries, outcomes are improved if site owners optimize for the questions users ask and provide information in a format that helps search engines to deliver answers to those questions.

Which questions are your customers asking?

Voice search queries often ask a direct or implied question, tend to be longer than text queries, rely more on long tail keywords, and signal intent more clearly.

The first step in creating effective content for voice search is to figure out which questions your customers are asking and why they ask them. These questions might be based on your products, brand, customer support requirements, questions often asked to your sales representatives, and more.

Question-and-answer sites like Quora and StackExchange are a useful resource, as is Google’s own “People also ask” box, which often appears in search engine results for conversational question queries.

Don’t limit yourself to basic keyword research: long-tail key phrases are more likely to occur in voice searches because they are longer and more conversational. If your business already has an FAQ, that’s an excellent place to start.

After identifying questions, create high-quality content that answers them, ensuring that relevant key phrases appear in headers and prominently within the article’s text. Don’t over-optimize or stuff key phrases in unnatural positions. Instead, shape content so that it is easier for search engines to identify relevant sections.

Which results appear in voice search results?

Optimizing content for voice searches is in many ways similar to mobile SEO. The content most likely to appear in voice search results has these qualities:

• It already ranks well in desktop and mobile search.
• It includes short, concise answers to relevant questions.
• It is part of a featured snippet, which appear in over 40% of voice search results.

Focus on core SEO factors

If search results don’t rank well in traditional searches, they don’t appear in voice search results. Voice search optimization isn’t an entirely new discipline: it is based on many of the same signals that SEOs are familiar with:

• Well-structured content with topic phrases in H1 and H2 tags.
• Keyword phrases and variants present in the text.
• Optimized title and meta description tags.
• Mobile friendliness and low-latency on the desktop and mobile.
• Pages delivered over SSL.

Voice search optimization is not effective in isolation from general search engine optimization best practices.

Featured snippets

The featured snippet box is important to voice search optimization. When a user asks Google a question, the featured snippet is often prominently displayed in the search results, often, although not always, at the top (position zero).

When the response is delivered by voice via Google Home or as a direct answer to a question, much of the information comes from the content contained in the featured snippet.

The content in featured snippet boxes is almost always drawn from the top-ten results, although not necessarily the top result. Featured snippets are intended to provide a concise and informative response to a search query. To be in with a chance of getting into the featured snippet box, part of a page’s content should be formatted so that it provides an encapsulated “nugget” of topic-relevant information.

Featured snippets come in various forms:

• Short paragraphs of information
• A list
• A table

Lists are worth focusing on because they provide a good illustration of how to optimize for featured snippets. Most list-type featured snippets use the H2 headers of a “listicle” that also includes in-depth information for each of the list’s items.

This structure of headers followed by details, both containing information relevant to a question, makes it easier for Google to deliver an acceptable answer to a voice search query.

This voice search for the question “what is the largest tree in the world?” is an excellent example of a paragraph-type snippet. The article linked to in the snippet contains a variation of the question in its H1 header. The first paragraph is a concise encapsulated answer to the question that references the topic before supplying an answer.

Google often draws from content that is not at the top of the article — content under H2 headers often appears in featured snippets — but the basic pattern is the same: mention of the key phrases in the header and in the topic position (early in the first sentence).

Local SEO

A high proportion of voice searches are related to a location. For your site to be included in results with a local intent, Google needs to know where your business is located.

Local SEO is too big a topic to cover in this article, but at a minimum businesses should:

• Ensure that its Google My Business listing is correct and complete.
• Include location-specific data such as the address and telephone number on their website.
• Use structured markup with location data — more on this in a moment.

This information, combined with positive SEO signals such as mobile friendliness and solid performance increases the likelihood that a business will be returned in a prominent position for location-specific voice queries.

Structured Data

Structured data uses a standardized vocabulary that conveys the meaning and purpose of content to search engines. Structured markup makes it easier for Google to pick out relevant information and relate it to the query.

For instance, marking up address data makes it easy for Google to see that a particular chunk of content is an address and how lines of text map onto a traditional postal address.

Content such as recipes, reviews, articles, and videos can be similarly marked up.

Don’t neglect other search engines

I have focused on optimizing search for Google in this article, but it is unwise to ignore voice search optimization for other search engines. Apple’s Siri and voice search throughout Google’s platforms use Google search results, but Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana use results from Microsoft Bing.

In conclusion

Voice search optimization is the tip of the iceberg: get the fundamentals of content optimization, mobile friendliness, and local SEO right first. They have a greater effect on the likelihood of a business’s pages appearing in voice search results than any voice-specific optimizations.

That said, structuring content meaningfully and providing concise, easily excerpted summaries will help Google to identify relevant content for voice interface responses and featured snippets.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

No matter if your marketing goal is more traffic, more subscriptions or sales, your prospects look for some basic information about why they need what you’re offering and why you’re better than your competitors.

The problem is that nobody wants to read big chunks of text to get that information – and that’s where whiteboard videos come in to help you fully explain your product or service with an engaging story.

Whiteboard videos are very versatile but they are especially suitable for complex products/services such as IT solutions, software and business to business (B2B) campaigns that need a little more time to be fully explained.

All that being said, you may have noticed that there are thousands of whiteboard videos on the web but not all of them really deliver the appeal we’re talking about.

There are a few tricks and tips you need to know before making a killer whiteboard video that converts. Let’s review them and I’m sure at the end you’ll feel more confident.

1) Harness the power of storytelling

Since the dawn of time, human beings have been yearning for stories. Even the oldest cave paintings support that. Your marketing video should also take advantage of that deep human desire.

Let’s try to explain how to apply storytelling to marketing videos (not only whiteboard videos, but all of them).

Your story needs to answer three basic questions: what, how and why.

• What problem does your product/service solve?
• How does it solve it?
• Why is it the best choice in the market to solve that problem?

First, you need to focus on your prospect’s need or pain point. Then, your product/service will show up to sort it out. Finally, you’ll explain your product’s differentiators or provide information to prove that your product is the right choice. Oh, and you need to do all that in 90 seconds!

Don’t panic. Just think of a story in which your target audience has a problem (their pain point) and your product is the hero who will help them. It’s not so difficult, right?

With our explainer video production company, Yum Yum Videos, we created this video for an IT company. Check it out and you’ll see this story and its three moments crystal clearly:

Spigit – Whiteboard Animated Explainer Video

At http://yumyumvideos.com we produced this custom animated explainer video (whiteboard) for Spigit, a management software that helps you invent new products and experiences with the best people for each specific industry.

In the first 30 seconds, we explain the audience’s problem. Then, after the logo appears, we explain how this software can solve it and at the end, we provide some stats to prove why the product is very efficient to do that task.

2) Create relatable characters

Once you have your story, you’ll need animated characters who will drive it forward. A video that resonates with the intended audience should grab their attention from the first second. You’ll achieve that by customizing your characters to represent your target audience. Think about their gender, average age, overall style and tone and create your character according to that data.

In the previous video, the “Head of Innovation” represents the target audience. This likeable and funny character helps the prospect feel connected with the story.

3) Keep it fun!

In general, this is a valuable piece of advice for any explainer video but with whiteboard videos, this is essential. Whiteboard videos’ educational focus should never be confused with a boring style. Please, don’t do that!

A simple hint of humor will enhance your brand’s message and keep your audience entertained.

Your character could be funny, you can refer to something funny in your story or add some funny secondary characters. Don’t you think those sheep in the previous video are funny and likable at the same time?

4) Keep the classic whiteboard’s elements

What’s a whiteboard video without a white background? That’s the first element to achieve that simple and clean style that you need to make your story shine.

You’ll also need a hand that will draw the whole story. Back in the old days, the artist used to draw everything live in front of the camera. Today, the digital artist uses a digital image of a hand to mimic that first analogic experience.

Last but not least, that hand will be holding a black marker and it will look like this:

5) Brand your video

Right now we count on a powerful story, likeable characters and a black and white style. Then, how will you represent your brand? Easy as pie! Just add a hint of color!

Your brand’s colors can help you highlight some important parts of the story. This video style helps the audience retain more information, that’s why it’s important that they also remember your brand.

Your logo also needs to appear, in general, before the second part of the script (the how).

As an example, check the first video and look for the orange highlights. Bear in mind that you need to use your exact brand color so that it matches your logo.

6) Only accept the highest quality

The Whiteboard style may seem easy to get but in fact, it is one of the most difficult ones.

Nowadays, people watch several videos per day so they are used to knowing what’s great and what’s lame. If they feel your video is cheap, they will back out without hesitating. Simply put, that means a higher bounce rate on your landing page and lower ranking in the page results. You’ll end up wasting money and time for a video that won’t show the results you’re looking for.

So, don’t skimp on quality! Pay attention to the animation design. Keep in mind that it needs to resemble a hand-made drawing made with a magic marker or a stylish pen and that’s not so easy to do with digital art.

Take a look at this fine capture and its shading to know how a professional artist should do it:

7) Hire a professional voice actor

In a whiteboard video, characters don’t speak. Their voice is a voice-over that needs to be recorded separately.

To choose the right voice is the key to truly represent your audience. It needs to match their gender, age and tone. That’s why it’s very important to hire a professional voice-actor who should be a native speaker (of the country of the target audience) to tell your story.

Of course there are some free automated voice generators on the web but they sound robotic and lame. Try them and you’ll agree with me. Believe me, that mistake could ruin your video instead of building that priceless bond with your audience.

8) Interconnect your drawings

A professional whiteboard video needs to be planned as a whole because every scene should be connected with the next one. Remember that whiteboard videos are actually telling a story by drawing it in front of the viewer’s eyes so it should flow seamlessly in order to maintain your viewer’s attention.

The secret is a continuous and interconnected drawing. Of course, sometimes you’ll need to clean the whiteboard and start from scratch but try to do this as few times as possible. You don’t want to break the story into too many pieces and lose your audience’s attention.

Let’s watch an example:

Fraudlogix – Whiteboard Explainer Video

At http://www.yumyumvideos.com we created this whiteboard animation video production for Clickfraud Solution. If you want to learn more about how we can help you with your custome animated explainer video, please visit us at https://www.yumyumvideos.com/ You can also write us at barry@yumyumvideos.com Enjoy! Script transcript below: Meet Steve.

How cool is that? Interconnected drawings have a huge power to grab your audience’s attention. Note that this video is a little longer than the average 90 seconds that we mentioned before, but it’s still engaging.

Leverage interconnected drawings and your audience will feel visually appealed to your story and they’ll keep watching until the end of the video. The longer they watch, the more time your brand message will have to sink in. Talking about the end…

9) Don’t forget your call to action (CTA)

At the end you need to tell your audience what they should do next. Whether it is to buy a product, like, share, sign up to an email list, visit your site or download an eBook, ask for that action and support that message with the right image. This is an example:

If you upload your video on YouTube, which I definitely recommend you do, you can leverage YouTube’s features to maximize engagement. Try YouTube cards and end cards to achieve your marketing goals.

But remember that first you need that your prospects keep watching through until the end of your video, so let’s review all the tips you’ve learned in this article to create a killer whiteboard video that converts.

Wrapping up…

Whiteboard videos are very versatile but they’re a must when it comes to complex products or services.

With an engaging story, you can maintain your audience’s attention through the whole video. Given that you’ll state your audience’s pain point from the start, they’ll feel connected with your product/service. At least one of the characters needs to be fully customized to fit your target audience. Make it likeable and fun. Even if it’s a B2B service there is no need to be so serious!

Look for the highest quality. Remember that the devil is in the details and only a professional video production company will ensure a stellar video that elevates your brand and makes it distinguishable from the crowded marketplace we live in today.

Don’t forget your call to action or you’ll lose those precious leads who, by the end of your video, will have totally embraced your brand!

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Using influencer marketing is one of the best ways to organically target an engaged audience and promote brand awareness.

A recent survey showed that over 40% of marketers planned to increase the amount of money spent on influencer marketing in 2018.

Unlike traditional marketing campaigns that catered to the masses, today’s online marketing activity is focused on account based marketing. Highly valued prospects and leads are targeted through the channels they use and presented with offerings most relevant to them. Using influencers to do this has many benefits, but it also presents some challenges.

Finding the Right Influencer

One of the greatest challenges is choosing the right influencer. Does the influencer have a voice and personality that’s a good fit for your brand? If you choose the wrong person, your campaign could under-perform, but worst case scenario, your brand reputation could never recover.

Alignment with your brand ideals

The reputation of influencers can work very favorably for your brand as long as they’re aligned with your brand ideals and can position your brand as one to be trusted. They can help you with lead generation and increase your conversion rates.

Evaluate quantitative metrics

You will have to evaluate quantitative metrics to ascertain whether the influencer has enough followers and achieves consistently high engagement rates. Likes, shares and comments help the social media manager of a company to find out how active an influencer’s followers are and how they react to different types of content. You need to steer clear of influencers who may have many followers but low engagement rates.

Similar audience demographics

The influencer’s audience demographic has to be in line with your brand’s audience demographic. Find an influencer who holds sway over your target audience, and you could reap great rewards.

Similar product endorsements

Look at what type of products the influencer has already promoted and see whether they are similar to yours. You may even find that some influencer has already mentioned one of your products and working with this person would probably feel authentic and genuine to the target audience.

Quality of content

Check the type of content an influencer was responsible for in the past. Look at the quality, substance, tone, consistency and focus of the content. Did it position the brand in a positive light without being too promotional? Was it in line with the brand’s image and goals? What kind of engagement did it generate?

Establishing a relationship with the influencer

You can’t just assume that an influencer will be delighted to partner with you. Influencers receive many opportunities, and they are often highly selective. They only choose to work on campaigns they care about. You have to establish your credibility and present your business proposal ideas in a creative, thoughtful way. Weak influencer relationships translate into unsuccessful campaigns.

Use social media to come up on an influencer’s radar

You may want to start sharing some of their posts or making comments. Do this regularly and consistently where appropriate, but don’t overdo it. If your comments are pithy, relevant and entertaining, they are likely to draw attention.

Befriend an influencer rather than just making a pitch

Get your social media assistant to do some research into the influencer. This will help you to find reasons to make the influencer care about your campaign. If there’s any recent work you found particularly impressive, be sure to mention it. Find points of common interest and use these to start growing the relationship.

Be clear about what you expect

While approaching an influencer, you need to define what you expect to achieve from the relationship. You can’t be vague and just say “Let’s try and do something together.” Unless an influencer has a concrete idea of what you expect, you’re likely to be ignored.

Be clear about benefits

As much as you need to tell influencers what you expect, you need to be clear about the benefits of the partnership to them. They receive monetary compensation, but they often receive other perks too, such as free products, free trials, trips and even inspirational retreats. These perks help to build the relationship with your brand.

Giving the influencer creative freedom

When brands don’t allow influencers to express themselves freely, brand messages may sound insincere and scripted. It may be hard to give up creative control, but unless the influencer’s followers enjoy the content, they won’t support it.

You have to trust that influencers know what they are doing

They have often managed to build up huge followings on social media because they know exactly what their followers want. They should be able to come up with authentic, original content for you that they know will be viewed and shared by their many followers.

The most successful brands give influencers the space they need to promote a brand authentically. One example of this is Subaru’s #Meet an Owner campaign where bold, adventurous influencers made posts and videos featuring Subaru but kept their own style and flavor.

Their opinions are highly valued

Influencers create content for you around their opinions, personalities and day to day lives. On social media, their opinions are highly valued by their followers, and they wield considerable power.

Any suggestions or recommendations from them can spread like wildfire and affect the real-world decisions of their followers. Lenovo reached out to millennial influencers to showcase their products which were positioned as a go-to tool in their normal lives in authentic, personal videos.

Types of creative content they can produce

They may decide to incorporate your product or service into their content as a creative Instagram post, a captivating video or an entertaining blog article. By integrating the brand content organically into their lifestyle content, they influence followers who want to emulate how they look, what they buy, what they do and where they go.

Give final approval

To maintain some control over messaging, you may need to implement some specific requirements for copy. You should also ask for final approval before copy goes live. You don’t want to become embroiled in any controversy or impropriety caused by inappropriate content that could affect your brand image. Set up a way to vet content before it appears.

Coordinating with influencers

Influencer marketing campaigns have many moving parts. If you don’t schedule enough time for communicating with an influencer during a campaign, it can impact its success. You need to set up clear expectations with regard to timelines and responsibilities for each part of the campaign from the very beginning. Utilize your social media marketing tools optimally to derive the best output from influencer tie-up.

The initial proposal

Some issues to cover during the initial planning phase would be the terms of engagement, nature of the content, how and when communication takes place. A proposal template such as the one offered by HubSpot can be used to formulate a timeline and goals for the campaign.

Issues that may arise

Many issues can arise during the course of a campaign, such as missed deadlines and wrong or incomplete deliveries. Other details that can cause problems are delays in payments, content approval, and product shipments. To avoid any such issues, you can opt for corporate social media services from a reputed agency.

Using an influencer marketing agency

Partnering with an influencer marketing agency can help to eliminate any coordination problems because they are used to dealing with all the intricacies of such campaigns.

Avoiding Violations of FTC Requirements

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has strict guidelines about advertising disclosures on social media. In 2017, it sent notices to nearly a hundred brands and celebrities for violating these guidelines.

More transparency

What the FTC’s guidelines are based on for sponsored content is the assumption that consumers will react differently to recommendations that come from trusted friends than from people who are compensated for endorsing a product. They want more transparency and place the onus on brands and influencers to divulge their relationship.

Proper disclosure on every platform

Influencers have to clearly identify when they are being given financial compensation, a gift in exchange for a post or a free product. Proper disclosure has to be included every time a product or service is being promoted for compensation. The FTC also has different endorsement requirements for sponsored content on each social media platform.

Measuring the success of influencer marketing campaigns

It is a challenge to measure ROI when using influencers because it’s hard to determine direct financial returns.

One way to help with tracking the impact of the influencer is to use discount codes or influencer-specific links. These can help to determine click through and conversion rates.

Other less direct ways to measure return is with factors such as social media reach, impressions, and engagement rates. Various tools are available to help you measure the number of impressions and engagement generated by the influencer.

There are tools that measure engagement and also help you to monitor the cost of every impression and engagement together with the overall amount spent on a campaign.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing has many benefits if you can find the right influencer. One of the biggest challenges is to find someone who is a good fit for your brand and has the same target audience as your company.

It can be a challenge to build a relationship with influencers and allow them the creative freedom to market your product or service in a way that keeps their style and flavor.

Campaigns can be challenging and require close coordination with influencers regarding deadlines and other issues. It can also be challenging to keep up with all the FTC requirements and to measure the results of a campaign. However, there’s no question that the benefits outweigh the challenges.

Influencer marketing can take your brand to the next level.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Whether engaging with a company’s customer service and support teams, or being marketed (or even sold) to, it’s generally understood that the modern customer wants said engagements to have an organic feel to them. That is, today’s consumers want to know the companies they interact with are truly looking to help them in some way – not just to make a quick buck.

As HubSpot points out, this is one of the main reasons conversational marketing has proven to be so effective in recent times: it allows brands to meet their customers where they currently are, provide them with the exact information they need, and forge an authentic and organic connection with them in a way that transcends the typical “company-customer” relationship.

In doing all this, brands that implement conversational marketing are typically more trusted than those that don’t seek to engage in authentic discourse with their customers. In turn, these companies are usually able to gain a ton of valuable information from their customers – information that can be used to improve their initiatives and processes in the future.

Now, as you’re likely well aware, the newly-implemented GDPR has thrown a bit of a monkey wrench into the overall plans of most companies’ marketing teams. Back in April, “The GDPR introduces stringent rules around data collection and processing, and establishes legal grounds that justify the collection of personal data.”

One of the main tenets of the GDPR is that companies must obtain consent from any individual from whom they intend to gather data for marketing purposes – before they gather such data in the first place. Needless to say, this has major implications in terms of how brands implement conversational marketing tactics moving forward.

But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the enforcement of the GDPR can potentially lead to more efficient and effective conversational marketing initiatives – as long as the changes are approached from the correct angle.

Which is exactly what we’ll be discussing throughout the remainder of this article.

How the GDPR Will Affect Conversational Marketing

As was to be expected, the implementation of the GDPR caused a bit of a shock-wave throughout the marketing world, leaving companies around the globe working tirelessly to ensure they would be following the proper protocol moving forward.

Admittedly, many marketers initially saw these new regulations simply as a bunch of new hoops to jump through, on top of all their other duties and requirements. Also of concern is the fact that the GDPR inherently makes it more difficult for companies to engage with and collect information on their customers and prospects.

(This, of course, is a necessary byproduct of the true intent of the GDPR, which is to protect customer data across the board.)

However, as we alluded to earlier, what may at first seem like a roadblock (or at least a bump in the road) can be beneficial to your company’s conversational marketing initiatives in the long run.

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

True Transparency is Essential

If we’re being completely honest, no matter how transparent a company’s approach to marketing of any kind (conversational marketing included) is, said company will almost certainly end up using the data it collects on its customers in ways said customers probably never anticipated.

(For example, consider the process of remarketing, in which a brand’s ads seem to “follow” customers around the web after they visit the company’s site just once.)

While most modern consumers understand – and even expect – companies to use their information for the purpose of providing personalized marketing material and experiences, it is possible for companies to go a bit too far in such initiatives. When this line is crossed, the marketing attempts that follow typically come off as, well… kind of creepy.

Thinking about all this in terms of conversational marketing, you might make the argument that the more authentic and organic an engagement feels to the consumer, the more taken aback they may be once they realize the company in question had been collecting data on them the entire time. Ironically, in an instance such as this, the company’s attempt to build an authentic relationship with the customer may end up backfiring.

That said, it’s important to call attention to the fact that your customers are not your friends. As we said earlier, no matter how authentic your engagements are with your customer base, the bottom line is your relationship with them revolves around your providing them with a service, and their providing you with revenue.

In understanding this, it becomes clear that following GDPR protocol can potentially bring your relationship with your customers to an entirely new level of authenticity: one in which both parties truly acknowledge what the relationship is really all about.

In turn, this can lead to…

A More Focused Approach

To be sure, conversational marketing is all about engaging with your individual consumers on a one-to-one basis, allowing each of them to have their voices heard.

However, it’s all too easy for marketers to allow their customers to become too conversational during these exchanges – causing them to inadvertently neglect the “marketing” side of the equation. In other words, in an effort to gather as much information as possible from a given customer, marketers can sometimes allow such conversations to go “off the rails,” so to speak.

When this happens, it becomes easier for both the customer and the marketer to stray from the original topic of discussion. In turn, the information provided by the customer becomes less and less valuable to the marketer. Worse yet, as both parties become less focused on a singular goal, the customer may even move away from their buyer’s journey.

Of course, it’s always been best practice for marketers to approach such engagements strategically, so as to avoid instances such as the one described above.

However, the implementation of the GDPR makes such an approach not just “suggested,” but legally necessary, as well: because marketers are now legally required to disclose how and why they gather specific information from their customers, it inherently will become easier for marketers to maintain focus during marketing-related conversations with customers and prospects.

Going along with all this, marketers of all kinds should be focused on collecting the minimum amount of information necessary for a given purpose. For example, if a company is looking to determine the median age of its customer base, its team should only be worried about collecting the birth dates of its audience members – and nothing else.

Again, this legal requirement can make your conversational marketing efforts become more efficient, as you’ll inherently be focusing on gathering only the data that pertains to your current purposes.

Intensive Lead Qualifications

Like the process of collecting consumer data, the process of qualifying leads is another area in which it’s better to be focused than to “cast a wide net.”

In other words, it’s always been best practice to have a rather intensive lead generation and qualification process in place. Simply put, the more focused this process is for an organization, the less time, money, and energy the company will spend chasing after dead-end leads.

But, again, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of chasing after any ol’ lead, in the hopes that those who don’t typically fall under your definition of a “target customer” (i.e. longshots) end up converting. Needless to say, this rarely happens – and if it does, these less-than-ideal customers typically won’t stay on board for very long.

The legal aspect of the GDPR now adds an extra layer to all of this. Not only are you legally required to gain consent for collecting information from any consumer you engage with, but you’re also required to ensure this data remains safe and secure while in your possession. Additionally, if you end up not needing to use said data, you also need to ensure that you dispose of it according to GDPR protocol.

All this being said, you stand to lose even more time, money, and energy by implementing a less-intensive lead generation and qualification process, now that GDPR protocol is in place.

With this in mind, then, it’s clear that becoming more intensive in your lead-gen processes can lead to a higher level of efficiency for your marketing team across the board.

Going back to the transparency aspect we spoke about earlier, even the initial process of obtaining consent can, in itself, be seen as a part of your lead generation and qualification process.

Think of it this way: if a consumer trusts you enough to give you permission to use their information for marketing purposes, you can be rather confident that they’ll be likely to engage further with your company moving forward. And, on the other hand, those who don’t consent to all this probably aren’t high-quality leads, anyway – and you shouldn’t waste any more time chasing after them.

Wrapping Up

As we alluded to in the intro, while the advent of the GDPR certainly means marketers will need to make some changes in the way they engage in conversation with leads and prospects, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

On the contrary, it essentially means marketers are now required to follow some of the best practices for lead generation and engaging with consumers that, to be sure, they should have been following anyway.

Perhaps the most important takeaway, moving forward, is that you should strive to be as intentional as possible whenever engaging in conversation with a potential customer. In turn, you’ll not only ensure that you maintain compliance with the GDPR – but you’ll also ensure that your conversational marketing efforts end up paying off in dividends.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Believe it or not, Instagram is more than just a place to share photos with your friends. It’s a powerful marketing tool and a lucrative sales channel.

With over 800 million active users, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms to ever exist. Especially among younger demographics, who are increasingly moving away from Facebook, Instagram reigns supreme.

It’s a great place to build up a social presence and cultivate an audience that’s genuinely engaged with your brand – and most importantly, that converts into more sales than ever before.

But how will you convert your Instagram business page into an outstanding branding channel?

With the right strategy, and some simple but powerful tactics you can implement, your brand can leverage Instagram’s massive reach to connect with more potential customers than you could ever imagine.

It’s not just a matter of content marketing, though. You can also use Instagram directly as a sales channel.

Do you want to know how?

Here’s a list of 10 essential ways to convert your Instagram business page into a branding channel:

1. Turn your one-time visitors into loyal long-term Instagram followers.

Don’t lose potential customers once they’ve come and gone from your site. You can keep them engaged long term by encouraging them to follow your brand on Instagram.

There, they’ll be able to catch your latest posts, keeping your brand at the top of their mind for some time to come.

This is especially important if you’re getting traffic via your company’s blog. Recent studies have shown that as many as 80% of blog post visits are new visitors, not people who have been to your site before.

Creating a unique Instagram marketing strategy will compel people to follow your brand and maximize the likelihood that they’ll come back to your site again – and in the long run, become your customers.

So how do you do this?

You’ll want to have a prominent button on your top performing pages with a “Follow Us on Instagram” CTA (call to action).

Here are a few small tweaks you can make on your site to turn readers into loyal Instagram followers.

Add follow buttons.

If you’ve already got these for other platforms like Twitter and Facebook, add Instagram to the mix, too. Make sure they’re featured prominently on your site. If you’re using WordPress as your content management system, there are quite a few plugins you can use for this.

Implement pop-ups on popular pages that encourage readers to follow you on Instagram.

There’s definitely a balance involved here. Too many popups, too soon after a person lands on a page, can cause them to bounce. But you might want to try Instagram CTAs in popups, especially if you’ve already got them for other things like newsletter subscriptions.

If you’ve got author bios on your blog posts, add a “Follow on Instagram” CTA.

This also applies to your guest posts on other sites. If you’re using guest posting as a link building strategy, ask the sites you’re working with if you could include an Instagram link. Most of the time, they’ll say yes!

2. Use simple plugins & tools to turn Instagram into a direct sales channel in just a few clicks.

One of the best ways to make more sales is to make it as easy as possible for people to make a purchase.

And Instagram is actually great for that.

People have limited time and mental energy. If they see your product on Instagram and think, “Hey, that’s kind of neat, I might buy that later,” they probably won’t.

Making your Instagram shoppable is a smart way to turn a “maybe” into a “yes” when someone sees something they like. Brands who’ve implemented this strategy successfully have reported revenue increases as high as 20%.

If you’re selling products through a service like BigCommerce or Shopify, there are built-in user-friendly tools for making your Instagram posts fully shoppable.

3. Get noticed and make a statement with a killer Instagram bio.

Do you have a good bio on your Instagram account?

If not, breathing some new life into it could make a big difference in your follower count.

A great Instagram bio stands out and gets noticed, making an impact on people who come across your account.

Let’s take the example of Vera Bradley’s Twitter bio:

Yes, it has an interesting Instagram bio, but do you know how you can get a unique bio for your brand?

Here are some advanced tactics you can use to make your bio more interesting and more alluring than ever before, striking the right chord with the people most likely to buy from you.

Targeted language that expresses your brand’s identity and lets your target audience know they’ve come to the right place.

Unfortunately, you don’t have much space to work with. You’ve got 150 characters to convey who you are and what you do. Don’t be afraid to hire a great copywriter for this part. You want to capture your brand’s “voice” as succinctly as you can.

Add a couple emojis to catch the reader’s eye.

Don’t be afraid to use an emoji or two, especially if you’re a brand with a “fun” aesthetic going on. Images and colors catch the eye and make things more memorable.

Include a CTA.

Including a URL sounds good, but you don’t want to just leave it there. Weave it into a clear CTA: “Visit us at AwesomeSite.com for all your awesome needs.”

Include contact information.

Invite your followers to reach out and actively communicate with your brand. This could mean an email address, a Twitter handle, or a link to a contact page.

Making these simple tweaks to your bio can have a huge impact on your account’s growth and popularity, helping you bring in new followers who might have passed you over before.

4. Promote your products with fun, creative visual content and irresistible captions.

Don’t just post a product photo and slap some hashtags on there. You need text, too. And it needs to be engaging.

For best results, you want to aim for a professional-level copy. Like the product descriptions on your website, your Instagram captions should be informative yet engaging.

Here are a few actionable tips you can start using today for captions that pack a serious punch.

Put your hashtags at the end of your caption.

Don’t worry too much about these being “above the fold.” Their biggest function is to improve searchability and make sure your content comes up when someone’s looking for whatever it is you have to offer. The General Instagram etiquette is to put hashtags at the end of captions, not the beginning. The latter looks tacky, and screams “I’m new to Instagram and have no idea how anything works.”

Keep it casual.

Instagram is a pretty easygoing, lighthearted kind of place. Don’t feel like you have to be super formal, even if you’re in a niche or industry where your overall brand voice needs to be relatively formal and professional.

5. Capture your brand’s unique aesthetic with Instagram’s built-in editing tools.

As you’ve probably noticed, Instagram has a ton of built-in editing tools you can use to modify and enhance your posts.

Filters make the images feel more unique and stand out from the crowd. You can use these features to enhance your brand’s unique aesthetic, creating a consistent “look” that lets your followers know instantly whose photo they’re looking at.

Don’t be afraid to play around and experiment with everything Instagram has to offer. There’s more to life than #nofilter.

6. Share your brand’s impressive culture and legacy with content that adds a personal touch.

There’s more to being successful on Instagram than just posting pictures of your products. It’s more about capturing your brand’s unique personality and aesthetic.

Want to know how?

Well, Google’s Instagram profile can help you get a clear idea.

Are you confused about what you should post?

Here are some ideas you can draw from to create content your audience will love.

Give your followers a peek behind the scenes.

Photos of your team at the office, your production facilities, and other behind the scenes content can really help humanize your brand and forge a connection with fans.

Post images with a story behind them.

This is a different take on the “behind the scenes” concept.

Encourage user-generated content.

Create branded hashtags, and encourage your followers to post their own photos of your products. Pairing this approach with giveaways or photo contests is a great way to encourage active engagement and connect your brand with the right people.

Embrace #ThrowbackThursday and #FlashbackFriday.

Tell the story of your brand’s unique journey by sharing some of your history with your followers.

7. Offer exclusive and promotional announcements to followers.

You can offer limited time discounts, coupon codes, and other promotions exclusively for people who follow you on Instagram. This adds an incentive for customers to follow you.

Here’s a basic strategy you can use to plan and execute sales-oriented posts that convert every time.

Teaser post.

Let your audience know ahead of time that you’re about to run a sale or a promotion.

Engagement post.

The goal of this post is to encourage your followers to share your brand with their own audiences. Branded hashtags are great for this.

Regular content your brand usually posts.

You don’t necessarily want a streak of nothing but promotion posts. Don’t be afraid to break things up with the kind of content you usually post.

Context post.

This gives you sale context. *Why* are you running a sale in the first place? Answering that question can make your offer a lot more engaging and appealing. Example: “Winter is coming. Get 25% off Game of Thrones themed extra warm fleece lined hoodies on Wednesday only!” Holidays and changing seasons are the natural opportunities to run a sale.

Sale post.

One or more posts advertising the sale itself, complete with a link or coupon code your followers can use.

These promotions work best if you create a sense of urgency. Emphasize that your sale is only for a limited time, or that only a limited number of people can get the discount.

Also, while your sale is active, temporarily change the link in your bio to make it even easier for people to come “get it while it’s hot.”

8. Use popular, relevant hashtags that make sense for your business.

Hashtags are essential for searchability on Instagram, and choosing the right ones can lead to tons of new followers.

There are two factors a great hashtag should have: relevance and popularity.

You can see how Nespresso has used all the coffee ingredients as their hashtags in the post. This way you can also use hashtags relevant to your brand and get in the limelight!

What you don’t want to do is to jam in a bunch of dubiously relevant or just plain out of place hashtags.

It can be tempting to throw in a few ultra-popular hashtags that get a lot of traffic, but that may not have much to do with your brand.

Here’s a simple example to gain in depth knowledge…

It doesn’t matter how popular #cutepuppies is, it doesn’t belong on your health supplement company’s picture of your brand new banana flavored protein bar. Even if #cutepuppies gets ten times as many searches as any other hashtags out there, your protein bar isn’t what people are looking for. They’re going to ignore it.

You won’t get engagement from irrelevant hashtags, no matter how popular they are.

Instead, it makes more sense to hone in on hashtags that are popular and engaging, but that also depict your brand.

For a protein bar, you could add hashtags like #cleaneating, #fitness, #gettingfit, #supplements, #ketodiet, and others that are relevant to fitness, healthy eating, and a healthy lifestyle.

While you don’t want too many hashtags, don’t be afraid to use a bunch of them. Think seven to ten though, not twenty five.

9. Use fun contests and high value giveaways to boost engagement and reach new audiences.

Everyone likes to be a winner. Everyone likes free stuff.

Exactly how Fabfitfun has grabbed the users attention through giveaways:

You can use these facts to your advantage, by using Instagram as a platform to run contests and promotions.

Using a branded hashtag, you can do things like organize photo contests that revolve around your products. This helps you not only bring in new followers, but leverage your existing followers for some extra publicity.

10. Join forces with top Instagram influencers in your niche.

Influencer marketing is huge right now, especially on Instagram.

There are tons of people out there whose visual charisma and charm have won them tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers.

Many of these people have an audience that overlaps quite a bit with yours. Selling women’s fashion? There are tons of popular fashionistas with massive Instagram followings.

Whatever your niche may be, you can almost certainly find influencers who can tap into the right audiences for your brand.

Be advised that this isn’t free. Some smaller-scale influencers, often referred to as “micro-influencers,” might give you a promo in exchange for some free stuff.

But in many cases, you’ll need to pay influencers for promotions. However, this can pay off in spades, and it’s an option worth exploring.

Let your brand’s uniqueness shine through with Instagram

Instagram is a great platform to capture your brand’s unique personality and distinctive aesthetic.

Using a variety of different kinds of visual content – including behind the scenes photos, product photos, aesthetic imagery, and more – you can make an impact on the minds and hearts of your target audience.

With a little creativity, just about any brand in any industry can make the most of one of the most popular social media platforms of all time. For building an audience of loyal fans and brand advocates, you can’t beat Instagram for sheer reach.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

If we match those two statements with the rise of video as the most engaging type of content on the internet today, working on your Youtube SEO strategy to rank high, should be at the top of any business’s priority list.

In this article, we are going to discuss the best way to go about doing this.

I’ve broken down this post into the following topics:

• Why your business needs to be on YouTube
• Keyword research
• Optimizing video elements
• Video creation
  • Best types of video marketing to rank on YouTube
  • How long should the video be?
  • How to hook the audience
  • What’s the most important segment of the video?
  • How to create a video for audience retention
  • Using keywords for SEO purposes
• Calls To Action
• Playlists

Why your business needs to be on YouTube

In 2019, having an effective online presence means using video marketing to communicate your brand to the world. YouTube should be the first platform that comes to mind when thinking about showcasing your video content. After all, it does have over 1.5 billion monthly active users viewing more than 5 billion videos per day.

If the magnitude of its reach is not enough to convince you, here are a few more facts to help you see why it is important to have your video on Youtube:

YouTube attracts about ⅓ of users on the internet – Having your video on YouTube will not guarantee views, but if you want to start somewhere, it’s probably a smart idea to begin by being where 33% of worldwide users hang out online.

Millennials prefer YouTube 2:1 over traditional television – The word “millennial” is not just a buzzword, it’s more like an indication of where to find the influencers of the 21st century. It’s probably wise to follow their tracks.

By 2025, it’s predicted that 50% of viewers under 32 will not subscribe to paid TV – Yet another reason why online video will rule for years to come.

Keyword research

Now that your video is on YouTube (let’s hope), you have to make sure your content gets found. That’s why it is imperative that you use the right keywords to help you drive traffic to it. Here’s a brief rundown of how to do this:

1. Make a list of very specific keywords that best describe your content.
2. Head over to Google’s keyword planner and see which of these drive the most traffic.
3. Once you’ve identified the most popular keywords, come up with both a title and description that uses said keywords.

Optimizing video elements

Tags

Like keywords, using tags the right way will allow you to reach the right audience. So choose words and phrase that best describe your video. One way to do this is by putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and asking yourself which search terms you would use in order to find your video.

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of using generic tags just because they have a larger reach. Being specific with your tags will allow you to reach audiences that will actually engage with your video. Keep in mind that it’s about how much time users spend watching your video and not about how many views your video has.

Video description

This is an opportunity to describe your video with all the keywords you researched earlier. It is also an opportunity to add useful information and links that viewers can later reference.

If it’s pertinent, you can also add links to your other videos. This way, you’ll be making it easier for your audience to reach any useful information mentioned in your video.

Title

The title should be a cohesive snippet that describes the content of your video to perfection. It has the duty of doing this while incorporating the relevant keywords that will rank your video higher in the search engines. So be descriptive but brief.

Thumbnails

Thumbnails are like mini advertisements for your video. You only get one chance with them before users scroll past you, so make them stand out. Use colorful images that best describe what your video is about and avoid abstract looking images.

Video creation

Best types of videos to rank on YouTube

There are many videos you can publish on YouTube. Here’s a quick rundown of the ones I think will give you the best ranking.

Explainer videos

Besides using it for entertainment, YouTube is often used as a resource to learn about new things. At first, during the discovery phase, you just want to watch someone explain things briefly instead of having to read dozens upon dozens of blog posts. A primer on the topic. 

Explainer videos do a great job at this, and when it comes to introducing a new idea or process, having this kind of video on YouTube and tagging it as such will definitely get you some hits.

How-to Videos

Users will eventually want to get into the nitty-gritty of the topic they are researching. To do this, they are very likely to search the term “how-to” and then fill in the blank. Not only is it a popular keyword, it is also a very popular genre of video, which you can later organize into playlists to make it easier for potential subscribers to find.

Product Videos

Businesses will often have a video about their product on their company’s site (especially on eCommerce platforms). This is of course a good idea, but a better idea is to make sure these videos are on YouTube. User’s will flock to YouTube to look for all kinds of videos about the product.

They don’t care who makes it as long as it gives them a well rounded picture of what the product is. A good idea is to make many videos showcasing a different product feature in each video. You can then reference each video to each other through playlists or by way of the description.

How long should the video be?

The length of your video will vary depending on the type of video you want to make. In my experience, explainer videos are best kept under the two minute mark.

However, how-to videos will require more time allotted to them since they have a lot more content to get through. As long as it is engaging and you hook them early on then you should be fine. This brings me to my next point.

How to hook the audience

According to some research, “20% of users will leave a video if it hasn’t hooked them in the first 10 seconds.” In other words, you better make your video memorable and fast.

Cut to the chase by telling your audience what your video is about as soon as playback starts. You can do this in the form of a question so that it is clear that the remainder of the video will be spent answering it. This way you are telling your audience what the video is about while also peeking their interest.

Another good way to do this is by showing the end result of some process right at the beginning and then letting your audience know that the rest of the video will be spent showing them how you got there.

What’s the most important segment of the video?

With video, you are basically creating a story. And with any story, there should be a beginning, a middle and an end. So which one is the most important?

Short answer, every segment of your video should be considered equally important. However, they are important in their own specific way. I’ll be succinct in explaining this:

1. In the beginning you hook the audience.
2. Then you give them the meat of your argument/content.
3. And in the end, you reel them in with a call to action.

Not one of these segments works without the other, so pay special attention to make sure each one is doing its part accordingly.

Calls To Action

Not only should your video be informative, it should also be persuasive enough for the viewer to take some kind of action. It could be anything. You can call on them to visit your website, subscribe to your channel and newsletter, or even purchase your product.

Be elegant as to how you go about it though, so that it doesn’t feel like you’re desperately and indiscriminately building spammy email lists.

The point here is to get your audience to opt in voluntarily so that you can follow up with them with something they’ll find valuable in return. A call to action should drive this message home. This means being clear as to what they’ll get in terms of value for taking any specific action.

Playlists

With the use of playlists, you can organize content into topics or themes. The point of doing this is to make it easier for users to find and consume your video. Getting into the habit of doing this will help drive views to videos that might have been overlooked had they not been part of a themed playlist.

Of course, don’t just bundle together random videos for the sake of it. The playlists should feel way more valuable than the individual videos that are within them. Or at least that’s how you should think about it when making them.

Conclusion

YouTube is a great platform to host and promote your video. In order to do so, you will have to work on building the right kind of content and make sure it is easily found by your users. This means doing it in a way that appeals to user’s psychology as well as YouTube’s algorithms. So be prepared to use keywords, tags and visuals that consider these two variables.

A simple title may be enough for a human to gauge a video’s content without any further context, but it may not be enough for a search engine to do the same and rank it with the most relevant searches. The key is testing different angles while thinking wholesomely of how to best build your brand’s YouTube presence in a way that stands out.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The truth is, no matter how innovative or life-changing your product or service might be, there’s always going to be someone out there who can do it bigger, better, or cheaper. The only way to boost your chances of sustainable sales, and keep the profits coming, is to differentiate yourself with a brand identity that ensures long-term loyalty.

Your brand is the secret sauce that separates you from every other Tom, Dick, and Harry on the business block that’s working to steal your customers and sap your sales. Your identity is made up of countless crucial building blocks, from your logo to your name, that dictates how your audience should see you.

With the right brand identity, you can transform yourself from another faceless company in the crowd, to a friend for your customers – someone who offers all the solutions to their most common problems. In the long-run, an exceptional brand can have an incredible impact on ROI. All you need to do is figure out how to use it to your advantage.

Why Should You Care About Branding?

Not only is the competition in today’s marketplace fiercer than ever, but it’s becoming tougher for businesses to connect with their customers too.

Today’s consumers are tired of the same old marketing strategies. They ignore advertisements, block out banner ads, and actively disengage with companies who spend too much time promoting themselves online. Yet, all the while, companies with strong identities continue to thrive because they give their followers something to resonate with and relate to.

People fall in love with brands, believe in their products, and trust their services. With the right brand identity, you can:

• Improve your credibility: The more powerful your brand is, the more effective your marketing becomes. For instance, if you spend time building your identity as a company that knows all about technology, your customers will be more likely to trust you the next time you say you’re selling the most innovative product on the market.
• Ensure consistency: It’s easy to develop a sense of familiarity with a company that uses the same media and messages in all its campaigns. A solid branding strategy will ensure that all your marketing has the same tone of voice, enhancing your overall identity.
• Increase the value of your products: People are willing to pay more for items that come from reputable brands. If your identity resonates with values and beliefs that your customers hold dear, then they’ll purchase your product in an effort to express themselves, and showcase important parts of their personality.

Investing in your brand identity, and applying it consistently to your marketing campaigns isn’t just about getting your target audience to choose you over your competitors. Instead, the aim should be to convince your clients that you’re the ultimate solution to their problem.

Here are just 6 brand identity tricks that could make your marketing campaigns more successful, and an insight into the statistic-backed benefits they introduce.

1. Always Start With A Buyer Persona

When you create a brand identity, you do so with your user persona in mind. Doing this allows you to create a logo, a tone of voice, and an image that fits with the kind of person you want to attract. Just as great branding relies on an in-depth understanding of your market, exceptional advertising comes down to knowing what your audience wants too.

Think about how you can integrate your customer-friendly brand identity into your marketing messages to connect with your audience on a deeper level. This might mean creating custom content that’s designed to reflect trending issues in the marketplace, or changing your media colors to suit the preferences of a specific demographic.

Remember, statistics show that 78% of customers feel companies who focus on custom content are more trustworthy than organizations who churn out generic content for the sake of it. No matter what your marketing campaign consists of, from email messages to television slots, you should always start with your target audience in mind.

2. Build Your Online Presence

As any company should know in today’s marketplace, earning the respect and attention of your audience takes a lot more than constantly posting advertisements online, or sharing links on social media. Consumers are looking for new ways to build relationships with the companies they do business with.

In fact, 50% of people online today follow up to 4 brands on social media, while 26% follow up to 9 brands, and 22% follow more than 10 brands. Only 3% of all the people active online today don’t spend their free time interacting with companies in some way.

When you develop your brand identity, you end up with a set of unique guidelines that you can use to help people in your organization represent your company, regardless of whether you might interact with your customers. This can help you to build your presence through an “omnichannel” approach while demonstrating the same, consistent image.

Find out where your customers spend their time, from social media to blogs, and local forums, then use your identity to spread the message of what your business is capable of.

3. Tell A Powerful Story

You don’t have to be a master marketer to know that “storytelling” has become a powerful strategy for many companies in the online space. The reason for this is that science tells us that people make purchasing decisions based on “emotional factors”, rather than logic and strategy.

While it’s tempting to tell yourself that you always make sensible decisions about the products you buy, the Harvard Business School revealed that 95% of the money-based decisions we make are settled unconsciously. In other words, your emotions prompt an immediate response, which you then back up with a logical reason for your purchase.

Many marketers spend so much time thinking about numbers and statistics, that they forget to harness the “human” part of the commerce conversation. With a brand identity, you can begin to develop a narrative that speaks to your customer on an emotional level, improving their affinity with your business, and increasing your chances of brand loyalty.

For instance, you might be the underdog that suffered through years of hardship to support ideals that matter to your customer, like value, ethics, or social responsibility. The more authentic, and interesting your story is, the more inspired your customers will be to support you regardless of what you do or sell. In fact, storytelling has been scientifically proven to help companies sell more products.

4. Use Content To Generate Authority

Experience is the ultimate differentiating factor in today’s marketplace. In a world where customers are sick of waiting in long lines, dealing with uninspiring products, and ultimately regretting their buying decisions, it’s hard to convince anyone who doesn’t already know your brand that you’re worth their time.

Unfortunately, for companies that are just getting started in the marketplace, this overall sense of cynicism can make it difficult for your marketing messages to have an impact – no matter how much effort and money you pour into your campaigns.

Before you start trying to sell anything, it may help to use your brand communications to convince your customers that your business is valuable and reliable. The best way to do this is by creating informative, entertaining, and authoritative content.

Not only does content give you a unique opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge on a particular niche or industry, but companies with blogs also generate 67% more leads each month than companies without a content marketing strategy. Content also makes it easier for your clients to find your brand when you’re not investing in marketing campaigns, by giving you up to 434% more indexed pages on Google.

5. Strengthen Relationships With “Transparency”

One of the many lessons that today’s companies are learning as they struggle to connect with empowered customers is that people don’t fall in love with corporations, they form relationships with “people”.  A brand identity that’s based on transparency, shared values, and authenticity can help your company to feel more like a “friend” in a digital world that’s full of faceless businesses.

The Harvard Business Review shows us that 64% of consumers consider shared values to be the primary reason to buy from a brand. The more you focus on showcasing your transparent nature across every channel, from your website to your social media campaigns, to your offline marketing strategies, the more people will come to trust your company.

Just remember that you’ll need to be consistent if you want your branding strategy to pay off. Statistics show that brands that are presented consistently are 4 times more likely to enjoy greater brand visibility.

6. Expand Your Brand

Finally, when it comes to making your marketing messages count, a sustainable brand identity will also make it easier for you to find people you can collaborate with in your chosen industry. While it’s tempting to think of everyone in your community as a potential competitor, the right partnerships can give more volume to your advertising efforts, and ensure that your messages reach the right people.

For instance, a new company could partner up with an existing brand in a similar field to offer packaged products as part of a promotion. Imagine a business that sells paints collaborating with a brand that sells paintbrushes, for example.

On the other hand, if you’re looking at marketing from a social perspective, influencers have been proven to generate up to 11 times the ROI of traditional advertising campaigns. The key to benefiting from an influencer strategy is making sure that you choose an authority individual whose customer base aligns with your brand identity.

Branding And Marketing Belong Together

Just like salt and pepper, branding and marketing are two concepts that complement each other perfectly in today’s competitive business world. As customers continue to invest more money and loyalty into companies they can build a relationship with, it makes sense to design your marketing around a strong, emotional brand.

The right brand identity paves the way to countless marketing opportunities, all the way from authority-boosting content, to engaging influencer connections. It all starts with figuring out who you are and designing a personality that resonates with your audience.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

While writing may not be as gruesome as what Hemingway describes, I am certain we can all understand what he means.

When you’re inspired, content creation is a piece of cake. The words flow out like the Mississippi River, and you feel like a champion.

But when you’re not inspired, content creation sucks. You feel like you’re Sisyphus, having to push that boulder up that impossible hill.

And you can’t stop. Your boss demands it. Your clients demand it. Google demands it.

You have to publish, publish, publish – all for that sweet Google juice.

But… What if there was a way for you to create articles faster? What if you could have proven templates that you could simply fill in and get a blog post done?

Guess what?

There IS such a thing.

Because you see – writing content is like cooking. While you can certainly create original recipes from scratch, sometimes all you have to do is to grab a proven recipe, follow the ingredients and instructions, and just cook.

And the best part – there are 10 such recipes out there for you to use and replicate.

Ready?

Keep reading.

10 Blog Post Recipes You Can Use To Create More Articles In Less Time

1. The How-To Post

Is there really an introduction needed for the How-To post? The How To post is probably the most common format seen out there in the interwebz. It is used everywhere – from blog content to videos, from advertising to books.

Most people love How-Tos. And why not? Everyone loves a good post that can teach them how to do something.

Here’s the quick-and-easy formula on how to write a How-To blog post:

1. Choose a Topic

What is your audience interested in? What would they love to learn how to do, but don’t know how? What would they want to learn, but are unfamiliar with it?

Select a topic, and you’re ready to move on.

2. Outline the Steps Required

How-To posts are typically organized in a step-by-step fashion. Begin outlining all the steps required in order for a specific result to happen.

Ideally, you should already know how to get the result your audience wants, and outlining is merely a reorganization of your memory. If you don’t know how, then don’t worry. Give a quick search on Google to discover the steps required.

3. Write Your Headline

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – David Ogilvy

Your headline is the most important part of the post. Without a good, catchy headline, people will skip past your post. Here are a few headline templates you can choose from:

• How To [Achieve A Desired Outcome]
• How To [Desired Outcome] Without [Unpleasant Action]
• How To [Achieve Desired Outcome] Like [Celebrity]
• A Tutorial To [Achieve Desired Outcome]
• [Number] Steps To [Achieve Desired Outcome]
• [Keyword]: How To [Supporting Keywords]

4. Write Your Intro

Give a brief introduction of the problem most people from your audience face, and how they can finally do it today.

5. Fill In the Steps

Once you’re done introducing the post, jump straight into the steps required. Give them all the steps required (like what I’m doing here) to achieve the end result they want.

6. Write Your Conclusion

End your post with a motivational call-to-action; inspire them to begin taking action on the action steps you’ve provided.

Examples:
How To Collaborate With Different Types of Clients

How To Create Content That Generate 5,228 Visitors In Only 14 Days

How To Create A Marketing Plan

2. The List Post

Ahh, the list post. One of the most shared content types on the Internet, the list post is both hated and loved at the same time.

However, you don’t always have to create a clickbaity listicle. That’s for BuzzFeed. There is a way to create highly shareable, and highly loved list posts.

How?

Give each item on the list more “meat”. Instead of merely listing down all the points, give it an overview and describe why you included it in the list.

Here’s the recipe on how to do it:

1. Choose a Topic

Similar to the How-To post, make sure the topic you’re choosing is something that is highly desired by your audience. And for this particular format, make sure the topic you’ve chosen can allow you to generate at least 10 – 15 tips.

2. List Out All the Tips

Before even writing, you should list out every single tip possible. You can:

• Brain-dump everything you know about that topic on a Google Sheet.
• Research from other blogs. Do a Google search for “your topic” + “tips” to surface other list posts and guides that you can borrow tips from.
• Pretend that a customer or a client is asking you questions about that topic. What tips or strategies would you give that would change his or her life?

3. Shorten the List

Now that you have a huge list of all the tips you know, it’s time to cut it. Don’t give them 100 tips on how to do something, there’s a surefire way to make sure your audience does nothing.

Instead, choose 10 – 15 of your best (and actionable) tips, and explain them clearly.

4. Write Your Headline

You are now ready to write your article. Give it a good headline to entice readers to read. Here are a few headline templates you can consider:

• XX Things You Didn’t Know About [Person/Thing]
• XX Ways To [Do Something]
• XX Tips For [Objective]
• XX [Adjective] Facts [Person/Audience] Should Know
• XX [Blank] That Will Change Your Life

5. Write Your Intro

Do a quick introduction of the problem you’re trying to solve.

6. Fill In the Tips

Include the 10 – 15 of your best tips here. Don’t just list out the tips and leave it as it is. Add some meat!

Write an overview for each tip to give it some context, and write a short step-by-step guide on how to execute it. Make it actionable.

7. Write Your Conclusion

Conclude your post by channeling your inner Coach Wooden. Tell them what they should do next. Tell them how they should be taking action.

You want them to walk away, apply one of your tips, and change their lives.

Examples:

• Get More Customers: 10 Ways To Increase Sales By Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site
• 17 Untapped Backlink Source

3. The Egobait Post

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language” – Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie is right. Everyone loves to see their names featured somewhere. Everyone loves their ego stroked.

Take advantage of that by creating an egobait post. This is a post that is specifically created to attract the attention of a person or a group of people.

And this is the simple formula on how you can do it:

1. Choose Your Topic

Choose a topic that an influencer would be proud to be part of.

Pro-Tip: Make sure the topic is something more specific, for example, instead of “best fitness blogs”, you can do one on “best CrossFit blogs.”

2. Find Your Influencers

With the topic at hand, it is now time to search for people who would fit in that category. You can:

• Do a quick Google search for top [topic] blogs or top [topic] experts.
• Use AllTop.com – a site that lists down all the most popular blogs in a range of topics. Use AllTop to surface these experts’ blogs.
• Use other egobait posts.
• Watch out for virtual summits, or podcasts. They usually contain some of the best experts on particular topics.

3. Organize Your List

This depends entirely on how many experts you want to feature. Whittle down the list to the number you desire. Keep them relevant to the topic you’re discussing.

4. Create Your Headline

Here are some templates you can use:

• XX Of The Best [Topic] Blogs You Should Read
• Top XX [Topic] Blogs
• The Best [Topic] Blogs You Need To Follow In [Year]
• XX [Topic] Experts You Should Follow
• 11 [Topic] Experts Whose Insight Will Change Your Life

5. Write Your Intro

For your introduction, you can write about how many amazing experts there are out there on that topic, and why you chose these particular few experts.

6. Order Your List

Whilst I discourage ranking them in hierarchal order, try putting some of the more authoritative blogs at the top to make your list look legit.

7. Create the Listing

Don’t sweat this too much. Follow the proven template on how this is done. Here are the 4 important elements for your egobait post:

• Their name or website name
• Their picture
• A short, descriptive bio
• A link back to their site or social media profiles

8. Write Your Conclusion

Keep your conclusion simple. Tell your audience to bookmark or follow them.

Examples:
19 Inspirational Content Marketing Quotes To Breathe New Life Into Your Strategy

16 Top Marketing Blogs and Publications You Need to Be Following

4. The Expert Roundup

Getting influencers involved in your content is a surefire way of getting them to share your content. One good way of doing this is to create an expert roundup. An expert roundup is a blog post that features contributions by multiple experts.

Here’s the formula for doing it:

1. Choose Your Topic

When choosing your topic, make sure it is something that is relevant to your audience, and interesting to the experts.

2. Find Your Experts

With your topic at hand, search for experts to reach out to. You can uncover them by using search terms like “top [topic] blog”, “interview with” + keyword, “keyword” + “guest post by”.

3. Craft Your Question

With your list of experts, it’s time to craft a good question that the experts would want to answer. As experts are mostly busy people, make sure it is easy for them to answer. A good rule of thumb is: “can their answer fit into a tweet?”

4. Email Them

Reach out and ask them the question.

5. Wait For Them to Get Back to You

Since they are busy, they will take some time to get back to you. Wait for a week or so, then follow up with them.

Pro-Tip: Set your own internal deadline for publishing this post. You don’t want to end up delaying (or worse, not publishing) just because you decided to wait for everyone to reply you.

6. Create Your Headline

Here are some templates you can choose from:

• How XX Top Influencers [Desired Result] in [Timeframe]
• XX [Topic] Experts Reveal [Tip]
• XX Experts Discuss [Topic]

7. Write Your Intro

Introduce the post by talking about the problem, why you reached out to these experts and what question(s) you asked them.

8. Include Their Answers

Add their answers into the post. Include:

• Their name
• Their website (with a linkback)
• Their picture
• Their answers

9. Write Your Conclusion

Conclude your post by thanking all the experts that participated, and tell your audience what to do next with these expert information.

Examples:
59 Experts Discuss Key SEO Metrics To Measure ROI

How To Stand Out Online: 43 Experts Share Their Top Tips

19 Instagram Marketing Experts Share Their Insights On How To Grow Your Following From 0 – 10K In 30 Days

5. The Curated Blog Post

Instead of explaining everything from scratch, give your audience all the best resources for learning how to do something. Give them every single resource that can help them solve their problems.

Here’s the formula:

1. Choose Your Topic

What do your audience need help with? What problems are they facing? Which topic in your niche has too many poor resources out there that needs sorting?

2. Collect Your Resources

With your topic, search for all the good resources out there. However, don’t only use Google. Your goal is to be as comprehensive as possible. Use these other search areas:

• YouTube/ Vimeo/ Dailymotion
• TED
• Pinterest
• AllTop
• SlideShare
• Amazon
• GoodReads

3. Trim Your Resource List

Not everything you’ve found is good, so make sure to trim your list and only include the best. Give your list a quick glance, and remove anything that is not up-to-standard, outdated or copycat.

4. Create Your Headline

Here are some headline templates you can consider using:

• XX [Topic] Resources That’ll Take You From [Point A] to [Point B]
• X Resources to [Do Something]
• X [Type] Resources That Will [Achieve Goal]
• X Resources for [Target Group]

5. Write Your Intro

Tell them what problem you’re solving and what delectables you’re giving them.

6. Showcase Your List

Include all of the resources you’ve found in Step 3. Make it even better by organizing it in categories, and giving it a short one-liner description.

7. Write Your Conclusion

Giving them a huge list of resources can be overwhelming. Give them a tip or two on how to tackle the list.

Examples:
101 Writing Resources That Will Take You From Stuck To Unstoppable

21 Amazing Sites With Breathtaking Free Stock Photos

The Amazing, Breathtaking, Colossal, Really Really Useful List of Landing Page and CRO Resources

6. The “Hub” Post

A more advanced version of the curator post, the “Hub” post is organized neatly into different chapters that systematically guides the reader to the end result he or she wants.

Here’s the formula:

1. Choose Your Topic

What does your audience need help with? Where is he or she stuck, and needs an illuminating guide to help them?

Pro-Tip: Beware of being too specific. Choose a topic that you can break down into at least 7 -10 chapters.

2. Break Down Your Topic

With your chosen topic, break it down into 7-10 subtopics. These subtopics will end up being your “chapters”.

Imagine you’re writing a book to explain a concept. What would the table of contents be?

3. Collect Your Links

Follow the process in “Curated Blog Post” and search for good, relevant content. Make sure those links can fit under your subtopics.

4. Create Your Headline

For a “Hub” post, you can leave your headline as the keyword you want to rank.

5. Write Your Intro

Introduce the topic and some common challenges people face.

6. Create Your Table of Contents

Let the audience know what you’re going to cover. Let them skip to the different chapters they are interested in.

7. Create Each Chapter

Write a brief overview for each chapter, then add the links they need to read to become world-class in that subtopic.

8. Write Your Conclusion

End off your “hub” post by giving them “further reading.” Give them the opportunity to explore more if they are interested.

Examples:
Ultimate Guide To Starting Your Blog

Email Marketing

Customer Acquisition Strategies For Entrepreneurs

7. The Ultimate Guide

Ultimate Guides are long (3,000 words or more) posts that aim to be the only resources a reader needs to learn about a topic.

It is not easy to write; however, with the formula below, you too can do it.

Formula:

1. Choose Your Topic

Choose a topic that is broad enough to sustain a 3,000-word post. Ideally, it should be a topic where complete, detailed information is difficult to find in one place.

2. Do the Research

Your ultimate guide needs to be comprehensive and epic in scale. Meaning, you must cover everything the audience wants to know about that topic. You should aim to leave nothing out.

To do that, you need to look beyond merely Googling. You should check out:

• Books
• Podcasts
• YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion
• Online communities – Quora, Reddit, Facebook Groups, etc.
• Udemy, Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, etc.
• Ask experts

3. Outline Your Ultimate Guide

Because you’re going to be dealing with so much information, create an outline on what you expect to tackle. If you’re writing a step-by-step Ultimate Guide, break the topic down into the different steps first. If you’re writing a comprehensive, “book-like” Ultimate Guide, break down the topic into the different subtopics.

4. Create Your Headline

Here are a few templates you can take inspiration from:

• Ultimate Guide to [Activity]
• The Ultimate Guide To [Achieving Goal]
• The Definitive Guide to [Activity/Achieving Goal]

5. Write Your Intro

Because the post is going to be so epic, let them begin reading it right away. Tell them what they should expect after they are finished with your post.

6. Fill In Your Chapters

It’s time to write. Take your outlined chapters, and begin filling in the meat. There’s no shortcut here, so shut off all distractions and churn out the words.

7. Write Your Conclusion

Wrap up your epic post with a bang. Tell them what you want them to do. Inspire them to take their first step. Tell them that change is awaiting them, if they are willing to put in the work.

Examples:

The Complete Guide To Building Your Own Personal Brand

The Ultimate Guide To Social Skills

The Quick Guide To Surrounding Yourself With Successful People

8. The Celebrity Revealed Post

The “Celebrity Revealed” post is a post that “divulges” something about somebody famous in your field. You can “reveal” something they do, or analyze/reverse-engineer some of their actions.

The best part?

You don’t even need to know the celebrity personally. You can always use quotes, interviews, or whatever they’ve written as your research material.

Here’s the formula:

1. Choose the Celebrity

Decide on who you want to talk about. Ideally, the person you’re “revealing” is someone that is recognizable in your niche, or someone that is globally recognizable.

2. Decide On an Angle

What are you going to reveal about the celebrity? His background? How she does her makeup? How they travel? How they built their business?

Whatever it is, you should have an angle in mind that you want to “expose”.

3. Do The Research

Begin researching how the particular celebrity does his or her thing. Look out for books they’ve written, interviews they’ve given, quotes they’ve made, and so on. You can also reverse engineer their process.

If your influencer is approachable, reach out to him and her and ask them about their process.

4. Create Your Headline

Here are a few templates you can steal from:

• How To [Achieve Desired Outcome] Like Celebrity
• How To [Achieve Desired Outcome] Using The [Celebrity] Formula
• The [Celebrity] Formula: How To [Achieve Something]

5. Write Your Intro

Give a brief description of the celebrity, why you decided on him/her and what you’re trying to reveal.

6. Fill In The Gaps

Now, take whatever you’re discovered, and tell your audience. What did you find? What was useful? How did he or she do it?

7. Write Your Conclusion

End off your post by telling them to take action on the tip you’ve just found.

Examples:

How Tony Robbins Generates 1,000,000 Website Visitors Per Month

The Ramit Sethi Formula: How To Get A Crap Ton Of Email Subscribers

How To Stop Procrastinating Using The Seinfeld Strategy

9. The Case Study

How do you show off that you’ve helped someone achieve something… without sounding hype-y, spammy or just pure bragging?

Easy. Write a case study.

With a case study, you can tell the story of how someone achieved success with your help… without overtly bragging.

Here’s the formula on how you can write a case study:

1. Find Someone You’ve Helped Or Used Your Product

To write a successful case study, you have to tell a truthful story. To do that, find someone you’ve helped.

2. Map Out Their Journey

How did the person get from Point A to Point B? Where was he or she at Point A? How did he or she get to Point B?

Identify all the steps the person took. Grill them on the details. Extract every single thing they did.

3. Create Your Headline

It’s time to create your headline. Here are a few templates you can use:

• Case Study: How To [Achieve Result]
• Case Study: How to [Desired Result] By [Number/Percentage] In Just [Time]
• How I Achieved Desired Results With Numbers – [Supporting Details]

4. Write Your Intro

In your introduction, introduce your “hero”. Who is the person? What problem did he or she have before receiving your help? Why was it even more challenging than normal? Why did he or she approach you?

5. Outline Their Results

What results did they achieve? Give a quick overview of their end results, and why the audience should care.

6. List Down Their Steps Taken

List down all the steps your “hero” took. Go into detail. What did he / she do in each step to bring her that result?

You want to make your case study replicable by anyone who reads it.

7. Write Your Conclusion

Summarize the results your “hero” got. Motivate your readers to do the same thing as your “hero”.

Examples:

How RBBi Uses AWR Data To Manage Top Brands [Case Study]

Case Study: How We Created Controversial Content That Earned Hundreds of Links

How BuzzSumo Achieved $2.5m Annual Revenue In Its First Year: Case Study in SaaS Growth

10. The FAQ Post

Considering the popularity of Quora, surveys and Instagram polls, one thing’s for sure – FAQ posts are still effective. (GaryVee also blew up with his famous #AskGaryVee.)

All you have to do is answer commonly asked questions by your audience.

Formula:

1. Discover Frequently Asked Questions

Where can you find these questions? Easy. You can:

• Check your inbox
• Use community-driven sites like Reddit, Quora, Facebook Groups, etc.
• Use search tools like AnswerThePublic

2. Find Out The Answer To This Question

Ideally, as an expert, you should already know the answer. If you don’t, do your research!

3. Create Your Headline

The FAQ post is easy – simply use the question as the headline.

4. Write Your Answer

Go straight into your answer. Further elaborate when necessary.

Examples:

Is It Bad To Drink Coffee Every Day?

Sitting Too Much: How Bad Is It?

How Can I Set Up Google Analytics In WordPress?

Never Create A Blog Post From Scratch Again

How’s that?

I’ve just given you a list of 10 blog post formulas that you can simply follow like a checklist, and finish your blog posts in record time.

There’s no need to be original all the time. With these 10 recipes in hand, you can create content fast – or even hand it off to someone to help you with your content creation.

With this, you no longer have to worry about content creation ever again.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

But what if instead of targeting celebrities with a huge social following, you work with hundreds or thousands of micro-influencers to get even better results?

In general, micro-influencers are bloggers or social media users with 100,000 followers or fewer. And here are a few stats that illustrate why brands really need them:

•  71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on a social media reference.
• Only 14% of people can recall the last time they saw an ad and identify the offer it was promoting.
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 33% trust ads.

Think of it this way – Say you run an eCommerce business that sells tennis equipment. Even if you managed to get Serena Williams or Rafael Nadal to endorse your product (good luck with that), most people would take it with a grain of salt. If instead you find a few hundred regular tennis fanatics to mention your brand on social media, their friends and followers will listen.

I know what you’re thinking: A few hundred micro-influencers? It will take ages to reach out to all of them.

And you’re absolutely right, unless you take advantage of marketing automation.

How to automate your micro-influencer marketing campaign

Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can put some (or most) of your micro-influencer marketing campaign on autopilot. But before you start using them, you need to answer 3 questions:

1. What do you want to achieve with influencer marketing?
2. Where does your target audience hang out?
3. What kind of influencers will they listen to?

What do you want to achieve with influencer marketing?

If you want your micro-influencer marketing strategy to succeed, your goals need to be more specific than just improving your bottom line.

Social media influencers can help drive all sorts of goals that ultimately improve your brand reach and grow your business, such as:

• Build brand awareness
• Drive sales
• Generate new leads
• Grow your social following
• Get reviews
• Increase site traffic
• Encourage in-store visits
• And more.

Which marketing goals you choose will determine what kind of content your micro-influencers will share. This influencer marketer post is a good example of encouraging in-store visits:

Where does your target audience hang out?

Next you’ll need to figure out which social platforms are most relevant to your target audience. Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are all popular platforms to find micro-influencers, but where is your target audience actually listening?

If you already have buyer personas as part of your marketing strategy, you can refer back to them to figure this out. Compare your buyer personas to the demographic data of different social media sites, such as gender, age, location, income, education, etc.

Which platforms best represent your target audience?

You can also refer to your current social media marketing efforts to get an idea. On which platform do you get the most followers and engagement already?

Once you know which platforms you want to market to, you can start finding influencers.

What kind of influencers will they listen to?

The last step before you start automating is finding your perfect influencer. You already know what platform they should be on, but what other characteristics should they have?

Consider:

• Male, female, or either?
• How many followers?
• What skills and interests should they have that relate to your product?

Those are the minimum questions you should answer before searching for micro-influencers. Some search tools allow you to get even more nuanced, with filters based on age, location and other factors. But we’ll discuss that below.

Tools for Micro-Influencer Marketing Automation

Now you know what you hope to achieve with micro-influencer marketing, and have a good idea of what kind of influencers can help you do it. Next comes the processes you can automate:

• Finding influencers: Instead of scouring social media to find your perfect influencers one by one, use an online tool or searchable database to do it for you.
• Creating content: You could create content yourself or hire influencer marketing experts to do it for you. Better yet, use an influencer marketing platform that prompts your influencers to create content for you.
• Compensation: Use an influencer marketing tool to set your campaign budget and automate payments to your influencers.
• Measurement: Automatically track your influencers’ posts to get insights about engagement whenever you need.

You can automate some or all of these processes depending on which tools or services you use. In the rest of the post, we’ll discuss 3 types of tools that help:

• Influencer discovery and outreach tools.
• Influencer marketplaces to find, contact, and work with influencers on different social media sites.
• All-in-one tools to automate every stage of your influencer marketing campaign.

Influencer Discovery and Outreach

Klear

Klear is an influencer search engine with 500 million profiles spanning 60,000 categories. You can use it to search for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and blogging influencers specializing in all sorts of niches.

Klear gives you an in-depth look at each influencer’s social presence, including their engagement:

You can easily catalogue and contact influencers right on the platform.

NeoReach

NeoReach is a self-service influencer marketing platform. It indexes the social web into a searchable database of social media and blogging influencers. The platform also helps you manage outreach, and track the results of your campaigns.

Huge brands have used NeoReach to find influencers to help promote their products, like Walmart and their Gold Disk Giveaway:

HYPR

HYPR calls itself the world’s largest influencer marketplace, and with more than 10 million influencers listed, it just might be. It helps you find influencers based on their audience demographics, like age, location and interests.

Traackr

Traackr is an influencer relationship management platform. With it, you can upload your database of existing influencers and use their information to expand your network and find others.

Traackr can also help you impress your potential influencers by making it easy to monitor influencer activity and discover the right time to connect and start building a relationship.

Traackr also helps you manage your engagement with influencers and measure the results of your efforts for brand reach and other factors.

Revfluence

Revfluence is a sophisticated database of over 500,000 influencers that uses machine learning to help you find the right people to help with your marketing campaign.

You can browse influencers by industry, location, audience demographics and lots of other factors, or just use a keyword search. Instead of sending out hundreds of cold emails, Revfluence makes it easy to contact influencers with a single click.

The platform also helps keep track of sales, site traffic, follower attribution, and other key performance indicators you can use to measure ROI.

Influencer Marketplaces

Shoutcart

Shoutcart is an influencer marketing tool for Instagram and Twitter. All you have to do is browse their database of influencers and select ones that work best with your niche. You can browse by category, number of followers, price, and other factors, or use the search feature:

Then you upload an image or video to the site for these influencers to share. Select what time you’d like your influencers to share, pay for the order, and you’re done! Your influencer will share the post with their audience.

Tribegroup

Tribegroup works a bit differently than Shoutcart – you don’t provide the content for influencers to share, they create it for you.

First, you upload a brief of your product to the platform, then select influencers from Tribegroup’s extensive database.

These selected influencers can then create a unique post about the product and submit it to you for approval. If you like it, they’ll share it and you’ll pay them.

The real benefit of this platform is that the content influencers share is more genuine. They add their own touch to the post instead of blindly sharing whatever brands throw their way.

Famebit

Famebit is another popular platform where you can find micro-influencers for YouTube and Instagram. If you’re looking to market on YouTube, Famebit connects you with creative people who will make unique videos about your product and share them on their profiles.

This YouTube video for Office Depot is an example of the platform’s work:

Like Tribegroup, you submit a brief about your product for content creators to work with. They’ll then submit content proposals to you that you can reject or approve. Once approved, they create the content and share it with their social followers.

All-in-One Tools

IZEA

IZEA is an all-in-one influencer marketing tool that can help you with many different areas of the process. If you have the budget to completely automate your micro-influencer marketing strategy, then you can hire their in-house team to create content, find influencers, optimize your campaign, and more.

If you’re on a budget, you can opt for their self-service content amplification tool. It’s also automation-friendly because you can add links to your content or your entire RSS feed to the system to create new influencer marketing opportunities every time you publish new content.

Then you just pick your influencers, set your budget, and let the program run itself.

Linqia

Linqia is another great tool for micro-influencer automation. It uses a combination of artificial intelligence and audience targeting to find the best influencers for you. It also offers goal-based pricing that automatically adjusts how much you spend based on what goals you want to achieve (Reach, engagement, traffic, etc.).

They also have a team of experts on hand who can optimize your campaigns for you, and make sure your brand is appears consistently across social media.

Wrapping Up

Now you know quite a few different tools that can help you automate your micro-influencer marketing strategy. Let’s quickly recap which platforms can help you with your various automation needs:

You can automate as little or as much of your micro-influencer marketing campaign as you want, based on your budget and time investment needs. All these tools are at your fingertips to make it happen.

Influencer marketing is a nascent space in digital marketing. New tools are released all the time, while the others are constantly improving and expanding their features. As time goes on, there will definitely be new ways to save time and optimize your strategy using automation.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.