Wednesday, April 8, 2015

5 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE RESULTS IN 2015


Nowadays social media is the most widely used media for propagating and consuming information. As per a survey, social media activity has become the top daily activity among most people in the US. As per the survey, 93% of marketers in the US use social media in promoting their business.
In the current market dynamics social media is emerging as one of the biggest tools of promoting businesses. You stand to lose big chunk of prospective consumers if you are not actively marketing on social media.
Following are some social media marketing strategies that can be used to further develop your social channels and make them standout and generate more loyal followers in the year 2015.

1: Creating and sticking to a game plan
For your marketing plan to see the light of the day there has be a well sorted out creative and execution strategy. Lapse at any level even if the content is unique and engaging can make your whole effort redundant. You need to set benchmark or limits to the no. of tweets you have to post on daily basis. Though this figure can be modified as per the need, but once you have a target set it keeps you involved with your social profile even if you are posting 2 or 3 tweets per day.
Keep an eye on your competitor’s activities, monitor their posting behavior. Carry out industry research to find out what kind of content is doing rounds and what is the ideal amount and no. of times content should be published on your social channels per day. The idea is to be active on social media and not overly active.
Collect and put all your content in an editorial calendar. You can start off with Google excel docs. Create a share-able weekly calendar segregated on basis of different social channels on a weekly basis. Here also make sure that you provide columns where members of your content team can put up their feedback before posting any content. Move ahead in this manner but keep an eye for any important additions as and when required.
Make use of social media management tools like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Buffer etc. These tools are quite helpful as they enable you to schedule your posts ahead of time. It also provides you access to performance analytic and helps you overlook and manage your social feeds in an efficient manner.

2: Treating every social channel as a separate entity.

Another important point that marketers fail to give required emphasis is not treating each social media channel as a separate channel or entity.  Generally here the content should be the one that is propagated across all social channels – for instance if you have appointed a new Director or VP of sales, then you want to share this news across all channels, but your communication strategy will need tweaking as per the audience of that particular social channel.
For e.g., Pinterest, Instagram or Flickr tends to have audience who have an eye for content that is visually engaging whereas viewers on business platforms like LinkedIn will have an appetite for a more business-focused, in-depth, and educational content. You need to lay emphasis on the demography and taste of your audience on each channel and feed content that interests them.

3: Strive for moving both above & beyond in servicing your customers and viewers.

Extra caution is required while engaging with your visitors. Suppose a visitor posts a comment on your Facebook profile or tweets on your twitter handle and you forget to respond back this leads to loss of trust and confidence. Since there is no communication from your side it leads to dissatisfaction and may turn this potential audience to a competitor. On the contrary, if you deliver a timely and a thoughtful response it flatters that visitor who will stick with your brand for some time. A timely response not only gives the feeling of being cared to the prospective user but at the same time also helps you in building your authority.
Along with good responses you will also get negative feed-backs. You need to be swift and cool in addressing these feed-backs with patience and respect.  You should think of these as an excellent opportunity to display how well you treat your audience.
Make use of these 4 steps to enhance the experience of your followers:
·     Start with first assigning a first res-ponder for the purpose of posting and monitoring each social channel your brand has a presence on.
·   Creating a troubleshooting library comprising of common complaints or bugs that arise during operating, and the way to handle such issues. This ensures that any issues that are part of the library get addressed timely and in a proper manner.
·    Being creative– Strategic use of giveaways, discount coupons, opinion pools, sharing humorous content for e.g. memes goes a mile in engaging your followers and converting them into free promoters of your brand.
·    Make sure never to IGNORE any comment posted on your social accounts: Any comment whether critical or stellar. An lead to creation of brand detractors.
4: Accepts mishaps
All of us are bound to make mistakes as humans, so committing mistakes is perfectly natural and unavoidable. This is true even in the dynamic world of social media. It is better to accept the mistakes rather than ignore them. No need announce small mistakes like missing a full stop or a comma, but make sure no to delete the tweet. If there is a continuous re-posting it is more likely to caught the attention of the audience. In case of bigger mistakes for e.g. wrong brand communication or product errors, be proactively in quickly accepting the mistake, respond swiftly and send out a message apologizing and communicating how the issue is being sorted to keep the customers aware and informed.

5: Tracking & Talking

Tracking activities on social medium is very important but often it is perceived as time-consuming and tedious. No doubt it requires time and effort but taking out few hours per month gives you an idea of what you are doing, what are the drawbacks and takeaways to improve your strategy. Take out time monthly for reviewing metrics which are important for your business. Following are few stats which can be of use for e.g. Growth in number of followers, total no. of posts, CTR(click through rate), no. of page-views, no. of likes, shares, comments, impressions etc. You need to analyze each channel separately and compare the results with your biggest competitors.
If you are short on time and it is difficult to analyze all the data individually then you can take help from various tools to track data. The most widely used tools are Hootsuite, Google Analytics, bit.ly etc. This can help you in tracking which content or post received the maximum likes or shares. This can help you in planning your posts/content for future.
Sharing your findings with your team members helps in setting up the right tone and concentrated efforts towards your social targets. Brainstorm and take feedback from departments especially the sales and customer service as they are the people who are in direct and regular touch with the customers.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

10 Ways to Grow a more followers on Twitter

With 100 million daily active users and its specialized look, Twitter has become one of the go-to platforms for personal and company branding. The social network monster has recently launched group direct messages as well as native video sharing and editing. It is time for Twitter users to catch up with how to get the most out of Twitter previous to they find themselves stuck with the average 208 followers.
Here are 10 common Twitter mistakes and what to do instead.

1. Embed SlideShare presentations links.

SlideShare Presentations are one of the greatest ways to share promotions, discounts or other information about your company on Twitter. They look attractive, take up just the right amount to get awareness and can be browsed right within the tweet. To make sure your SlideShare presentation is a success, use font sizes of 30 pts or bigger and apply plenty of images.

2. Check who unfollows you.

Who follows you is similarly important to who unfollows you. Once someone decided to follow you, they do not follow you forever. As a matter of detail, most people are rather picky about who they follow and you might overlook an unfollowing pattern of tweeters who would retweet your content or simply become a devoted fan of your brand.

3. Use Twitter’s free analytics.

Twitter provide analytics for every twitter account for free. Review the number of impressions your tweets had, how many people took achievement (e.g. favorites, retweets, clicks, replies), how many people unfollowed or followed you and what your followers are like (gender, interests) among other things.

4. Create a custom hashtag.

Most startups and small businesses do not have custom hashtags because they are afraid they would be the only ones using them. To promote more people to use your hashtag, you could make it more common. For instance, a bakery could have the hashtag #nocrumbsleft. in addition, hashtags are searchable on Bing and can keep track of who talks about your company.

5. Share photo collages.

Sharing the special photo of you at an important event is great. Sharing it always in the same design is not. To create a photo collage, simply add the first photo to a tweet as if you were to share just one. Then click the same icon another time and add more photos. Twitter will create the random collection automatically once the tweet is published.

6. Stop sharing Instagram links.

Twitter prefer you to share photos via Twitter instead of Instagram. If you wish the look of your Instagram photos, share them from the photo folder on your smartphone where all Instagram photos are automatically saved. It will look like you uploaded it with Twitter and have the Instagram look without the unwanted Instagram photo link in the tweet.

7. Make sure your tweeted gifs are moving happily.

Gif is an image file format that supports static images and animated images. Animated gifs do not move in Twitter unless the tweet contain the gif is pin to the top. If you have not at all used gifs, consider thanking followers for their support with a wagging puppy tail gif from a free gif website.

8. Follow for favorites and retweets.

probability are that the people who favorite and retweet your tweets might become trustworthy followers in the future. If you give them the possibility that is follow people who favorite and re-tweet your tweets and verify if they are following you back. Most of them will and it is a fast way to raise your followers.

9. Attach the featured image of blog posts.

Instead of sharing the title of the article and the link, take a screenshot of the feature image and attach it to the tweet. It will take up significantly more freedom in people’s timelines and therefore get more clicks. Furthermore, properly designed featured image or eye-catching photo regularly gets favorite before it is even clicked.

10. Tag photos.

Following the previous point, featured images of blog posts should be tagged with the respective blogger or publishing stage. Other photos could be tagged with the Twitter account of the city where the photo has been taken or with the Twitter account of the host for the event you are attending. Tagging companies or fellow professional shows other Twitter users that you are well connected, interested in dealings and not self-absorbed.

Monday, March 30, 2015

How to Start a Online Business

There is a proven sequence of steps you can follow to guarantee your success when you're starting a small trade online. I've seen thousands of people start and grow successful businesses by doing the following:
1.    Find a need and fill it.
2.    Write copy that sells.
3.    Design and build an easy-to-use website.
4.    Use search engines to drive traffic to your site.
5.    Establish an expert reputation for yourself.
6.    Follow up with your customers and subscribers with e-mail.
Anyone, from newbie to seasoned online industrialist, can benefit from this process in learning how to start a business online.

Step 1: Find a need and fill it
Most people who are just preliminary out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second.
To boost your chances of victory, start with a market. The trick is to get a group of people who are searching for a answer to a difficulty, but not finding many results. The internet makes this kind of market research easy:
·         Visit online forums to notice what questions people raise and what troubles they're trying to solve.
·         Do keyword research to find keywords that a lot of people are searching, but for which not many sites are competing.
·         Check out your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of what they're doing to fill the order. Then you can apply what you've learned and make a product for a market that previously exists--and do it better than the competition.
Step 2: Write copy that sells
There's a proven sales copy formula that takes visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive to the moment they make a purchase:
1.    Arouse interest with a compelling headline.
2.    Describe the problem your product solves.
3.    Establish your credibility as a solver of this problem.
4.    Add testimonials from people who have used your product.
5.    Talk about the product and how it benefits the user.
6.    Make an offer.
7.    Make a strong guarantee.
8.    Create urgency.
9.    Ask for the sale.
Throughout your copy, you need to focus on how your product or service is uniquely able solve people's problems or make their lives better. Think like a customer and ask "What's in it for me?"
Step 3: Design and build your website
Once you've got your market and invention, and you've nail down your selling procedure, now you're ready for your corporate web design. Remember to keep it plain. You have less than five seconds to capture someone's attention--otherwise they're gone, never to be seen again. Some essential tips to keep in mind:
·         Choose one or two basic fonts on a white background.
·         Make your navigation plain and easy, and the same on every page.
·         Only apply graphics, audio or video if they develop your message.
·         contain an opt-in offer so you can collect e-mail addresses.
·         Build it simple to buy--no more than two clicks between potential customer and checkout.
·         Your website is your online storefront, so build it customer-friendly.
Step 4: Use search engines to drive targeted buyers to your site
Pay-per-click advertising is the easiest method to get traffic to a new site. It has two advantages over coming up for the shift to come to you organically. First, PPC ads show up on the search pages immediately, and second, PPC ads allow you to test different keywords, as well as headlines, prices and advertising approaches. Not only do you get immediate traffic, but you can also use PPC ads to discover your greatest, highest-converting keywords. Then you can divide out the keywords throughout your site in your copy and code, which will help your rankings in the normal search results.
Step 5: Establish an expert reputation for yourself
People use the internet to discover information. Offer that information for free to additional sites, and you'll see additional traffic and improved search engine rankings. The secret is to always include a link to your site with each tidbit of information. 
·         Give away free, professional content. make articles, videos or any other content that people will find helpful. Distribute that content through online article directories or social media sites.
·         Include "send to a friend" links on important content on your website.
·         Become an active professional in industry forums and social networking sites where your target market hangs out.
You'll achieve new readers. But even better, every site that posts your content will link back to yours. Search engines love links from related sites and will reward you in the rankings.
Step 6: Use the control of e-mail marketing to rotate visitors into buyers.
When you build an opt-in list, you're creating one of the most valuable assets of your online company. Your clientele and subscribers have given you authorization to send them e-mail. That means:
·         You're giving them a little they've asked for.
·         You're increasing life span relationships with them.
·         The reply is 100 percent assessable.
·         E-mail marketing is cheaper and more effective than print, TV or radio because it's highly targeted.
Anyone who visits your site and opts in to your directory is a very warm lead. And there's no healthier tool than e-mail for following up with those leads.

 At Ascenteq we specialized in Digital Marketing Services like ( SEO, SEM, SMO, Affiliate Marketing, Mass Mailing etc ) at best competitive price. To know more pls mail us to info@ascenteq.com or contact + 91 8056087385 

Saturday, March 28, 2015

7 Best WordPress Plugins for eCommerce sites


The WordPress platform makes it easy to set up an online stock up, either as your primary business or to complement your physical small business. In addition to thousands of template, there is a massive library of plugins designed to simplify and automate your online sales.

Below are 7 of the best WordPress plugins for eCommerce that you can use to enhance your website and create a smooth, hassle-free online shopping experience for your customers.
 

WPe-Commerce

A popular and long-standing plugin that was one of the first ecommerce options offered by Word Press, WP e-Commerce comes with a wide variety of functions and facial appearance. The fully-featured free download works great out of the box and comes with flexible coupon code, discounts and free shipping option, cross-page promotion, a New goods widget, single-page checkout, integration with popular e-commerce payment and third-party platforms and much more.

Extend your eCommerce site with additional modules
    Make the plugin your own with CSS and HTML customizations

WooCommerce

A fully functional free plug-in with a vast library of premium upgrade available, Woo commerce is easy to use for both vendor and consumers. Free features for this plugin include complex coupon campaign, product and record management, order management, sales information, a customer account area, control over shipping and tax charges and more.

Jigoshop

With detailed reporting, widgets and short code, one-page checkout, inventory track, product imports/exports, related product display and more, Jigoshop has everything you need to run an ecommerce store. It’s free, with a nice library of free extension, and you can also purchase premium themes and extensions for added functionality.

eShop

More than half a million people e have downloaded the free shops plug-in, an easy-to-install shopping cart that is fully compatible with Word Press and can create product pages from Word Press page, posts or custom posts. Features include customer account, multiple options for goods, selling downloadable content, sale data, sales tax, stock control, discount option and more.

Quick Shop

A super-simple, “fast and dirty” ecommerce plug-in with a surprising level of functionality, Quick Shop come with built-in support for PayPal and email, and uses Word Press sidebar widgets to continuously show shopper what’s in their carts. With this plug-in, you can add goods instantly with a Tiny MCE button, create drop-down list with product options and more.

YAK Shopping Cart Plugin

The YAK shopping cart plug-in associates your goods with weblog entries and hence your post ID becomes your product code. You can easily categorize the goods and configure settings for the shopping cart. It provides custom payment option like cheques, credit cards, PayPal and a variety of other payment gateway. You can configure the shipping option based on weight or a flat rate.

Shopp

This popular premium plug-in works out of the box with any Word Press theme and comes packed with features. Shop is built to work with Word Press and includes things like short codes, dashboard widgets for quick view of sale and product histories and theme widgets that let you easily drop products and elements into pages.
extra features include standard ecommerce tools plus multiple product/variation images, multi-category inventory management, promotional tools, native and plug-in support for a wide variety of payment gateways, email notifications, a shipping calculator and more.

At Ascenteq we have a separate specialized Custom Word press plug-in Development team to bring clients requirements on live at affordable price. We are one of the top web design and development company in Georgia, USA, having branches in India, Australia and UK.


To know more pls mail us info@ascenteq.com or call us +91 (805) 608 7385 .    

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

5 Online Marketing Mistakes That Cost Your ROI

I’ve had the pleasure of working with nearly a hundred companies so far on advertising and marketing initiatives. My client base ranges from Fortune 500 to cool new startups ready to take on the world. While marketing and advertising for these companies I’ve started to notice many common questions and actions that have had negative effects on the bottom line.
When we are evaluating whether or not our services are the right fit for our clients, here are the questions that we ask to make sure that we can deliver, and are on the same page when campaigns go live.

1. Not Knowing Your (CPA) Rate

Often I’m asked how much money a certain marketing method will make for a client. The best way to answer this is to know their current CPA, and back into how many “acquisitions” seem appropriate for a certain campaign.
Often early stage companies haven’t had the opportunity to test different methods of acquiring customers or users, so they are not sure. Until you are sure, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Use small test budgets and test many different tactics (but still large enough to have an accurate sample size) until you find what works for you.

2. Not Knowing Your Conversion Rate

This is another question that you need to be able to answer. If I can bring you X amount of qualified site visits, how should that convert for you? If your conversion rate is currently low, is it because of the quality of traffic you are receiving, your product, or your web design?
You can narrow down if it’s the quality of traffic you are receiving by looking at conversion rates by site or advertisement. Are your retargeting ads receiving higher conversions than your amplification? Or are your Facebook advertisements receiving fewer conversions than influencer marketing?
3. Undecided on Funnel Approach
A top funnel approach is sending new people to your site. You want to invest in top funnel approaches (such as PR and influencer marketing) once you know that your product sells and you know what your conversion rate is. Top funnel approaches are best for those who have already optimized the bottom of the funnel (getting people to become customers or users).
Investing in a bottom of the funnel approach would be trying to increase your renewal rate or repeat customers. There are very different tactics for bottom of the funnel and top of the funnel, so before you invest your money in a certain area make sure that they can address your needs appropriately. Once your bottom funnel is optimized (people are buying!) you know that you can scale out your top of the funnel approach and start hitting your goals.

4. Not Pricing The Value of Long Term Advertisements Correctly

Everyone is used to display advertisements. You pay X amount, you get X impressions, and from there, you know how many conversions you receive. It’s cut and dry. The ad goes up. The ad goes down.
Other marketing methods, such as PR and influencer marketing are not cut and dry. Its not an ad that is served for a couple seconds and disappears forever. PR and influencer marketing (as well as other content strategies such as blogging) are long-term advertisements. You can’t price long-term advertisements and short-term advertisements the same way.

Long-term advertisements have additional value besides the initial impression (that you receive with display ads), with a few examples being:
·         Social shares (to Twitter, Facebook, g+….)
·         Discussion
·         SEO
·         Forever accessible
·         Increased brand recognition (reading is a much higher level of engagement than an ad that may or may not have been viewed)
When you are pricing out whether or not a long-term marketing or advertising method is a good value, you can’t look solely at impressions. Calculating total media value is a much better way of determining if your budget will go to good use. To do this, put a price tag on each piece of media or action, such as a Facebook share being valued at $5, and an organic site visit through the SEO of that content as $10.

5. Not A/B Testing

Perhaps one of the most simple, yet often overlooked is A/B testing. If you are investing in any top of the funnel approach (like PR, influencer marketing, or even behavioral display buys) A/B testing the page you are directing visitors to will help you optimize the layout for future initiatives.
Make slight changes in the page, such as language, colors and pictures and see which one yields the best conversion rate. If you invest in top of the funnel without A/B testing you are missing out on valuable data that will help your business GROW.



Tuesday, March 24, 2015

If You Run A Facebook Page, Expect The Like Count To Drop Soon

Do you run a Facebook Page? Heads up: your page’s “Like” count is probably going to drop a bit soon, and it’s totally not your fault.


The short version: Facebook is changing the way it’s counting likes, subtracting any accounts that have been either manually deactivated or “memorialized” after its owner passed. It’s something that probably should have been done since the beginning — but since it wasn’t, it’d be easy to think your Likes had dropped because of something you’d done.
One thing that’s important to note: it seems that this only accounts for profiles that have been manually deactivated. Likes from profiles that could be considered “inactive” because the user just hasn’t logged in for a while will continue to count.
The shift won’t happen immediately; Facebook says it’ll roll out in “the coming weeks.”
So how many Likes might you lose? It’s tough to say. While Facebook says to expect a “slight dip,” it’s all relative to how many Likes you have to begin with. If your page only has a few dozen likes, you might not even lose one; if it has a few million, that slight dip will feel a bit bigger.
If you run your company’s Facebook page and your boss gauges your performance based on whether that “like” counter keeps climbing, it’s probably a good idea to let them know what’s coming.
-Techcrunch

Monday, March 23, 2015

5 Mobile App Ecommerce Strategies for 2015


Online retailers that pinpoint the attention of a mobile app strategy may be struggling to decide how to get an app working and what that app should do.

Mobile marketing and mobile apps are becoming increasingly important for online and multichannel stores. Analyze that in the US, customers pay about 15 hrs a week researching products on a mobile device, and about 93% of owners that research a product from a mobile device will ultimately make a purchase.

With the rise of mobile, commerce businesses may be receiving calls and emails from firms offering to design and create apps. Some of these leads will, no doubt, be from well-known companies that provide services that may really help an ecommerce business raise. But some of these leads will come from people just trying to turn a fast buck with a shoddy product.

The bottom line is that retailers, jointly online and multichannel, have three primary plans to employ for producing and distributing a mobile app. They can create formal native apps, use HTML5 and JavaScript with a package or select not to have an app and focus on the mobile web instead.



1. Build a Native App

In the mobile app setting, the label native app normally describes an application that is written in the operating system’s native programming language. For sampling, an Androidapp would be build in the Java programming language and a native iPhone or iPad app would normally build in the Objective-C language. There are some differences, but generally this is true of native mobile apps.

From the retail and marketing point of view this system, that if you select to generative native mobile applications, you will need to have the app written more than once. The objects and features of your Android, Windows, or iOS app strength be the same, but the guidelines that the mobile device follows (the computer code) will be different — perhaps vastly different.

Native apps, however, may work better, process faster, and have better connection to phone features like cameras, speakers, Os updating or similar. Many native applications also do a better job of following OS conventions, such as attitude and actions that the user expects.

2. Use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript

Together HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript are the web stack — i.e., the markup and languages that are behind almost everything done in a web browser. And, it points out, they can also be used to develop mobile applications that may be included in native application stores and loaded on mobile devices just like native applications.

Working with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for developing mobile applications offers two basic advantages over producing native applications.

First, HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript developers are more generic and usually economical. Put another way, many more peoples know how to program HTML5 than know how to write Objective-C.
Second HTML5 mobile apps may be delivered to nearly any mobile device, in any case of OS, with only minor changes to the program significations that the app only really needs to be written once.

3. Focus on the Mobile Web

A few ecommerce businesses may select not to have a mobile applications at all, focusing instead on a mobile optimized website.Google, as an example, reported that about 74 percent of American shoppers using mobile devices start with search. That is they open Google or Yahoo in a mobile web browser and look for mobile sites, shopping, banking etc.

Actually the usual mobile-device using shopper visits six retail sites a week.
With this in mind, for all online sellers (E-commerce store) having a mobile optimized website should come before worrying about a mobile app.Remember making a conscience selection not to do a bit right now is still a mobile app strategy.

4. mobile-friendly websites in search results

Starting April 21, we will be raising our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This modification will involve mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a major impact in our search results. Therefore, users will find it easier to get related, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.

To create a mobile-friendly site, check out Google webmaster mobile-friendly guide toturials.

1. Check Mobile-Friendly Test to all your site inner pages.

2. Check your Webmaster Tools to get a full list of mobile usability issues across your site using the Mobile Usability Report.



5. Mobile Site URLs

Google bots may also need a hand if you use separate URLs for your mobile site (i.e. http://m.site.com/). To make sure search engines can distinguish between the mobile and desktop versions of a particular page, add the following tags to the <head> section of your web pages.

1. Insert canonical tags to mobile URLs that point out the desktop version of the URL as the canonical.

Ex:  Insert the following tag to the <head> section of http://m.example1sitename.com/store-locator:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example1sitename.com/store-locator”>

2. Insert alternate tags to desktop URLs that specify the mobile version of the URL as the alternate.

Ex:  Insert the following tag to the <head> section of http://www.example1sitename.com/store-locator:
<link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)” href=”http://m.example1sitename.com/store-locator”>

At Ascenteq we are experienced in creating Mobile friendly website design at affordable price. We are created more then 45 mobile friendly site to know more pls visit www.acenteq.com