Benefits of Social Media Marketing

8 Ways To Increase Your Instagram Followers

September 6, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

Are you new at Instagram and doing it yourself?

If you’re a new business and just starting out Instagram will most likely be on the list of social media platforms that you should take advantage of. Posting photos can take a lot of time and can be disappointing when your met by nothing more than a few likes from a handful of followers, it’s easy to get discouraged. Unless your a rocker, movie star, sports figure or selling a hot product it could take time to see an increase in followers and likes. Instagram is not just about posting pictures. If managed correctly it can:

Increase product sales
Drive traffic to your website
Increase brand awareness
Increase customer satisfaction
Attract top talent
Identify and establish relationships with influencers

Here are a few tips that might help the process along when your first starting out with Instagram!

Hashtags are known to help increase followers: depending on the kind of business you have you will want to use hashtags like #interiordesign #homemakeover #homedecor #diningroom or #kitchendesign if you are a interior designer. Think of words that are associated with your business. Look up popular hashtags that are associated with your business.
Like random pictures from people in your target audience. Write a comment. Compliment a project, say how much you love the post, be engaging. This is the most natural way to gain new followers.
With anything quality beats quantity. Edit your account to leave only the best images. No one wants to follow someone with thousands of images of random shots. Be smart and thoughtful of what your putting up.
Make sure your bio is complete. Include relevant keywords and hashtags, and make sure you have a link to your website. You don’t want to be spammy when running a professional business.
Ask questions in the captions of your photos. This is a great way to increase engagement. Once you establish yourself people will respond.
Use geotagging, especially if you’re a local business. When you geotag your photos, others who post photos in your area will see your postings on the location’s page and it will help gain traction for you.
Plan, and prepare ahead. Devise a plan for how you’re going to use Instagram, and a schedule to keep yourself on track. Don’t get lazy.
When is the best time to post on Instagram? Just like the Instagram algorithm, the answer seems to change every year. Here is an article that might help answer this question. https://later.com/blog/best-time-to-post-on-instagram/

Be aware there is a game called “follow-bait”. This is when Instagrammer’s want to gain followers. They randomly follow accounts in hopes to get follows back, (mostly new accounts) once they get the new follower they will unfollow you. After a while, some have thousands of followers but only follow a few hundred back which is a sure sign they are only looking to gain more follows.

Don’t take it personally, the follow-unfollow is popular because, it still works. But as you become more familiar with Instagram and learn the ropes you will know who to follow and not to follow.

You will also discover the improvements Instagram has made to help your business grow like creating photo albums and videos to tell a story or share an event.

If you have any questions please email us or give us a call at 203 414 9692

Wieting Design | Website Design CT

Wieting Design is a full-service, graphic and website design agency based in Fairfield County, CT and serving all of Connecticut (CT). We are committed to sharing our experience and expertise in website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine marketing (SEO), and video production to help build powerful tools and campaigns that work for your Connecticut business. Whether your objective is to grow your reputation, create client loyalty, drive traffic to your website or set up a marketing strategy, we will adapt our approach to get you the results you need with the services we provide.

6 Reasons To Keep Your Blog Alive and Active

August 28, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

In the era of digital marketing, content is the unmistakable king. There is no doubt, all your digital marketing initiatives will surely fall flat unless you have strong content marketing skills. Your blog is one of the most effective tools in content marketing. An irregular or dying blog does not add good value to SEO in which you have been investing a lot of time and money for long. Many business owners do not realize the power of an active blog in search visibility, leads and sales growth. They reluctantly begin with by posting once a month and eventually stop.

Here are 6 reasons on why you must keep your blog alive and active.

Keeps Readers Engaged

In order to keep your target audience engaged, you need to strike a chord with them. As the time changes interest of readers shifts along with the way they search for a particular topic or product.

An effective SEO practice tries to grab this ever changing tendency. It keeps itself continuously improving and adjusting with the change. SEO and blogging goes hand in hand.

A successful blog meets searchers interest by providing them with relevant and engaging posts. Strong readership and repeat visitors of the blog eventually increase website traffic.

Establish Your Authority and Expertise

You need to establish your online authority and expertise in order to rank higher in organic search results. This establishment organically boosts SEO ranking.

The best way to attain this is to post regular blogs on topics related to your business.
Answer your readers’ queries.
Try to cover all the relevant areas and subtopics to show your expertise.
The more you provide useful and authentic information to your searchers the more they spend time in your website.
Google’s spider is continuously indexing all the websites to measure their relevancy and authority. When people spend more time on your website and make repeat visits, your authority and expertise gets built. Your rank improves.

Provide Internal links With More Pages to Help Your Readers

A well managed blog always have relevant internal links in each of its blog posts.

Internal links connects a post with another relevant post of the same blog.
Logically placed useful internal links help searchers touch all the sub-topics easily.
It helps the visitors understand the topic much better.
It makes the visitors spend more time in your website.
Google finds it easier to understand the subject matter of the topics when they are interlinked.
Goggle focuses more toward the meaning behind the searches and webpage; it shifts from keyword matching.

Google Wants You to Keep your Website Updated

Google wants you to keep your website regularly updated and relevant with the time. It must cater the needs of a search query relevant to your website or blog. The best way to do so is to create relevant blog posts on regular basis. When a website grows by adding new content and web pages with regularity, Google rewards them by improving its rank.

Active Social Media Presence

Digital marketing is incomplete without an active social media presence. For that you require constant supply of high quality contents on social media.

You need to post interesting, high quality blogs in different social media channels.
Good social media blog posts are the most effective way of redirecting relevant customers to your website.
Getting likes and shares on your post improve your popularity and online presence.

Helps in Humanizing your Brand

When you show human side of your business in your blog, you actually connect more with your present and potential customers

Posts about how your employees are putting their efforts and passions in the business helps in humanizing your brand.
You can also touch issues and concerns relevant to your interest. It gives you unique chance to connect with your customers and build trust.

Your blog provides you a unique voice to present your expertise to build trust in your readers. Make your blog an active participator in establishing your online presence.

If you have any questions please email us or give us a call at 203 414 9692

Wieting Design | Website Design CT

How to Create an SEO-Friendly Blog Post

May 22, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

We have been discussing the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) many times in our blogs. Being the backbone of any form of digital marketing initiative, your inbound marketing strategy will remain ineffective unless it gets fine tuned with SEO.

Blog posts play crucial part in inbound marketing and inbound marketing is an unavoidable part of digital marketing. An engaging and useful blog post can become a turning point in making your website achieve higher page rank as well as can help increase the number of repeated visitors.

Google keeps changing its algorithm, so that its website index technique remains a secret. Emphasizing healthy competition is Google’s target. It ensures that only relevant, useful and authentic information tops in the list of organic search results.

After doing some analysis we have figured out some qualities that SEO-friendly blogs should have. Lets’ find out-

Understanding recent SEO trends – Google, being the most popular search engine, every moment a huge number of people click here to get their queries answered. As per the recent trend of Google algorithm, concentrating on having exact keyword matches is a passé. It emphasizes more on analyzing relevancy and usefulness of the blog’s idea and content. Readability and cohesiveness of the blog play a crucial role in getting higher page rank in organic SERPs.

Maintaining High Quality Standards- It is important to maintain high quality standards throughout your blog posts. A quality blog is always organic and free of plagiarism in any form. Make sure the information you are providing to your audience is authentic and if possible add its source that testifies its authenticity. Making grammatical errors will affect blog post’s readability; so, be careful about that.

Including relevant Links- Adding links of useful pages that stand directly relevant to the subject matter and content of your blog post influences escalating your blog post’s quality. It helps Google in analyzing and recognizing the idea and content of your blog post. But before doing that, make sure the links you are providing also bear the marks of quality and authenticity.

Making blog post easy to skim- Not all your visitors will have patience to read each and every word of your blog post. A considerable section of the visitors will simply skim through the article to know whether it will fulfill his need or not. In order to win such visitors’ attention, make your blog easy to skim. An easy to skim blog post usually carries attractive headings and sub-heading that clearly tries to make readers have a quick grasp of what it tries to talk about.

Using Paragraphs- Sensible use of paragraphs attributes to make a good blog. Using separate and sensible paragraphs will not just improve coherency and readability of the blog but also will make it look nice. Each paragraph should have a main idea. You can easily figure it out by questioning yourself.

Attractive Headings and Meta description- Headings should be coherent and created by keeping the potential client’s need in the center. With an appealing headline, you also need well written Meta description. Meta description plays crucial part in making Google understand the subject matter of the respective page. It also increases your chances of getting clicked by searchers. Make sure you do a competitor study and make your heading stand-out in the crowd.

Wieting Design | Social Media Fairfield County CT

6 Ways to Market Your Business This Holiday Season

December 10, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

Are you ready to cash in on the holiday shopping craze? If so, you need to create a few holiday marketing campaigns to attract customers to your store. This time of year, there are holiday marketing campaigns everywhere. Whether the campaigns are small and involve dressing up a company’s logo, or big, expensive campaigns that manage to go viral, many businesses should ready to take advantage of the spending season and seek out ways to market their brand to enthusiastic customers.

If you want to capitalize on the holiday spirit – give these 6 marketing strategies a try to boost your holiday season.

Find your brand’s unique holiday angle – Keep It Simple Silly (K.I.S.S.), make it personal and give people a reason to pass it on. How can your business or products improve the holidays for your customers?
Get your customers involved – the power of user-generated content can is gold in the marketing world. Ask for pictures featuring your services, or how they use your products during the holidays.
Discounts, contests, giveaways – A holiday promotion can take many forms: maybe a discount code, rewards points, or a free surprise gift with a purchase. Social contests are an effective method of driving holiday sales.
Give your site a festive, holiday feel – 92% of holiday shoppers will research or buy gifts online – they can interact with your brand and product from the comfort of their fuzzy slippers and glass of eggnog. That leaves your business with an excellent opportunity to grab them by those holiday heartstrings while they browse your site this season. When customers land on your site, your business’ special holiday promotions should welcome them with festive, cheerful designs. Create holiday-themed landing pages to help direct customers to any deals you are offering, and make it an enticing, enjoyable experience to shop on your site
Social media posts Do you have an in-house designer? Perfect! If not, you might want to start thinking about your need for outside resources to plan for future holiday display campaigns. In the meantime try Canva or Snappa. Festive images on Facebook and social networks can really help create a cheerful connection between your brand and your leads. From quoting favorite holiday movies, to funny family meme’s you can be festive and entertaining all at once. Be sure to have fun with social media and get your customers excited about the holiday season. Post questions for engagement like “What’s a good hiding place for gifts?”. Post a picture of a gift-wrapped box, ask your fans to guess what’s inside, and award the fan who guesses correctly. Social media posts like these are sure to inspire engagement.
Throw a holiday party – Not the employee holiday party type – but more of an open house at your place of business. There’s no better way to build a strong relationship with prospects and customers then giving them actual face time, so why not use the holidays as an excuse to do just that. If you want to increase your foot traffic, consider incorporating a “Giving Campaign” into your open house like a food drive for your local food bank, or Toys for Tots. Tis the season for giving. Give to your customers, give to your community, and ask them to join you in giving back.

The 2017 holiday shopping season is expected to be one of the best in recent years. Don’t let your business miss out on the chance to spread your own holiday cheer to your customers. Follow these holiday marketing strategies, and you’ll be sure to make you and your customers very merry this season.

Wieting Design | Social Media Marketing Fairfield County CT

How To Make The Most Out Of Facebook To Promote Your Business

November 2, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

With over 2 billion active daily users, Facebook is notably one of the best platforms to grow your business. While it is free to use, Facebook does encourage a pay to play mentality, but once you’ve built up a fan base you can keep them engaged for free or better yet, convert them to your email list. You can promote your products and services, and you can sell your products to them without marketing costs. You can update your fans to let them know about any special events or deals that your business is running. Facebook is also one of the best platforms to interact and stay in touch with your customers by listening to what they have to say, and responding to their comments. By consistently engaging with your Facebook followers you can let people know what your business is up to. This allows you to stay fresh and relevant, so hopefully when your customer base makes their next purchasing decision, they will think of you and not your competitor.

Whether your business is new to Facebook marketing, or just in need of a refresh, here’s our best tips to help you make the most out of Facebook and make sure you are maximizing your engagement.

Set Up Your Facebook Business Page The Right Way

Claim a vanity URL by visiting http://www.facebook.com/username
Choose the correct category for your business
Get reviews – ask your family and friends first then start asking your customers to give you a review.
Pick the best picture for your profile photo and create a custom cover that shows what you do, creates an emotional response, and has a clear call to action for your business.
Complete the about section and use keywords that align with your SEO plan.

Encourage Traffic To Your Facebook Business Page:

Add the Facebook icon wherever you can – Promote your Facebook page on all marketing, including business cards, signs, email signatures, website,
Add a Follow Button on your website – Make it easy for your website visitors to Like your page by adding a Follow Button to your website or blog. A Facebook Follow Button is a widget you can add to your website that links people from your website to your Facebook Page.
Ask people in person – Ask people that come into your store to like your page. You know they already are interested in your business, so why not ask them to like your social media pages? You can even offer them something on the spot (e.g. discount, free item) if they like your page while in the store.
Ask people online – Have a pop-up box on your website that asks people to like your Facebook page. You can also ask people to like your Facebook page after they have purchased something on your site. The message can be along the lines of “Thanks for your purchase! Like us on Facebook to hear about new products and promotions.”
Get involved on Facebook – You can post on pages and groups that are related to your industry from your business page. If you offer helpful answers and advice, you may get people to click back to your page and like it.

Promote Your Business On Facebook:

To really boost your page, you need to be human first and promote second. This may sound counterintuitive, but with content marketing at a record high, users are tired of the hard sell. Here’s how you can maximize your Facebook reach in a way that builds a long term following.

Set up a regular posting schedule – Try to post original content at least once a week, but prioritize quality over quantity. Ideally, 3-5 times a week is a good sweet spot.

Monitor when your fans are online and tweak your schedule – once your page has attracted some attention, the Audience Insight tools gather quantitative information about the people who like and visit your page. In fact, Facebook’s highest traffic usually occurs mid-week between 1 to 3 pm which tells us two things — 1) Almost everyone hits that after lunch productivity slump than we think and 2) people are always looking for new content on their newsfeeds.

Provide value – the worst thing you could do for your page is to post any old random quotes or images. Why would your ideal customer care about your post? Is your goal to inform them of your company values, the team behind the brand, how your business can help them, how your business helps the community, and lastly, what can you do for them? The best rule of thumb in marketing is the 80/20 rule. Give away something 80% of the time and then sell 20% of the time. Your “give” message can be knowledge, motivation, a smile, or a laugh, but it shouldn’t be focused on the sale. When you do post your “sales” message they should fun and light.

Share relevant images – This is a great way to show up in user’s news feed organically. By tagging your fans in pictures, you are not only alerting them of the post, but your post is also likely to appear in the news feed of the fan’s friends. People are more likely to “like” and comment on a post of someone they know. So how do you do this? An example would be, If you’re a real estate agent, take a picture of your client in front of their new home and congratulate them on your Facebook page.

Give your fans a laugh – Don’t overthink it; just do something to give your fans a chuckle. Keep their interests in mind and make sure the humor is relevant to your audience, and appropriate for all audiences. Quotes get a lot of shares. People who get a laugh or feel inspired from a post want to share the feeling with others. You can use Canva to create this type of image for free. Include your logo, so if it’s shared by a third party, you are still advertising your business.

Respond to EVERYONE – If your business replies quickly to messages on Facebook, then others will be able to see that your page is active and responsive. Pay attention to the posts that get reactions and comments. Comments generally indicate a higher level of engagement because it takes more time to type a response than to simply hit “Like”. If you receive negative comments, carefully respond that you hear their concerns and invite them to email or call you directly. Don’t delete negative comments or ignore them, address them head on and you’ll build your brand’s trust.

Post native video – Videos on a Facebook user’s newsfeed auto-play, and therefore are very attention grabbing in nature. Have you noticed all those videos of people making delicious looking dishes in fast motion? That type of video could work well if you own a restaurant. You should consider posting a featured video to your page as well. People will connect more with your business if you show them the people behind it all.

Post and share events – Create Facebook events for your next big sale. When events are happening in the community, you can draw attention to those as well. Many businesses fail to leverage events as opportunities to promote their social media page. Creating an event page can increase the turnout for your real-world event because Facebook events make it easy for users to invite friends and see how many people plan to attend.

Ask a question or poll – This is an easy way to get people to comment on your post. Pair the question with a cute picture, and you’ll get people to pause at your post long enough to read the question.

Partner with other local business pages to cross promote – By tagging another business your are reaching their fan base as well as your own. You can encourage fans to tag a friend and you are exponentially increasing the reach of the post too. People will be notified if they are tagged and encouraged to check out your page and products. Moreover, you are spreading brand awareness. By sharing the best content from any source you become the one-stop-shop for the information your buyer personas care about. Once your fans rely on you as their go-to source for information, your Facebook engagement will organically increase because they’ll visit your page when they don’t see your posts in their newsfeed. Sharing others’ content also shows that your brand is helpful, not just going out for the sale.

Use tracking URLs and Facebook insights – You want to establish a routine to see how your posts are doing, how your fan base is growing, and to measure your social media marketing effectiveness. If you have a particular post doing well, consider boosting that post to extend it’s reach.

Tailor your messages to your fan base – Learn more about their demographics, and use that information to reach out to new groups. If your page is attracting more middle-aged women than expected, for example, then you may want to include posts that are particularly relevant for those potential customers.

Success with Facebook marketing doesn’t happen overnight; it takes time. Increasing your Facebook engagement requires the persistence to be active on the platform day after day. Ultimately your goal should be to give value, build a relationship with your fans which in turn then leads them to see you as a valuable resource and eventually buy your product or services. Marketing is all about making consumers want and need what you have, your Facebook Business page is one powerful tool if you use it correctly.

Wieting Design | Social Media Fairfield County CT

8 Trends To Improve Your Marketing

December 7, 2016 by Cindy Wieting

Creative marketing can set your business apart from the pack, so it’s wise to stay updated on new approaches and trends. Before you jump into creating your marketing strategy for 2017, take a look at what marketing trends are going to have the most impact and return on investment.

8 Trends to Improve Your Marketing in 2017

CONTENT DENSITY – with the rise of SEO comes the rise of black-hat tactics as businesses try to outrank one and other. Random filler keywords and long dry content is going to be a thing of the past as Google makes yet another algorithm change to favor sites providing clear concise value in their choice of words versus length. Visitors are skimming content, skimming posts, and often only browsing headlines and H1 tags. With the current content overload, consulting an expert when curating content for your marketing would be a great investment as dense content makes a rise.

LEVERAGING BRANDING – having an established brand simplifies your advertising. It’s not enough to have a logo, you need an identity and voice that will help you stand out among your competition. Then include native advertising to grow your brand views. As we noted in our Google Adwords article, it also pays to advertise your brand and nurture potential buyers that may be stuck in the “just curious phase” of the buy cycle.

PERSONALIZED CONTENT – with the influx of businesses using social media, your voice will be lost if you target too broad a crowd. Rather tailor your marketing towards a specific audience. This goes back to our tip last week of creating your ideal customer profile and creating content like you were speaking to just them.

SOCIAL MEDIA – always monitor your social channels either live or via social listening tools and tailor your message to your market . Do not robo post the same content, all at once, across all platforms. It’s obvious to your followers you’re only interested in doing the bare minimum, not connecting with them and building a relationship. It’s also important to not go on social-autopilot by scheduling your posts and then disappearing until your queue is empty. Connect with your followers post with in the moment messages and share your brand’s voice.

LIVE STREAMING VIDEO – social media users are demanding more in the moment real unscripted content and live feeds are the fastest way to capture this. You do not need a studio, professional lighting, or equipment. Let your followers see the people behind their favorite brand and what inspires you to create your product.

EPHEMERAL CONTENT – Some marketing sources will tell you this is the wrong way to grow, but if you’re targeting a young progressive audience, it’s has a place and can be a great way to capitalize on the FOMO (fear of missing out) trend.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, we’re only a call away and can provide a free consultation to help you get your business marketing plan ready for the new year. Give us a call at 203 414 9692 or email us!

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