The Importance of Sitemaps

Establishing a Clear Website Hierarchy

Site mapping is the process of creating a visual representation of your website’s structure and hierarchy. By mapping out your site’s pages and their relationships, you can ensure that your content is organised logically and intuitively. A well-structured sitemap makes it easier for both users and search engines to navigate your website, ultimately leading to a better user experience and improved SEO performance.

Streamlining the Development Process

A comprehensive sitemap not only serves as a blueprint for your website’s organisation but also helps streamline the development process. By having a clear plan in place, your development team can avoid wasting time and resources on unnecessary revisions or restructuring. This ultimately results in a more efficient and cost-effective project.

The Power of Wire framing

Visualising Your Website’s Layout

Wire framing is the practice of creating a simple, visual layout of your website’s pages. It is an essential step in the design process, as it allows you to map out the placement of various elements such as navigation menus, images, and content blocks. By creating wireframes, you can ensure that your website’s layout is both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly.

Facilitating Effective Communication

Another key advantage of wire framing is that it facilitates clear and effective communication between your design and development teams. With a set of wireframes, your teams can easily discuss and refine ideas, ensuring that everyone is on the same page throughout the project. This, in turn, leads to fewer misunderstandings and a smoother development process.

Identifying Potential Usability Issues

Wire framing allows you to identify potential usability issues early in the design process. By testing and refining your wireframes, you can address any problems before they become more significant, time-consuming, or costly to fix. This proactive approach helps ensure a seamless user experience when your website is launched.

The Key to a Successful WordPress Website

Sitemaps and wire framing are indispensable components of the web design and development process. By investing time and effort into these crucial planning stages, you can set the stage for a successful and user-friendly WordPress website that meets both your business goals and your audience’s expectations.

If you’re looking to create a stunning and effective WordPress website, don’t hesitate to contact us today. Let’s work together to turn your vision into reality.

The post Laying the Groundwork for Your Online Success first appeared on Digital Thing.

Uniqueness and Brand Identity

Custom WordPress themes allow businesses to create a truly unique website that reflects their brand identity. Custom themes are designed and developed from scratch, tailored to the specific needs and preferences of a client. This level of customization ensures that your website stands out from the competition and leaves a lasting impression on your visitors.

On the other hand, page builders offer pre-designed templates that can be customised to some extent. However, these templates may not fully encapsulate your brand’s personality, as they are designed to cater to a broader audience.

Performance and Speed

Custom WordPress themes are built with performance in mind. Developers optimize the code and assets to ensure that your website loads quickly and runs smoothly. This results in better user experience and improved search engine rankings, as Google considers page load time a crucial factor in its ranking algorithm.

Page builders, although user-friendly, can sometimes result in bloated code and slower website performance. The drag-and-drop functionality of page builders often generates unnecessary code, which can lead to slower loading times and negatively impact your website’s overall performance.

Flexibility and Scalability

As your business evolves, your website must adapt to accommodate new features, pages, and functionality. Custom WordPress themes are built with flexibility and scalability in mind. Your theme can be modified and expanded upon, making it easier to add new features or make changes as your business grows.

Page builders, while offering some level of flexibility, may limit your ability to scale and adapt as your needs change. Some page builders may not be compatible with specific plugins or may have limitations when it comes to customizing the template beyond a certain point.

Seamless Integration and Compatibility

Custom WordPress themes ensure seamless integration with other plugins and third-party services. Developers can create custom integrations, guaranteeing compatibility and ensuring that your website functions as intended.

With page builders, compatibility can be a hit-or-miss affair. Some plugins may not work well with certain page builders, which can lead to broken features and potential conflicts on your website.

Making the Right Choice for Your Business

Custom WordPress themes offer a unique, high-performing, and scalable solution for businesses looking to establish a strong online presence. While page builders provide an accessible option for those with limited technical skills, they do not offer the same level of customisation, performance, and flexibility as custom WordPress themes.

Contact us today to discuss your project and experience the benefits of a custom WordPress theme tailored to your unique needs.

The post Benefits of Custom WordPress Themes first appeared on Digital Thing.

Streamlined Content Creation

The block design concept simplifies the process of creating content by breaking it down into individual blocks. This modular approach allows users to easily insert, rearrange, and customise elements on their web pages. Whether you’re adding text, images, videos, or other multimedia elements, the block design concept makes it easy to create visually appealing and functional web pages without any coding experience.

Enhanced Flexibility and Customisation

With the block design concept, you can create unique and tailored layouts that suit your brand identity and business needs. WordPress offers a wide array of pre-built blocks, such as headings, quotes, galleries, and more. The ability to mix and match blocks within your pages allows for endless customisation options, giving you the freedom to create a truly distinctive website.

Simplified Theme Development

The block design concept has revolutionised the way developers create and maintain themes for WordPress websites. By using blocks, theme developers can now create more flexible and dynamic themes that cater to a wide range of website requirements. This streamlined approach to theme development also allows for faster updates and improvements, ensuring your website stays up-to-date with the latest design trends.

Improved Website Performance

The block design concept promotes clean and efficient coding practices, resulting in a more optimised and faster-loading website. By using blocks, you can minimise the number of plugins and unnecessary code on your site, leading to a significant improvement in overall performance. In today’s competitive online landscape, a fast-loading website is crucial for maintaining user engagement and improving search engine rankings.

Future-Proof Design

One of the key benefits of the block design concept is its ability to ensure consistency across your website’s pages. This is achieved by allowing you to reuse and repurpose blocks throughout your site, ensuring a uniform appearance and user experience. With the block design concept, you can maintain a consistent brand identity and design language across your entire online presence.

By employing reusable blocks, you save time and effort when updating or redesigning your website. For example, if you decide to change a particular design element, you can simply update the corresponding block, and the changes will automatically apply to every instance of that block throughout your site. This efficient approach not only future-proofs your website but also allows for a seamless transition as your brand and design preferences evolve over time.

Seamless Integration with the WordPress Ecosystem

The block design concept is fully integrated with the WordPress ecosystem. This means that it works seamlessly with themes and plugins, ensuring that your website remains cohesive and functional. Furthermore, as the WordPress community continues to grow and develop, you can expect regular updates and improvements to the block editor and its features.

Embrace the Future of WordPress Web Design

Don’t miss out on the advantages the block design concept has to offer. Contact Digital Thing today to learn how we can help you create a stunning, user-friendly WordPress website that takes full advantage of this revolutionary design approach.

The post The Block Design Concept first appeared on Digital Thing.

Effortless Drag-and-Drop Interface

One of the main reasons Breakdance stands out is its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. This feature allows users to create stunning layouts without requiring any coding knowledge. Whether you’re an experienced developer or just starting, Breakdance makes it easy to design eye-catching and responsive pages.

Stellar Performance and Speed

Nobody wants to wait around for a slow-loading website. Breakdance focuses on delivering top-notch performance and lightning-fast loading times. Its lightweight architecture and built-in optimisation tools ensure that your pages load quickly, providing a seamless user experience.

Ideal for Single Page and Small Business Websites

Breakdance truly shines when it comes to creating single-page websites and small business sites. Its easy-to-use interface, extensive library of pre-built elements, and seamless plugin integration make it a fantastic option for users looking to quickly and easily create a professional, responsive website without extensive coding knowledge.

Unparalleled Flexibility and Customisation

With Breakdance, the sky’s the limit when it comes to customisation. Its vast library of pre-built elements, modules, and templates makes it simple to create unique designs that cater to your specific needs. From adding a simple button to crafting an elaborate layout, Breakdance empowers you to take complete control over your website’s look and feel.

Seamless Integration with Popular Plugins

Breakdance is designed to play well with others. It offers seamless integration with a wide range of popular WordPress plugins, such as WooCommerce, All In One SEO, and Gravity Forms This compatibility ensures that your website remains functional and feature-rich, no matter which plugins you choose to incorporate.

Regular Updates and Active Support

The team behind Breakdance is dedicated to keeping their product up-to-date with the latest web design trends and technology. Regular updates ensure that Breakdance stays ahead of the curve, providing you with cutting-edge features and tools. Plus, their active support community is always available to assist you with any questions or concerns.

Choose Breakdance for a Next-Level WordPress Experience

In a world filled with page builders, Breakdance stands out with its intuitive interface, impressive performance, extensive customisation options, and seamless plugin integration. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just getting started, Breakdance can help you create the perfect website to showcase your brand.

The post Breakdance: The Game-Changing WordPress Page Builder first appeared on Digital Thing.

1. Enhanced Customer Experience

Digital transformation enables companies to offer seamless, personalized, and engaging customer experiences. By leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence, chatbots, and big data analytics, businesses can tailor their services to individual customer preferences, enhancing brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

2. Improved Operational Efficiency

Through the integration of digital tools and platforms, businesses can streamline their operations, reducing human error and manual tasks. By automating repetitive processes and implementing data-driven decision-making, organizations can improve productivity, save time, and reduce costs.

3. Accelerated Innovation

Digital transformation fosters a culture of innovation within organizations. By embracing cutting-edge technologies and constantly seeking new ways to improve products and services, businesses can maintain a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

4. Increased Agility and Scalability

Adopting digital transformation strategies allows organizations to quickly respond to changes in the market, customer demands, and emerging trends. Cloud-based solutions, for example, enable businesses to scale their infrastructure as needed, ensuring they are prepared for both growth and unexpected challenges.

5. Enhanced Data Security

Digital transformation involves the implementation of advanced security measures to protect sensitive information and assets. Through technologies such as end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and robust cybersecurity protocols, businesses can safeguard their digital assets from potential threats.

6. Better Decision-making

Leveraging data analytics and business intelligence tools enables organizations to make informed decisions based on real-time insights. By collecting, analyzing, and interpreting large volumes of data, businesses can identify trends, predict future outcomes, and optimize their strategies to achieve better results.

In Summary

Digital transformation offers a wealth of benefits for businesses in Melbourne and Australia, ranging from improved customer experience to increased operational efficiency. By embracing digital transformation, companies can unlock new opportunities and ensure their long-term success in the competitive digital landscape.

At Digital Thing, our WordPress Design and Development experts are ready to help you harness the power of digital transformation. Contact us today to discover how we can transform your business and elevate it to new heights.

The post Unlocking New Opportunities for Your Business first appeared on Digital Thing.

The aim is to find that “magic formula” that will convert users into leads.  If you attract 10,000 visitors to your website and 1,000 of those visitors “sign up” that’s a conversion rate of 10%.

There’s a lot of advice on this topic, but what might work for one industry or one website might not work for yours.  It’s a game of trial and error, tracking and tweaking, learning and optimising.

Data is key.  When we understand how users interact, you can make an informed decision.

First things first, install tracking!

Before going down this path of CRO you need to ensure your website is setup to track the right metrics.

Assuming you’ve got Google Analytics installed, make sure goals are setup.  If you have an eCommerce site, be sure to setup eCommerce tracking.

A goal might be newsletter signups or an enquiry via a contact forms.  With this setup, you can now track your website conversion.

When we’re asked about a benchmark, my response is to benchmark against your previous month.  Swim in your own lane. If you have a conversion rate of 1%, then the aim of next month should be to get that to 2%.

Another option is to work backwards.  How many sales per month do you need to meet budget?  What’s the company’s conversion rate per sale?

This will give you the amount of leads required per month.  Use the following formula to establish what conversation rate required to meet budget.

Visitors per month/leads required = conversation

Resources and skills required to dominate CRO efforts

There are lots of moving parts with CRO.  You need a leader with a strategy mindset.  This person is in charge of developing a plan, and project manage the teams priorities.  You’ll need tools or someone to track website data. This will help uncover information to make data-driven decisions.

Next you’ll need a copywriter to create copy.  Have them focus on the customers problems and solutions.  This should evolve over time and required a team effort. Involve the whole company. Get a list of questions clients ask. Both existing clients and prospective clients.   Find patterns, and answer them throughout the website. Whether in an FAQ format or dedicated pages or blog posts for the more complex answers.

Ensure you have a trusted team of web designs and developers.  This is crucial. The designer has to ensure the designs are inline with the brand style guides. The developer needs to turn around tasks fast, without losing quality of code.  It’s a fine line.

Beginning CRO with some quick wins

As mentioned earlier, CRO is about trial and error. Although CRO is a long-term process, we generally begin the process with some quick wins to set you up for success.

Quick win #1:  Review your copy.  Focus on your home page (or the page with most traffic).  Does this page clearly clarify your company’s value proposition?  Am I clearly asking what I want the reader to do?

Remember:  Great copywriting has an actionable outcome.

Quick win #2:  Review your call to actions.  Further to the above, the call to action needs to be a short pressing sentence.  For example, Buy Now, Join our newsletter. Get straight to the point, so the user can take the logical next step.

Remember:  Call to actions aren’t always headings, links and form buttons also count!

Quick win #3:  Reduce the form on your site.  Are some of your forms lengthy?  Cut them in half? People get deterred by lengthy forms.  Get a name, email and phone number. If there’s more information required, either trigger an automated email to ask the appropriate questions, or, PICK UP THE PHONE!

Setup and review funnels

Once you’ve setup your goals in Google Analytics, it’s now time to set your Analytics on fire! Funnels are the key to understanding the journey you want your customers to take through your website.

On an eCommerce website it might look something like:

Step 1:  Home Page

Step 2:  Category Page

Step 3:  Product Page

Step 4:  Add to Cart

Step 5:  Checkout

Understanding how many users go through the funnel, and at what points they drop off can help with identifying the bottlenecks within your website, and therefore where to focus your CRO efforts.

This video by the team at Kiss Metrics explains how to setup a funnel:

The post What is Conversion Rate Optimisation? first appeared on Digital Thing.

If you’re using Google Analytics for SEO, this guide will help you make the most of your analytics reporting.

Where is your traffic coming from

Get started with the overview dashboard, and change the date range to a minimum of 3-month range.

Compare those results to the same period last year to see if your progress has resulted in growth or decline.

With that in mind, pull up Acquisition > Channels to view where your traffic is coming from.

We get a lot of organic traffic, which is great, but we also want to look at other sources like direct, referral, social, and email. Next, click through organic traffic to see how your landing pages are performing. From here, you can view page impressions, unique views, and bounce rate, but you can also see how each of your conversion goals perform per landing page.

Finally, filter your landing page results to see which pages are converting at the highest rate.

Depending on the type of website you have, you may also want to compare mobile and tablet traffic against desktop traffic, which may let you know if you need to make your site more responsive.  Pro Tip:  Do this as a segment to really compare the deference between website engagement and also entrances.

Additionally, you can see how users are converting for mobile-specific goals on your landing pages.

What your users are doing on your website

Move over to Behaviours > All Pages and choose each individual page you’d like to view for more details. For us, we like to see how users are behaving on our home page.

You’ll be able to view the number of page views; ours is quite low since our blog performs higher, but usually you’ll see about 20% on most sites.

Look to see how long your users spend on your page with Average Time on Page. Entrances, which differ from sessions, will show how many users entered your website by using that webpage.

Review your bounce rate to make sure it’s not too high, otherwise you may need to make changes to your page.

Now that you know how users are acting on individual pages, review how they navigate through your entire website. Click on the Navigation Summary tab to see where users go from each page. For example, we found that users most often navigated from our home page to work page, digital services page, and contact page.

How you’re achieving your website goals

Finally, move over to Conversions > Overview to see the progress towards your preset goals; for example: ours is an email signup or contact form submission.

You can also view where those conversions are coming from e.g. direct, organic, search traffic etc. under Source.

Use Top Conversions Paths in order to see how many times a person will visit your website before they convert; this report is especially useful for e-commerce sites.

The post A Quick and Simple Guide to Using Google Analytics first appeared on Digital Thing.

It also includes diagnostic tools such as, crawl errors (404 page not found, 503 server errors), malware issues, sitemap generation and a heap more technical insights.

In this post, I want to talk about how to use the Google Search Console to manage, and enhance your SEO with a basic reports to enhance your SEO techniques and search engine rankings.

Personally, we use it for our own site, and set up a monthly routine to make changes on our website based on our findings. 

All it takes is 30 minutes per month.  And you will see an impact.

Search console can be overwhelming for the non-technical at first, as there are so many tools and options that allow you to drill down into the data, but there are a few steps I would love to share that will provide you with an insight to how Google rank your site, and how you can make instant tweaks and see results.

Start with an overall snapshot

Once you log in, head over to the search analytics section of your Google Console dashboard, toggle all of the options (clicks, impressions, CTR, and position) to get your recent totals.

Choose the prior month (or last 28 days) as a comparison date range to get a sense of what has improved, maintained, and decreased over this period.

If the data still feels overwhelming, you can always toggle between clicks, impressions, CTR, and position to review their progress individually.

Then  use the query selector feature to choose specific keywords and view how each are performing.

Query Review – what queries have dropped off last month?

Once you have a bird’s eye view of your analytics,  we now want to deep dive into where we have dropped off in the last 28 days.

Use the page filter feature to view the queries with the biggest drop in clicks.  Or you can search for queries that you want to rank for. 

Then click on the keyword which will do a filter on which page that specific keyword is ranking for.

In this view, you want be able to see how your page is ranking across all the keywords.  This gives you great insight into which keywords Google associates with individual pages. 

If there are some queries, that appear in that list, that you feel you want to rank for but are not, this is where you want to manipulate the page on your website and tailor it to that particular keyword. Refer to “putting data into action” below.

Page by page review

Next, use the pages filter feature to display all pages to see which are your best performing and which may have dropped off the search engine’s radar.

Focus first on your conversion pages (from Google Analytics) to see what keywords are bringing in the most impressions and clicks.

Again, we also recommend adding a comparison date range, such comparing to last month, and looking for a click differences of -50 or more.  Note:  You can click the Differences in the top of the column to filter.

It’s common to see a bit of flux in position from month to month, but a drastic change is a red flag that something major has changed.

If you’re not in the ranking position you’d like to be (we all want to be #1, right?) for a particular keyword, take a look at your competitors to see what they are doing or how they’re doing it that may be attracting more traffic.

Putting data into action

Use these results to determine if you’d like to change your website pages.

We found that we were ranking 7.3 (not as high as we’d like) for the keyword ‘design brief’ on our How to Create a Good Design Brief page, so we choose to update the article to see if it showed improvement.

Here’s what we did:

1. Read through other articles that were ranking higher than us
   • Takes notes on things such as how many words, is there a video, what links are they linking to?  What’s their social media engagement?
   • One article was so good we decided to link it in our article.
2. Updated the title tag
3. Updated the page title
4. Updated the page description
5. Add more content & images.

By revising the article, we’re letting search engines like Google know the page has been updated, a signal that says Google should re-evaluate the page and hopefully have an impact on rankings.

We’ll review the keyword query next month to see what effect the change had.

The post How To Enhance Your SEO With Google Search Console first appeared on Digital Thing.

In today’s lesson, we’re going to explore how we can become email marketing ninjas – which means sending the right message to the right person, at the right time; ensuring recipients take the action we want them to make.

When it comes to spend vs. return on investment, it’s no secret that email marketing is the best bang for buck.

Done right and email can become the best tactic in your marketing arsenal, so below are four strategies to make it as effective as possible.

Strategy #1: Segment Your Data

As I already mentioned, the key to a good email campaign is sending the right message to the right person, at the right time.

The best way we can do this is by segmenting our data to understand exactly who we’re talking to and what their interests are.

Here are 4 quick ways to segment your data and customise your email messages:

1. Geographic Location – By using Campaign Monitor, you can get a report of what location the user opened the email. Use this data to your advantage. If you’re in the retail business and you have stores around Australia, then this is even more important. Targeted messages and events can increase engagement substantially.
2. Gender – Again, if you’re in retail and selling products to all sexes, then you need to be sending different emails per gender. You should test having a different tone in your message and learn what works best.  
3. Age – Let’s face it, people of different ages speak very different languages. What a 21-year old is interested compared to that of a 40-year old can be very different things.  Even the products you sell to each age bracket will often vary because of interests.  Again, it’s important to test the language and gauge what works.
4. Interests – This is broad but understanding your lists’ interests can help you send more direct messaging. For example, if you were sending an email for a shoe brand that sells runners and casual shoes, your database could still have varying interests including walking, running (marathons, sprinting), gym-goers or yoga. Understanding what interests your database can help you target your messaging. In fact, it could also help you to plan your stock purchasing for the future as well!

In summary, email segmentation will get results.

Try a number of segmentation strategies, test and use the ones that gets you the best results. Then do it again!

Strategy #2: A/B Testing

With the aim of improving conversion rates and making more sales, A/B testing is crucial to getting results. A/B tests refer to when you run two versions of an email (or web page) to see which performs better.

The one that gives better results wins.

To set up a successful A/B campaign you will need a good database size. I would recommend anywhere over 5,000 emails.

However, if you don’t have 5,000 emails then don’t worry; you can always take this same approach to testing two whole email campaigns.

TIP: It’s important to test one thing at a time and not ten things at once.

So, what should you be testing?

• Call to Actions: Such as “Buy Now” vs. “Click Here”
• Subject Lines: Personalised vs. non-personalised, specials on specific products vs. categories
• To include or not to include testimonials
• Layout of the message: One column vs. two columns
• Personalisation: “Hello Chris!” vs. “Hey there!”
• Body text: Length of copy vs. mostly images

Different tests can work for different metrics, for example:

• Low open rates will relate to the subject line or time of day the email is sent
• Click through rates will relate to call to actions or body copy

Test as many as you can and see which works. Just always make sure you’re comparing your metrics and making improvements as a result.

Strategy #3:  Optimisation for Mobile

If your email isn’t optimised for mobile, then you need to act quickly.  

Over the past few years, email opens on mobile have exploded.

At the moment they are around 45% of all email opens.  Not only are mobile opens on the rise, but desktop opens have also decreased over the last few years.

It’s important to note that every audience is different, so it’s important to go into your email analytics to see which devices your own database prefers. You should ensure that your testing and optimisation efforts are focused on the devices a majority of your subscribers are using to read your emails.

Here are a list of mobile email best practices:

• Large Fonts – By default, the iPhone will increase any font below 13px, but as a minimum, I would use 14px for body text and 22px for headlines
• Streamline Your Content – On mobile especially; the shorter your copy, the easier it is for people to scroll
• Single Column Layouts – Although many “desktop” newsletters make use of multiple columns, a mobile friendly layout will only ever have one column  
• Large Buttons – Your CTA buttons need to be touch-friendly

Strategy #4: How to Avoid the SPAM Folder

When sending email campaigns, you need to avoid the dreaded SPAM folder. Most people don’t check their SPAM or junk folders, so it’s unlikely your material is even getting noticed, let alone read.

Here are 8 tips to help you avoid SPAM folders:

1. Avoid Buying Lists – Often these lists are littered with fake emails, or emails that never gave consent to use their address. These are the email addresses that are likely to mark your email as SPAM, which will in-turn add a strike against your domain
2. Review Your Content – SPAM filters are getting smarter these days, and have a list of “keywords” that can identify your email as SPAM. These include words such as “Free”, “Buy” and “Promo”.  Ensure you have a good image-to-text ratio, include links to credible websites and make sure your images are hosted within your email software and not linked to a dodgy external URL.
3. Certify Your Domain – If you have a dedicated IP address you can get your domain certified with a company called Return Path 
4. Ask Subscribers to “Whitelist” Your Emails – If you send a “Welcome” email when someone subscribes, simply ask them to add your email address to their address book
5.  Tag Images – use the “image alt” tag to put in a description of the image

By applying these four strategies to your own email campaigns, we hope you see an increase in the number of recipients who open and click-through to your website.  We understand that all this information can get overwhelming.  That’s why we highly recommend using Email Marketing Tools.  These tools can not only help you grow your database but also help with converting emails into paying customers.

The next part in our course will focus on measuring the results of your campaign.

The post 4 Email Marketing Strategies to Super Charge Your Database first appeared on Digital Thing.

However, boosting your brand awareness via social networks is not just about creating accounts on all platforms available, inviting random people to like your page, and sharing a few posts every once in a while. It’s about marketing to the right people, through the right channels.

Here are several social media marketing tips that will take your branding efforts to a whole new level.

1.    Choose the Right Social Networks

Choosing where to focus your social networking energy may be a daunting task. You need to keep in mind that not all social media platforms will work the same way in helping you reach your goals. Precisely because of this, you need to be picky and make educated decisions. There is a plethora of questions you need to ask yourself, most important of which are:

• What are the networks your customers use?
• How popular is a certain social networking channel?
• Does this channel make sense for your brand?
• How can it improve your brand awareness?

Once you do your research and answer all these questions, you will be able to narrow down your choices. For example, since the majority of your potential customers are on Facebook, you need to be there, too. This platform gives you the opportunity to target a wider audience, engage different social groups with your brand, and build an extensive online community. Twitter is for those brands that want to boost their conversation with a tech-savvy crowd, while LinkedIn is great for B2B companies that are looking for new influencers, business partners, or employees. If you have a knack for photography or you’re planning to share DIY tips, you should turn to Pinterest and Instagram and pair them with your Facebook account.

2.    Share Engaging Content

Content marketing is an inseparable and most valuable aspect of your social media campaign. Only by delivering relevant, easily digestible, and shareable content will you establish yourself as an expert in your niche. However, improving the performance of your content on social networks requires more than writing good-old articles. You need to focus on an interactive and engaging visual content, as well. Use infographics, photos, videos, memes, gifs, and quote graphs to hook your followers’ attention and keep them interested in the content you share.

If you’re active on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, you should also take advantage of ephemeral content that will boost your customers’ excitement and trigger FOMO (the fear of missing out), motivating them to take action faster.

3.    Be Unique and Consistent

To engage people with your brand, you need to deliver recognizable content people will instantly relate to your brand. Such an approach will help you build trust among your target audience and put an emphasis on your brand’s mission statement, goals, and core values. Here are a few strategies that will set your brand apart from its competitors.

Invest in your brand’s visual identity

For starters, make sure that your logo, colours, and font types are used consistently in all posts you share. To give your visual brand a boost, you should also focus on delivering the same feel across all social networks. Make all the pieces of your visual content look like they belong together by using the same picture size, filters, patterns, and font types.

Find your tone of voice

To make the most of the content you create, you need to define your tone of voice. Gather a representative sample of the posts you’ve shared so far and cast a critical eye on it. Are your posts trustworthy, quirky, or action-oriented?  See what tone suits your brand the best and stick to it in your future content creation efforts.

Schedule your posts

To let your target audience know what to expect from you, you should stick to your content distribution calendar and share your posts regularly. Instead of managing your posts manually, you should make this process simpler by using social media management tools. They will help you sync your social networking profiles, find fresh content, and schedule hundreds of social media posts at once.

To make the most of your social sharing, you should also classify your content by type. For example, you could introduce a “Pro Tip Monday,” when you would share industry-specific content and answer your followers’ questions.  On Fridays, you could share fun content, like gifs or photos of your staff.

4.    Answer and Acknowledge

One of the most powerful ways to earn your customers’ respect is to provide them with an instant feedback. To stay on top of your communication with your customers, you should use social media monitoring tools. With their help, you will be able to monitor your target audience’s discussions and participate in them in real time. When doing so, you need to obey the following rules of social networking:

• React and respond to all questions in a timely manner (consider implementing chatbots).
• Be polite and professional.
• If you were wrong about something, apologize.

5.    Use Social Proof

Why do we stay loyal to famous brands like Coca-Cola, Apple, or Starbucks? The fact that there are millions of people around the globe using their products lends an air of authority, trustworthiness and quality. That’s called social proof and, to integrate it with your social media campaign effectively, you need to:

• Share your users’ testimonials.
• Inspire your customers to rate and review your products and services.
• Seek for influencer endorsements.
• Show appreciation for mentions.
• Share your business’ milestones, such as reaching a certain number of customers.

6.    Offer a Rewards Program

When done right, customer loyalty programs are immensely powerful customer retention boosters. As the holiday season is here, you should incentivize your followers for being loyal to your brand, as well as for sending feedback, making referrals, or sharing your posts. And, social networks are a perfect place for you to do so.

Just make sure that the rewards you offer are valuable to your customers. You could throw a giveaway, offer huge discounts, involve your customers in your brand promotion, provide them with an exclusive product preview, give free access to the content they value or ask them for suggestions.

To Wrap it Up

Any way you slice it, social networks help you promote your brand to a wider audience, deliver a personalized user experience, offer outstanding customer services, and collect instant feedback. Hopefully, with the tips listed above will help you harness the power of these channels and give your branding efforts a kick in the pants.

How do you use social media marketing to boost brand awareness?

The post Social Media Marketing: Your Key to Boosting Brand Awareness first appeared on Digital Thing.