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Influencer marketing has evolved from a mere buzzword amongst the noisy, overcrowded digital marketplace into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Brands scrambling to figure out how to stay current have turned to influencer marketing, and many of them have even received a 520% return on investment, based on a 2018 statistic.

Moreover, statistics show us that 49% of consumers take into consideration an influencer’s product testimonials before deciding whether or not to purchase an item.

This effect on consumers’ spending habits has prompted many marketers to allocate a budget for influencer marketing.

But like any other marketing strategy, developing an influencer campaign requires careful planning, cooperation, and attention to detail if you truly want to enhance brand credibility and reach your target audience.

Here are a few simple steps to get you started:

1. Create Goals That are Actionable and Measurable

The initial step is setting realistic goals.

Whether you want to expand your network to reach the younger audience or enhance the relatability factor of your brand, defining your objectives makes it easy for you to choose the ideal influencer or platform for your campaign.

Take into account the industry you belong to, the market you want to target, the type of channels you want to use to spread your business’ message, and the influencers’ style and network that are best suited for your campaign.

Ideally, for instance, a skincare brand should collaborate with multi-channel influencers who have huge followings on YouTube and Instagram.

These platforms are where most of the younger demographic spend their time online.

On the other hand, if you’re aiming to target a network of professionals, you should consider launching your campaign on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Knowing where to place your content and who to collaborate with are crucial if you want your campaign to have a better chance of success.

2. Find the Perfect Influencer For Your Brand

Your potential influencer should tick all the right boxes in terms of content quality, follower count, engagement, and style.

Marketers often make the mistake of reaching out to an influencer for a collaboration prior to doing a thorough background check.

First things first: check if your prospect is engaging in fraudulent activities (i.e., fake followers and fake engagement).

There are tools readily available to quickly scan the engagement activities and follower/following ratio of the influencer to identify their legitimacy.

For example, Instagram has the IG Audit tool, which gives a rundown of a user’s estimated real follower count and average engagement activity.

It is  also equally important to scroll through past posts to see if they’ve already collaborated with brands that have a product or service similar to yours.

Moreover, there’s a growing trend among brands and marketers who choose to work with micro and nano-influencers.

They have relatively fewer followers than celebrities and macro-influencers but they deliver quality engagement.

This is a great option for brands that want to establish their reputation through influencers who post consistently engaging and relatable content.

Once you’ve chosen who you feel is the appropriate person to represent your business across various channels, you can reach out to them via email or private message.

3. Get Creative

Set the budget and lay out your plans to the influencer.

You should be concise about everything – from the type of campaign you want to execute to the content you want to publish.

You can be upfront about the relevant posts you want for your campaign, but don’t interfere with the influencer’s unique style and creativity.

It’s important to be open to suggestions and collaborate with them in order to get the creative juices flowing and produce a win-win outcome.

Whether you want the influencer to post sponsored content, a product review or a contest/giveaway, give them all the required information they need to do so.

Provide the requested tags, and call-to-actions, and let the influencer take care of the rest.

They should be experienced in knowing exactly how to peak the interest of their followers, and further drive interaction and engagement.

Modern, hard-to-please consumers have grown tired of all the digital noise and product promotions that lack sincerity and transparency.

They are smart enough to detect if the influencers are forced to promote a product they don’t actually like.

So it’s crucial to establish a meaningful, collaborative relationship with the influencer instead of just dismissing them as mere marketing tools.

4. Monitor the Success of Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

Monitor the reach, engagement, and conversion to see if your campaign is yielding the desired results.

Keep track of the number of likes, shares, and comments on the posts, as well as the business website traffic.

A significant increase translates to your influencer marketing campaign, effectively reaching a wider audience.

Although enhancing brand awareness is one of the major priorities of brands, the end goal should always be increasing revenue.

Tools and software are also available to effectively measure if sales performance has improved.

If you don’t see an upswing in results, however, you can always invest in careful re-planning and revising to better cater to the needs and wants of your target demographic.

In this modern day and time, traditional marketing methods will not be able to provide the desired results.

With the advancement of technology and increased popularity in social media, you will need to think of other ways that will help you to tap into large numbers of mobile users.

However, this does not mean you will have to give up your traditional ways of marketing.

All you need to do is make a few changes here and there, and essentially combine social media channels with your email marketing campaigns.

This is however a delicate art as it has been always and therefore should be handled with care.

For the proficient, this can be useful but for the others, it can be a real headache.

It is, for this reason, that large companies totally separate social media and email marketing teams.

However, there are a few risks to this approach such as:

• The marketing strategies and the content are often found not to be perfectly aligned, and
• As a result, the channels function in a silo.

Since you cannot afford to maintain two different teams, the best approach is to combine the two.

This will not only save you money, but will also ensure that everyone involved works in tandem and discussion to ensure the best possible outcomes.

With the direct touch of your email marketing campaigns and a dedicated channel like Instagram working together, you will surely have a rapid-fire mobile engagement.

Such integration will help grow both channels.

Background

Before you delve into integrating Instagram and email marketing to power your marketing the processes, you should know a bit of the background:

• Instagram today is the fastest growing social media network that has outpaced Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn, having over 800 million users who are active every month.
• Most of businesses and brands use the photo and video sharing app to the fullest to promote their services and product and direct their Instagram followers towards their site to increase their level of organic traffic.

The platform provides marketers with the best launchpad for promoting their business, as there are several useful features, tools, and opportunities provided by Instagram.

• One such useful feature and benefit is that you can host a contest around an automated feed of some of the recent Instagram photos to increase the level of engagement amongst the users. You can promote a branded hashtag to your subscriber base that will guarantee that more customers will engage with your Instagram campaign. If you reward them with a gift card or a coupon you can achieve even better results.
• In addition to that, the platform also provides you with the opportunity to give a personal touch to the Instagram photos when you use shots of people using your product. This will create a true sense of community around your brand.

However, Instagram posts have a relatively short lifespan, but if you have contextual marketing platform you will be able to integrate your targeted email campaigns with the latest Instagram photos in realtime.

This will ensure that you create a more engaging and dynamic experience using both of the channels in tandem.

Approach for Integration

There are a few specific approaches that you may follow while integrating email and Instagram for achieving better results from your marketing efforts.

• When you use contextual marketing it will help you to serve the newest social content through your emails and transform every single email of yours into an exhilarating invitation to something that may be happening at a specific moment.
• You may also include your social profiles in your email template via social icons. These social icons are usually located at the bottom of the email. This approach will make the use of templates more subtle and effective.
• When you use both the channels you will be able to make subscribers your social fans and the social fans to become your subscribers as well. The primary goal is to make them join your subscribers’ list or to follow you on the social networks depending on which they have not done yet.
• Offer discounts that are specific to each particular channel when the users perform a request and follow the way desired to do that. This will encourage your email subscribers to become your social fans regardless of wherever they are.
• Proper use of social ads is another good approach to target your email subscribers and direct them to the desired product pages. This is in fact the most common thing that you will see in your newsfeed to help track cookies from the visits to the website.
• You must follow the Rule of Seven in marketing as that is the easiest way for both social media and email to make a contact before any customer makes a purchasing decision from you, which after all is your ultimate goal.
• In order to build your email list you may also use your community like the Facebook group. There are several ways in which you can do this. One good way is asking those who want to join the group to provide their email address through specific questions asked for group onboarding.
• Another way is to use a lead magnet as your cover image. Make sure that this lead magnet has a link in the image description that will take the users to the desired product page.

Sharing your content between channels is an obvious approach that you should implement, especially if you are into larger marketing campaign.

However, when you do so you must make sure that you use the same content that you wish to adopt for each medium and across all the distribution channels.

This will keep your messages recognizable and consistent.

All these courses of actions are necessary to succeed.

All you have to do is use your content wisely and add a great video or a well-illustrated photo across email and social media platforms such as Instagram.

Author Bio

Pete Campbell is a social media manager and has immense knowledge about email marketing and Instagram promotion. He delights his clients by helping them get great results. He loves to travel, write and play baseball.

In the event that you would want to begin a new start-up business venture, then you will need to realise that you will have to meet the demands of certain specific markets which have to be developed to make your business a success.

Also, it will be essential for all new business ventures to always be on the lookout for new business opportunities that can help in increasing their revenues.

This will also go onto increasing their profit in the future.

This article will help you get some essential tips and key ideas which can help in establishing your new business start-up venture.

You may have seen in the last several years a lot of new markets have emerged.

You should try to understand that it is difficult to get a foothold in these market places because they are not only trending, but also the demands from these markets are set to increase a lot in the future.

This demand needs to be fulfilled with different products and services.

You will need to study all these emerging markets which will have long term demands, and your business needs to find ways to fulfill these demands.

1. Eco-Friendly Living

In the last few years, people have become more and more concerned about the environment and how it is important to conserve it.

They are prepared to use products which are biodegradable and will not damage the environment.

You can consider creating a business start-up that focuses on filling this gap.

It may be a bit difficult initially to get a foothold in this market, because the number of customers would be too slim initially and there are already well-established brands in the market.

But you can diversify and focus on different aspects of eco-friendly life.

You can venture in making eco-friendly interior decoration products which would be quite novel.

You can consider trying to find eco-friendly solutions and alternatives for commonly used household products also.

Try promoting such products made by other business houses because it will also help in promoting

Your own brand and it will reward your business in the end.

Customers would also appreciate your efforts.

You might have also noticed that electrical appliances are focused on becoming more and more energy-efficient and try to cut down on electricity consumption.

You may consider making or selling such appliances. Appliances for the kitchen are always in demand and would be a hit easily.

You can also focus on other household necessities like a vacuum cleaner.

You must always look for new products in the market and try to improve them in terms of their energy efficiency.

These efforts would help in establishing your start-up venture.

2. Fitness & Other Wellness Products

A new market that has emerged is that of fitness, sports, and health.

As people are becoming more aware of their body and how to keep it healthy, they are starting to invest more in personal fitness items.

These items include not only fitness and exercise equipment, but also exercise clothing and other gear.

This is a market that will not slow down easily, because people will always try to look good, fit, and slim.

Health products have taken over the earlier markets of junk food and soft drinks, beauty products like fairness creams are replaced with anti-aging creams, and so on.

Thus, you can focus on creating or selling such items.

You may either produce or sell exercise equipment or clothing, or even such cosmetic products designed to make people healthier and stronger.

This is a unique business opportunity which is not going to go out of trend any time soon.

3. Sustained Customer Interaction

As a new start-up business venture, you must always look for ways of getting new customers.

One of the simplest ways of doing this is by retaining the goodwill of your old customers.

You must always provide a solid customer care system that can help in resolving all the issues a customer has had with your products.

You need to ensure the timely and safe delivery of products and that the items delivered are of top quality and value for money.

You should use social media platforms for interacting with your customers and also to let them contact you for support.

You should also offer them discounts and special offers from time to time as it will help in making your business look more credible.

You will need to provide prompt service whenever and wherever you can.

This will ensure that your goodwill is preserved in front of your customers and that they will readily recommend you to other people.

4. Market Expansion

As the owner of new business starts up, you must not try to be too greedy initially and attempt to expand out on to a larger market.

It is important that you should first focus on your own local market and solidifies your presence there before you gradually start to expand.

Also, you should first start off with a select range of products and then add more products and varieties to your inventory.

5. Business Database

No matter whatever is the type of your business venture, you should try to have a solid presence on the internet as a bonafide company.

You must have a business database that stores the information about your customer’s data, your visitors who come to your website.

This will allow you to make more effective marketing strategies.

Visit RemoteDBA.com for example, to learn more about using business databases.

Conclusion

As the owner of a business start-up, you need to be aware of the latest business opportunities and market trends so that you can incorporate them and develop your business more.

You will need to be prudent in your product and market selection too.

Hopefully, the information mentioned in this article will have helped you.

Today, one of the best ways to reach out to your audience and communicate with your customers is through SMS marketing.

It is easy on your budget compared to other marketing channels, driving significant engagement and leading to increased earnings and profits.

Did you know that text messages could convert the expenses of a $20 support call?

Texting is widely used today and 97 percent of US citizens use texting apps once in a day.

Customers are more likely to open text-based messages compared to other forms of mobile communication.

According to an article published on https://www.inc.com, there are many ways to ensure your SMS marketing success.

For example, when customers participate in a contest, integrate your social media or website URLs in the automated reply option.

It is one of the easiest and quickest ways to connect with your targeted audience to your numerous web pages or social media pages, thus enticing your existing and potential customers to click on the URLs.

It will make your SMS contests more engaging as well as interactive.

You can even send photos, video clips so that your customers get to see the visuals of your business.

Despite all such data or information, there are numerous myths surrounding SMS marketing.

Here are four of these misconceptions debunked in this article:

1. It is Not Effective

There is a perception that text-based messages do not have the impact other marketing channels create like email and social media marketing. Then, the opposite is true.

Did you know that customers respond to SMS faster than social media or emails?

People open and read text-based messages at least five times compared to emails. The ratio is 98:20 percent.

People read 90 percent of the text messages within three minutes after they receive them.

Again, 79 percent of smartphone users check new text messages within 15 minutes of waking up.

High message delivery is not just one benefit, SMS marketing accounts for higher conversion rates as well compared to other marketing methods.

Mobile messages have a response rate of more than seven times compared to email. The ratio is 45:6 percent.

Did you know that 48 percent of web visitors prefer to receive loyalty-based SMS?

Again, it requires an average person 90 seconds to reply to a text-based message.

Therefore, we can infer that SMS marketing is effective and converts leads into customers.

2. No One But Millennials Uses Text Messaging

The greatest myths about SMS marketing is that only the millennial generation use text messages.

Even businesses think that their SMS promotions will work only when they target the same to the youngsters or Generation Y.

The fact is people of all ages use text-based messages including millennials, seniors, and baby boomers.

Smartphone users consist of 98 percent of people belonging to 30-49 years using text messages.

Again, 92 percent of the people are over 50 years use text messaging.

There are other data to prove that millennials are not the only ones using messages.

Did you know that 92 percent of the American population uses smartphones and uses text messages?

Therefore, use your SMS marketing tactics for people of all ages to determine your customers’ likes and dislikes.

Create SMS campaigns your customers will find useful. Besides, if you want to learn more about SMS marketing tips and benefits, you can research online.

3. Customers are Annoyed with Messages

Text messages are personal and therefore, it is a common perception that customers do not like receiving them from a business or promotion.

Then, did you know SMS marketing is less invasive compared to other types of marketing tactics?

That is because there is an opt-in feature before customers start receiving any promotional offers from companies.

Then, these messages are less than 160 characters, concise, easy to read, and clear.

People can scan these messages and read them quickly if they are of any interest to them.

If yes, customers can take action like opting for deals or discounts.

Did you know that 75 percent of users do not mind if they receive text messages from a business, after opt-in?

Then, over 50 percent of customers like to contact support via text messages compared to other marketing channels.

The appointment reminders through text messaging minimize missed appointments by 26 percent.

Again, nine out of 10 people who opt for SMS loyalty programs feel that they benefit from the same.

Therefore, the question of annoyance does not arise provided the opt-in option is available.

4. SMS Marketing is Expensive

Many businesses stay away from SMS marketing thinking that it is expensive. Wrong!

There is also a myth that text messages are time-consuming and you need special knowledge to implement the same. It is another myth.

The truth is SMS marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your products or services to connect with your audience.

Moreover, you do not require any special knowledge or skills to implement the same.

Yes, you do not require any marketing specialist to do your job.

Did you know sending bulk messages to your subscribers would cost you only pennies per user?

These pennies will translate into leads and sales via offers, coupons, deals, contests, and the like. It is one of the best ways to stay connected with your targeted audience.

Did you know that 50 percent of American customers do direct shopping once they receive SMS branded text, discount coupons, and QR codes?

Again, SMS marketing tactics are estimated to contribute about 40 percent growth rate of revenues. When it comes to coupons received via SMS, the redemption rate is 10 times more than printed coupons.

Many businesses use other marketing campaigns and spend thousands of dollars on huge campaigns that do not yield significant ROI.

One could use much less amount of money in SMS marketing, generate leads, and transform them into customers.

SMS marketing offers predictable results when it comes to the count of subscribers.

Conclusion

Now that these myths are debunked, implement SMS marketing strategies to reach out to your targeted audience.

Generate leads, gain customers, and boost sales.

In the world of business today, marketing specialists and business owners will have to adopt new strategies so they will always be able to stay ahead of the competition.

Perhaps the most effective way to do this is by using social media platforms to promote their specific business products and services.

Instagram is the fastest growing social media app for this task.

In this article, you’ll learn why you need to use Instagram and how you should use it to help increase your business revenues.

Using Instagram the Right Way

You will not get any substantial benefit from just having business profiles on Instagram.

It is important also to learn how to correctly use Instagram to your advantage.

Use the following methods outlined below so that you can get more successful and more sales:

Posting Just Visual Content

It is probably known to you already that on Instagram, you can only post visual content.

This is in the form of either pictures or video footage with a duration of one minute.

You will need to post as much visual content as you can in order to increase your audience reach.

Aside from this, you should also consider uploading a lot of memes and humorous posts to keep your audience engaged.

Post Your Best Photos

You should always post the best photos that you have of your business products.

You need to take high-resolution pictures from several angles and then upload them as that will help to entice and educate your audience.

Photos are a medium that helps make people understand the primary use of your products and the purpose they serve.

You should consider uploading photos of products whilst in use as this helps people to understand the correct way of using them.

Videos Should Reflect How Good Your Products Are

All videos which you have uploaded to Instagram should be ordered and not random.

You can upload videos which can show off the manufacturing process of your products.

You can showcase to people how they need to use the products you make in the most efficient ways possible.

You should also make videos showing how people need to maintain and take care of your products and increase its longevity.

Such videos can help in making a lot of new people learn about your business and help you get more followers.

Use Relevant Hashtags

Instagram is useful for promoting business products because of popular hashtags, which helps increase the visibility of your posts.

Hashtags are really like keywords which can help to improve the discoverability of the posts you put online more comprehensively.

Hashtags are also useful in describing your products quickly and effectively.

You can find the most relevant and popular hashtags being used for your specific products, niche, and industry through online searches.

Avoid putting misleading or irrelevant hashtags because that will lose the trust of the audience.

Also, don’t use too many hashtags. Put a maximum of five hashtags in each post for the best visibility.

Using Suitable Captions

It is important to use the captions wisely.

In the captions section, describe the basic information about the products that you have.

Also, don’t forget to include links to your main business website.

Besides descriptions, you also need to put more hashtags in your posts.

These hashtags will have to be relevant.

You also need put a link of your business website in the caption.

You need to remember that your caption is the main thing any user would notice when they find your post through a hashtag.

As a result of this, you should not be too creative and put something which common users might not understand readily.

Embed Links

One of the primary prerequisites of business marketing on Instagram is link embedding.

Instagram will help you to embed links to all the official business websites in the caption section of all your posts.

When you start to embed links, you will start to see increased traffic from other business websites too.

It is important that you should mention only the main information pertaining to your products in the captions that you put.

You can include all the rest of the broader information about product details, payment options, purchasing options, delivery systems in your main business website.

The user will be able to visit the website from the links that you had embedded.

Competition

There are plenty of businesses where marketing specialists actively use Instagram in order to conduct online surveys and competitions to help with their marketing.

These competitions attract plenty of users who participate to win a prize.

As a result of this, you will be increasing your user engagement, and this can help a lot of people learn about the business and how they can benefit from using your products and services.

In the event, you want to get more information about how you should use Instagram to promote your business, you can check out with how does Instagram work for business and learn all the various technicalities and requirements from the best marketing professionals in the industry.

Conclusion

Instagram will have changed the very model of business marketing on the internet in the next few years.

Instagram is useful because it allows you to expose your business to a large number of people from everywhere in the world.

This can help you generate greater awareness among the people about your business, which can help to increase your sales significantly.

Hopefully, the information mentioned in this article will have helped you.

Author Bio

Pete Campbell is a social media manager and has immense knowledge about email marketing and Instagram promotion. He delights his clients by helping them. He loves to travel, write and play baseball.

If you use Instagram and social media in combination with your business marketing campaign, you will find it easy to leverage the level of engagement of Instagram.

This will in turn inspirethe followers to sign-up to your email list. This can be done in different ways such as:

• Through a competition
• Through user generated content
• By incorporating choice of calls to action or
• By making the best use of the new power of Instagram Stories.

After all, social media and email marketing is individually very effective but when these are combined together,  such integrated approaches will drive more revenue and help you to build more followers in comparison to what either of these channels will produce alone.

Proper marketing and desired results are all about the strategy you follow.

Sometimes you will need to take ideas from professionals in this field that can elevate marketing results with their professional and result driven marketing services.

However, you may also get enough ideas by visiting different such sites such as stormlikes.com and others.

Instagram and social media is however the demand of the hour whether you are a startup or any established business.

With such strategic and integrated marketing programs, you will gain a lot as you will be able to:

• Drive more traffic
• Generate more prospective sales
• Effectively align your followers
• Raise the level of engagement
• Ensure better marketing returns and results and
• Generate more salesboth with the users as well as the teams within your organization as applicable.

Apart from the above benefits, there are several others that you can enjoy when you incorporate Instagram in your marketing using the different social media platforms.

• You will be able to take on more complex business and marketing challenges simultaneously that will eventually help you in designing the best and most appropriate solutions for it.
• This will help you to simplify the business processes and at the same time drive the customer outcomes.
• You will be able to provide your business as well as your customers the desire value that will in turn help you to succeed in the given as well as any new verticals.

Most importantly, such an approach will help you to stay true to your core business values and at the same time create the brand integrity as desired.

It will be easy for you to get noticed by the influencers who are rightfully considered to be the most powerful ‘brokers’ in the digital marketing system.

There are several good reason to believe that they are so.

• This is because even a single mention or endorsement from these influencers may result in a recordbreaking organic traffic drive to your site.
• These influencers do not simply drive traffic, the drive trust as well with their mention or endorsement of a particular business brand or product.
• This means, the mention of an influencer about your product is in a sense ‘pre-sold’ simply because the customers who will visit your site based on their mention will trust your brand as well as your product more than those that do not have any mention of an influencer.

It is for this reason more and more marketers vie for the attention of the influencers when it comes to marketing of their business.

Strategies to Follow

Unfortunately, this is not an easy way and the results may not come overnight even if you manage to get hold of some of the best influencers who are highly in demand.

Most good influencers usually have a large number of people that share their work on different social media channels.

They also receive a large number of emails every day and their inbox and voicemail is full of messages from their innumerable admirers.

In order to make sure that your message is not deleted along with the others and you are successful in breaking in you will need to follow these strategies:

• Be specific and strategic in your approach by selecting the right people first. Though these influencers may not be the most renowned ones, but must make sure that you select the ones that have a ludicrous amount of clout and a huge following along with websites that usually get tens of thousands of visitors every day. Also make sure that they receive hundreds if not a thousand pitch emails every day.
• To make your marketing tactics more effective you must think these influencers not as persons but as keywords! Surprising as it may sound, this is a good way to approach with your tactics. As you may knowkeywords are the primary things in a content that will get massive traffic and plays a very significant role in beating the competition to fetch a higher rank for your site. If your keyword is not strong, you will get less trafficand less competition. An influencer will act just like a long tail keyword that will provide the same results such as get good traffic that will be more likely to convert.
• Apart from the influence and coolness you must focus on getting the best opinion and experience to make your marketing work in your favor. Smaller influencers or micro-influencers surprisingly may have a high conversion rate that the mega influencers. They are ideally the less targeted influencers and are far less competitive to reach out too. They will receive far too less emails as compared to the number of emails received by a mega influencer. This means getting the attention of these micro influencers is far too easy than the mega influencers.

Lastly, make sure that you use the right mindset to talk to the influencers the best possible way.

For this you will have to think about them first in the right way so that you do not pitch them but befriend them.

The best way to work with influencers is to think them to be your long term business partners and your friends.

All experts and successful marketers typically looks beyond a one off influencer campaign when they use influencers for their business benefits.